BUSHNELL, HORACE (1802-76), American theologian, was born in the village of Bantam, township of Litchfield, Conn., April 14, 1802. He graduated at Yale in 1827, was associate editor of the New York Journal of Commerce in 1828-29, and in 1829 became a tutor at Yale. Here he at first took up the study of law, but in 1831 entered the theological department of Yale college, and in 1833 was ordained pastor of the North Congregational church in Hartford, Conn., where he remained until 1859, when on account of long-continued ill-health he resigned his pastorate. Thereafter he had no settled charge, but, until his death at Hart ford, Feb. 17, 5876, he preached occasionally and was diligently employed as an author. While in California in 1856, for the restoration of his health, he took an active interest in the organ ization, at Oakland, of the College of California (chartered in 1855 and merged in the University of California in 1869), the presidency of which he declined. As a preacher, Dr. Bushnell was a man of remarkable power. Not a dramatic orator, he was in high degree original, thoughtful and impressive in the pulpit. Four of his books were of particular importance : Christian Nur ture (1847), in which he opposed revivalism and "effectively turned the current of Christian thought toward the young"; Nature and the Supernatural (1858), in which he discussed miracles and endeavoured to "lift the natural into the super natural" by emphasizing the supernaturalness of man; The Vi carious Sacrifice (1866), in which he contended for what has come to be known as the "moral view" of the atonement in dis tinction from the "governmental" and the "penal" or "satis faction" theories; and God in Christ (1849), in which he ex pressed, it was charged, heretical views as to the Trinity, holding, among other things, that the Godhead is "instrumentally three— three simply as related to our finite apprehension, and the com munication of God's incommunicable nature." Attempts were made to bring him to trial, but they were unsuccessful, and in 1852 his church unanimously withdrew from the local "consocia tion," thus removing any possibility of further action against him. To his critics Bushnell formally replied by writing Christ in Theology (1851), in which he employed the important argument that spiritual facts can be expressed only in approximate and poetical language, and concluded that an adequate dogmatic theology cannot exist. That he did not deny the divinity of Christ he proved in The Character of Jesus, Forbidding His Possible Classification with Men (1861) . He also published Sermons for the New Life (1858) ; Christ and His Salvation (186q) ; Work and Play (1864); Moral Uses of Dark Things (1868); Women's Suffrage, the Reform against Nature (1869) ; Sermons on Living Subjects (1872) and Forgiveness and Law (1874). Dr. Bushnell was greatly interested in Hartford, and was the chief agent in procuring the establishment of the public park named in his honour by that city.
An edition of Dr. Bushnell's works, in eleven volumes, appeared in 1876-81 ; and a further volume, gathered from his unpublished papers, as The Spirit in Man: Sermons and Selections, in 1903. New editions of his Nature and Supernatural, Sermons for the New Life, and Work and Play, were published the same year. See Mrs. M. B. Cheney's Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (188o; new edition, 1903) ; Dr. Theodore T. Munger's Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian (1899), and a series of papers in the Minutes of the General Association of Connecticut (Hartford, 1902). A full bibliography, by Henry Bar rett Learned, is appended to Dr. Bushnell's Spirit in Man.