Bushnell, HORACE, an eminent American divine, born at New Preston, Connecticut, in 1802. He graduated at Yale College in 1827, and in 1833 became pastor of a Congregational church at Hartford, where the eloquence and power of his sermons, no less than the spiritual insight and profundity of his theological writings, soon made him famous. In 1849 a charge of heresy was brought against him for certain views about the Trinity alleged to be in his volume entitled God in Christ, but the charge was dropped, and Bushnell replied in the most dignified manner in 1851 in his
Christ in Theology, in which, after reviewing the beliefs that have prevailed in the church, he concludes that exactness in theology cannot be attained, from the defects of human language as a medium for expressing spiritual conceptions. Bushnell died February 17, 1876. His chief books are Nature and the Supernatural as together constituting the One System of God (1858), The Vicarious Sacrifice (1865), and Forgiveness and Grace. His Women's Suffrage, the Reform against Nature (1869), was widely read. See his Life by his daughter (New York, 1880).