"NATURE AND THE
SUPERNATURAL"
"The grandest natural agencies are but servitors of a grander than themselves. Using nature as his organ, he transcends it; the act in which he does so is the exercise of his own Free Volition, rendering determinate what was indeterminate before: it is thus the characteristic of such acts to be supernatural; and Man, so far as he shares a like prerogative, occupies a like position; standing to that extent outside and above the realm of natural law, and endowing with existence either side of an alternative possibility. At both ends, therefore, of the scheme of Cosmical order, are beings that go beyond it; all that is natural lies enclosed within the supernatural, and is of the medium through which the Divine mind descends into expression and the Human ascends into interpreting recognition." JAMES MARTINEAU, Nature and God, vol. iii. pp. 147, 148.
"NATURE and the Supernatural," Bushnell's most thorough and complete treatise, was the fruit of that kind of study, which he gave to all subjects, - close observation and brooding thought. It might be said of him that from first to last he thought of little else than the relation between these two terms. He was well fitted for this discussion in himself; the whole play of his mind had this double cast of natural and supernatural. But the conception of nature that was taking shape struck in him a responsive chord. The reign of law had already laid hold of him, and his own experience furnished data for the complementary thought. In 1853 we find him saying that "the supernatural is the necessary complement of nature; . . . my mind turns naturally in this direction." But he did not enter an untrodden path. He had read Edwards carefully enough to see that he cared little for miracles in comparison with spiritual experiences.1 Schleiermacher and Cole-
1 "The greatest privilege of the prophets and apostles was not their being inspired and working miracles, but their eminent holiness. The grace that was in their hearts was a thousand times more than their dignity and honor, than their miraculous gifts." (Edwards' Works, vol. i, p. 557.)
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ridge, the only writers who greatly influenced him, - one teaching that "miracles are not a component element in our faith in Christ," the other that "miracles of themselves cannot work conviction in the mind,"1 had furnished hints he was not slow to follow. But a special incentive came from a prevalent treatment of nature, which he calls "Naturalism," and characterizes as "the new infidelity."
The book opens by calling attention to the "primitive habit of mind" which led men "to believe in that which exceeds the mere terms of nature;" "everything was supernatural." This tendency was met in Greece by the Sophists, who resolved the myths of religion into natural history, a process to which the Sadducees were subjecting Judaism at the time of Christ. This raises the question whether "Christianity will not experience the same fate."
"From the first moment or birth-time of modern science, if we could fix the moment, it has been clear that Christianity must ultimately come into a grand issue of life and death with it, or with the tendencies embodied in its progress. Not that Christianity has any conflict with the facts of science, or they with it. On the contrary, since both it and nature have their common root and harmony in God, Christianity is the natural foster-mother of science, and science the certain hand-
1 Professor George P. Fisher, D. D., History of Doctrine, pp. 508,448.
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maid of Christianity, And both together, when rightly conceived, must constitute one complete system of knowledge. But the difficulty is here: that we see things only in a partial manner, and that the two great modes of thought, or intellectual methods, that of Christianity in the supernatural department of God's plan, and that of science in the natural, are so different that a collision is inevitable and a struggle necessary to the final liquidation of the account between them; or, what is the same, necessary to a proper settlement of the conditions of harmony" (p. 19).
After reviewing the various forms under which naturalism - which is not to be confounded with nature -is sapping the foundations of Christianity, some of which still hold good, while others have lost their significance, he states his purpose, which is "to find a legitimate place for the super-natural in the system of God, and show it as a necessary part of the divine system itself. . . . The world was made to include Christianity; under that becomes a proper and complete frame of order; to that crystallizes, in all its appointments, events, and experiences; in that has the design or final cause revealed, by which all its distributions, laws, and historic changes are determined and systematized." 1
1 "Even the coming of God in Christ is not contrary to the fundamental constitution and laws of the universe, but rather the consummation of the continuous action of God immanent in the universe and ever coming near to man in the courses of human history." (Professor Samuel Harris, D. D., God the Creator and Lord of All, vol. ii. p. 493.)
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We have here a foreshadowing of the interpretation which Christian thought is now putting on Evolution as involving an ethical purpose and end in creation. Bushnell was as much of an evolutionist as he could be in his day. Agassiz's classification of species was the limit of his scientific acceptance of it, but there were times when his insight into the nature of things took him further into the great law that soon came to dominate all thought,as when he says that "there is, in the whole of things called nature, an about-to-be, a definite futurition, a fixed law of coming to pass, such that, given the thing, or whole of things, all the rest will follow by an inherent necessity. In this view, nature ... is that created realm of being or substance which has an acting, a going on or process from within itself, under and by its own laws" (p. 36).
But nature is not the universe. "God has erected another and higher system, that of spiritual being and government, for which nature exists; a system not under the law of cause and effect, but ruled and marshaled under other kinds of laws and able continually to act upon, or vary the action of the processes of nature. If, accordingly, we speak of system, this spiritual realm or department is much more properly called a system than the natural, because it is closer to God, higher in its consequence, and contains in itself the ends or final causes, for which the other exists and to which the other is made to be sub-
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servient. There is, however, a constant action and reaction between the two, and, strictly speaking, they are both together, taken as one, the true system of God" (p. 38).
In singular agreement with Martineau (on our prefatory page), who, however, wrote later, he asserts "that the moment we begin to conceive ourselves rightly, we become ourselves supernatural. . . . In ourselves we discover a tier of existences that are above nature and, in all their most ordinary actions, are doing their will upon it. The very idea of our personality is that of a being not under the law of cause and effect, a being supernatural" (p. 43).
He thus lays down the fundamental position of his treatise; namely, "that nature is that world of substance whose laws are laws of cause and effect, and whose events transpire, in orderly succession, under those laws; the supernatural is that range of substance, if any such there be, that acts upon the chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain, producing, thus, results that, by mere nature, could not come to pass. It is not said, he it observed, as is sometimes done, that the supernatural implies a suspension of the laws of nature, a causing them, for the time, not to be, that, perhaps, is never done, it is only said that we, as powers, not in the line of cause and effect, can set the causes in nature at work, in new combinations otherwise never occurring, and produce, by our action upon nature, results
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which she, as nature, could never produce by her own internal acting" (p. 43).
Two things are to be noticed here, - that the supernatural does not imply a suspension of the laws of nature, and that man is a supernatural being. The latter rests on personality, and this on the will. The air in New England was still too full of the great Edwards to admit of Bushnell's passing by this leading factor without discussing the place of motives in determining human action, and their relation to the will. It was partly concession to prevailing thought, the necessary incident to a still dominant theology and also to the nature of the subject, and partly it was inevitable in himself; he had lived too long in the climate of "the will" to escape its fascinating entanglements, but after all his discussion of it he drops "motives," and finds freedom in "the indisputable report of consciousness." The discussion of the will in New England and for more than a century it was the chief subject of theological debate was a two-edged sword. In the hands of Edwards it aimed to defend divine foreknowledge and decrees as necessary to a divine government of the world; but while it seemed thus to uphold Calvinism as against Arminianism, it involved a practical necessity which bred an infidelity that outweighed the faith that was preserved, a fatal process, interrupted only by an unconquerable sense of freedom. A hundred and fifty years of discussion failed to do what consciousness, left to itself, does in a moment.
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It has been reserved for the great poet of the century to put the problem, which is simply a part of the insoluble problem of the relation of the finite to the infinite, into words which express at once its substantial reality, its mystery, and its sacred uses: -
"Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine."
The treatise would have lost nothing if Bushnell had contented himself with this simple assumption. His discussion is not beyond criticism; taking the sword, he is sometimes slain by it, as when, farther on, he asserts a bondage of the will under sin. But in spite of slips of this kind, his line of thought not only opens in the direction of freedom, but touches the borders of present-day psychology, which looks less to motives and more at the will itself. He thus escapes the endless chain of causation, which entangled the older discussions and confounded their quest for freedom.
Having established his thesis of a supernatural and a natural system, the latter subordinated to the former and together constituting the one sys-tem of God in which man occupies a place in the supernatural by virtue of his will or personality, he goes on to show the inability of nature by itself to inspire and satisfy men, lacking the other factor to dominate and direct it. This point is skillfully elaborated by citations from organic and inorganic life, showing how in nature itself there are "two grand systems of chemical force
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and action; one of which comes down upon the other, always from without to dominate over it, . . . producing substances which the other could not."
He runs marvelously close to the evolutionary theory of creation, but rejects it on grounds, which no longer have force. A full doctrine of the divine immanence would have rendered needless many brilliant pages. In them, however, we find the distinction between "things" and "powers" which is fundamental to his main contention,- "Nature is only stage, field, medium, vehicle, for the universe; that is, for God and his powers." The apparent dualism can easily be passed by; the truth after which he is feeling is clear and indisputable. However it may be with his science, and it was often astray, being of its age, - it was correct enough to uphold him in his effort to broaden the field of the supernatural. Wherever there are "things" there are "powers," and these are supernatural. "Powers" dominate "things" and use them for their own end. Even if the "powers" sin, it is but a sign of that free agency which constitutes the supernatural. The sin is the incident in a system that has for its end the development of "powers" as of more value than "things." "God preferred to have powers and not things only" (p. 96). Thus he escapes the charge of offsetting nature and miracle. Natural and supernatural constitute a universal order and an everyday process. It is by such a path,
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beginning in the lowest forms of nature, that he finds his way up to holiness as God's last end; and when that is gained, it will be seen that it is the culmination of a process that embraces all the stages of creation. The redeeming work of Christ will not appear as an intrusion into a continuous order, but only as another and a supreme instance of the supernatural entering into the natural. "The cross of redemption is no after-thought, but is itself the grand all dominating idea around which the eternal system of God crystallizes" (p. 139).
In successive chapters Bushnell discusses the problem of existence as related to evil; the fact of sin; the consequences of sin; the anticipative consequences of sin; and development or self-reformation not a remedy for sin. In the first three of these chapters he is in substantial agreement with the later school of New England theology so far as the freedom of the will, which he defines to be simply a volitional function, is concerned; but he diverges from, though he does not contradict it, in regarding the beginning of sin as due to "conditions privatize that are involved as necessary incidents in the begun existence and trial of powers." He connects it, however, with a doctrine of angels, good and bad, that later exegesis would set aside; but it does not weaken his assertion that character lies in the will, a necessary assertion if he would get sin into the category of the supernatural under cover of the
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will. "To violate the law of God is itself an act supernatural" (p. 143). Hence "nothing but a supernatural agency of redemption can ever effectively repair it." He thus paves the way to a supernatural Christ and a redemption that is more than self-reformation; it is sin that requires a supernatural remedy.
As an illustration of his sense of the reality of sin, we quote this striking passage, which will be recognized, not as a logical inference, but as an appeal to consciousness: -
"Every person of a mature age, and in his right mind, remembers turns or crises in his life, where he met the question of wrong face to face, and by a hard inward struggle broke through the sacred convictions of duty that rose up to fence him back. It was some new sin to which he had not become familiar, so much worse perhaps in degree as to be the entrance to him consciously of a new stage of guilt. He remembers how it shook his soul and even his body; how he shrunk in guilty anticipation from the new step of wrong; the sublime misgiving that seized him, the awkward and but half possessed manner in which it was taken, and then afterward, perhaps even after years have passed away, how, in some quiet hour of the day or wakeful hour of night, as the recollection of that deed - not a public crime, but a wrong, or an act of vice returned upon him, the blood rushed back for the moment on his fluttering heart, the pores of his skin opened, and
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a kind of agony of shame and self-condemnation, in one word, of remorse, seized his whole person. This is the consciousness, the guilty pang, of sin; every man knows what it is.
"We have also observed this peculiarity in such experiences; that it makes no difference at all what temptations we were under; we probably enough do not even think of them; our soul appears to scorn apology, as if some higher nature within, speaking out of its eternity, were asserting its violated, rights, chastising the insult done to its inborn affinities with immutable order and divinity, and refusing to be further humbled by the low pleadings of excuse and disingenuous guilt. To say, at such a time, the woman tempted me, I was weak, I was beguiled, I was compelled by fear and overcome, signifies nothing. The wrong was understood, and that suffices" (p. 151).
It is such pictures from life and appeals to experience that make one regret that Bushnell ever troubled himself to speculate on the nature of the will or of sin. It is like measuring the speed of the wind and the volts of the lightning to prove the reality of the tempest.
In chapter sixth, which treats of the "Consequences of Sin," amid much overstatement and without due recognition of the fact that the penal is often redemptive, there occurs another passage of keenest insight upon the effect of sin in the soul. It is such passages as these, drawn straight from life, that carry his argument on and over his
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not always consistent statements; insight triumphs over definition: -
"Given the fact of sin, the fact of a fatal breach in the normal state, or constitutional order of the soul, follows of necessity. And exactly this we shall see, if we look in upon its secret chambers and watch the motions of sins in the confused ferment they raise, the perceptions discolored, the judgments unable to hold their scales steadily because of the fierce gusts of passion, the thoughts huddling by in crowds of wild suggestion, the imagination haunted by ugly and disgustful shapes, the appetites contesting with reason, the senses victorious over faith, anger blowing the overheated fires of malice, low jealousies sulking in dark angles of the soul, and envies baser still, hiding under the skim of its green-mantled pools, all the powers that should be strung in harmony loosened from each other, and brewing in hopeless and helpless confusion; the conscience meantime thundering wrathfully above and shooting down hot bolts of judgment, and the pallid fears hurrying wildly about with their brimstone torches,- these are the motions of sins, the Tartarean landscape of the soul and its disorders, when self government is gone and the constituent integrity is dissolved. We cannot call it the natural state of man; nature disowns it. No one that looks in upon the ferment of its morbid, contesting, rasping, restive, uncontrollable action can imagine, for a moment, that he looks upon the sweet, primal
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order of life and nature. No name sufficiently describes it, unless we coin a name and call it a condition of unnature" (p. 173).
The close of this chapter on the "Consequences of Sin in the Natural World," and the next chapter, on the "Anticipative Consequences," might well be omitted, were they not revelations not only of limitations, but also of how nobly he can err. There is no anticipation of sin in paleontology or elsewhere before man. That there is "pre-meditation prior to creation," and that man is the end in view and the outcome of creation from its beginning, is, next to the Copernican system, the most valuable contribution to human knowledge ever made by science, but it anticipates order and not disorder. Sin can be put into divine foreknowledge, but not even by symbol into creation. Bushnell's mistake sprang out of a habit of making everything contributory to his point. He was always a jealous lover of his subject. Wherever he looked, he saw the truth he was contending for, and he impressed into its service whatever his facile imagination could bring within range. Sin stands before him a great reality, and he will show it to be great in order to suit the proportions of the redemption he has in mind. Hence he finds signs of it wrought into the very texture of the globe, and traces it out with wild and splendid rhetoric; but every instance cited is instead a prophecy of perfection.1 It was not wholly due to mistaken
1 The whole subject is admirably treated by Professor James
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thinking, nor to the lingering influence of a passing theology, but also to the fact that science had not yet emphasized the evolutionary theory of creation. Still, it is difficult to find sufficient excuse for thought so contrary to its usual tenor.
The chapter on "No Remedy in Development, or Self-reformation" is written with great care, and in its latter pages with a profound sense of the need of God in order to remedy the evil of sin and to regenerate character. It abounds, however, in ethnological and physiological illustrations that no longer bear the interpretation put on them. That which is called supernatural, or a type of it, for instance, the healing of a wound (p. 230), is quite as natural as any part of growth. It is recovery and may serve as an analogy to a moral process, but it is wholly natural. Bushnell here incurs the danger of dealing too confidently with natural science. He drew his dividing lines over-sharply. Clement, whom he quotes, says, "I saw nothing but the piling up and tearing down of theories." The interpretations of one day yielded
D. Dana in the New Englander, vol. xvii. p. 293, an exhaustive article, in which he shows that the real anticipation of man in nature is man's need, not his sin and retribution. Bushnell used nature to fortify a doctrine of sin and so made it almost sinful. Dana saw nature as a related whole; and each thing as it bore on the general purpose. It is, however, just to Bushnell to say that he anticipated if he did not answer this inevitable criticism in chapter iv. page 98: "God's unities are all, in the last degree, unities of end, or causal as related to end; consisting never in a perfect concert of parts or elements, but in a comprehensive order that takes up and tempers to its own purposes many antagonisms."
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to those of the next; the supernatural "became natural, and both tend more and more to a spiritual interpretation, which may perhaps have the unity of the spirit. But these slips in science do not weaken the force of his claim that self reformation is not effected as Alcibiades said, "by the will," but as Plato said, "by God's will" (p. 243).
Having shown that "there is no hope for man or human society, under sin, save in the supernatural interposition of God" (p. 250), Bushnell asks if there is any rational objection to such interposition. This always has been and is the hard question in connection with miracles, Are they reasonable? When the reason raises the question, it will not be satisfied with a negative answer; they will be denied, or they will be accepted on some ground of historic evidence that silences but does not satisfy reason. Bushnell delivered thought out of this slough by including miracles under law, and naming the law supernatural, assuming that law is reason itself. This point is worked out with great ability, especially in that part of the chapter in which he contends that law in nature implies law in the supernatural, particularly as seen in the nature of God, quoting with effect Hooker's saying that "the being of God is a kind of law to his working." Whatever becomes of nature and supernatural when brought under so unifying a force as law, the objection to miracles as unreasonable disappears.1
1 A remark of Rothe on this point is of interest. "Here I
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It is with this triumphant note that he enters upon the famous tenth chapter, where he contends that the character of Jesus forbids his possible classification with men. This chapter almost supersedes the rest of the volume, even as it surpasses all in sustained interest and adequacy of treatment. It has the finish of a classic, and by frequent republication has already become one. Despite Bushnell's uncertain handling of the humanity of Christ in theological analysis, upon no other theme does he write with so profound sympathy. Having established his general thesis that the disorders of sin require a supernatural divine ministration to overcome them, he approaches Christianity as "a kind of miracle, a power out of nature and above, descending into it." Christ is "the central figure and power, and with him the entire fabric stands or falls" (p. 276).
must face the question, how I dispose of the grave difficulties which seem to be involved in the very nature of a miracle. In respect to this question I find myself somewhat embarrassed, not, however, by the solution of the difficulties, but because I do not see that any difficulties exist. I will in all simplicity out with my honest confession, that to this hour I have never been able to make it clear to myself how my rational nature could possibly take offense at the conception of a miracle. It may arise from this, that I am so thoroughly a theist in my nature that I could never find in myself the least trace of deistic or pantheistic feelings. In part it may arise from the fact that as a matter of principle I have ever held these two questions distinctly apart, - the simply abstract inquiry, whether a miracle in itself is rationally conceivable, and the concrete, whether, in a given case, a reported miracle, even if it be in the Bible, is to be received as having occurred in fact." (Studien und Kritiken, 1858, pp. 24, 25. Quoted from the New Englander, vol. xvii. p. 251.)
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A few quotations will indicate the drift and spirit of the chapter.
"Christ is no liberal, never takes the ground or boasts the distinction of a liberal among his countrymen, because it is not a part of his infirmity, in discovering an error here, to fly to an excess there. His ground is charity, not liberality; and the two are as wide apart in their practical implications, as adhering to all truth and being loose in all. Charity holds fast the minutest atoms of truth, as being precious and divine, offended by even so much as a thought of laxity. Liberality loosens the terms of truth; permitting easily and with careless magnanimity variations from it; consenting, as it were, in its own sovereignty, to overlook or allow them; and subsiding thus, ere long, into a licentious indifference to all truth, and a general defect of responsibility in regard to it. Charity extends allowance to men; liberality, to falsities themselves. Charity takes the truth to be sacred and immovable; liberality allows it to be marred and maimed at pleasure. How different the manner of Jesus in this respect from that irreverent, feeble laxity, that lets the errors be as good as the truths, and takes it for a sign of intellectual eminence, that one can be floated comfortably in the abysses of liberalism. 'Judge not,' he says, in holy charity, 'that ye be not judged;' and again, in holy exactness, 'whosoever shall break, or teach to break, one of these least commandments, shall be least in the kingdom of God.' So magnificent
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and sublime, so plainly divine, is the balance of Jesus. Nothing throws him off the centre on which truth rests; no prejudice, no opposition, no attempt to right a mistake, or rectify a delusion, or reform a practice" (p. 312).
"But before we drop a theme like this, let us note more distinctly the significance of this glorious advent, and have our congratulations in it. This one perfect character has come into our world, and lived in it; filling all the moulds of action, all the terms of duty and love, with his own divine manners, works, and charities. All the conditions of our life are raised thus, by the meaning he has shown to be in them, and the grace he has put upon them. The world itself is changed, and is no more the same that it was; it has never been the same since Jesus left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, is wafted on us in its breath. ... It were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky, separating and expunging one of the colors, than to get the character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the world. Look ye hither, meantime, all ye blinded and fallen of mankind, a better nature is among you, a pure heart, out of some pure world, is come into your prison, and walks it with you .... In him dawns a hope; purity has not come into our world, except to purify. Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world! Light breaks in, peace settles on the air, lo! the prison walls are giving way, rise, let us go" (p. 330).
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It will be noticed that Bushnell does not contend for the non-classification of Jesus with men on ontological grounds. Once only, and then but slightly, does he refer to the miraculous birth. It is the perfection of his character that puts him beyond classification with men and into the supernatural. But having already put men in this category, he so far includes men and Jesus in the same classification, and separates him from men only by the moral perfection of his humanity. It would be untrue, however, to infer that Bushnell's thought of the person of Christ did not go further than this.1 But in this chapter there is an irenic tone that reveals where his thought rested as he strove to show that the perfectly human separates Jesus from men. His sympathetic reader today overlooks the aim, and rejoices in the pages as showing that the perfectly human is divine.
In the chapter (p. 833) in which the miracles of Christ are discussed, the usual line of argument is pursued, often with great keenness, but with the common result of unsatisfactoriness due to the in-
1 "A German theologian finds the unparalleled power of Jesus in the unlimited range of his sympathies. He stands apart from and above all men in greatness. He is absolutely unique. He is, as Bushnell said, unclassifiable. But is not his uniqueness this, that he is not provincial, local, and narrow, but universal; that he knew what is in man as no other has known, and that he had power and sympathetic union with men and women of any nation and any religion? He whose uniqueness made him the Son of God was he whose universality made him the Son of man. Dr. Dorner therefore lays down the principle that the uniqueness of Jesus is his universality." (President George Harris, D. D., Inequality and Progress, p. 147.)
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herent difficulty of the subject. The time for a proper discussion of the historicity of miracles had not fully come.
The claim that God acts only "immediately on the whole" is well met: "The argument by which all particular action is excluded, would re-quire that God should never have begun to act immediately anywhere. Creation is thus philosophically impossible. God, therefore, has had nothing to do, but to be chained to the wheel from eternity, acting immediately on some eternal whole that is self-existent as He; allowed to begin nothing, vary no part or particle, held by a doom to his eternal totality. Is it this which 'the idea of God' requires, this by which our idea of God is fulfilled?" (p. 343).
In conclusion, the question is referred to the general problem of Jesus; the miracles do not prove him, he proves the miracles: -
"The character and doctrine of Jesus are the sun that holds all the minor orbs of revelation to their places, and pours a sovereign self-evidencing light into all religious knowledge. ... It is no ingenious fetches of argument that we want; no external testimony, gathered here and there from the records of past ages, suffices to end our doubts; but it is the new sense opened in us by Jesus himself a sense deeper than words and more immediate than inference - of the miraculous grandeur of his life; a glorious agreement felt between his works and his person, such that
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his miracles themselves are proved to us in our feeling, believed in by that inward testimony. On this inward testimony we are willing to stake everything, even the life that now is, and that which is to come. If the miracles, if revelation itself, cannot stand upon the superhuman character of Jesus, then let it fall. If that character does not contain all truth and centralize all truth in itself, then let there be no truth."
The chapter on "Miracles and Spiritual Gifts not Discontinued" is usually regarded as a detraction from the book, especially in view of the examples cited. Bushnell himself said of it that it cost him more of a sacrifice to insert it than anything he ever did. While it was not necessary to his main contention, it was almost unavoidable. As the corrective of naturalism, which is a recur-ring if not an abiding feature of human thought, the supernatural seems to be also called for as a constant attendant. Besides, the supernatural was so far extended over the domain of what was usually regarded as nature, and as they together constituted the one system of God, it seemed absurd to shut out the play of the greater factor and give it over to the doubtful keeping of historic remembrance. Such considerations evidently weighed with him, but his pen labored under the difficulties involved; miracles, even under law, are beset with so much hazard, and run to such excesses, that he is driven to the supposition that they are periodic, appearing when they are necessary to
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correct the rationalism begotten by unvarying law.
Almost the last writing done by Bushnell was a few pages of a proposed treatise on the Holy Spirit, - too brief to indicate what his treatment would have been; but we cannot avoid the surmise that if he had lived to complete it, he would have found in the ever active Spirit of God a power that superseded the need of intermittent miracles to quicken faith. The trouble with his thought here is that he failed to keep it within limits; his ardor carried him over the borders, whence he could return only by weakening explanations. But how much better is this than dull, unimaginative shortcoming! And how much better also is over faith than under faith!
Of the book as a whole it should be said that it is not a study of the Christian miracles. It is not the miraculous but the supernatural that engages Bushnell's attention. He assumed but did not treat crucial points such as the supernatural birth of Jesus and the ascension. He did not enter upon questions of historicity, it was too early, but he did something more important: he contended that nature and the supernatural constitute one system, and that "powers" are greater than "things." This is fundamental and inclusive; all else is not unimportant, but relatively so. Did Christ rise from the dead? If so, it was according to law. This is fundamental and eternal. The historic treatment of the details of
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miracles is a matter that belongs to a region not yet fully entered; but whatever the outcome of criticism, the service rendered by Bushnell was and is still of greatest value. A recognition of the reign of law and the continuity of force was rapidly entering into the thought of the day. The claim that God suspended the law in order to reveal his special presence or power was losing its force;1 the "great bell" no longer rang clear. The crass dualism involved in the conception of law and miracle began to plague thought with suspicion and uncertainty. If miracle stood for God, and nature for itself, each factor was too great for the other; the dualism must be resolved, and unity of some sort established. In the light of modern criticism and exegesis, it is easy to see which way the current was flowing. If the traditional definition were insisted on, miracles would go by the board; no doctrine on the subject could be retained, and naturalism would hold the field. Whatever the future of the question may be, Bushnell made it possible for reason and faith to keep together, at least for a time. But he did more; he hewed a path rough but not blind - into that realm of the Spirit to which the age is slowly opening its eyes. He interpreted the world spiritually. Laws are not ends, but means for getting into the free world of the Spirit, which dom-
1 The word suspended is used because it defines the popular conception of a miracle then held. The more careful definitions of Canon Mozley (Bampton Lectures) and Professor Fisher (Grounds of Theistic Belief) had not yet been made.
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inates all things because it has created all. He enforces the distinction between "things" and "powers," and names the latter "supernatural." It is in this light that his book has permanent value. It is to be regarded, not as an argument for miracles, but for the supernatural.
Its reception was what might have been expected. It was extensively reviewed both at home and in Great Britain, where, if it did not escape criticism, it received kinder treatment than here.
A letter to Dr. Bartol indicates in a word the situation in which the critics put him: -
"I will try to comfort myself in the hope that I am about right when you, on one hand, set me down as the demolisher of nature, and the 'New Englander' complains, on the other, that I defer too much to nature, and am too much under her power." And again: "It is really hard times with a poor fellow. The 'New Englander' tries me all through by the New Haven theology, and Dr. James makes me a ninny for being in the New Haven theology. About everything said on one side is thrown back on the other, and I am pelted all round."
But little of this criticism was based on its merit or demerit, so determining was theological prejudice. That he was regarded in Boston as a "demolisher of nature" and in New Haven as deferring "too much to nature" is a reflection of the fixedness of the thought in each region. It
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was evident that a fresh thinker had broken into the world of New England theology. But while the shepherds were contending over the book, one side denying that it was food for faith, the other that it was true, the flock found their way to it, and were fed and comforted. Like "Christian Nurture," it was another deliverance, and another lesson in the Christian faith.