SERMONS
"All light of life for us disappears from the life of Christ unless that life be to us a life indeed, and not the mere acting of an assigned part." - JOHN McLEOD CAMPBELL, Nature of the Atonement, p. 228.
"The gospel is nothing now any more than it was at the first unless it is reincarnated, and kept incarnate." - BUSHNELL, Living Subjects, p. 94.
"A right mind has a right polarity, and discovers right things by feeling after them." -Ibid., p. 173.
"O what worlds-full of great feeling are given to us, if only we can die into the causes of the worlds! " - Ibid., p. 412.
"Man finds his paradise when he is imparadised in God." - BUSHNELL, Sermons for the New Life, p. 41.
AN able and sympathetic critic has said of Bushnell that "the designation of a theologian cannot, in any technical sense at all events, be applied to him." 1 Whatever truth there may be in this remark lies in the fact that he was pre-eminently a preacher, and a preacher is seldom a technical theologian. In Bushnell the preacher absorbed the theologian and supplanted his methods. It is as a preacher that he first conies before us, and henceforth whatever he says bears the sermonic stamp. His treatises had their origin in the pulpit, and in this fact lies their chief value, and also something of their weakness. They will not always be read, nor is it necessary that they should be in order to perpetuate his thought; it is found in its truest and most vital forms in the sermons. They are a court of appeal when the treatise falters or goes amiss in its unnecessary logic; the heart of the matter is to be found in those utterances which came from him as he looked straight into the lives of the people and preached the gospel to them "first hand." He was dominated and inspired by his profession, and he did not
1 Rev. S. S. Drew, Contemporary Review, August, 1879, p. 823.
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well know how to speak in any other way. He was not only a great preacher, but he was great at the outset, and the designation never was amiss. Whatever came from him bore the unfailing mark of his best qualities, - insight, comprehension, power of statement. When he preached his first sermon, some one said: "There is more where that came from." The sermon "Duty not measured by our own Ability," in which he flanked each wing of the contending factions of the day, was writ-ten in the first year of his ministry, and it might have been written in the last. His first printed sermon, called out by the mobbing of Garrison in Boston in 1835, wears the statesmanlike cast that marks all of his sermons on political topics; they are always discussions of principles and tendencies, and invariably reveal an insight into causes.
His manner in the pulpit at this period is thus described: -
"His preaching had in those days a fiery quality, an urgency and willful force, which, in his later style, is still felt in the more subdued glow of poetic imagery. There was a nervous insistence about his person, and a peculiar emphasizing swing of his right arm from the shoulder, which no one who has ever heard him is likely to forget. It seemed as if, with this gesture, he swung himself into his subject, and would fain carry others along with him. His sermons were always written out in full and read; never extemporized, never mem-
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orized. For the latter method and its results he had no liking. For the former, not sufficient confidence, though that came to him later, when driven to extempore work by ill-health. His early manner betrayed this want of confidence, and was at times a little constrained and labored. The same was true of his prayers, which lacked ease and flow, such as came to him with fuller inspiration. The whole effect of his services was, however, always pointed and practical. Prayers, hymns, Scripture reading, text, sermon, all converged on the same central theme, and went to heighten the impression of the leading thought,"
A closer description of his preaching, at an early period, is given by Charles Loring Brace, whose life illustrated the influence he describes: -
"The writer holds it among the especial blessings of his life that his boyhood and youth were passed under the pastorate of Dr. Bushnell. Those were the eager and powerful days of the great preacher, when his language had a pure and Saxon ring which it somewhat lost in later years, when emotions from the depths of a passionate nature bore him sometimes to the highest flights of eloquence, and wit and sarcasm flashed from his talk and speeches, and he stood the most independent and muscular sermonizer in the American pulpit. He reached afterwards a higher plane of spiritual life, and showed more balanced power and more consideration for the views of others, and was no doubt more humble minded, and yet
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more elevated above the world; still those early fiery days of his left an indelible mark on all the youth who came under his influence. We felt the divine beauty of Truth, and how sweet and easy it was to sacrifice all to her. We were withdrawn from the overpowering control of external formulas and formal statements, and began to search for the realities as for hidden treasures. Our great teacher seemed to stand as a prophet, directing us to things unseen and eternal; and though perhaps he and his disciples at that time exaggerated the value of the intellect, it was a healthful movement, and always inspired with devout reverence and a deep sense of the personality of Christ as the Son of God. Truth, independence, humanity, under an overpowering faith in God and Christ, were the principles stamped then into youthful minds by the preaching and life of Dr. Bushnell. He showed himself in all his intercourse, what he was, a large pattern of a man. Proud, at times almost disdainful; full of powerful feelings; simple; witty; tender as a woman to real misfortune, but biting in his sarcasm against pomposity and falseness; self-willed, thoroughly independent, a true leader of men."
It must not be inferred that Bushnell was what is usually called a popular preacher. Men of the first order of intellect seldom win that name; they are both unwilling and unable to bridge the chasm between themselves and the throng. He always had a hearing, but the audience was determined
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by the severest selection.1 He drew, but only such as had ears to hear him. He was impatient with half-way thinking, and his genius was cast in too rigid a mould to admit of accommodation to the populace. His brilliancy and fervor flashed and burned at too great a distance to be discerned by the multitude, and the orbit of his thought was too vast for it to measure. He can be fully appreciated only by those who heard him preach. Sermons and delivery fitted each other like die and image. The sincerity of the word was matched by the quiet confidence of his bearing, and the poetry of his diction was sustained by the music of his voice, which always fell into a rhythmic cadence. The flights of his imagination were not rhetorical strivings, but the simple rehearsals of what he saw. He was always more conscious of the God-ward than the man-ward side of his subject. His early conception of God as enshrined in Christ followed him to the end, and it was the divine rather than the human that entranced him. He was eminently an interpreter of the divine mysteries, and he brought with him the air and the bearing of the region into which he had penetrated. His effectiveness was peculiar. If he gained any hearing at all, he won the consent of the whole man, - not agreement always, but intellectual and moral sympathy. The sermon never
1 Professor George Adam Smith said - in colloquio - that Bushnell is the preacher's preacher, as Spenser is the poet's poet, and that his sermons are on the shelves of every manse in Scotland.
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lost its power to move and inspire such hearers through lapse of years. He lodged so vast an amount of truth in heart and mind and conscience that it could not be forgotten. Its staying power was due also to the fact that, though speaking from such a height and never descending an inch to catch the ear, there was an utter absence of the ex cathedra and even of the theologic tone. He was the most democratic and the most human of preachers, and at the same time one of the loftiest and most spiritual. He spoke to men as on equal terms and in a direct way, taking them into his confidence and putting himself in their place, feeling their needs, sharing their doubts, and reasoning the question out as one of them. He never berates, and if he exhorts, it is in the same spirit of comradeship over the matter in hand. Still, he is dominated by his subject and its demands, following where it goes, and if any of his hearers falter, he does not stop with them, but leads the rest on to the final solution, or up to the last look into the mystery.
One of the most noticeable things about the sermons is the relation between text and title. When they have been announced, he has already half preached the sermon. The title is not a happy hint nor a catching phrase, but is the subject itself in little. He starts with a full conception of his discourse, not working his way into it, but working it out, having already gone through it. Hence it is not a tentative groping after the truth, but the
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truth, itself, in brief but clear proportions. The title of the first discourse in "Sermons for the New Life" - "Every Man's Life a Plan of God" contains his whole thought on the subject. It took a great truth out of dialectic theology, where it deadened action, and made it a living force. It was not a great sermon as compared with some others, but was great because of its timeliness and the shrewdness of its address. The text - "I girded thee, though thou hast not known me" - matched the title, each piquing interest and forcing attention. Equally striking is the title of the third sermon, "Dignity of Human Nature shown from its Ruins." It is not one of his best, and is somewhat cumbered by dogmatic views of the Fall, which, however, he soon forgets in a first-hand view of that side of human life where dignity is not usually looked for. "The Capacity of Religion extirpated by Disuse;" here an old and much debated doctrine is taken out of its dogmatic setting and put into life itself, where it is clearly seen to be an everyday fact. "Unconscious Influence," with its allusive text, "Then went in also that other disciple," was preached and first published in London in 1846, where it must have caught the eye of Robertson, who in a letter speaks of the subject and text, but without mention of the author.1 It might be named along
1 Mr. Henry Clay Trumbull, in an interesting series of papers on Bushnell in the S. S. Times (August, 1899), refers to an absurd controversy over the question of plagiarism by Robertson. Bushnell dismissed the question by saying: -
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with "Every Man's Life a Plan of God," a prolific sermon, having called out innumerable discourses on the same subject and bearing fruit beyond measure. In the sermon on "Happiness and Joy," he fixes the distinction between them, and in the sermon on "The Power of an Endless Life" turns the mind away from duration to the moral power to live and grow spiritually. That on "The Efficiency of the Passive Virtues" was greatly needed at a time when the newly felt freedom of the will made life over tense with action.
In the next volume, "Christ and his Salvation," the most notable discourse is that on "The Insight of Love," based on the anointing of Jesus. The first sentence challenges attention: "It takes a woman disciple after all to do any most beautiful thing; in certain respects too, or as far as love is wisdom, any wisest thing." After an exquisitely tender and beautiful unfolding of the text, he passes to a discussion of casuistry-very timely when literalness was the rule of conduct as it was of interpretation, -and then to the "superior preceptive morality of the Gospel of Christ,"
"Robertson was too much of a man for that. He didn't need to do such
a thing. There was no temptation to him to appropriate another man's ideas in
that way."
"How, then, do you account for all this?"
"I suppose that Robertson read a report of that sermon in the newspaper, one morning soon after I had preached it, and he liked the plan; hut then it practically went out of his mind. Later its ideas came back to him in such a way that he thought he was originating them, when he was unconsciously recalling them from his memory."
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which is "incarnated in his person, all beauty, truth, mercy, greatness, wise counsel of life," and supersedes all casuistry so that one who embraces him" is able to fill up a beautiful life and meet, with a glorious consent of practice, all the grandest meanings and remotest future workings of God." This sermon is a remarkable example of refined discussion put to every-day use, the highest art in the preacher, and almost the mea-sure of his power. That on "The Fasting and Temptation of Jesus" the crucial subject in all preaching shows Bushnell at his best. Thought, feeling, insight, sympathy, - all are at the highest. Save a few sentences touching on our "fallen nature," the treatment anticipates the latest exegesis, and has no equal in its passionate and clear-sighted conception of this experience in the life of Jesus. It is a fine illustration of nearly all his sermons; correct enough in exegesis, not because of critical study, but by pure insight and reproduction of events in his imagination. The sermon on "The Wrath of the Lamb" has in it more of technical theology than most of his discourses; still it is marked by his usual clearness of vision. The reader is left in uncertainty as to his meaning on certain points, but not as to the general purport. It is sufficiently clear until he suffers his subject to lead him into the prevalent theology, against which he deals heavy blows, while he does not wholly make evident his own view; but the sermon should live, and be read
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as a moral tonic, and a reminder of the strenuousness of life under the eternal laws.
The third volume, "Sermons on Living Subjects," goes on in the same fashion, - incarnating a theme in a title and binding it fast to a text. The most notable titles are "Feet and Wings;" "The Gospel of the Face;" "Loving is but letting God love us;" "The Outside Saints; " " Free to Amusements, and too free to want them."
Valuable as the sermons of Bushnell are to all who read them, they are of special value to the teacher of homiletics. As he studies them, searching for the art that lends such power to the thought, he notes first their structural quality, - built, not thrown together, nor gathered up here and there. He traces the intertwined rhetoric and logic, each tempering the other, - the reasoning little except clear statement and the rhetoric as convincing as the logic. He follows the wide sweep of the thought, which yet never wanders from the theme. He notes the Platonic use of the world as furnishing images of spiritual realities; and a kindred habit of condensing his meaning into apothegms that imbed themselves in the memory. He shows how the preacher begins by almost sharing a doubt with his hearer and leaves him wondering why he ever doubted; how theology is transformed into religion which becomes the judge of theology; and how while the whole sermon is instinct with thought and sentiment, it is practical down even to homeliest details; - this
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and more the teacher will point out to his students, but he has not compassed the preacher, nor can he measure these discourses by any analysis. They have that which defies analysis, - genius, the creative faculty, the gift of direct vision. Something in almost every sermon is to be set aside, defective exegesis, fanciful interpretation of nature, provincial prejudice, lingering dogma, overemphasis, but after this is done, there remains the body of the discourse, marked by that peculiar insight that sees straight into the nature of things, and by that gift of expression which can utter what it sees; each gift reinforcing the other.
It is impossible to form a just estimate of Bushnell's preaching without taking into account that of the day. It was a style of preaching in which nature and life were fairly driven off the field. There was no such thing as a direct look. Everything was viewed through four or five dominant doctrines that prescribed the thought, whatever might be the subject. The Fall gave the keynote, and a constant warning rang in the ears of preacher and people; fear of unsoundness and the "system" determined the conclusion. The themes were great, but the assumptions and the method determined in advance what was to be said. Sometimes the argument wandered into bypaths of thought and even sentiment, and sometimes the preacher ran a wild chase in imaginary regions and was deemed eloquent, but for the most part he followed a beaten path to a fixed
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goal, marked out by proof-texts on one side, and by the system on the other side. There was no full look at life and its conditions, no rational analysis of motives and conduct; nothing was viewed in its own light. The condition, in one word, was a lack of freedom, aggravated by an intense provincialism. Bushnell broke into this treadmill world and reversed its method. He did not ignore dogma, but he would not allow it to prejudge his conclusion; nor did he fail to quote proof-texts, but he used them chiefly as helps in the examination of his subject. For that he struck straight into the heart of things, - life as he himself and those about him were living it, and nature as it lay under his eye.
If the question were raised as to the theological significance of his sermons as a whole, it would be difficult to give a clear answer; but this much may be said, - they reinforce the general purport of his four theological treatises, and translate their main contentions into terms of every-day life. Treatises and sermons have as their common and chief result a transfer of thought in New England theology from the atonement, viewed under two or three theories, to the incarnation; that is, from a dogmatic conception of Christ's death to a natural conception of his life. The change was inevitable in the evolution of theology; Bushnell led the way, and made it clear and open. The question asked today in the earnest world is not, Why did Christ die? but, How did he live? The incarnation has taken into itself the atonement.
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More specific mention of this change is made elsewhere, and is spoken of here to illustrate the fact that by bringing the atonement under the terms of human life, and by making it a fulfillment of the laws of humanity, which are also the laws of God, he carried it directly into the incarnation, that is, the human life of Christ. It does not matter whether Bushnell inclined to the Sabellian or the Nicene view, something stronger than either drove him along his path; namely, the conviction that if God is in Christ, it is in order to fulfill himself under the laws and conditions of humanity. This essential transition in theological thought is clearly seen in Bushnell's sermons. It permeates them, and makes them what they are. His theological treatises will be read less and less as time goes on. Theology is a science, and science is a Saturn that is always devouring its own children; but these sermons belong to that other class of literature, which has been called "the literature of power" because it deals with the unchangeable factors and conditions of humanity. No sermons have a better claim to be ranked in this class, and it may be expected that they will live on in the world of literature, along with those of Bishop Butler and Mozley and Newman, with hardly less weight of matter, and with even deeper insight into the ways of the spirit, both of God and man. They are universal, and yet they especially reflect the New England mind as a combination of ideality, conscience, and practicality, the last dominating
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the others, though in subtle and subordinate ways. They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their diction, commanding in their moral tone, penetrating in their spirituality, and are pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not one, - the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners, no petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption, no logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of truth, coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God. He illustrates on every page the remark of his teacher, Professor Gibbs, that "language is the sanctuary of thought." These sermons are the worship he paid in that temple where reason and devotion are one.
The writer supplements his own insufficient ac-count of the preaching of Bushnell by a graphic pen-picture from the Rev. Dr. David N. Beach.
"In the academic year 1870-71, at Yale, the College Pastorate having just become vacant, and there being no immediate intention of filling it, President Woolsey, who had a year in advance announced his intention of laying down his office at the next Commencement, provided for the college pulpit an extraordinary feast of good things. It was the modern 'Board of Preachers' without the name. Among the eminent men whom he, with consummate discernment, brought hither, none, however, so shone as himself and Dr. Bushnell, each of whom preached on several Sundays. The
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difference between no two men could have been greater, and it afforded our student world a reassuring glimpse of how wide-lying the kingdom of truth is, to perceive that minds so diverse in aptitude, training, and method, stood, nevertheless, in the most evident and heartfelt sympathy. The compact, weighty, simple, profound thought of Woolsey, immensely in earnest, building toward faith but more toward conduct; and the vision, the scope, the uplift of Bushnell, his seership, as of an Elijah already beyond Jordan (it was almost his last preaching), and talking with some Elisha, are fixed forever in the minds and lives of not a few who then sat, morning and afternoon (for so was it in those days), in that grim old chapel.
"Hunting through a file of our college news-paper for that year, I find that, under the title, 'How does he do it?' I essayed to answer the unanswerable about Bushnell (Yale Courant, January 18, 1871, pp. 129, 130). It is a poor little article, missing almost altogether the point, but still a token how our seer had laid hold on us, and glistering with great Bushnell phrases. For example: 'Doubt is not occasioned by investigation, but by the lack of it;' 'Scorn is blind, for the eyes it thinks it has are only sockets.' Nothing could have been more Bushnellian at least as, like an apparition, he appeared before us on those Sundays - than those two words, 'only sockets.' Pretty much all our illuminations seemed 'only sockets' sockets of a skeleton when he would
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have done; and we found ourselves looking far away to that light which never was on sea or land. Days of fate - like one of his own he told us of, 'in a little bedroom of one of these dormitories' - were those to some of us. But to be more specific: Gaunt was he, gray, ashen of skin, thin-voiced till he got under way, stopping time and again to cough, no elocution, nor rhetoric (albeit scarce ever such rhetoric, soberly conceived); making us his by no ad captandum themes or illustrations, or metaphors; the plainest, most matter of fact person that ever stood there. His invocation, which we could scarcely hear, would still us. The Scripture lesson, plain speech (as if uttered on yesterday's half holiday) about some valiant soul, read as only one reads who dwells for-ever with realities, would change our temper for the entire day. Then the prayer. I can hear it yet. Nothing about Bushnell so holds me, though I cannot recall a sentence of it. You deemed, like Jacob at Bethel, that God was there. All conventions, too, were dissolved betwixt Him and you. Our seer must have held Him with his glittering eye. Then the great argument began, - a shorter 'pastoral prayer' than we had ever heard, that spake to the Infinite as a man to his friend; reverent but familiar; grateful but self-respecting; diction the simplest, the weightiest; hesitating not to assume for us responsibilities, nor to lay answering responsibilities on God; (you divined, now, how it was that Jacob had wrestled
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at Face-of-God, and had successfully thrown down his gauntlet before Jehovah;) and done, as all straight, pregnant speech is done, soon, simply, confidently. The world has changed when you lift your head. To have heard Bushnell pray, and to have prayed even a very little with him, was already to have entered the world of spirit. Our Saviour's unique prayer life was explicable thereafter.
"The sermon I remember best, better than all except that 'On the Mount,' was the one entitled 'The Dissolving of Doubts,' 'Doubts are not peculiar to Nebuchadnezzar,' he begins, putting into that monarch's lips words belonging to Belshazzar (and it so stands in the printed volume); but if you notice this, you do not mind, any more than you mind Shakespeare's anachronisms. No, they are not peculiar to Nebuchadnezzar; you even have had yours. Thereupon, in the space of some three coarsely printed pages, say in five minutes, he has given you what an earlier metaphysician would have called the 'natural history' of your own mind. Then, while you sit breathless, he describes whither you are come. 'His suns do not rise, but climb.' Next he proposes a way out. It appeals to you the more because he shyly implies that he has tried it himself. Here occurs the parenthesis about the 'little bedroom.' 'O God, if there be a God,' he quotes, and you take heart. 'A dismal sort of prayer,' he comments, while you whisper Amens, 'but the best he can
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make, and better than some.' The tears by this time are streaming down your face, but you sit bolt upright on those timber benches, not fearing, at least for now, the face of man. But it is his application that lifts you. 'Never be afraid to doubt.' 'Never try to conquer doubts against time.' ' Never force yourself to believe.' 'If you try this way, you must be anything that it re-quires, a Jew, a Mohammedan, ready to go to the world's end, anything; most probably you must be a Christian.' All this with a calm, a stillness, a solemnity of emphasis, a cheerful confidence in you and in God, that by this time have bathed that sombre place as in a soft and warm and heavenly light. The president, who sits beside him in the high pulpit, and who will rather have chosen the theme, 'Sin not Self-Reformatory,' lifts his glasses to clear the mists that are even in his piercing eyes, and you walk out into a new, an unfearing, a believing life.
"This was the peculiarity of Bushnell's preaching: it was vision, it was pure insight, it changed your point of view, you were another man. Shortly before the death of Thomas Hughes, I heard him say in his own library at Chester, before an exquisite portrait of Maurice, his voice tremulous with an emotion that almost bowed that strong man, 'Oh, he was the prophet, he was the prophet!' You felt the same about Bushnell."