His earliest book of consequence was on Christian Nurture, published in 1846. Consistent Calvinism presupposes in its converts mature years. Even an adult must pass through waters deep for him. He is not a sinful child of the Father. He is a being totally depraved and damned to everlasting punishment. God becomes his Father only after he is redeemed. The revivalists' theory Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of religion a transcendental matter which belonged on the outside of life, a kind of miraculous epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing individualism. He anticipated much that is now being said concerning heredity, environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a classic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century offers to the twentieth.
Bushnell, so far as one can judge, had no knowledge of Kant. He is, nevertheless, dealing with Kant's own problem, of the theory of knowledge, in his rather diffuse 'Dissertation on Language,' which is prefixed to the volume which bears the title God in Christ, 1849. He was following his living principle, the reference of doctrine to conscience. God must be a 'right God.' Dogma must make no assertion concerning God which will not stand this test. Not alone does the dogma make such assertions. The Scripture makes them as well. How can this be? What is the relation of language to thought and of thought to fact? How can the language of Scripture be explained, and yet the reality of the revelation not be explained away? There is a touching interest which attaches to this Hartford minister, working out, alone and clumsily, a problem the solution of which the greatest minds of the age had been gradually bringing to perfection for three-quarters of a century.
In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had been trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of the Atonement; the one at New Haven on the Divinity of Christ, including Bushnell's doctrine of the trinity; the one at Andover on Dogma and Spirit, a plea for the cessation of strife. He says squarely of the old school theories of the atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the penalty of the law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them, of no light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our moral being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness, consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and if that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that God will have his modicum of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go he will yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness of love, the identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the sense that the Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the woes which naturally follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed. Yet there is no pretence that he used vicariousness or satisfaction in the same sense in which his adversaries did. He is magnificently free from all such indirection. In the New Haven address there is this same combination of fire and light. The chief theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as maintained by the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish the dramatis personæ for the doctrine of the atonement. In the speculation as to the negotiation of this substitutionary transaction, the language of the theologians had degenerated into stark tritheism. Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity, spoke of the three persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper view of the unity of God made the forensic idea of the atonement incredible. He sought to replace the ontological notion of the trinity by that of a trinity of revelation, which held for him the practical truths by which his faith was nourished, and yet avoided the contradictions which the other doctrine presented both to reason and faith. Bushnell would have been far from claiming that he was the first to make this fight. The American Unitarians had been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian protest was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought it from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a personal equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later in his work. He took up the central religious problem when Channing's successors were following either Emerson or Parker.
The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's views of the causes which had led to the schism in the New England Church. A single quotation may give the key-note of the discourse:—'We had on our side an article of the creed which asserted a metaphysical trinity. That made the assertion of the metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable. We had theories of atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which required the appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side, theological culture was so limited that we took what was really only our own opinion for the unalterable truth of God. On the other side, it was so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took the opposite contention with the same seriousness and totality of conviction. They asserted liberty, as indeed they must, to vindicate their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely human and, in that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion ever invented.'
[THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL]
The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this way. The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but complex. It was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals which had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its ways and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis, the rights of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty, equality, fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were prepared to assert the meaning of community, the continuity of history, spiritual as well as civil authority as the basis of order, and order as the condition of the highest good. In literature the tendency appears as romanticism, in politics as legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism. Le Maistre with his L'Eglise gallicane du Pape; Chateaubriand with his Génie du Christianisme; Lamennais with his Essai sur l'Indifference en Matière, de Religion, were, from 1820 to 1860, the exponents of a view which has had prodigious consequences for France and Italy. The romantic movement arose outside of Catholicism. It was impersonated in Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went over to the Roman Church. The political reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic. In the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have a mission again. Divine right in the State must be restored through the Church. The Catholic apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion of the premises of the Reformation. The religious revolt of the sixteenth century, the philosophical revolt of the seventeenth, the political revolt of the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth, are all parts of one dreadful sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after the first flood of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the eighteenth century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the cyclone which had devastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from the Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down the revolution. Only God's goodness had preserved England. The logic of Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England the State was weaker and worse than were the states upon the Continent. For since 1688 it had been a popular and constitutional monarchy. In Frederick William's phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter. The Church was through and through Erastian, a creature of the State. Bishops were made by party representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills, the course of the Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were steps which would surely bring England to the pass which France had reached in 1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the people. It was in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority. It would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century.
[THE OXFORD MOVEMENT]
In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the Oxford Movement or the Catholic revival a movement of life, ecclesiastical, social and political as well, its history falls outside the purpose of this book. We proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary movements have frequently got on without much thought. They have left little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their avowed principle has been that of recurrence to that which has already been thought, of fidelity to ideas which have long prevailed. This is the reason why the conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as this. It is not that their writings have not often been full of high learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas about which they reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives themselves—those of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation—and of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history of the early or mediæval Church.
Nevertheless, when with passionate conviction a great man, taking the reactionary course, thinks the problem through again from his own point of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the history of contemporary thought. When such an one wrestles before God to give reason to himself and to his fellows for the faith that is in him, then the reactionary's reasoning is as imposing and suggestive as is any other. He leaves in his work an intellectual deposit which must be considered. He makes a contribution which must be reckoned with, even more seriously, perhaps, by those who dissent from it than by those who may agree with it. Such deposit Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They offered a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action. Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character and standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the road of reason which they took in the defence of Catholic principles, made Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it had not been English for three hundred years. Yet though Newman brought to the Roman Church in England, on his conversion to it, a prestige and qualities which in that communion were unequalled, he was never persona grata in that Church. Outwardly the Roman Catholic revival in England was not in large measure due to Newman and his arguments. It was due far more to men like Wiseman and Manning, who were not men of argument but of deeds.