God conceiver and God conceived are, then, in nature and essence, one and the same; whilst as the conceiver and the conceived, they are two distinct persons; and in this sense, there is a necessary duality in the infinite. This duality is brought into harmony and unity by the production of a third termination, the Holy Ghost. The conceiver and the conceived necessarily love each other. This is the result of a metaphysical law of the act of intelligence, including subject and object; since to intelligence an object produces an inclination or attraction in the subject toward it. Now the two persons in the Godhead intelligence each other; therefore they love each other. It is, again, the nature of love that the object loved should abide in the subject loving, in a state of feeling or an actively attractive state, a state which human language cannot utter. The best expression we can find is, that the object should abide in the subject in the capacity of beatifying it. The Godhead, under the termination of conceiver, loves the Godhead under the termination of conceived; and, vice versa, the Godhead, under the termination of conceived, loves the Godhead under the termination of conceiver. The result of this operation is a third termination of the Godhead—the Godhead under the termination of love, goodness, or bliss, proceeding from the other two terminations, the conceiver and the conceived. This new termination being distinct from the two former, and opposed to them, inasmuch as it originates from them, is consequently its own, incommunicable to the others, and hence a person. But as it is the same identical Godhead, under the termination of love, the three are but one and the same God. Without these terminations or triplicity in the Infinite, the God cannot exist or live. For what is a being without the knowledge of himself and without love? What is life but action? and action without a term originated is a contradiction in terms. The Godhead must, then, intelligence and love himself. The result of this are three terminations in the Godhead; a primary, unbegotten activity, a begotten intelligibility, an aspired goodness. That these three terminations do not break the unity of the Infinite will be manifest from the analysis to which we shall subject them.
We shall now proceed to vindicate the personality of the three terminations against a class of disguised pantheists—disguised even to themselves—that is, the Unitarians.
Why should these three terminations in the Godhead be persons? Could not the Godhead understand and love itself without supposing three personalities?
We answer that without the admission of three persons in the Godhead, we should necessarily fall into the pantheistic theory concerning God.
The Unitarians will concede to us that God must understand and love himself. Without this he were inconceivable. Now, we beg the Unitarians to tell us what this intelligence and love are? Are they only passing and transient acts or modifications, or are they faculties and attributes? What are they?
Besides essence and nature, which includes substance, our minds cannot conceive any other categories than the following:
1st. Attributes or perfections.
2d. Faculties.
3d. Acts of the faculties or modifications.
4th. Subsistence and personality.
Now, excluding subsistence and personality, the understanding and love of the Godhead must be either an attribute or faculty, or a transient act, or both of these together.
The Unitarians may demur at so many distinctions; but we would beg them to observe that when we see the most sacred dogmas, nay, the very pivot of knowledge, attacked by a flimsy and proud philosophy, we have a right to descend into the depths of science, and ask of the flimsy and boastful philosophy what it means when it attacks so sweepingly and so confidently. This remark has been forced from us by reading the following words of Channing: "We believe in the doctrine of God's unity, or that there is one God, one only. To this truth we give infinite importance, and we feel ourselves bound to take heed lest any man spoil us of it by vain (?) philosophy. This proposition, that there is one God, seems to us exceedingly plain. We understand by it that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfections and dominion belong. We conceive that these words could have conveyed no other meaning to the simple and uncultivated people, who were set apart to be the depositories of this great truth, and who were utterly incapable of understanding those hair-breadth distinctions between being and person, which the sagacity of other ages has discovered."