With a doctrine of personality in Deity, including the ideas of physical and moral power, this of the Trinity has been declared a mystery incomprehensible to the human mind; and I declare that a mystery incomprehensible to the human mind, pressed upon human attention, as of importance, is an absurdity, and must be an imposture; for who has comprehended it so to state? This is the matter-of-fact view of the subject.
But the subject being a declared mystery in the theological sense, there is a spiritual interpretation to be put upon the language of the letter; and that I take to be thus:—
That the Trinity is not to be considered as of persons, but of principles; and then we shall find it a philosophical doctrine, true to nature, and proved by science; true to physical and to moral science.
All the ideas that physical science can bring us of creation is the root of three in one. Whatever admits of analysis sets forth the truth and doctrine of the Trinity. Water, the great parent of production on this planet, is known to be composed of two gases—hydrogen and oxygen. They become water through contact and decomposition by electric action. Thus, in the order of a Trinity in Unity, we may describe it as of hydrogen, oxygen, electric contact=water. I do not mention this as any thing new; but it is new in application to a definition of the doctrine of the Trinity. Water had not been made but by the electric contact of hydrogen with oxygen, by the power of a Trinity in Unity. Chemistry teaches us, that this power of a Trinity in Unity is an all-creating power; and so far it is man's comprehension of the creating power or Deity, and not a thing or principle incomprehensible: it is a doctrine older than the Christian era; was a doctrine among the Pagan Philosophers, and is true as to principles or powers; but not true in our modern sense of persons, as identical and separate beings.
A great mistake, too, has been made in the understanding of the word person, in relation to theology: it never was meant to express beings in the image of you and me; but the dramatic manner of presenting a description of the principles of nature in the theatre, per sonantem, by sound or song, by fiction, by disguise, by allegory, by mask or mystery, by representative action: the revelation of which would be to understand the principles of nature so personated on the stage, as I have defined the Trinity. And it is in this, and no other sense, that I read the names of Deity in the Old or New Testament, as brought apparently on the stage of human affairs, in person, by the authors; that personating meaning nothing more than a present picture or representation of an absent or infinite power, by sounds or voice, and sometimes by masks, as was the earliest known practice in dramatic exhibition, which explains everything about gods and oracles, and makes the Hymns of Orpheus as sacred as the Psalms of David; as they are as certainly beautiful in poetic composition, and equally useful to human welfare.
You, Sir, if you enter the House of Commons next month, may be said to personate the Electors of Tamworth; a power in the abstract greater than you, because many and supposed qualified to reject your personation and to elect another. Therefore, the personation is not the power personated. As the King's chief Minister, you will also personate the King's Government in the House of Commons; but you are not in reality that governing power; because, it is something distinct from you, and greater than can be concentrated in your person. You, as plain Robert Peel, and I, as Richard Carlile, are not persons; and though it is a custom so to use the word and so to describe us, yet it is a mistake and misuse of the word, unless the body may be said to personate the mind, soul, &c. I hope you see that much of the error of our Church has turned upon this point; because a person was never the reality of the power, and consequently the persons of the Trinity are not to be considered the reality of the Trinity: and hence the Unitarian Dissenter has no reasonable ground of dissent. The doctrine of the Trinity, as a description of Deity, is a valid theological and philosophical doctrine, admitting of no rational dissent.
I wish the Bishops to learn this before the Dissenters, so that the Church may be taught how to call back her errant and ignorant children, that her property may be held together for useful purposes, and not be wasted at the shrine of dissenting ignorance or bankrupt government.
And now, Sir, can you yet see your way with me, "to remove every abuse that can impair the efficiency of the establishment; extend the sphere of its usefulness, and strengthen and confirm its just claims upon the respect and affections of the people?" If you cannot, I beg you to follow me farther.
It is not only in physics that the doctrine of the Trinity is theologically and scientifically correct, but in morals also; and this is the foundation of the Christian Religion.
As God, the Father, personates all science, under the attribute of omniscience; that is, personates all existence, both omnipotence and omnipresence, and is, in that reality, the fountain of knowledge—the all and every part that can be known; so God the Son, Christ or Logos, personates the human mind, as the existence or manifestation of knowledge and reason, as Jesus or the principle of salvation from evil, in possessing that knowledge, and as the true God, in us and with us, in and with whom we live, and move, and have our being.