A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM - Starr King School for the Ministry

and even in hell. It is his presence in them that gives them their existence. God
creates nothing to which he does not present and communicate himself. He is
everywhere, the complete essence of all things. He so contains in himself the
essence of all things that by his own essence alone, without another creature, he
can here manifest himself as fire, as air, as stone, as amber, as a twig, as a
flower, as whatever else you will. 52
Small wonder that in view of such teachings Servetus should have been set
down as a pantheist; for though he does not indeed identify God with the
created universe, but rather makes the universe a manifestation of God dwelling
within it, yet pantheism is the nearest system of thought to which most would
incline to assign it. 53 Of course in such a doctrine of God there was no room for
anything like the accepted doctrine of the Trinity. In his former works, as we
have seen in a previous chapter, Servetus still accepted belief in a Trinity, not
in the traditional sense, indeed, but as a threefold manifestation of divinity in
three wonderful ‘dispositions.’ Here, however, even this view has faded away
be fore the grander conception of a God who is manifested in everything. His
previous views of the Holy Spirit and of Christ are retained in somewhat
expanded form, but actually they stand in the shadow of the all-embracing
doctrine of God. The God-man of the theologians has disappeared from the
plan; though as an object of religious worship in mystical devotion Christ
continues to be the centre of Servetus’s personal religious experience.
Turning from speculative doctrine to practical, Servetus finds in baptism
the second cardinal doctrine calling for reformation. In the practice of infant
baptism he sees the source of all the corruption in the life of the Church; for as
it is baptism that is supposed to regenerate one and introduce him into the
kingdom of heaven, infant baptism is a delusion, formally admitting into the