MORE than fifty years of controversy have been waged in New England between Trinitarianism and Unitarianism, as if they were two conflicting forms of Christianity. In this warfare Trinitarianism has been opposed as if it were both tritheism and idolatry, and Unitarianism has been opposed as if it were a denial of Jesus Christ and a rejection of his authority. That these mutual charges and imputations are both true and false could be proved abundantly by citations from the writings on both sides. Trinitarianism may be held and explicated as the worship of three Gods, or it may be held as the purest theism. We believe it has been held as both. Unitarianism may be held as conserving both the unity of God and the divinity of Christ, or it may merge both these doctrines in sheer pantheism, and lose the historical Christ altogether. It has had all this range and has it to-day. At the same time Christianity, as God's all-revealing Word and his final achievement in human nature, has a unitizing power more manifest from age to age. If the Paraclete which it brings did not tend to melt down artificial distinctions, and develop, amid endless diversity, an increasing and controlling catholicity, we could not recognize it as the Holy Spirit which was to achieve that sublimest of all Unitarianism announced by Jesus, "I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may believe that thou didst send me." Christianity was given to mankind in a state of barbarism; and to say that clouds gathered about it, drawn from human error, conceit, and earthliness, is only saying that it did not turn the earth by magic into paradise; at the same time we should expect the obscuring clouds to dissolve and become light before the face of revealed truth on its conquering way. And this is plainly so. Two great facts are noteworthy. Jesus Christ, as given in the New Testament and in the consciousness of the church, ever growing deeper and clearer, is the guide of the nations to-day. The statistics show it. The denominations which receive Christ, not as the self-development of human nature towards God, reached eighteen hundred years ago, but as the opening dawn of God to man, and of heaven to earth at this hour, are spreading and growing, and their rate of increase is higher than that of the population. Faith in Christ, as the great want of man and the renewing power of a fallen world, waxes but never wanes. This is one fact, we say, which the statistics of the denominations, carefully collated, clearly reveal. And there is another which may not be within the reach of statistics, but concerning which we presume the reader will have no shadow of doubt. It is this: the denominations are becoming more fully possessed with the mind and spirit of Christ. If you doubt it, compare the present century with the last, or compare the modern with the medieval ages, as pertains to the golden fruits of a true faith, righteousness, charity, brotherhood and universal love. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, the sweet humanities of the Sermon on Mount Olivet, and the love that breathes through the Johannean discourses never beat with more tender pulses than now to move and inspire all the ecclesiasticisms of the Christian world. Wor 391 thier and lovelier views of the divine character and attributes, zeal for Christ purged of all bitterness from the gall of the unregenerate heart, tolerance of error in opinion, intolerance of wrong to any child of God or of cruelty to any creature he has made, better theories of human nature and destiny, and better feelings of human fellowship that make every man not only the image of God, but the image of every other man, these mark the advent of Christ, as John foresaw it, Christianity displacing at length the old Judaism and heathenism, as the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. The unbelievers who assail Christianity now must go back into the centuries where they find it as corrupted and overlaid by the Judaism or paganism through which it was melting its way, not as it breaks through them from the sun-bright face of the Christ himself. True, it is not yet entirely cleared of them, for they are "the old man with his lusts" that lurks in all our hearts; but the missions, the charities, the self-sacrifice, the faith in God, the hope of man, and the deeper tenderness that beats through them all, are the inspiration of the Christ always coming in his kingdom. If you doubt this, strike out that name and the faiths organically connected with it; faiths which make man an immortal being, to be cared for as such, and not an animal to be fed and dressed for this world only, faiths which give the Paraclete as the inspiration of our work-day songs and our visions of glory at the dying hour; strike these out, and leave every man to his own guessings and intuitions, and how speedily would our beneficent Christian enterprizes collapse and die. The living Christ, we say, leads and inspires the thought of all our advancement to-day. Any reform that meets with tolerable success, succeeds because the Christ is in it, showing the worth of man as an immortal being, the child of a universal Father, and the member of a universal brotherhood, his fellowship being not of earth and time only, but of the glorified in heaven as well, whose sympathies draw us mightily upward, and whose "Come up hither!" ever falls down to us from the celestial abodes. There is not a denomination of Christendom, whose literature we are acquainted with, which does not show that the Spirit is coming within them with greater fullness and tenderness, making their theologies fluid in the love of Christ, as they reflect from his face in softer light the heavenly beatitudes which he spake and lived. All this being so, another consequence inevitably follows. We cannot move towards the Christ without coming closer to each other. Leave out him and his unitizing word, and let every man strike out for himself, and we tend to a crumbling individualism, to endless distraction and confusion. But those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as the supreme authority and guide, and enter more into his all-revealing mind, are making progress towards the harmonizing truths which he represents. However wide apart they may be at the start, their progress is ever on CONVerging lines. Essential truth becomes more and more central and manifest; the non-essential falls away to its subordinate place, and orthodox and beterodox move alike towards a higher and higher unity. It is not that any one sect is making a conquest of the others, but Jesus Christ is making a conquest of them all. Sometime ago Professor Stuart declared, in the name of Trinitarian orthodoxy, that it did not teach three persons in the Godhead, in the sense that Unitarians interpret that phraseology; that Trinitarians did not use the word "person" in its modern acceptation, but to indicate a distinction in the Divine Nature which they did not pretend to understand, and that the word "person" was only employed on account of the poverty of language. And because of this liability to misconstruction, the word has been dropped from many declarations of faith. Several orthodox creeds are before us, some of them of large representative churches, which read, “We believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," leaving the interpretation of these Bible words to the Christian believer as God shall reveal himself in the clarified consciousness, so that the divine threeness shall not conflict with the divine unity. That the worship of Christ may be and often is idolatrous worship; that it is the exaltation of the creature to the place of the Creator, of a finite suffering man to the place of God, - 393 we are by no means disposed to deny. We suppose it inevitable that many minds cling to the mere finite, without rising clearly out of it. But we have no right to bring this as a sweeping charge against the orthodox denominations, as many persons do. Those who make these charges ignore the distinction which orthodoxy has always made in its doctrine of the hypostatic union, the union in Christ of the infinite and the finite. Christ, as an object of prayer and of divine honors, stands for nothing finite and mortal to the mind of any intelligent worshiper; but rather for the Word, God speaking, the Divine Mind opening down to the human in Jesus Christ,the Divine Logos of which the finite suffering humanity was but symbol and scaffolding. To bring down the Christ within our human dimensions, and then project our shriveled conception into the creeds of our neighbors and charge them with worshiping the Christ as we have constructed him, is not the device of truthful and honorable controversy. As the mediator through whom alone the soul has been drawn up into the embrace of the divine love, what multitudes there are, both Trinitarian and Unitarian, who would say with tearful thanksgivings, "All I know of God is bound up in that name.' There is no ground for the charge of idolatry against those who worship God, under the name of Christ, whether Unitarian or Trinitarian, merely from that fact alone, any more than there is against the naturalist who sees God through the symbols of nature. The naturalist, if a theist, says that nature is God revealed, and he stands amid her blaze of magnificence and adores. Am I to turn upon him and charge him with worshiping stones and trees and mountains, and not rather enter into his thought, in which stones, trees and mountains, and the whole range of finite objects, are seen as the exponents of forces that lie within them and behind them, and these again resolved into the grand force of all, which is the adorable and eternal One? No catalogue of finite objects, however classified, exhausts your conception of nature. implies some power that lies within and behind them. If you It ascribe to this power self-consciousness and personality, you are a theist, and worship it as God. But I should grossly |