HORACE BUSHNELL (1802-1876.) Out of a life of seventy-four years Dr. Horace Bushnell had but twenty-five of activity in his chosen work. These were spent in the North Church, Hartford, but their influence went far beyond its circle and opened a broader vision for his generation and for this. Outside his work as student and teacher, Dr. Bushnell was a citizen of such stamp that Hartford honors his memory as of one whose work has left on the town its distinct mark. It was in the year of his address before the New England Society-1849—that his book “God in Christ” appeared. This work raised to its fiercest height the storm of adverse criticism that throughout his life met this independent thinker. Dr. Bushnell's address is less rhetorical than many of the orations of this collection, less eloquent than others of Dr. Bushnell's speeches, yet it is virile in style and original in thought. One can fancy the gleam of the dark eyes as he talked of the great men of the past, of the great days of the future, in words not unworthy of his own brave and vigorous spirit, nor of the Tabernacle whose walls had heard and were yet to hear mighty voices. ORATION Gentlemen of the New England Society: IT T is a filial sentiment, most honorably signified by you, in the organization of your Society, and the regular observance of this anniversary, that the founders and first fathers of states are entitled to the highest honors. You agree in this with the fine philosophic scale of awards, offered by Lord Bacon, when he says, "The true marshalling of the degrees of sovereign honors are these: In the first place, are Conditores; founders of states. In the second place, are Legislatores; lawgivers, which are sometimes called second-founders, or Perpetui Principes, because they govern by their ordinances after they are gone. In the third place, are Liberatores; such as compound the long miseries of civil wars, or deliver their countries from servitude of strangers or tyrants. In the fourth place, are Propagatores, or Propugnatores imperii; such as in honorable wars enlarge their territories, or make noble defence against invaders. And in the last place, Patres patriæ, which reign justly, and make the times good wherein they live." Holding this true scale of honor, which you may the more heartily do, because you have fathers who are entitled to reverence for their worth as well as their historic position, you have undertaken to remember, and with due observances to celebrate, each year, this twenty-second day of December, as the day Conditorum Reipublicæ. Be it evermore a day, such as may fitly head the calendar of our historic honors; a day that remembers with thoughtful respect and reverence the patience of oppressed virtue, the sacrifices of duty, and the solemn fatherhood of religion;-a register also of progress, showing every year by what new triumphs and results of good, spreading in wider circles round the globe, that Being whose appropriate work it is to crown the fidelity of faithful men, is Himself justifying your homage, and challenging the homage of mankind. Meantime, be this one caution faithfully observed, that all prescriptive and stipulated honors have it as their natural infirmity to issue in extravagant and forced commendations, and so to mar not seldom the reverence they would fortify. We pay the truest honors to men that are worthy, not by saying all imaginable good concerning them: least of all can we do fit honor, in this manner, to the fathers of New England. It as little suits the dignity of truth, as the iron rigor of the men. If it be true, as we often hear, that one may be most effectually "damned by faint praise;" it may also be done as fatally, by what is even more unjust and, to genuine merit, more insupportable, by over-vehement and undistinguishing eulogy. We make allowance for the subtractions of envy; but when love invents fictitious grounds of applause, we imagine some fatal defect of those which are real and true. There is no genuine praise but the praise of justice: "For fame impatient of extremes, decays In this view, it will not be an offence to you, I trust, or be deemed adverse to the real spirit of the occasion, if I suggest the conviction that our New England fathers have sometimes suffered in this manner-not by any conscious design to over-magnify their merit, but by the amiable zeal of inconsiderate and partially qualified eulogy. In particular, it has seemed to me to be a frequent detraction from their merit that results are ascribed to their wisdom, or sagacious forethought as projectors, which never even came into their thoughts at all; and which, taken only as proofs of a Providential purpose working in them, and of God's faithful adherence to their history, would have yielded a more reverent tribute to Him, and raised them also to a far higher pitch of sublimity in excellence. The very greatness of these men, as it seems to me, is their unconsciousness. It is that so little conceiving the future they had in them, they had a future so magnificent— that God was in them in a latent power of divinity and world-disposing counsel which they did not suspect, in a wisdom wiser than they knew, in principles more quickening and transforming than they could even imagine themselves, and was thus preparing in them, to lift the whole race into a higher plane of existence, and one as much closer to Himself. And just here is the difficulty that most consciously oppresses me in the engagement of the present occasion. It is to praise these great men justly-to say what is fit to them and not unfit to God. It is to make unconsciousness in good the crown of sublimity in good; to set it forth as their special glory, in this view, that they executed by duty and the stern fidelity of their lives, what they never propounded in theory, or set up as a mark of attainment-so to meet the spirit of the occa |