that ruling purpose of his whose workings we are trying to trace. What did he do in these books to ethicize theology? The relation of these discussions to his ethical purpose seems, doubtless, more remote; but it is not less real.

The doctrine respecting the relation of children to the kingdom of heaven which he assailed in "Christian Nurture" was one whose ethical complications were dubious. All these

little children were assumed to be, until their conversion, in a state of nature, which was a state of alienation from God and of hostility to him. He might not hold them guilty of Adam's sin that dogma had been modified by the New Haven theologians; but, until their conversion, they were outside of his kingdom of grace. There were no legal barriers, perhaps, to keep them out; but they were out, all the same. To the fatherly love and care of God they were strangers. The religion of that day, as Dr. Bushnell said, "takes every man as if he existed alone; presumes that he is unreconciled to God until he has undergone some sudden and explosive experience in adult years, or after the age of reason; demands that experience, and only when it is reached allows the subject to be an heir of life. Then, on the other side, or that of the Spirit of God, the very act or ictus by which

the change is wrought is isolated or individualized, so as to stand in no connection with any other of God's means or causes,- an epiphany, in which God leaps from the stars, or some place above, to do a work apart from all system, or connection with his other works. Religion is thus a kind of transcendental matter, which belongs on the outside of life and has no part in the laws by which life is organized,— a miraculous epidemic, a fire-ball shot from the moon, something holy, because it is from God, but so extraordinary, so out of place, that it cannot suffer any vital connection with the ties and causes and forms and habits which constitute the frame of our history."*

All this theory which Bushnell is impaling falls in with the conception of religion as having a compartment all to itself in our lives, as being a wholly separate interest from our other affairs. That conception is sure to issue in a defective morality. And what shall be said of the character of a God who leaves the little children of our homes to be practically orphans,- in their spiritual relations, destitute of a heavenly Father's care until they have grown old enough to pass through the ordeal of conversion? It is not true of the best earthly parents that they maintain a waiting attitude toward their children, holding

*Christian Nurture, p. 187.

back tenderness and loving kindness until the children are old enough to ask for it. It would seem that the heavenly Father must love the little children in the days when their consciousness is dawning as much as we love them then, and must want them to know it.

I do not want to try to tell just what the attitude of God toward the unconverted children was believed to be in that theology which Dr. Bushnell was repudiating in "Christian Nurture," and which rose up to denounce his teaching as dangerous: I am afraid that I could not make any statements about it which would not seem unjust to those who held it; but it certainly seems to me that the God whom that theology assumed was a being of a very defective character. He was not what Dr. Bushnell would call "a right God" he did not deal with the little children of our homes in a way that satisfies our notions of justice; for we have learned to believe that love is a debt owed by every moral being to every other moral being, and that he who fails to receive love gets less than is due him. The only explanation which that old theory could offer of God's relation to unconverted children must have involved the idea that his goodness is different in kind from our goodness, and that is the essence of the worst immorality. The only reply

to that is Mill's indignant outburst: "I will call no being good who is not good in the sense in which I apply that term to my fellow-men; and, if such a being sends me to hell for not loving him, to hell I will go." The fact that such a conception of God underlay this doctrine was the real reason why Bushnell made war upon it: it was his ethical thoroughness that found voice in this revolutionary treatise.

I think, also, that the Rev. Charles E. McKinley is entirely right in saying that Bushnell's conception of the whole matter of religion in the family "was so strange, so foreign to current modes of thought, that a complete new doctrine of the Spirit's methods of activity was necessary. The positions taken in Christian Nurture' made the work on 'Nature and the Supernatural' imperative. Some total reconstruction of the conception of the relation of the human world with its vital forces to the divine world had to be undertaken. Is human nature part of a spiritual province, the scene of the spirit's constant activities, or is it alien territory, to be invaded now and then for purposes of grace from some celestial stronghold?" This was the question which "Nature and the Supernatural" undertook to answer; and the writer from whom I have just quoted goes on to say, in words that are as

true as they are beautiful: "Bushnell has compelled us, in theory at least,- and theory and practice are not always contrary, to make for the Holy Spirit a dwelling-place in the homes of men, where he may come, not now and then as a heavenly stranger, to work a miracle of grace, but as a familiar Presence to abide, working daily in us and ours what is well-pleasing unto God. In our New England firmament the author of this doctrine of Christian nurture was the morning star of that glad new day when joyous faith should realize once more that God is in his world; that heavenly grace comes into human lives on the common ray of daily sunshine as well as on the lightning's blinding flash, while the very atmosphere about us is charged with holy energies, because, 'Now are we the children of God.'"*

But the work for which Dr. Bushnell is best known lies in another field of thought. His name to the theological world is most identified with his teachings respecting the redeeming work of Christ. Bushnellism," as a term of reproach, as a badge of heresy, describes a theory of what Jesus Christ has done to save men from their sins.

In their attempts to "improve" the Calvinistic theology the New England theologians had not neglected the doctrine of the Atonement.

*Bushnell Centenary, pp. 109, 110.