its
direct teachings.

The two most striking and characteristic sermons in the volume are the
first and the last, respectively entitled, "Christ waiting to find
Room," a masterly analysis of the worldliness of the so-called Christian
world, and "Heaven Opened," a plea equally masterly for the existence in
man of a supernatural sense to discern supernatural things. Between
these come the sermons entitled, "The Gentleness of God," "The Insight
of Love," "Salvation for the Lost Condition," "The Bad Mind makes a Bad
Element," and "The Wrath of the Lamb," which illustrate so well the
union in Dr. Bushnell's mind of practical sagacity and force of thought
with keenness and reach of spiritual vision, that we select them from
the rest as particularly worthy of the reader's attention. Indeed, to
have written these discourses is to have done the work of a ministry.

The peculiarity of the whole volume, and a singular peculiarity in a
collection of sermons, is the absence of commonplace. The writer's
method is to bring his mind into close contact with things instead of
phrases,--to think round his subject, and think into his subject, and,
if possible, think through his subject to the law on which it depends;
and thus, when his thinking results in no novelty of view, it is still
the indorsement of an accepted truth by a fresh perception of it. Truths
in such a process never put on the character of truisms, but are as
vital to the last observer as to the first. There is hardly a page in
the volume which is not original, in the sense of recording original
impressions of objects, individually seen, grasped, and examined. There
are numerous originalities of a different kind, which may not be so
pleasing to some classes of Christians,--as when he aims to show that an
accredited spiritual form does not express a corresponding spiritual
fact, or as when he splits some shell of creed which imprisons rather
than embodies the kernel of faith, and lets the oppressed truth go free.

This power of penetrating thought, so determined as at times to wear a
look of doggedness,--this analysis which shrinks from no problems, which
is provoked by obstacles into intenser effort, and which is almost
fanatical in its desire to get at the idea and reason of everything it
probes,--is relieved by a richly sympathetic and imaginative
nature,--indeed, is so welded with it, that insight and analysis serve
each other, and cool reason gives solidity to ecstati