The peculiarity of the whole volume, and a singular peculiarity in a collection of sermons, is the absence of commonplace. The writer's method is to bring his mind into close contact with things instead of phrases,--to think round his subject, and think into his subject, and, if possible, think through his subject to the law on which it depends; and thus, when his thinking results in no novelty of view, it is still the indorsement of an accepted truth by a fresh perception of it. Truths in such a process never put on the character of truisms, but are as vital to the last observer as to the first. There is hardly a page in the volume which is not original, in the sense of recording original impressions of objects, individually seen, grasped, and examined. There are numerous originalities of a different kind, which may not be so pleasing to some classes of Christians,--as when he aims to show that an accredited spiritual form does not express a corresponding spiritual fact, or as when he splits some shell of creed which imprisons rather than embodies the kernel of faith, and lets the oppressed truth go free. This power of penetrating thought, so determined as at times to wear a look of doggedness,--this analysis which shrinks from no problems, which is provoked by obstacles into intenser effort, and which is almost fanatical in its desire to get at the idea and reason of everything it probes,--is relieved by a richly sympathetic and imaginative nature,--indeed, is so welded with it, that insight and analysis serve each other, and cool reason gives solidity to ecstatic experience. Perhaps as a seer Dr. Bushnell may be more certain of recognition than as a reasoner. Whatever may be thought of the orthodoxy of the doctrines he has rationalized, there can be no doubt as to the reality of the spiritual states he has described. His intellectual method may be wrong or incomplete, but it in some way enables him to reach the substance of Christian life and light and love and joy. There are passages in the volume which are all aglow with the sacred fire of that rapture which rewards only those souls that soar into the regions where the objects that kindle it abide; and this elevation which touches ecstasy, this effluence from the spiritual mood of the writer, is not limited to special bursts of eloquence, but gleams along the lines of many a clinching argument, and flashes out from many an uncadenced period.