And has God given to thee a love, It is but for a time thine own, Then leaves it thee so all alone, Then weep thou! Yes, weep thou! Now must thou understand my strain, When living mortals part in pain, ART. III.-TWO NEW TRINITIES. 1.-The Trinity: its Scripture Foundation and the early construction of Church Doctrines respecting it. A Lecture preached at Springfield, Sunday, Oct. 28th, 1849. By GEORGE F. SIMMONS, Minister of the Third Congregational Society. 2.-A New Gnosis. [By WILLIAM B. GREENE, a pamphlet of 10 pages.] THE first of the above works is written in an amiable and conciliating spirit: it is also very impartial, considering that its subject is the Trinity. A person who attempts to coax that doctrine into placid assimilation with his nature, cannot remain perfectly just and genial; for the digestive apparatus will have its little revenges for the imposition. It is a made taste, like that for olives and liquor, and cannot be enjoyed without some atrabiliar nemesis. But there is a mongrel Orthodoxy that, like highly diluted spirit, is comparatively harmless. And, of all Trinities, give us the sentimental Trinity for digestion. We are not ready yet to propound it as an axiom, that a man's idiosyncracy decides his theology; but give limits and qualifications in a few directions to a generalization that would otherwise be grossly material, and we have an important truth. A man's theology is not the independent result of his pure reason. Were such a theology, in fact, attainable, it would be constricted and cheap enough. But it depends upon that precise balance of faculties and sentiments, that special power of each, which any given individual represents, just as various made colors result from the mixture of different shades, so that an individual becomes toned down into a theology that is as inevitable and irreversible for him as is his complexion. It would not be impossible to construct a theological sliding scale, in which various tendencies of character should be matched with their congenial and necessary modes of speculation; not with creeds, but with modes of speculation; for, after all, the essential difference between men is not so much in the formulas and number of articles they subscribe, as in the modes of thought which they exercise upon spiritual things. The differences, then, cannot be very extensive. There are only two radical distinctions, with supplementary ones belonging to each, depending upon culture, sentiment and health of brain. These two involve the natural and the supernatural modes or habits of thought. Supplementary to these, are various ways of holding the doctrines peculiar to each, depending upon that subtle blending which is baptized John, or James, or George. This truth ought to teach us unconditional tolerance, and also save us from that anxious proselyting spirit, which imagines that a man can receive an opinion, on abstract considerations, independent of that special totality of his which must determine the issue, and which through all its alterations must modify the issue. We should as soon expect to see the Chinese successful in converting the Yankees to birdsnest and rat soup. Not that rat soup is positively inadmissible, by the conditions of human nature, any more than is a Trinity, or a quaternity, for it is astonishing what the human stomach will endure. Shipwrecked people, in extremis, have eaten each other; but then they were somewhat seasoned in advance for this Kilkenny banquet, by the cannibal acerbities of their theologians. But, after all, it is better for each genus to stick to its providential nutriment. Mr. Simmons does not seem to be in extremis, and yet we find him nibbling at this Trinity. He is a supernaturalist, but that is only one essential antecedent for the gratification of such a taste. He belongs to that class of supernaturalists who, in a doubtful issue between Science and Scripture, would allow to Scripture the casting vote, forgetting that the interpretation which they put upon Scripture is, for the time being, their science. The right of private judgment within the limits of Scripture, means, the interpretation of Scripture according to individualities more or less orthodox. But Mr. Simmons is a sentimentalist, and that is the determining antecedent of the Trinity which he develops in this lecture. The following sentence illustrates the tone of his mind, and the consequent coloring of his theology: this Trinity "grows up in the retreats of devotion; it is like that flower which is found in shady thickets, and goes by the name of nodding trillium, - which, being one of the few which have a triple petal, bends low its blossom, that it may be sheltered under the extended leaves. The root of this plant is said to be medicinal." A supernatural, Scriptural, devout Sentimentalist, who had become acquainted with Tholuck and Neander, had sympathized, from his Unitarian education, with every effort to rationalize evangelical doctrines, and lately, with Bushnell's æsthetic altar-form of Christianity and modal Trinity, could not do otherwise than believe that "the Father redeems us through his Son, in the fellowship of the Spirit. The whole Trinity is there included; nothing of it left out." This is the nod ding trillium which Mr. Simmons finds in the baptismal formula in Matthew xxviii. 19. In another place, he speaks of the Trinity as the living disclosure God has made and is making of Himself to man, the scheme of the Bible.' This is not a a threefold distinction in the nature of the self-subsistent God, but only" that threefold character which He assumes to us. But Mr. Simmons does not affirm that these three phases of God exhaust the Divine nature. To say nothing of the angels, he adds that the religious mind recognizes these four things, -"the Father, Nature, Christ and the Spirit." An ingenious mind might illustrate this quaternity by the four-leaved clover, if Matthew's formula of baptism only contained four terms instead of three; for this Trinity is, after all, only spun out of the above text, and Mr. Simmons is not scientific, when he says that the mind cannot unite any two terms of this Trinity in the same thought. There is his whole difficulty. Waiving all discussion concerning the nature of the Son, we suggest that the two terms, Father and Spirit, are not only capable of union, but that the term Father covers the whole ground of both, practically and religiously. Of what consequence is it, then, how a formula of baptism is worded, if its terms are plainly reducible. The religious mind is not compelled to find its satisfaction in the Trinity of Mr. Simmons, 25 NO. X. 66 any more than in that ontological speculation, the Orthodox Trinity, which is the supposed ground and explanation of the other. Mr. Simmons holds the idea, but objects to any attempt to substantiate and explain it. Next to believing a thing which cannot be proved, is that more unfortunate tendency to believe a thing because it cannot be proved. When we speak of proving a thing, we do not mean that logical processes can demonstrate every object worthy of our faith. The whole man must advance to the proof of a spiritual problem, and he must test it by his totality of thought and feeling. Then faith in a thing indemonstrable becomes a rational prolongation of reason. But it must not contradict scientific laws; it may pass beyond them, and out of their province, but still it cannot be at variance with them. If it contradicts them, no individual sentiment can make it worthy of belief. Mr. Simmons' Trinity is at variance with scientific laws, inasmuch as it distinguishes the two modes or phases, Father and Spirit. Therefore it is an idiosyncracy, and not a legitimate object of belief. This leads us to say a word or two concerning that naturalism which Mr. Simmons rejects with aversion. How could he do otherwise, with his individuality? Will he, nill he, he must reject it, until a fresh shake of the kaleidoscope throws his powers and sentiments into another combination. But, in the meantime, it may be possible to convince all those who sympathize with Mr. Simmons, that Naturalism lacks none of those Christian graces which are claimed as results of a socalled Scriptural scheme, with or without a Trinity. A too sweeping generalization is involved in the statement that under the scheme of Naturalism, "virtue will be the virtue of stoicism, and the mind's soaring will be that of contemplation, not of prayer." We can imagine that to have been penned with the reminiscence of a volume or two of contemplative essays and poems hanging about the writer's sense. If a man is contemplative by nature, his prayer will be contemplative, whether he be a Naturalist, or an ultra Calvinist, or a moderate Unitarian. What an itching there is to fix such characteristics as appear objectionable to any one, or are not in harmony with one, upon this or that creed! But if a man be a stoic, he will display the virtue of stoicism, and all the thirtynine articles cannot make him more trustful and dependent. When Mr. Simmons proceeds to add that, in the school of Naturalism, "all virtue will be practised under a sense of de sertion," and that prayer itself will gradually cease, since "it is the natural fruit only of a faith which connects us by a living tie with God," we are on the point of growing indig nant, and filling the rest of this review with notes of amazement. Whom did Mr. Simmons have in his eye, to designate withal a whole genus? We hasten to disabuse a devout mind of a consideration which must be afflictive to it. No living tie with God? Why, Naturalism is very little else: the merciful, suggesting, humbling, creative presence of God in the intellect and soul of His children, is the central thought from which the whole action and spirituality of the Naturalist proceeds. The consciousness of that great fact has slowly made him what he is, and affection, devoutness, thought, and will, are meekly subordinated to faith in that glorious presenceno, not to the faith, but to the presence. Can virtues grow stern, and can prayer cease, in the heart of any child who lives and thinks, walks the streets and transacts his business, with an absorbing sense of the nearness and the minute solicitudes of the Infinite Father? Pray God that Mr. Simmons may become acquainted with the heart of some Naturalist. Another misconception is contained in the following paragraph: "it may be said that this school make much, on the contrary, of inspiration. But they make too much of it. If all is inspired, nothing is inspired. And that presence of God is nothing to me, which I share with the clod." He has here compounded a rare Pantheism with a scientific Naturalism. Is it really predestined in the decrees of God, that a devout Sentimentalist cannot be discriminating? There is much Pantheism among the Absorptionists of the East; there has been some in Germany: a few men, both there and in this country, may have been betrayed from the very excess of a contemplative devoutness, united to a poetic temperament without analysis, into the vagueness of this doctrine. But even to them the presence of God is something more personal, practical and ennobling than it is to a clod. Given a clod, and indeed God's presence will not be very salient and impressive. Given a holy, aspiring soul, and the doctrine is robbed of its horrors. But we venture to affirm, that a legitimate Naturalism in alliance with keen eyed and discriminating science, is fast correcting what little vagueness exists upon the subject of the immanence of God. If Mr. Simmons would successfully oppose the oriental impracticability of Pantheism, he must become a Naturalist and believe in inspiration. |