c experience.
Perhaps as a seer Dr. Bushnell may be more certain of recognition than
as a reasoner. Whatever may be thought of the orthodoxy of the doctrines
he has rationalized, there can be no doubt as to the reality of the
spiritual states he has described. His intellectual method may be wrong
or incomplete, but it in some way enables him to reach the substance of
Christian life and light and love and joy. There are passages in the
volume which are all aglow with the sacred fire of that rapture which
rewards only those souls that soar into the regions where the objects
that kindle it abide; and this elevation which touches ecstasy, this
effluence from the spiritual mood of the writer, is not limited to
special bursts of eloquence, but gleams along the lines of many a
clinching argument, and flashes out from many an uncadenced period.

The style of the book is what might be expected from the character of
the author and the processes of his thinking. The mental state dictates
the form of the sentence and the selection of the words. Thought and
expression, so to speak, breed in and in. There is a certain roughness
in the strength of the man, which is ever asserting itself through his
cultured vigor; and in the diction, rustic plainness of speech
alternates with the nomenclature of metaphysics, rugged sense with
lifting raptures, and curt, blunt, homely expression with vivid,
whatever may be his form of words, he always loads them with meaning,
and with his own meaning. He is not a fluent writer, but his resources
of expression ever correspond to his richness of thought. And if his
style cannot be said to bend gracefully to the variations of his
subject, it still bends and does not break. In felicity and originality
of epithet, the usual sign of a writer's genuineness of perception, he
is excelled by no theologian of the time. He also has that power of
pithy and pointed language which so condenses a statement of a fact or
principle that it gives forth the diamond sparkle of epigram. The effect
of wit is produced while the purpose is the gravest possible: as when he
tells some brother religionists, who base their creeds on the hyperboles
of Scripture, that they mistake interjections for propositions,--or as
when he reproves those pretenders to grace who count it apparently "a
kind of merit that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit
impossible."

The animating spirit of the volume is a desire to bring men's