170 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REJIEJl 
he shared the creative and determining power of God. Man, because 
he was spirit, child of God, could change nature. Not only were we 
workers together with God but we were creators together with Him. 
Man was made only a little lower than the Gods, to quote the Psalmist. 
It was left for two of the most eminent of Bushnell’s disciples, Theo¬ 
dore T. Munger and James M. Whiton to develop this idea. It dom¬ 
inates all of Dr. Munger’s writings, especially his famous essay The 
New Theology and was elaborated in Dr. James M. Whiton s famous 
essay Nature is Spirit . Henry Ward Beecher, from the pulpit of Ply¬ 
mouth Church, Brooklyn, for many years spoke to the whole nation, 
and his great message was the immanence of God in nature and in man. 
He made the relationship between God and His children as near, inti¬ 
mate, and tender as that between a mother and her child. 
The second marked tendency in religious thought in America dur¬ 
ing the last fifty years has been the rising consciousness that revelation 
has been a growing thing. The fact of development was as true of the 
spiritual universe as of the natural. Emerson had shown how the con¬ 
sciousness of God was ever a widening and deepening sense. Di. A ew- 
man Smvth in Old Faiths in New Light, another epoch-making book, 
showed how the Bible was a progressive revelation. W ashington Glad¬ 
den emphasized this same fact in a series of remarkable books on the 
Scriptures. The Andover Divinity School professois, undei constant 
torment of heresy trials, continued the work and applied the theoi\ 
of development to theology. Dr. Lyman Abbott in two books on the- 
ology and revelation emphasized the progressive revelation of God in 
human experience, as Dr. A. V. G. Allen had outlined it in histoiy. 
To-day the fact is widely affirmed that revelation is a continuous proc¬ 
ess and that God speaks new truth to every generation. The dominant 
note of Phillips Brook’s great human message was that man is the 
child of God and that God speaks to the listening soul to-day as he 
spoke of old, and that man is capable of divinity in all ages if only he 
will open his soul to the incoming of the glory of God. 
Perhaps the most marked trend in recent years has been in the 
direction of the social gospel. The older gospel was purely individual¬ 
istic. It is very seldom that one finds in the sermons of the first half of 
the last century that the institutions of men are as much the object of 
redemption as the individual himself. During the last half century 
the change in this direction has been very marked. It is hard to com¬ 
prehend how new the words of Dr. Josiah Strong, Dr. Washington 
Gladden, and other prophets of the new order were when they main¬ 
tained that the social, political, industrial, and international orders 
must be redeemed and brought under the laws of the gospel. To-day 
a thousand preachers are making this their chief gospel. Indeed there 
has been danger that the relations of the individual soul to God might 
be neglected in the new enthusiasm for humanity as a whole, in the new 
