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the book: “Our very theory of religion is that men are to grow up in 
evil and be dragged into the church of God by conquest.” Against this 
theory he protested, insisting that the child should grow up as much a 
part of the spiritual world as of the natural world, and be taught that 
God, his heavenly Father, was just as real, intimate, and close to him 
as were his parents. Perhaps the most revolutionary utterance in the 
New England theology is this sentence from Christian Nurture : “That 
the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being 
otherwise.” This was the thesis laid down at the beginning of the 
discussion. 
Under the influence of Bushnell and the disciples who soon flocked 
to his views, the transformation in thought begun by this epoch-making 
book went on. Religious thought was gradually liberated from the 
bondage of formalism, inflexibility, and remoteness, and religion began 
to assume a more natural, experiential form. The barrenness of the 
old systems yielded to the warm, rich, human note of the gospels. The 
rationalism of the older forms was replaced by a theology in which 
the immediate realization of God in the human heart brought reality 
into faith. As Professor Buckhan has so truly said: “This was a 
prophetic emancipation. It came with abundant refreshment and 
promise of new life, like the music of raindrops after a drought, and 
was followed by verdure, blossom, and fruitage as of a new and affluent 
season of the soul.” 
Along two other lines Bushnell and his followers exercised a deter¬ 
mining power. They saw that the older doctrines of the atonement 
were forensic, developed purely in the realm of belief, that the death 
of Christ was treated as an event isolated from human experience. 
They insisted that it was an instance of an eternal and universal law to 
which every life bore witness and in which every one who suffered for 
others had part. Innocence must always bear the sins of the sinful; 
the strong must always give life for the weak. Furthermore the death 
of Christ was a moral influence to change the nature of man rather 
than an act transacted to change the temper of God—all making for 
the naturalness of religion, bringing it down out of the world of meta¬ 
physics and rationalism into the every-day precincts of love, impulses, 
struggles, life as a whole. 
It is easy to see how all this new approach to religion was tending 
to break down the sharply drawn distinction between nature and the 
supernatural. In our time the distinction has largely passed away. 
There are no two Kingdoms, the natural and the supernatural, for all 
the universe is a manifestation of God. God is immanent. He is not 
outside His world, but in it, and shines through it as the soul shines 
through the body. Bushnell saw this afar off as it were, and began 
the movement by insisting that if there were two Kingdoms, natural 
and supernatural, man was on the side of the supernatural, because 
