SEARCH FOR HEALTH
"It would not answer even for the Christian who has meant to surrender his will, and really wants to be perfected in the will of God, to be made safe in his plans and kept in continual train of successes. He wants a reminder every hour; some defeat, surprise, adversity, peril; to be agitated, mortified, beaten out of his courses, so that all remains of self-will in him may be sifted out of him, and the very scent of his old perversity cleared. O, if we could be excused from all these changes and somersets, and go on securely in our projects, it would ruin the best of us. Life needs to be an element of danger and agitation, - perilous, changeful, eventful; we need to have our evil will met by the stronger will of God, in order to be kept advised, by our experience, of the impossibility of that which our sin has undertaken. It would not even do for us to be uniformly successful in our best meant and holiest works, our prayers, our acts of sacrifice, our sacred enjoyments; for we should very soon fall back into the subtle power of our self-will, and begin to imagine, in our vanity, that we are doing something ourselves. Even here we need to be defeated and baffled, now and then, that we may be shaken out of our self-reliance and sufficiency, else the taste of our evil habit remains in us, and our scent is not changed." BUSHNELL, Sermons for the New Life, p. 420.
BUSHNELL, though a man of great physical strength and vigor, was an invalid nearly half his life. We find him in 1839 "complaining again of throat trouble," and visiting Saratoga for relief. But not till 1845 did the breakdown actually come. A journey to North Carolina in April failed to bring relief, and a year in Europe was determined on and provided for by his church. He sailed in July, and landed in Falmouth after a voyage of twenty days. He followed the usual route of American tourists in Europe, through England and the Scotch lakes, Belgium, the Rhine, Switzerland, Italy, Geneva, Paris, a prolonged stay in London, where he did some literary work, and a return home in June. He saw what the ordinary tourist sees, and much beside, the real meaning and charm of the art and music and architecture and scenery that fell in his way. At Heidelberg he first suspected from certain symptoms that he might be the victim of consumption. It cost him a temporary struggle, not a strange thing in a man of forty three, but he found "rest in God," and went about his sightseeing with his usual irre-
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pressible vigor. He saw everything in a moral light, but his canons were broad. Of the castles on the Rhine he says: "Joy be to their ruins! Let them stand for all the coming ages as a monument of a day when there was no law." On the slope of the Scheideck he tried a wayside wooden trumpet, and in its echoes found the text for a passage in the address on "Religious Music," which Mr. E. P. Whipple pronounced one of the most eloquent in the language. Of Mont Blanc he says that "it sleeps on its base." He does not com-plain of clouds or the intervening hills. "I have observed a hundred times that the sublime requires the unknown as an element. A cathedral should never be finished. A mountain should be partially hidden by others or enveloped in clouds." He rejoiced in the avalanches on the Jungfrau: "One is not fairly still before another comes; the ice thunder is never over, and the sense of eternity is added to the sense of power. Far up in the cloud region, yet on earth, we hear the tumult of the frost giants waging the perpetual battle." He attends the meagre service at the cathedral in Geneva, and questions if "this falling off is not the penalty of Calvin's intolerant spirit." The cathedral in Milan "is a marble mountain hewn into a forest of spires and statues." In the Pitti gallery he notes that "the painters and sculptors derived their arts from their trades. . . . the law of all healthful growth in the fine arts." He admires yet misunderstands Michael Angelo, as "wanting in
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that delicate sensibility necessary to a complete and universal sense of beauty," a singular verdict, for the two men were largely endowed with the very quality deemed lacking. Michael Angelo's Moses is a Pluto, "an eminently unreligious statue." Of the Transfiguration he says: "The supernatural is here clothed in the natural, the spiritual in the terms of physics." He does not take the conventional view of the French. "The volatile Frenchman, always a proverb, I have not seen." In London he encountered the "Oregon question," then a matter of boundary and strained relations between the two countries, on which he wrote an effective letter; he hoped the two nations would not go to war "for the sake of a territory so worth less," for such was the estimate then put on Oregon. Here also he preached and published his sermon on "Unconscious Influence." The vespers at the Abbey led him to "the firm conclusion that if I were to be an Episcopalian, I would certainly have the liturgy sung or chanted."
Of his three months in London, he said it proved to be "just the thing I wanted. It does not crush me or anything like that, but it shows me what a speck I am. Anything that makes us know the world better, and our relations to it, the ways of reaching mankind, what popularity is worth, how large the world is, and how many things it takes to fill it with an influence, anything which sets a man practically in his place, is a mental good, a good of manners, of feeling, dignity itself."
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He reached home in June, apparently in greatly improved health, and plunged at once into work both in his church and outside of it, in the way of public addresses and book-making. His personal appearance at this time is thus described: "The spare, sinewy figure, tense yet easy in its motions; the face, then smoothly shaven, showing delicate outlines about the cordial, sweet-tempered mouth; the high, broad forehead, straight to the line where it was swept by the careless hair, just streaked with gray; the kindling gray eyes, deep set under beetling black eyebrows; and, above all, the abrupt yet kindly manner, indicating in its unaffected simplicity a fund of conscious power."
"The Moral Uses of Dark Things" was soon under way in the shape of sermons. "Christian Nurture" in its complete form followed, but came to publication first. The floods of accusation rose at once, and continued to flow for years, with brief intermissions and increasing volume. Under the combined stress of his incessant labors with pen and voice, and fret over the efforts to bring him to trial, always unavailing, as we have seen, but still harassing, it is not strange that his already impaired health began to call for rest and change. In 1852 he made a two months' journey to the West, going as far as St. Louis. The next year he spent his summer vacation in Sharon Springs, and returned to throw himself into the work of securing a public park in his city. The next year, 1854, brought an end to controversy, but an at-
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tack of bronchitis left him in such a condition of health that he was driven to seek a milder climate. He spent three months in Cuba, and returned in April, 1855, hardly better than when he went away. He spent the summer among his native hills, making notes on the "Supernatural," which in the winter he put into such shape that it could not be lost. March of the next year found him en route for California, where he remained, chiefly at the San Jose Mission, during the remainder of the year. His life here was characteristic to the last detail.
He threw himself into the life of the new State with the zest of a boy and the wisdom of a states-man. First of all, he studied the climate, that being his first concern. He is sure that one in search of health "should set off, not for Europe, but for California" (The New Englander, February, 1858). No problem in his "Moral Uses of Dark Things" is more carefully worked out than that of the way in which ocean currents, mountain ranges and passes, trend of valleys and sweep of winds, and many other physical causes unite to produce "the varieties and incredible anomalies of the California climates."
The variety of his studies and interests, especially in engineering and topography, reminds one of Da Vinci. If Bushnell had a passion outside of theology, it was for roads, and he closely connected the two; the new country afforded him a wide field for each. He was a critic of all he
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saw with the eye, and a builder in imagination of such as were needed or were possible. He foresaw a railroad across the continent, hardly dreamed of as yet, and, having examined all feasible routes of entrance into San Francisco, named the one that was finally chosen. He found the city under the reign of the famous vigilance committee, which he half indorsed, though it went against his instinctive sense of law and order. He wrote letters to the papers and preached in his usual "vein of comprehensiveness," hoping to guide public sentiment in the right direction. He seems never for a moment to have been idle in mind or body. He took up his residence in San Jose Mission, in the Santa Clara valley, near the base of Mount Hamilton, where he soon began to gain sensibly in health. Every mile within a radius of twenty of this beautiful region was gone over with the eye of a surveyor, an engineer, a naturalist, a poet, and a philanthropist. He was already well known to his clerical brethren, an able body of men, and they at once turned to him as a natural leader in their recently formed project for establishing a college. Bushnell gave himself to this enterprise with immense energy and thorough-ness, and after personal examination of seven proposed sites, named Berkeley, where the College, later the University of California, now stands. The presidency was offered to him, and declined on the ground that his health was so far recovered that he was able to serve his parish, to which he
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felt that he owed a prior allegiance. Dr. Henry A. Stimson refers to this episode as follows:-
"Horace Bushnell, a stranger and an invalid as he was, left an enduring impress upon what is now the great University of California. When called In 1856 to the presidency of the college that was to be, he, seemingly the last man for such duties, gave himself to the practical details of seeking a site with the proper requirements of soil, situation, water supply, etc., while he aroused the interest of that gold-seeking community to the needs of the future. 'If I can get a university on its feet, or only the nest egg laid,' he wrote to his distant Eastern friends, 'I shall not have come to this new world in vain.'" 1
While at San Jose Mission, Bushnell finished "Nature and the Supernatural," and projected another work on the "Laws of Grace, or Laws of the Supernatural." Such a book, if written, would have led him into the realm of his deepest insight.
"Laws are the alphabet of our knowledge on the footing of nature. So far, God will show us his way and conduct us into his will. . . . Laws are not, therefore, broken up by the specialties of faith, but are only transcended. Or rather we may say that we are now exploring and searching out the higher laws of God, even those of his personal society and goodness."
On his return to Hartford in January, 1857, he preached a notable sermon on "Spiritual Dis-
1 Review of Reviews, July, 1899, p. 453.
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lodgments," from a characteristically chosen text, "Moab . . . hath settled on his lees," etc., putting the long separation between pastor and people to the highest spiritual uses. He once more plunged into work as though he was a sound man, but the "predurable toughness" was gone. He "dreaded a long pull," but could not make "short designs." Treatises as well as sermons were always in his mind. He soon brought out the volume "Sermons for the New Life," keeping back "Nature and the Supernatural" for closer revision, - a wiser course than he knew, for the sermons by their great popularity prepared the way for the treatise. Indeed, his sermons always plead against any suspicion of heresy. So far as they were used by his critics, they were quoted for their orthodoxy in order to bring out his inconsistency, which led Bushnell to write: "I am brewing now a new heresy, which, if God spares my life, I shall certainly give to the world, even if I must die in the smoke of it."
In May, 1858, his people sent him away for a needed rest, and set about finding an associate pastor, as his health gave no promise of improvement. This position was filled successively by Rev. C. D. Helmer, Rev. G. N. Weber, D. D., and Rev. George B. Spalding, D. D., - Bushnell preaching often in the intervals between them. In the spring of 1859 he resigned his pastorate, and in July started with his wife for Minnesota, spending the winter chiefly at St. Anthony's Falls. His cor-
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respondence at this time is rich in apt and profound generalizations of experience: "We can do anything or bear anything with a goodwill, if it is only necessary," "There is no teaching so good as that which we get in the solid training of works and duties." "Put yourself on the footing of sacrifice." "Nothing is clear which is not cleared by the Spirit."
In April, 1860, he left the West somewhat invigorated, stopping at Clifton Springs for three months and returning for the winter, where he prepared for republication" Christian Nurture," and the tenth chapter of "Nature and the Supernatural," under the title of the "Character of Jesus."
It is sometimes said of Bushnell that he was a restless and impetuous thinker, rushing from one subject to another on some slight impulse. It is not quite true; he was a busy thinker, but not a restless one, nor did he start hastily on new quests. It is characteristic of him that all his leading contentions had their genesis early in his career, and were almost never absent from his thoughts. It was at this time that he wrote: "Instead of working at any oracle of my own, I let time chew my question for me, and am simply looking on. This habit has grown out of my theologic habit of referring questions I cannot answer to the same arbitrament."
He returned to Hartford in April, 1861, gathered his family about him, and made no more lengthened journeys in search of health. He was
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a confirmed invalid, but by no means a broken down man. Nearly half of his work of publication was done after this time, and if any of it bears the marks of disease, they are not signs of weakness, but of moral and spiritual ripeness.