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.

In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the
Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then
unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with
Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had been
trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of _the Atonement_;
the one at New Haven on _the Divinity of Christ_, including Bushnell's
doctrine of the trinity; the one at Andover on _Dogma and Spirit_, a
plea for the cessation of strife. He says squarely of the old school
theories of the atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the
penalty of the law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them,
of no light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our
moral being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness,
consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and if
that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that God will have
his modicum of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go he will
yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness of love, the
identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the sense that the
Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the woes which naturally
follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed. Yet there is no pretence
that he used vicariousness or satisfaction in the same sense in which
his adversaries did. He is magnificently free from all such indirection.
In the New Haven address there is this same combination of fire and
light. The chief theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as
maintained by the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish
the _dramatis personae_ for the doctrine of the atonement. In the
speculation as to the negoti