ce, the occasion, and
the man--a fervid Christian, and a born poet and orator--combined to
produce a work of wide and enduring influence. The dynasty of the
Edwardeans is continued down to the middle of the nineteenth century,
and later, through different lines, ending in Emmons of Franklin, Taylor
of New Haven, and Finney of Oberlin, and is represented among the living
by the venerable Edwards A. Park, of Andover, who adds to that power of
sustained speculative thinking in a straight line which is
characteristic of the whole school, a wide learning in the whole field
of theological literature, which had not been usual among his
predecessors. It is a prevailing trait of this theology, born of the
great revival, that it has constantly held before itself not only the
question, What is truth? but also the question, How shall it be
preached? It has never ceased to be a revival theology.

A bold and open breach of traditionary assumptions and habits of
reasoning was made by Horace Bushnell. This was a theologian of a
different type from his New England predecessors. He was of a temper
little disposed to accept either methods or results as a local
tradition, and inclined rather to prefer that which had been "hammered
out on his own anvil." And yet, while very free in manifesting his small
respect for the "logicking" by syllogistic processes which had been the
pride of the theological chair and even the pulpit in America, and while
declining the use of current phraseologies even for the expression of
current ideas, he held himself loyally subject to the canon of the
Scriptures as his rule of faith, and deferential to the voice of the
church catholic as uttered in the concord of testimony of holy men in
all ages. Endowed with a poet's power of intuition, uplifted by a fervid
piety, uttering himself in a literary style singularly rich and
melodious, it is not strange that such a man should have made large
contributions to the theological thought of his own and later times. In
natural theology, his discourses on "The Moral Uses of Dark Things"
(1869), and his longest continuous work, on "Nature and the
Supernatural" (1858), even though read rather as prose-poems than as
arguments, sound distinctly new notes in the treatment of their theme.
In "God in Christ" (1849), "Christ in Theology" (1851), "The Vicarious
Sacrifice" (1866), and "Forgiveness and Law" (1874), and in a notable
article in the "New Englander" for November, 1854, e