he was involved.  His law studies were complete, yet he turned to the ministry.  He had been born on the orthodox side of the great contention in which Channing was a leader of the liberals in the days of which we speak.  He never saw any reason to change this relation.  His clerical colleagues, for half a life-time, sought to change it for him.  In 1833 he was ordained and installed as minister of the North Church in Hartford, a pastorate which he never left.  The process of disintegration of the orthodox body was continuing.  There was almost as much rancour between the old and the new orthodoxy as between orthodox and Unitarians themselves.  Almost before his career was well begun an incurable disease fastened itself upon him.  Not much later, all the severity of theological strife befell him.  Between these two we have to think of him doing his work and keeping his sense of humour.

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.