(1802-1876)
BY THEODORE T. MUNGER
Horace Bushnell was born in 1802 in Litchfield, Connecticut, and reared in New Preston, a hamlet near by. He was graduated at Yale College in 1827, and after a year of editorial service on the Journal of Commerce in New York he became tutor in Yale College, studied theology at the same time, and in 1833 was settled in the ministry over a Congregational church in Hartford, Connecticut. He resigned his charge in 1853 on account of ill health, but lived till 1876, filling the years to the last with arduous study and authorship. He published three volumes of sermons, two of essays and addresses, a treatise on Women's Suffrage, under the title 'A Reform against Nature,' and five treatises of a theological character. Each of the latter was a distinct challenge to the prevailing thought of his day, and involved him in suspicion and accusation that well-nigh cost him his ecclesiastical standing. It is now generally acknowledged that he led the way into the new world of theological thought which has since opened so widely, and thereby rendered great and enduring service to the Christian faith.
Horace Bushnell
It is enough to say of his work in this respect that it was characterized by a mingling of the thought of the first three centuries, and of the modern spirit which had found its way from Germany into England through Coleridge. The two did not always agree well, and the latter is the predominating feature in all his writings. He was the first theologian in New England to admit fully into his thought the modern sense of Nature, as it is found in the literature of the early part of the century, and notably in Wordsworth and Coleridge. Dr. Bushnell was not a student of this literature beyond a thorough and sympathetic study of 'The Aids to Reflection,' but through this open door the whole spirit of that great thought movement entered his mind and found a congenial home. The secret of this movement was a spiritual interpretation of nature. It was a step in the evolution of human thought; and appearing first in literature, its natural point of entrance, it was sure to reach all forms of thought, as in time to come it will reach all forms of social life. The thing that the world is rapidly learning is, that not only is the world God's but that God is in his world. Bushnell was by nature immensely open to this thought, and its undertone can be heard in almost every page of his writings. It was this that gave value to his works and made them exceptional in his day and place. Each of his great treatises is, with more or less distinctness, an effort to put natural things and divine things into some sort of relevance and oneness.
He took the path by which superior minds have always found their way into new realms of truth. They do not pass from one school to another, but instead rise into some new or some larger conception of nature and start afresh. All gains in philosophy and religion and civilization have been made by further inroads into nature, and never in any other way. Dr. Bushnell, with the unerring instinct of a discoverer, struck this path and kept it to the end. At the bottom of all his work lies a profound sense of nature, of its meaning and force in the realm of the spirit. He did not deny a certain antithesis between nature and the supernatural, but he so defined the latter that the two could be embraced in the one category of nature when viewed as the ascertained order of God in creation. The supernatural is simply the realm of freedom, and it is as natural as the physical realm of necessity. Thus he not only got rid of the traditional antinomy between them, but led the way into that conception of the relation of God to his world which more and more is taking possession of modern thought. In his essay on Language he says (and the thought is always with him as a governing principle):—"The whole universe of nature is a perfect analogon of the whole universe of thought or spirit. Therefore, as nature becomes truly a universe only through science revealing its universal laws, the true universe of thought and spirit cannot sooner be conceived." Thus he actually makes the revelation of spiritual truth wait on the unfolding of the facts and laws of the world of nature. There is something pathetic in the attitude of this great thinker sitting in the dark, waiting for disclosures in nature that would substantiate what he felt was true in the realm of the spirit. A generation later he would have seen the light for which he longed—a light that justifies the central point of all his main contentions.
His first and most important work, 'Christian Nurture,' contended that the training of children should be according to nature,—not in the poor sense of Rousseau, but that it should be divinely natural. So 'Nature and the Supernatural,' whatever place may be accorded to the book to-day, was an effort to bring the two terms that were held as opposite and contradictory, into as close relation as God is to his laws in nature. So in 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' his main purpose was to take a doctrine that had been dwarfed out of its proper proportions, and give to it the measure of God's love and the manner of its action in human life. Dr. Bushnell may or may not have thought with absolute correctness on these themes, but he thought with consummate ability, he wrote with great eloquence and power, and he left many pages that are to be cherished as literature, while theologically they "point the way we are going."