ation of this substitutionary transaction,
the language of the theologians had degenerated into stark tritheism.
Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity, spoke of the three
persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper view of the unity of God
made the forensic idea of the atonement incredible. He sought to replace
the ontological notion of the trinity by that of a trinity of
revelation, which held for him the practical truths by which his faith
was nourished, and yet avoided the contradictions which the other
doctrine presented both to reason and faith. Bushnell would have been
far from claiming that he was the first to make this fight. The American
Unitarians had been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian
protest was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it
paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's
significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought it
from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a personal
equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later in his work.
He took up the central religious problem when Channing's successors were
following either Emerson or Parker.

The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's views of
the causes which had led to the schism in the New England Church. A
single quotation may give the key-note of the discourse:--'We had on our
side an article of the creed which asserted a metaphysical trinity. That
made the assertion of the metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable.
We had theories of atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which
required the appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side,
theological culture was so limited that we took what was really only our
own opinion for the unalterable truth of God. On the other side, it was
so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took the
opposite contention with the same seriousness and totality of
conviction. They asserted liberty, as indeed they must, to vindicate
their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely human and, in
that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion ever invented.'

THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL

The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the
so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an
intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal
animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this way.