COLLEGE AND PROFESSIONAL
STUDIES
"Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
" He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length
" To find a stronger faith his own; And Power was with him in the night, "Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone,
" But in the darkness and the cloud, As over Sinai's peaks of old, While Israel made their gods of gold, Altho' the trumpet blew so loud."
In Memoriam, xcvi.
BUSHNELL entered Yale College in 1823, when he was twenty-one years of age, - a full-grown and robust man. The students at Yale enter as boys and graduate as men, This mingling of ages and a uniformity of methods form the chief infelicity of the American college, and cause most of those troubles that afflict both students and teachers. Bushnell's career bore the marks of a full-rounded manhood. That he was treated as a boy did not greatly trouble him, save once, when he led a rebellion against a doubtfully prescribed examination, and was sent home for a period, a somewhat humorous proceeding in the light of his age and character.
His college life was marked by intellectual earnestness and "a wonderful consciousness of power." He led his class in athletic sports, - in the simple way of those days, led it also on the intellectual side, worked hard, lived rather by him-self, though not a recluse, and left in the college an enduring monument in the Beethoven Society, which he organized in order to lift the standard of the music in the chapel. His religious experience
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was what might have been expected in such a man and at such a period. He was just in time to feel something of the receding wave of French liberal-ism that had pervaded the country. It did not cease to be felt until some years later, when it died out, not because its criticism was refuted, but chiefly because the Anglo-Saxon will not long live without a religion. Bushnell's experience partook rather of skepticism than of the reaction from it. He says: "I loved a good deal the prudential, cold view of things; my religious character went down." This was inevitable. It had begun, after the fashion of the day, under the fervors of the revival system, which he attempted to keep alive by a forced defense of Calvinism; but both fervor and logic disappeared in the cool and calm isolation of college life. The Christian nurture in which he had been reared remained with him and "kept him a living soul."
The following pen picture by a master in the art - N. P. Willis, a classmate - so well out-lines Bushnell as a college student, and so keenly touches the secret of his method in dealing with opposite truths, that we quote it entire: -
"Seniors and classmates at Yale, in 1827 we occupied the third story back, North College, North Entry, - Bushnell in the northwest corner. As a student, our classmate and neighbor was a black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed, athletic, arid independent good fellow, popular, in spite of being both blunt and exem-
plary. We have seen him but once since those days, and then we chanced to meet him on the Rhine, In the year 1845, we think,- both of us voyagers for health. But to our story. The chapel bell was ringing us to prayers one summer morning; and Bushnell, on his punctual way, chanced to look in at the opposite door, where we were, - with the longitudinal, straight come-and-go which we thought the philosophy of it, - strap-ping our razor. 'Why, man,' said he, rushing in and seizing the instrument without ceremony, 'is that the way you strap a razor?' He grasped the strap in his other hand, and we have remembered his tone and manner almost three hundred and sixty-five times a year ever since, as he threw out his two elbows and showed us how it should be done. 'By drawing it from heel to point both ways,' said he, 'thus - and thus - you make the two cross frictions correct each other;' and dropping the razor with this brief lesson, he started on an overtaking trot to the chapel, the bell having stopped ringing as he scanned the improved edge with his equally sharp gray eye. Now, will any one deny that these brief and excellent directions for making the roughness of opposite sides con-tribute to a mutual fine edge seem to have been 'the tune' of the Doctor's sermon to the Unitarians? Our first hearing of the discourse was precisely as we have narrated it, and we thank the Doctor for most edifying comfort out of the
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doctrine, as we trust his later hearers will after as many years."1
Bushnell was graduated in 1827, and for a few months taught a school in Norwich. He found it uncongenial work, saying that he " would rather lay stone wall any time." He had probably got somewhat away from his childhood, and had not gained that deeper sympathy with it which came later. His address at graduation led to an engagement in New York on the editorial staff of the "Journal of Commerce," on which he remained for ten months, working incessantly and laying up stores of experience of utmost value. Finding it "a terrible life," he withdrew from it, though invited to a partnership in the paper, and devoted a half year to study in the Law School at New Haven, where he gained further stores of experience that proved helpful to him, and which appear in several of his ablest essays, notably in "The Growth of Law." In these varied experiences following a solid course of study in college, and preceded by a long youth hood that combined farm labor and a skilled handicraft, Bushnell laid broad foundations for a career which, though in-tensely speculative and spiritual, ran close to daily life and reality. He left the Law School, intending to settle in some Western city, where he would find his way into the practice of the law and also if possible into political life. While at home on a
1 From a letter in The Home Journal, 1848, which refers to a sermon preached by Dr. Bushnell in Cambridge.
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farewell visit, he received an appointment as tutor in Yale College.
We quote his own account of this crisis in his life, both because of its importance and because it sheds further light on that Christian nurture which underlay his life and entered so deeply into his thought.
"I was graduated, and then, a year afterwards, when my bills were paid, and when the question was to be decided whether I should begin the preparation of theology, I was thrown upon a most painful struggle by the very evident, quite incontestable fact that my religious life was utterly gone down. And the pain it cost me was miserably enhanced by the disappointment I must bring on my noble Christian mother by withdrawing myself from the ministry. I had run to no dissipations; I had been a church-going, thoughtful man. My very difficulty was that I was too thoughtful, substituting thought for everything else, and expecting so intently to dig out a religion by my head that I was pushing it all the while practically away. Unbelief, in fact, had come to be my element. My mother felt the disappointment bitterly, but spoke never a word of complaint or upbraiding. Indeed, I have sometimes doubted whether God did not help her to think that she knew better than I did what my becoming was to be.
"At the college vacation two years after my graduation, when I had been engaged in law studies for a year, I was appointed to a tutorship. A
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fortnight after reaching home, I wrote a letter to President Day, declining the appointment. As I was going out of the door, putting the wafer in my letter, I encountered my mother and told her what I was doing. Remonstrating now very gently, but seriously, she told me that she could not think I was doing my duty. 'You have settled this question without any consideration at all that I have seen. Now, let me ask it of you to suspend your decision till you have at least put your mind to it. This you certainly ought to do, and my opinion still further is' she was not apt to make her decision heavy in this manner -' that you had best accept the place.' I saw at a glance where her heart was, and I could not refuse the postponement suggested. The result was that I was taken back to New Haven, where, partly by reason of a better atmosphere in religion, I was to think myself out of my over thinking, and discover how far above reason is trust."
He entered upon his tutorship in the autumn of 1829, and for a year and a half kept up his studies in the law, still holding to his purpose of entering that profession. But great experiences or rather developments awaited him. He might during this time be described as sound in ethics and skeptical in religion. Each is easily explained. The soundness of his morality was due to his nature and training; his skepticism was chiefly due to the theology in which he was involved. The revolt had come early; he resisted it, but as time
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went on, his doubts grew into positive unbelief, which was held in check by his conscience. The change came and there was need of it - in one of those revivals which occasionally pervaded college life In those days. This is not the place to discuss their nature or their value. Their roots go deep into theology and the later Puritan movement, into Biblical interpretation, and also, let us not hesitate to say, into the religious needs of men. They are not exempt from the criticism, that can be visited, on almost any phase or form of church life, nor is there need to draw a line as to the value of their results. They involved violent reactions, but they also drew out and set in motion great and abiding forces. These movements in Yale College were free from the excesses of those in the churches outside, Bushnell became a critic of the revival system, as we shall see, but he did not include in his thought that movement in college which brought so great a change to himself. It was in the winter of 1881 that this deepening of religious feeling began. We quote an account of it given by his fellow tutor Dr. McEwen, of New London, so far as it relates to Bushnell.
"What, then, in this great revival was this man to do, and what was to become of him? Here he was in the glow of his ambition for the future, tasting keenly of a new success, - his fine passage at arms In the editorial chair of a New York daily, ready to be admitted to the bar, successful
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and popular as a college instructor, but all at sea in doubt, and default religiously. That baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire compassed him all about. When the work was at its height, he and his division of students, who fairly worshiped him, stood unmoved apparently when all beside were in a glow. The band of tutors had established a daily meeting of their own, and all were now united in it but Bushnell. What days of travail and wondering those were over him! None dare approach him. He stood far more than primus inter pares among all. Only Henry Durant1 tried carefully and cautiously to hit some joint in the armor. But even he, though free in his confidence, seemed to make no advance, when, all at once, the advance came bodily and voluntarily from Bushnell himself. Said he to Durant, 'I must get out of this woe. Here am I what I am, and these young men hanging to me in their indifference amidst this universal earnest-ness on every side.' And we were told what he said he was going to do, - to invite these young men to meet him some evening in the week, when he would lay bare his position and their own, and declare to them his determination and the decision they ought with him to make for themselves. Perhaps there never was pride more lofty laid down voluntarily in the dust than when Horace Bushnell thus met those worshipers of his. The result was overwhelming.
1 The founder and president of the first college in California.
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"When, then, he came at once into the confidences of the daily meeting of his fellow tutors, was it not Paul that was called Saul, and was there ever such a little child as he was? On one occasion he came in, and, throwing himself with an air of abandonment into a seat, and thrusting both hands through his black, bushy hair, cried out desperately, yet half laughingly, ' O men! What shall I do with these arrant doubts I have been nursing for years? When the preacher touches the Trinity and when logic shatters it all to pieces, I am all at the four winds. But I am glad I have a heart as well as a head. My heart wants the Father; my heart wants the Son; my heart wants the Holy Ghost and one just as much as the other. My heart says the Bible has a Trinity for me, and I mean to hold by my heart. I am glad a man can do it when there is no other mooring, and so I answer my own question, What shall I do? But that is all I can do yet.' "
The most interesting feature of this experience is that it turned on his sense of responsibility for others. He seemed to have no anxiety for him-self, nor did he find his doubts an unendurable burden, though he was sorely perplexed by them. But the sight of his pupils awaiting his action in a matter of supreme importance overwhelmed him. Here was conscience at its highest, touching self-sacrifice if not one with it. All along his early life we find these forecasts of his later thought. In his solicitude for his pupils we have the germ
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of "The Vicarious Sacrifice," and in his outburst of perplexity over the Trinity we find the discrim-inating principle that runs through all his treatment of that subject. In the main lines of his thought he was not an impulsive thinker taking up great subjects because he found them in the air or in books. All his contentions had root, not so much in his thought, as in his nature. He reviewed and recast his superficial opinions, but he never let go of the general principles that underlie his works. Bushnell always regarded this experience as the most important crisis in his life. Later on one equally great came in his thought, but it in no way lessened the significance of the first. It was strikingly like that through which Frederick W. Robertson passed in the Tyrol when tossed by doubt over the same questions.1 Each was reduced to the almost sole belief that " it must be right to do right; " each clung to the " grand, simple landmarks of morality," and so at last found his way into a fuller faith. Bushnell gives an account of his experience at this time in a sermon on " The Dissolving of Doubts," preached in the chapel of Yale College.
This sermon one of his ablest and most self-revealing- closes with six points, which indicate the path along which he traveled at this time and for years after: -
"Be never afraid of doubt.
"Be afraid of all sophistries, and tricks, and strifes of disingenuous argument.
l Life of F. W. Robertson, vol. i. p. 109.
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"Have it a fixed principle, also, that getting into any scornful way is fatal.
"Never settle upon anything as true because it is safer to hold it than not.
"Have it as a law never to put force on the mind, or try to make it believe.
"Never be in a hurry to believe; never try to conjure doubts against time."
His re-conversion, if such it should be called, was a conversion to duty rather than to faith, but he made the discovery that faith could wait, but duty could not. Through this simple principle he found his way not only into a full faith, but into the conception of Christianity as a life, - Christ himself rather than beliefs about Christ, a distinction which, if not then seen in its fullness, is implied in all his writings.
His law studies were completed, but he turned to the ministry. In the summer of 1831 he took leave of his pupils in an address full of practical wisdom, and indicating that his own habits of thought were fully formed. He left with them "two rules which ought to govern every man." The first is, "Be perfectly honest in forming all your opinions and principles of action." The other is, "Never to swerve in conduct from your honest convictions." He clinched this advice by saying, "If between them both you go over Niagara, go!"
This strenuous advice was probably borrowed from Dr. Taylor, who was soon to become his
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instructor in theology; it was often heard in his lecture-room, and it well represented the spirit of that stout champion of the "new divinity." There are few pupils of this great teacher who would not confess their deep indebtedness to him, but the emphasis of their gratitude would fall on the courage and honesty and thorough nobility of the man himself. He was a great teacher because he was a great man; and he was the teacher fitted for the time because what was needed was not more a new theology than courage and an independent habit of thought.
These qualities were abundantly nurtured in the lecture-room of Dr. Taylor, and there was also cherished a breadth of view and a charity not common in those days. As a teacher he was far ahead of his age. In no other school of theology were lectures closed with the uniform remark, "Now, young gentlemen, I will hear you." It was often the preface to another session of an hour or even two, in which teacher and pupils were man to man with all the give and take of close argument, or in the closer contact of a noble and generous nature pouring himself out upon sympathetic and responsive pupils. In argument he always won, though sometimes leaving them unconvinced, but in the spirit he infused into them his victory was total and permanent.
Bushnell fell into the spirit of the lecture-room; it fed and fortified his sincerity and courage and independence of thought. But when it came to
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the thought itself, he parted company with, his teacher, and went his own way. He had begun to read Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection." The theology of the day failed to satisfy him, and he had already learned to look for truth from certain sources and by certain methods that had small recognition by his teacher. As the subject will come up in the next chapter, we will only say that his theological studies in New Haven chiefly served to furnish a background against which all his thought and work in after years stand out in vivid contrast. It was not a contrast between the two men; it was between two ways of reasoning and two methods of discovering truth; a contrast between an old world drawing to a close and a new world coming on.
When examining for a license to preach, he read a thesis on the methods of natural and moral philosophy, in which he contended that systematized knowledge is possible in the former "be-cause nature is a system in which everything fulfills its end," but impossible in the latter "because a great share of the acts of men are in contradiction of those properties of their constitution which fit them for the end proposed in the end of their existence." Here we find the germ of "Nature and the Supernatural," which appeared thirty years later.