He took the path by which superior minds have always found their way into new realms of truth. They do not pass from one school to another, but instead rise into some new or some larger conception of nature and start afresh. All gains in philosophy and religion and civilization have been made by further inroads into nature, and never in any other way. Dr. Bushnell, with the unerring instinct of a discoverer, struck this path and kept it to the end. At the bottom of all his work lies a profound sense of nature, of its meaning and force in the realm of the spirit. He did not deny a certain antithesis between nature and the supernatural, but he so defined the latter that the two could be embraced in the one category of nature when viewed as the ascertained order of God in creation. The supernatural is simply the realm of freedom, and it is as natural as the physical realm of necessity. Thus he not only got rid of the traditional antinomy between them, but led the way into that conception of the relation of God to his world which more and more is taking possession of modern thought. In his essay on Language he says (and the thought is always with him as a governing principle):--"The whole universe of nature is a perfect analogon of the whole universe of thought or spirit. Therefore, as nature becomes truly a universe only through science revealing its universal laws, the true universe of thought and spirit cannot sooner be conceived." Thus he actually makes the revelation of spiritual truth wait on the unfolding of the facts and laws of the world of nature. There is something pathetic in the attitude of this great thinker sitting in the dark, waiting for disclosures in nature that would substantiate what he felt was true in the realm of the spirit. A generation later he would have seen the light for which he longed--a light that justifies the central point of all his main contentions. His first and most important work, 'Christian Nurture,' contended that the training of children should be according to nature,--not in the poor sense of Rousseau, but that it should be divinely natural. So 'Nature and the Supernatural,' whatever place may be accorded to the book to-day, was an effort to bring the two terms that were held as opposite and contradictory, into as close relation as God is to his laws in nature. So in 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' his main purpose was to take a doctrine that had been dwarfed out of its proper proportions, and give to it the measure of God's love and the manner of its action in human life. Dr. Bushnell may or may not have thought with absolute correctness on these themes, but he thought with consummate ability, he wrote with great eloquence and power, and he left many pages that are to be cherished as literature, while theologically they "point the way we are going."