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 g