An American theologian. He was born in Litchfield, Conn., April 14, 1802; graduated at Yale in 1827, where he studied law and theology; in 1833 became pastor of the North Congregational Church in Hartford, resigned 1859, and died there February 17, 1876. He was a voluminous writer on theological subjects, some of his works being “Principles of National Greatness;” Christian Nurture” (1847); “God in Christ” (1849); “Christian Theology” (1851); “Sermons for the New Life” (1858); “Nature and the Supernatural” (1858); “Work and Play” (1864); “Christ and His Salvation” (1864); “Woman’s Suffrage, the Reform Against Nature” (1869); “The Vicarious Sacrifice” (1865). He was also a writer for various periodicals and newspapers. He was a bold and original thinker, with peculiar eloquence of style. Though strongly evangelical in belief, he denied the Calvinistic theory of the atonement (known as the “satisfaction theory”), and gave less than the ordinary emphasis to the distinction between the persons in the Trinity. These, with other divergences, led to his being accused of heresy; but ultimately the fellowship of the Congregational churches was found broad enough to include him, and he kept his standing therein with growing influence until his death…. His select works appeared in a collected edition (8 vols., 1876–77). For his life, consult M. B. Cheney, “Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell” (New York, 1880); T. T. Munger (Boston, 1899).

Personal

  Three years ago it was my privilege to spend the major part of a summer vacation with this rare man in the Green Mountains. Some impressions which I received of his mental structure, and of his theology, and of his religious character, deserve recording…. Few men have ever impressed me as being so electric with vitality at all points as he was. He was an enthusiast in his love of rural sights and sounds and sports. In little things as brimful as in great things, he seemed the beau ideal of a live man. The supremacy of mind over the body was something wonderful…. The abandon of his recreations in the bowling-alley, where he was a boy again, and his theological talks of a Sunday evening, told the same story. “Dying, and behold we live,” recurred once and again in listening to the conversations in which he was sure to be the centre and the seer. I have never heard from any other man, in the same length of time, so much of original remark. One could not long discourse with him, even on the common things and in the undress of life, without discovering the secret of his solitude in the theological world. That solitude was not in him, as it is in some men, an affectation of independence. It was in the original make of the man. Nothing struck him as it did the average of men. He took in all things, and reflected back all things, at angles of his own. He never could have been a partisan. With many of the tastes of leadership, he could never have led a party or founded a school. Still less could he have been a follower of other leaders.

  During his years of failing health he always owned a horse, and many and great were the family excitements attending the sale of an old horse or the purchase of a new one. His occasional long absences from home in quest of health, during which he could not afford to keep a horse unused at home, made these changes somewhat frequent. His excessive honesty was certainly not good policy in dealing with horse-men. If his old horse had a fault or two, he did not content himself with mentioning it, but dwelt upon his failings and set them forth in all lights, till he had left the unfortunate animal not a leg to stand upon. He once sold a horse to a good friend, as honest as himself, who, after trying old Robin for a week or two, came to say that Dr. Bushnell had not asked enough for him, and generously handed over another hundred dollars. If, on the other hand, my father was about to buy a new horse, his easily roused enthusiasm would lead him to speak so heartily in praise of the animal, that the owner would at once see an added value in him, and fix his price accordingly. No experience of these facts availed to alter my father’s course at the next opportunity; the temptation to say all he thought was too much for him; nor would he consent to limit his freedom of speech out of any paltry considerations of policy. It was the same with horses as with theology—he was a little more than honest.

  Playfulness I should call one of Dr. Bushnell’s marked traits, seldom, if ever, exploding aloud. A native refinement kept him from public shouting or private noise. But some ghost of a smile seemed ever to haunt his face,—never hard or biting, but like the gracious beginning of a kiss. If the remark was incisive which he was about to make, the wreath of good-humor was always the more protective and soft. The geniality began in his mind, and went through the expression of his features into his unconscious manner and slightest gesture. Indeed, it was his very atmosphere. The boy never quite left the man. Something even of the look of the babe was in the virile glance and tone.

  When, at the close of the war, Yale College, his alma mater, honored her many soldier sons by a commemorative celebration, Dr. Bushnell was invited to deliver the oration. It seemed to me that he was never grander than on that occasion…. The Doctor was himself the central figure of the hour, not merely because of his position, but by his character and mental and moral power. He stood there like an inspired prophet of old to give his message and to bear his witness. He had, in one sense, been in more battles than any veteran before him. His face and figure showed scars that came of conflicts with intellectual and spiritual giants. And in his countenance was the clear light of assured triumph of faith. All present looked up to him with admiration and reverence.

General

  Dr. Bushnell is a profound and therefore an independent thinker, and has consequently been arraigned by some of his clerical brethren as not soundly “orthodox,” because he does not choose to adopt all the old phraseology. Those who have attacked him, however, on this ground, have had abundant reason to repent of their rashness; for he has vindicated his faith in a manner that has completely silenced his opponents.

  Neither his tastes nor his mental traits incline him to polemical theology; not that he is not a logical reasoner, but his nature is a sensitive one, and his discourses all show strong poetic feeling, and a tendency to illustrate spiritual truth by natural images and analogies, rather than to define it in exact formulas by sharp mathematical lines. It will be difficult to find in the sermons of any modern author so many passages of moral and intellectual beauty as Dr. Bushnell’s discourses furnish. The current of his thought is strong, but not dogmatic; his piety is evidently the mainspring of his life, but it has no tinge of asceticism; his imagination is his strongest intellectual faculty, but it is made subservient to the noblest uses.

  He was a bold thinker because he sought for the truth. Near the end of his life, he said playfully, to one of his friends, as the two were fishing in the wilderness, “It is my joy to think that I have sought most earnestly and supremely to find and to live by the truth.” He was broad-minded and many-sided, because he would look at the truth from every point of view. He was careless of traditions, because he sought solid standing place for his own feet. He was independent of others, because he must satisfy the consuming hunger of his own soul. When he found the truth, he applied it fearlessly to himself and to other men, to principles, institutions, and dogmas. He abhorred shams and conventional phrases in argument, because he believed so strongly in realities. What offended others as irreverent, often—not always—betokened his higher reverence for what he received as positive truth. He was also manly in the expression and defence of his faith. However he might appear to others, in the sanctuary of his inner self, there ever dwelt a prayerful, magnanimous, loving spirit toward God and man.

  Those piercing glances of insight, and those singular felicities of expression, which so often startle Dr. Bushnell’s readers, must surely have often been remarked in his letters and his conversation. And we may well ask, Is not his already large and constantly increasing audience to be satisfied with more knowledge, from these sources, of “the man and his communications?”

  Horace Bushnell, a man congenitally compelled to see all things in the light of reason, espoused at the beginning and maintained to the end the cause of the Orthodox faith. It has had no other expounder of equal genius in our time. He was, however, no such severe dialectician as Calvin. While he would be logical, the forms of logic he despised. His method was that of suggestion. He was more a poet than an advocate. No man drew out his discriminations in sharper lines. But in his nature underneath every line of argument was mystical piety for a daily refuge, and no romance charmed him like a book of prayer. He had that charity for his opponents which sprang from an understanding of their positions as well as from the tenderness of his own heart. He knew why and how one could differ from him; and his imagination, alike fine and broad, showed him on what ground had stood any and every scheme of religion that had prevailed in the world.

  Great as was his enthusiasm in the pursuit of truth, it was chastened by docility and patience. His aim and prayer were to hold himself in integrity,—perfectly open to the teachings of truth,—never to decide any questions by his prepossessions and his will, nor on the authority of a great name. And it is especially worthy of note that he would not go an inch beyond what the truth, as clearly recognized, warranted. The gist of his alleged heresy in respect to the Trinity lay in his refusal to affirm three metaphysical personalities in the interior substance of the Godhead. He was open to suggestions from persons of the humblest grade. There was something wonderful, almost sublime, in his patience, by which he could bridle his fiery spirit and quietly wait until his knotty questions, of their own accord, opened to him their solutions. And when, under this process, the solutions came, dealing away obscurities, and giving his mind rest, is it at all surprising that he should accept them as gifts from God himself, or that he should affirm, what has been an offense to many, that in forming his views he seemed to have had only about the same agency that he had in preparing the blood he circulated, and the anatomic frame he occupied?

  Bushnell the theologian was, like Robertson, Maurice, or Kingsley, in England, a genuine stimulating force upon many of the younger Congregationalists of New England; and Bushnell the essayist—now reminding one of Carlyle, now of Ruskin, but ever original—resembled Emerson, though, of course, in a small degree, in his broadcast spreading of seeds of thought.

  Dr. Bushnell had a creative mind of a high order, striking out a path of his own, an innovator, indeed, turning the mind of the churches into new directions, in order that they might escape the wearisome confusion bred by the old controversies, and yet aware also that the full significance of the old doctrines had not been measured. If he did not always solve the issues which he raised, yet he never failed to shed light upon them, revealing by his personal disclosure of his own religious need the positive directions which theology must take.

  Thirty years ago, Bushnell’s great work, “The Vicarious Sacrifice,” appeared and provoked a heated controversy. The author was excluded from many pulpits. But now his theory is more generally accepted than any other.

  I have called him a man of rare gifts, not yet, as it seems to me, appreciated at their true worth by those who are our conventional measures of reputation…. His vocabulary, full and rich, gives him pigments of the rarest. Language indeed is a passion with him; and he sways its rhythmic treasures to his purpose.

  Valuable as the sermons of Bushnell are to all who read them, they are of special value to the teacher of homiletics. As he studies them, searching for the art that lends such power to the thought, he notes first their structural quality,—built, not thrown together, nor gathered up here and there. He traces the intertwined rhetoric and logic, each tempering the other,—the reasoning little except clear statement and the rhetoric as convincing as the logic. He follows the wide sweep of the thought which yet never wanders from the theme. He notes the Platonic use of the world as furnishing images of spiritual realities; and a kindred habit of condensing his meaning into apothegms that imbed themselves in the memory. He shows how the preacher begins by almost sharing a doubt with his hearer and leaves him wondering why he ever doubted; how theology is transformed into religion which becomes the judge of theology; and how while the whole sermon is instinct with thought and sentiment, it is practical down even to homeliest details;—this and more the teacher will point out to his students, but he has not compassed the preacher, nor can he measure these discourses by any analysis. They have that which defies analysis,—genius, the creative faculty, the gift of direct vision.

  These political books and addresses of Dr. Bushnell reveal thoroughness of research and an intimate knowledge of contemporary conditions. They show him as the citizen, loving his city, and state, and country, the spokesman of the conscience of many, and the guide to their political thinking. They contain pointed sentences that stick, winged words that fly. While his civil interests were great, his ethical and religious interests were greater. He was a religious and moral teacher, but one who could not help applying his principle to life; so even his most abstruse theological reasonings become clear as appeals to a common humanity, which has its days to live in the streets and houses of an intricate civilization.

  Except in some of his theological works, he seldom felt a need of reinforcing his opinions or illustrating them, much less of adorning them, by quotation. If he sometimes made his argument overstrenuous, it was through urgency of zeal rather than pride of power, and never in malice of temper. He cherished no animosities, and courted peace rather than strife, but not at the price of suppressing the message he was charged to deliver.