Farewell to the First Congregational Church in Norwalk, Conn. (bound with other addresses)

[P. 150-1.] "III. Mannee OFTHE Plukality. To diBoover a suiEeient reason or economical necessity for the plurality or threeness, by which God is repre- sented in the Christian Scriptures, it seems to me is not difficult ; however diffi- cult it may be to discover that there is no other and deeper reason back of it. Not even the spirit, character, and powers of a man can be expressed in any other way than by contrasts, or in terms of light and shade. We require to see him as compared with other men, then as compared with himself in divers conditions and exigencies, that by one revelation what is tender and gentle, by another what is great and heroic, may appear. In the same way all his distinctive qualities will be manifested ; the soft, the strong, the good; the severe, the just, the true ; cau- tion, courage, delicacy, and breadth,,; his ability to grace humble scenes, to meet great storms of adversity, to sustain the burdens of empire, and bear the helm of counsel in years of revolution. Passing through these manifold terms of exer- cise, which are so many modes of self-revelation, he wiU seem at different times to be quite another being, so varied and repugnant are his demonstrations. And yet he is the same, only more completely revealed. " Can the infinite God be revealed in a simpler manner and with fewer an- tagonisms ? Being infinite, and all terms of expression finite, what shall we ex- pect but an array of contrasts more numerous, sometimes violent, even beyond the power of definite comprehension ?" ' [P. 126.] "The highest reality and truth of the Three is, that they manifest and are the One ; and whatever we receive, in the Trinity set forth, that is not a knowledge or impression of the One, is a residu-um of form anii number that belongs to the medium, and vehicle of truth, and not to the truth itself." [P. 137-8.] " Precisely here is opened to our discovery the real value and power of the Christian Trinity, as a supernatural revelsStion of God. To prevent ow diminishing the One and conceiving Sim to be only a man with magnifiers annexed, as in the feeble, undivine notion of a philosophic unity, it presents a- Three. To shut away, at the same time, the second error — that which, to escape the first, turns itself toward the doctrine of the Brahmins, and conceives him to be only a vast impersonal abysm, or platitude ; or, with the modern pantheists, to be the unconscious principle of an eternal Cosmos — it presents three Persons. And so the Christian Trinity, by its two elements of number and personality, holds us to a strain of thought after God, both as transcending the categories of our human understanding and as personal in his relations and character. "But just here rises the great question of Christian theology, viz., what shall be thought of the persons ? Most Christian teachers frankly confess that they do not understand: the interior personality of the persons; and yet they will press on the word, so as virtually to insist that there are three mstinct agents asserted as existing in the divine nature ; three persons having a personality that 22 Sec. III. Showing in what seTise^&oerthdess, the Trinity may te im- manent in the^odhead accor&vny to Dr. B. The Trinity proMbly has the same immanent ground in the Divine nature as revelation, [p. 146 ;] also, as all number, form, genus, family, sex, &c., [pp. lt4-5]. How far these are immanent in God, we shall probably learn as soon as the dis- covery will be of any value, [p. 155.] is constituted under and -within the same categories of -wiil, thought, emotion, and the like, by which oui' human consciousness is distinguished. Qod is now three magnijled men initead of one; hut if such a trinity of finites, acting in cross relations -with each other, may suffice to save the mind from lapsing into a conception of God as one finite, which is very little lower, the gain wiU be more than balanced by the increased distraction of mind thus produced. This con- ception of God 18, in fact, the most difficult that can be formed, and so far, at least, the most inadequate." [P. 146.] "Secondly, it is plain that if we look at the Trinity simply as an " instrumental trinity," unable to determine with certainty anything more positive concerning it, than that the One can be most fitly revealed to finite beings in this way ; then, as it is in the very nature of God to reveal himself as truly as to create, or to be, so there is, in this view, a ground of trinity certainly in the nature of God as truly immanent as his being." [P. 144-5.] " And no one certainly mil imagine that, in affirming the unity and strict simplicity of the Divine nature, I excluded every possibility or possible ground of number in it; for all number has its ground, more or less hnmanently, there. All distinctions of law, order, form, genus, family, have their root in God — not in his mil merely, but in the distribution of his interior, eternal, necessary intelligence. What thoughtful soul, cleared of dullness toward what is familiar, and turned in its pure longings every way to search after God, has not sometime paused in a deep maze of bewilderment over the fact of bisexual existence imi- versally observed in the living world, imagining what ground there may be, or not be, in God for such a distribution of organic life i It cannot be said that there was no ground for it, save in the act of will by which it was appointed ; for, in order to be willed, it must first be thought, and it could only be thought from eternity, the thoughts of God being, in some sense, necessary and coeval with his being. But if a distribution of God's visible work, so general and com- prehensive, implies no oori^esponding distribution in his nature itself, we discover how little it means, or may, to say tiat any thing has a ground in God's natm-e, — how little, that is, in respect to the essential composition or distribution of his nature. " That theVe is some threefold ground of the Divine nature, back of the Chris- tian Trinity, I was most careful not to deny. I only denied what some, with a most blamable presumption, have dared to affirm concerning it. The unity of God is itself a great deep, not merely in the fact that it supports a Trinity, but quite as much in the fact tliat all number is, in some sense, immanently grounded in it. [P. 155.] "All else in the Persons we may leave to the future, as we do all the other mysteries of form and event which encompass our life. If then it shall be found that the Persons, and even all number and form and relation are, in some most real ond true sense (which is far from being incredible), immanent in God's nature, it will be as soon as the discovery can be made valuable." 23 Sec. IV. Dr. B. elmms that tliere is cmd ought to he no settled doc- trine of the Trimdty. There is no doctrine of the Trinity that is generally ac- cepted. If there were, it would be disastrous to piety. It is best that it should remain an open question for ever, [pp. 122-3]. Seo. V. Showing his views of the doctrine of our New Englomd churches on this siibject. The doctrine prevalent among us that there is a Trinity of [Pp. 122-S.] "Secondly, it is another advantage of the view I have sug- gested that, while it holds the mind to a practical use of the Trinifryi it allows and provokes to the highest activity of thought concerning God. Nothing strains the human mind to such tensity as a riddle or mystery, when that riddle or mystery is not a fiction, but is based in the depth of some stupendous reality. And for just this reason it is that the Trinity of Scripture has availed to matje the nature of God a problem of so great interest to the human mind for the last eighteen centuries. Such a strain of human thought after God and his trans- cendent mystery could have been kept up by no other means. And the result has been that, while nothing has been gained as regards the real comprehension or solution of the mystery — ^that while so many heresies and confutations and de- terminations of councils, so much labor of logic and scholastic learning, so maii^ divinations of mysticism, so many theories of ontology and transcendental philosophy, have ended in just no solution or doctrine of the subject that can hope for general acceptance — ^there has yet resulted such a liftmg of the range and such an expansion of the circle of thought concerning God, as more than compensates the immense labor it has cost. The very confusion we complain of is, in one view, but another name for fertility. And what we have thus attained, we should never have begun to seek, had only the simple Jewish conception of Divine unity been given u& We owe it all to the amaEing riddle thrown out to the mind of the world, in the Christian Trinity. Aad it is one of the highest merits of the Christian expression of God under a threefold personality, that it would not allow the mind of the world to rest any longer in a conception- so easy to thought, and, in fact, so nearly finite ; but compelled a new toil of exploration, and thus conducted to a new sense of the possibilities included in God and the mystery of infiiiite being. ' "Now, the effort of the church has been and still is, though not so intended, to stop exactly that which it has been the merit of the Scripture Trinity to be doing. Could some science of the Trinity, or of God's immanent distribution, be perfected and estabUshed in a fixed form of dogma, so that nothing more would be left us but to run over the logical terms and hear what they say, then mani- festly the labor of the world's mind would rest, and the process of fertility be ended. And not only so, not only would God never be greater to thought, but there would begin to be a wave of retrocession, a subsidence of thought to a lower level. Since the dogma is, in that case, an end of question, thought re- ceives it without question ; and then, having God by rote, He becomes to mind as life- less as mind is lifeless to Him ; as much diminished in volume, too, as thought is diminished in the strain of its intensity. Accoriiuybj, jvxt that is wanted which the Church has been trying, in all ages, to escape, vis., to keep tlie TVinity an open Question for ever." 24 persons in the Divine essence, is plain teitheism, [p. 172]. Those who assert " three distinct persons in the one I>iviBe es- sence," mean simple heresy, [p. 173]. This is the prevailing doctrine among us, [pp. 173-4]. It, is equivalent to the doctrine of three substances in the Divine nature, [pp. 186-7]. "We have no standard better than a residuary trithei&tic compost," [p. 175]. Dr. B. therefore peremptorily refuses to justify him- , [P. 1*72.] "Oesisiiig to coneeiye a Trinity of act, we began to assert a Trinity of persons in the Divine essence itself which is plain tritheism." [P. 1Y3.] " Our brethren of Fairfield, too, in the minute they sent to our General Association at Salisbury, complained of it as a heresy, that some are be- ginning to deiiy ' three distinct persons in the one Divine essence — ^where the particle 'in' it is true, may be explained to mean only 'pertaming to' (i e., to the divine essence regarded as a necessarily active principle), and so to be con- sistent vnth proper Orthodoxy ; but which, taken in the liTew England sense of the terms, as I have no dmtbt it was both meant and understood, is simple heresy." [P. 173-4.] " Or, if it be suggested that all these examples of crudity and con- fusion are so many casual aberrations, and do not represent the true state of doctrine among us, I reply that our ablest preachers and theologie professors are even accustomed to assert and maintain a Trinity of persons in the Divine essence. More commonly they use the word nature, by which they understand the same thing."