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.
[Illustration: 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."
One of the most characteristic and interesting things about Dr. Bushnell
is the method he took to find his way between this spiritual view of
things and that world of theological orthodoxy where he stood by virtue
of his profession. It was a very hard and dry world,--a world chiefly of
definitions,--but it covered vital realities, and so must have had some
connection with the other world. Dr. Bushnell bridged the chasm by a
theory of language which he regarded as original with himself. It was
not new, but he elaborated it in an original way and with great ability.
In its main feature it was simply a claim to use in theology the
symbolism of poetry; it regarded language as something that attempts to
make one feel the inexpressible truth, rather than a series of
definitions which imply that it can be exactly stated in words; it held
that truth is larger than any form which attempts to express it; it
images and reflects truth instead of defining it.
This theory might be assumed without so long explication as he gave, but
it was greatly needed in the theological world, which at that time was
sunk in a sea of metaphysical definition, and consumed with a lust for
explaining everything in heaven and earth in terms of alphabetic
plainness. Dr. Bushnell was not only justified by the necessity of his
situation in resorting to his theory, but he had the right which every
man of genius may claim for himself. Any one whose thought is broader
than that about him, whose feeling is deeper, whose imagination is
loftier, is entitled to such a use of language as shall afford him
fullest expression; for he alone knows just how much of thought,
feeling, and imagination, how much of himself, he puts into his words;
they are coin whose value he himself has a right to indicate by his own
stamp. There is no pact with others to use language in any given way,
except upon some very broad basis as to the main object of language. The
first object is not to secure definite and comprehensive understanding,
but to give expression, and to start thought which may lead to full
understanding--as the parable hides the thought until you think it out.
Dr. Bushnell's theory did not blind the ordinary reader. No writer is
more easily apprehended by the average mind if he has any sympathy with
the subjects treated; but it was an inconvenient thing for his
theological neighbors to manage. While they insisted on "the evident
meaning of the words,"--a mischievous phrase,--he was breathing his
meaning into attentive souls by the spirit which he had contrived to
hide within his words. It is a way that genius has,--as Abt Vogler
says:--
"But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear:
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."
The first thing that brought Dr. Bushnell out of the world of theology
into the world of literature was his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society at Harvard College in 1848. He had achieved a reputation as a
preacher of remarkable insight for such as had ears to hear, and he was
already in the thick of theological controversy; but his fine power of
expression and breadth of thought had not been specially noticed. This
oration introduced him into the world of letters. Mr. J. T. Fields--the
most discerning critic of the day--said to the writer that the oration
was heard with surprise and delight, and that it gave the speaker an
assured place in the ranks of literature. That he should have been so
readily welcomed by the literary guild is not strange, for the title of
his oration--'Work and Play'--led the way into a discussion of the
secret that underlies all works of genius. For once, the possessor of
the divine gift heard its secret revealed and himself explained to
himself; his work was set before him as the full play of his spirit.
Beginning with nature, where our author always began, and finding there
a free and sportive element, he carries it into human life; making the
contention that its aim should be, and that its destiny will be, to free
itself from the constraint of mere work and rise into that natural
action of the faculties which may be called _play_--a moral and
spiritual process. His conclusion is that--
"if the world were free,--free, I mean, of themselves; brought
up, all, out of work into the pure inspiration of truth and
charity,--new forms of personal and intellectual beauty would
appear, and society itself reveal the Orphic movement. No more
will it be imagined that poetry and rhythm are accidents or
figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground of
nature. But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state
of man; the proper and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they
long for, and the rhythmic flow of that universal play in which
all life would live."
The key to Dr. Bushnell is to be found in this passage, and it is safe
to say of him that in hardly a page of a dozen volumes is he false to
it. He is always a poet, singing out of "the pure inspiration of truth
and charity," and keeping ever in mind that poetry and rhythm are not
figments outside of nature, but the real and true state of man and the
proper and last ideal of souls.
The centrality of this thought is seen in his style. It is a remarkable
style, and is only to be appreciated when the man is understood. It is
made up of long sentences full of qualifying phrases until the thought
is carved into perfect exactness; or--changing the figure--shade upon
shade is added until the picture and conception are alike. But with all
this piling up of phrases, he not only did not lose proportion and
rhythm, but so set down his words that they read like a chant and sound
like the breaking of waves upon the beach. Nor does he ever part with
poetry in the high sense in which he conceived it. I will not compare
his style, as to merit, with that of Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir
Thomas Browne, but he belongs to their class; he has the same majestic
swing, and like them he cannot forbear singing, whatever he may have to
say. His theme may be roads, or city plans, or agriculture, or
emigration, or the growth of law; yet he never fails of lifting his
subject into that higher world of the imagination where the real truth
of the subject is to be found, and is made to appear as poetry. It would
be unjust to identify him so thoroughly with the poets if it should lead
to the thought that he was not a close and rigorous thinker. It should
not be forgotten that all great prose-writers, from Plato down to
Carlyle and Emerson, stand outside of poetry only by virtue of their
form and not by virtue of their thought; indeed, poet and thinker are
interchangeable names. Dr. Bushnell wrote chiefly on theology, and the
value and efficacy of his writings lie in the fact that imagination and
fact, thought and sentiment, reason and feeling, are each preserved and
yet so mingled as to make a single impression.
This combination of two realms or habits of thought appears on every
page. He was, as Novalis said of Spinoza, "A God-intoxicated man," but
it was God as containing humanity in himself. His theology was a
veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the angels of God ascend and descend;
and if in his thought they descended before they ascended, it was
because he conceived of humanity as existing in God before it was
manifest in creation; and if his head was among the stars, his feet were
always firmly planted on the earth. This twofoldness finds a curious
illustration in the sub-titles of several of his books. 'The Vicarious
Sacrifice' does not spring alone out of the divine nature, but is
'Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation.' 'Nature and the
Supernatural'--the great antithesis in theology--constitute 'The One
System of God.' 'Women's Suffrage' is 'The Reform against Nature'--the
best book, I must be permitted to say, on either side of this
much-debated question.
It is a popular impression of Dr. Bushnell that he was the subject of
his imagination, and that it ran away with him in the treatment of
themes which required only severe thought: the impression is a double
mistake: theology does not call for severe thought, alone nor mainly;
but first and chiefly for the imagination, and the seeing and
interpreting eye that usually goes with it; its object is to find
spirit under form, to discover what the _logos_ expresses. For this
the imagination is the chief requisite. It is not a vagrant and
irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye whose vision is to be trusted
like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is
not a mere picture-making gift. Dr. Bushnell trained his imagination to
work on certain definite lines, and for a definite end--namely, to bring
out the spiritual meaning hidden within the external form. He worked in
the spirit of Coleridge's words:--
"I had found
That outward forms the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within."
No analysis or recapitulation of his works can be given in these
preliminary words. Perhaps his most influential book is the first,
'Christian Nurture'; while a treatise for the household, it was
surcharged with theological opinions which proved to be revolutionary
and epoch-making. 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' has most affected the
pulpit. 'Nature and the Supernatural,' the tenth chapter of which has
become a classic, has done great service in driving out the extreme
dualism that invested the subject of God's relation to creation. His
ablest essay is the treatise on Language; the most literary is that on
'Work and Play'; the most penetrating in its insight is 'Our Gospel a
Gift to the Imagination'; the most personal and characteristic is 'The
Age of Homespun.' His best sermon is always the one last read; and they
are perhaps his most representative work. The sermon is not usually
ranked as belonging to literature, but no canon excludes those preached
by this great man. They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their
diction, commanding in their moral tone, penetrating in their
spirituality, and pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not
one--the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and
crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners, no
petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption, no
logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of truth,
coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God.
Language was to him "the sanctuary of thought," and these sermons are
the uttered worship in that temple where reason and devotion are one.
[Illustration: Signature: T. T. Munger]