I have in my head some floating ideas on the Logos, which I hope, hereafter, to mould into a consistent form; but it is a gross perversion of the truth, in Socinians, to declare that we believe in three gods; and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice affirm that we believe in three suns. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first rudiments of christianity, would shrink back from a thing so monstrous. Still the Trinity has its difficulties. It would be strange if otherwise. A Revelation that revealed nothing, not within the grasp of human reason! — no religation, no binding over again, as before said; but these difficulties are shadows, contrasted with the substantive and insurmountable obstacles, with which they contend who admit the Divine authority of Scripture, with the superlative excellence of Christ, and yet undertake to prove that these Scriptures teach, and that Christ taught his own pure humanity.
If Jesus Christ was merely a man, if he was not God as well as man, be it considered, he could not have been even a good man. There is no medium. The SAVIOUR in that case was absolutely a deceiver! one, transcendantly unrighteous! in advancing pretensions to miracles, by the ‘Finger of God,’ which he never performed; and by asserting claims, (as a man) in the most aggravated sense, blasphemous. These consequences, Socinians, to be consistent, must allow, and which impious arrogation of Divinity in Christ, according to their faith, as well as his false assumption of a community of ‘glory’ with the Father, ‘before the world was,’ even they will be necessitated completely to admit the exoneration of the Jews, according to their law, in crucifying one, who ‘being a man,’ ‘made himself God!’ But in the Christian, rather than in the Socinian, or Pharisaic view, all these objections vanish, and harmony succeeds to inexplicable confusion. If Socinians hesitate in ascribing unrighteousness to Christ, the inevitable result of their principles, they tremble, as well they might, at their avowed creed, and virtually renounce what they profess to uphold.
The Trinity, as Bishop Leighton has well remarked, is ‘a doctrine of faith, not of demonstration,’ except in a moral sense. If the New Testament declare it, not in an insulated passage, but through the whole breadth of its pages, rendering, with any other admission, the book which is the christian’s anchor-hold of hope, dark and contradictory, then it is not to be rejected, but on a penalty that reduces to an atom, all the sufferings this earth can inflict.
Let the grand question be determined. — Is, or is not the bible inspired? No one book has ever been subjected to so rigid an investigation as the Bible, by minds the most capacious, and in the result, which has so triumphantly repelled all the assaults of infidels. In the extensive intercourse which I have had with this class of men, I have seen their prejudices surpassed only by their ignorance. This I found particularly the case in Dr. Darwin, (p. 1-85.) the prince of their fraternity. Without therefore, stopping to contend on what all dispassionate men must deem undebatable ground, I may assume inspiration as admitted; and equally so, that it would be an insult to man’s understanding, to suppose any other revelation from God than the christian scriptures. If these Scriptures, impregnable in their strength, sustained in their pretensions, by undeniable prophecies and miracles, and by the experience of the inner man, in all ages, as well as by a concatenation of arguments, all bearing upon one point, and extending with miraculous consistency, through a series of fifteen hundred years; if all this combined proof does not establish their validity, nothing can be proved under the sun; but the world and man must be abandoned, with all its consequences, to one universal scepticism! Under such sanctions, therefore, if these scriptures, as a fundamental truth, do inculcate the doctrine of the Trinity; however surpassing human comprehension; then I say, we are bound to admit it on the strength of moral demonstration.
The supreme Governor of the world and the Father of our spirits, has seen fit to disclose to us much of his will, and the whole of his natural and moral perfections. In some instances he has given his word only, and demanded our faith; while on other momentous subjects, instead of bestowing full revelation, like the Via Lactea, he has furnished a glimpse only, through either the medium of inspiration, or by the exercise of those rational faculties with which he has endowed us. I consider the Trinity as substantially resting on the first proposition, yet deriving support from the last.
I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till, lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them, until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night. All truths, however, that are essential to faith, honestly interpreted; all that are important to human conduct, under every diversity of circumstance, are manifest as a blazing star. The promises also of felicity to the righteous in the future world, though the precise nature of that felicity may not be defined, are illustrated by every image that can swell the imagination; while the misery of the lost, in its unutterable intensity, though the language that describes it is all necessarily figurative, is there exhibited as resulting chiefly, if not wholly, from the withdrawment of the light of God’s countenance, and a banishment from his presence! best comprehended in this world by reflecting on the desolations, which would instantly follow the loss of the sun’s vivifying and universally diffused warmth.
You, or rather all, should remember that some truths from their nature, surpass the scope of man’s limited powers, and stand as the criteria of faith, determining by their rejection, or admission, who among the sons of men can confide in the veracity of heaven. Those more ethereal truths, of which the Trinity is conspicuously the chief, without being circumstantially explained, may be faintly illustrated by material objects. The eye of man cannot discern the satellites of Jupiter, nor become sensible of the multitudinous stars, whose rays have never reached our planet, and consequently garnish not the canopy of night; yet are they the less real, because their existence lies beyond man’s unassisted gaze? The tube of the philosopher, and the celestial telescope, — the unclouded visions of heaven will confirm the one class of truths, and irradiate the other.
The Trinity is a subject on which analogical reasoning may advantageously be admitted, as furnishing, at least a glimpse of light, and with this, for the present, we must be satisfied. Infinite Wisdom deemed clearer manifestations inexpedient; and is man to dictate to his Maker? I may further remark, that where we cannot behold a desirable object distinctly, we must take the best view we can; and I think you, and every candid enquiring mind, may derive assistance from such reflections as the following.
Notwithstanding the arguments of Spinosa, and Des Cartes, and other advocates of the Material system, or, in more appropriate language, the Atheistical system! it is admitted by all men, not prejudiced, not biased by sceptical prepossessions, that mind is distinct from matter. The mind of man, however, is involved in inscrutable darkness, (as the profoundest metaphysicians well know) and is to be estimated, if at all, alone by an inductive process; that is, by its effects. Without entering on the question, whether an extremely circumscribed portion of the mental process, surpassing instinct, may or may not be extended to quadrupeds, it is universally acknowledged, that the mind of man alone, regulates all the actions of his corporeal frame. Mind, therefore, may be regarded as a distinct genus, in the scale ascending above brutes, and including the whole of intellectual existences; advancing from thought, that mysterious thing! in its lowest form, through all the gradations of sentient and rational beings, till it arrives at a Bacon, a Newton; and then, when unincumbered by matter, extending its illimitable sway through Seraph and Archangel, till we are lost in the GREAT INFINITE!
Is it not deserving of notice, as an especial subject of meditation, that our limbs, in all they do or can accomplish, implicitly obey the dictation of the mind? that this operating power, whatever its name, under certain limitations, exercises a sovereign dominion not only over our limbs, but over our intellectual pursuits? The mind
of every man is evidently the fulcrum, the moving force, — which alike regulates all his limbs and actions: and in which example, we find a strong illustration of the subordinate nature of mere matter. That alone which gives direction to the organic parts of our nature, is wholly mind; and one mind if placed over a thousand limbs, could, with undiminished ease, control and regulate the whole.
This idea is advanced on the supposition that one mind could command an unlimited direction over any given number of limbs, provided they were all connected by joint and sinew. But suppose, through some occult and inconceivable means, these limbs were dis-associated, as to all material connexion; suppose, for instance, one mind with unlimited authority, governed the operations of two separate persons, would not this substantially, be only one person, seeing the directing principle was one? If the truth here contended for, be admitted, that two persons, governed by one mind, is incontestably one person; the same conclusion would be arrived at, and the proposition equally be justified, which affirmed that, three, or otherwise four persons, owning also necessary and essential subjection to one mind, would only be so many diversities or modifications of that one mind, and therefore, the component parts virtually collapsing into one whole, the person would be one. Let any man ask himself, whose understanding can both reason and become the depository of truth, whether, if one mind thus regulated with absolute authority, three, or otherwise four persons, with all their congeries of material parts, would not these parts inert in themselves, when subjected to one predominant mind, be in the most logical sense, one person? Are ligament and exterior combination indispensable pre-requisites to the sovereign influence of mind over mind? or mind over matter?
But perhaps it may be said, we have no instance of one mind governing more than one body. This may be, but the argument remains the same. With a proud spirit, that forgets its own contracted range of thought, and circumscribed knowledge, who is to limit the sway of Omnipotence? or presumptuously to deny the possibility of that Being, who called light out of darkness, so to exalt the dominion of one mind, as to give it absolute sway over other dependant minds, or (indifferently) over detached, or combined portions of organized matter? But if this superinduced quality be conferable on any order of created beings, it is blasphemy to limit the power of God, and to deny his capacity to transfuse his own Spirit, when and to whom he will.
This reasoning may now be applied in illustration of the Trinity. We are too much in the habit of viewing our Saviour Jesus Christ, through the medium of his body. ‘A body was prepared for him,’ but this body was mere matter; as insensible in itself as every human frame when deserted by the soul. If therefore the Spirit that was in Christ, was the Spirit of the Father; if no thought, no vibration, no spiritual communication, or miraculous display, existed in, or proceeded from Christ, not immediately and consubstantially identified with Jehovah, the Great First cause; if all these operating principles were thus derived, in consistency alone with the conjoint divine attributes; if this Spirit of the Father ruled and reigned in Christ as his own manifestation, then in the strictest sense, Christ exhibited ‘the Godhead bodily,’ and was undeniably ‘one with the Father;’ confirmatory of the Saviour’s words: ‘Of myself, (my body) I can do nothing, the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.’
But though I speak of the body as inert in itself, and necessarily allied to matter, yet this declaration must not be understood as militating against the christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In its grosser form, the thought is not to be admitted, for ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,’ but that the body, without losing its consciousness and individuality, may be subjected by the illimitable power of omnipotence, to a sublimating process, so as to be rendered compatible with spiritual association, is not opposed to reason, in its severe abstract exercises, while in attestation of this exhilarating belief, there are many remote analogies in nature exemplifying the same truth, while it is in the strictest accordance with that final dispensation, which must, as christians, regulate all our speculations. I proceed now to say, that
If the postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth, if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, unconnected with matter, possessed an undivided and sovereign dominion over two or more disembodied minds, so as to become the exclusive source of all their subtlest volitions and exercises, the unity, however complex the modus of its manifestation, would be fully established; and this principle extends to Deity itself, and shows the true sense, as I conceive, in which Christ and the Father are one.
In continuation of this reasoning, if God who is light, the Sun of the moral world, should in his union of infinite wisdom, power, and goodness, and from all eternity, have ordained that an emanation from himself, — for aught we know, an essential emanation, as light is inseparable from the luminary of day — should not only have existed in his Son, in the fulness of time to be united to a mortal body, but that a like emanation from himself, also perhaps essential, should have constituted the Holy Spirit, who, without losing his ubiquity, was more especially sent to this lower earth, by the Son, at the impulse of the Father, then in the most comprehensive sense, God, and his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are ONE. ‘Three persons in one God,’ and thus form the true Trinity in Unity.
To suppose that more than one independent power, or governing mind, exists in the whole universe, is absolute Polytheism, against which the denunciations of all the Jewish and Christian canonical books were directed. And if there be but ONE directing MIND, that mind is God! operating however, in three persons, according to the direct and uniform declarations of that inspiration which ‘brought life and immortality to light.’ Yet this divine doctrine of the Trinity is to be received, not because it is or can be clear to finite apprehension, but, in reiteration of the argument, because the Scriptures, in their unsophisticated interpretation expressly state it. The Trinity, therefore, from its important aspects, and biblical prominence, is the grand article of faith, and the foundation of the whole christian system.
Who can say, as Christ and the Holy Ghost proceeded from, and are still one with the Father, and as all the disciples of Christ derive their fulness from him, and, in spirit, are inviolately united to him as a branch is to the vine, who can say, but that in one view, what was once mysteriously separated, may as mysteriously, be re-combined, and, without interfering with the everlasting Trinity, and the individuality of the spiritual and seraphic orders, the Son at the consummation of all things, deliver up his mediatorial kingdom to the Father, and God, in some peculiar and infinitely sublime sense, become all in all! God love you,
S. T. Coleridge.”
In a former page, Mr. Coleridge has been represented as entertaining sentiments in early life, approaching to, though not identified with, those of Unitarians; on his return to Bristol, in the year 1807, a complete reverse had taken place in his theological tenets. Reflection and reading, particularly the bible, had taught him, as he said, the unstable foundation on which Unitarians grounded their faith; and in proportion as orthodox sentiments acquired an ascendancy in his mind, a love of truth compelled him to oppose his former errors, and stimulated him, by an explicit declaration of his religious views, to counteract those former impressions, which his cruder opinions had led him once so strenuously to enforce on all around.
The editor of Mr. Coleridge’s “Table Tails,” has conferred an important benefit on the public, by preserving so many of his familiar conversations, particularly those on the important subject of Unitarianism. Few men ever poured forth torrents of more happily-expressed language, the result of more matured reflection, in his social intercourse, than Mr. Coleridge; and at this time, the recollection is accompanied with serious regret, that I allowed to pass unnoticed so many of his splendid colloquies, which, could they be recalled, would exhibit his talents in a
light equally favourable with his most deliberately-written productions.
I did indeed take notes of one of his conversations, on his departure from a supper party, and which I shall subjoin, because the confirmed general views, and individual opinions of so enlarged a mind must command attention; especially when exercised on subjects intrinsically important. I however observe, that my sketch of the conversation must be understood as being exceedingly far from doing justice to the original.
At this time I was invited to meet Mr. Coleridge with a zealous Unitarian minister. It was natural to conclude, that such uncongenial, and, at the same time, such inflammable materials would soon ignite. The subject of Unitarianism having been introduced soon after dinner, the minister avowed his sentiments, in language that was construed into a challenge, when Mr. Coleridge advanced at once to the charge, by saying “Sir, you give up so much, that the little you retain of Christianity is not worth keeping.” We looked in vain for a reply. After a manifest internal conflict, the Unitarian minister very prudently allowed the gauntlet to remain undisturbed. Wine he thought more pleasant than controversy.
Shortly after this occurrence, Mr. Coleridge supped with the writer, when his well known conversational talents were eminently displayed; so that what Pope affirmed of Bolingbroke, that “his usual conversation, taken down verbatim, from its coherence and accuracy, would have borne printing, without correction,” was fully, and perhaps, more justly applicable to Mr. C.
Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey Page 339