George Edward Ellis on the Trinity Doctrine 1857

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Subject: George Edward Ellis on the Trinity

"The doctrinal statement of the Trinity leads off the Orthodox creeds: no vague, inferential implication of the contents of the doctrine is thought to be satisfactory. Doubt about it is dangerous; a rejection of it is fatal. The doctrine is obtruded upon us in its stiffest literal terms, though, strange to say, many of its champions affirm that they dislike its  terms,and wish that they could express it more adequately. Here certainly is no backwardness, no hesitation, on the part of those who, believing the doctrine, think it ought to be reiterated and emphasized. Now, how comes it that Christ and his Apostles furnish us not one single announcement of  it? If anything can be inferred with certainty as to the belief of the Jews concerning the mode of the Divine existence, it is that they knew  nothing of the Orthodox dogma of the Trinity. Surely then we might expect that their first Christian teachers would have been at least as careful to declare it to them as a new revelation of truth, the basis of all Christian doctrine,
as modern Christian teachers are to demand a faith in it from their pupils. It will not do to say that the Apostles left other essential Christian doctrines without any direct, explicit statement of them. It is not true. They had a commission from their Master, and they  discharged it. Whatever they have not taught plainly, must be pronounced to be. No part of their teaching, however positively their successors may have taught it. Peter, who preached to the Jews the first Christian discourse after the Church had risen from the grave of its Founder, told them that "Jesus of Nazareth," "whom they had put to death," was "a man approved of God by works which God did by him," and that God had raised him up. Words could not be more explicit. Yet not from them, and from no other words spoken by the Apostles to the Jews, as recorded, could they have gathered a plain statement of the Trinity. As to the Gentiles, we find traces, among a school of philosophic dreamers, of a sort of Trinitarian conception, far unlike that, however, which Christian divines now receive, though the dogma came into the Church by that channel. No direct announcement of the doctrine was made by the Apostles when they preached to Gentiles, who certainly were ignorant of it, and might claim to be distinctly informed about the first fundamental doctrine of the Gospel."

Ellis, George Edward (b.1814-d.1894). A Half-Century
of the Unitarian Controversy, With Particular Reference to its Origin, its Course, and its Prominent Subjects Among the Congregationalists of  Massachusetts.
(Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company; Cambridge: Metcalf and Company, Printers
to the University, 1857), Appendix VIII, "The Doctrine of the Trinity,"
pp. 464, 465. BX9841 .E5 / 33-022268.