Horace Bushnell (1802-1976) was born in Bantam, Connecticut. He was educated to hard work. His daughter, Mrs. Cheney, in her biography, says that he did the full work of a man for at least five years before he came to the age of a man, often working thirteen hours a day. He spent the first twenty-one years of his life on the farm and in the factory. He had his winters in school, but the school was an interval from work. His father was a Methodist and his mother an Episcopalian, but when they moved to New Preston they joined the Congregational Church. His younger brother, George, who also became a minister, said of Horace: "If ever there was a child of Christian nurture, he was one."

Bushnell was admitted to Yale in 1823, and graduated four years later. His college career was marked by intellectual conflict and doubt, and a degree of deliberation which did not allow him to become an outstanding student. His problem of adjustment at Yale was a reflection of societal changes in New England at that time. An urban society was emerging from a farming economy. The people from the farming areas were able to retain the traditional religious faith, while the newly-formed classes looked for more sophisticated ways of expressing their religion. After graduation Bushnell taught school, worked on a newspaper, and studied law.

His mother had dedicated him from his birth to the Christian ministry, which finally decided him -- somewhat against his own inclination -- to be a minister. While he was a tutor at Yale, a great revival swept the college, during which he was converted. He entered Yale Divinity School in 1831 and was ordained at North Church, Hartford, in 1835, and was married the same year. He resigned his pastorate in 1859 because of continual ill-health, with which he waged battle all his life. He spent the years 1859 and 1860 in Minnesota, and from 1861 until his death in 1876 he remained in Hartford, writing and occasionally preaching.

His interest in the world and life was intellectual and philosophical. This habit of mind he took into his discussion of theological questions and he always sought to penetrate to the heart of the question and to get at what was fundamental. All his life he was a student, a thinker, and one who in the secret recesses of his soul fed himself on God. He had both imagination and common sense, he was both saintly and shrewd, and all he said was quick with vigorous life.

A thinker first, when the spirit burned he became a preacher. Language with him was the reflection of his thought rather than the exact representation of it. He sought to translate the language of the pulpit into common speech and to restore reality to the theology of the day. He was convinced that theology must speak to the modern world in terms which were in keeping with the contemporary developments in thought.

Bushnell was a mediator between the old school of theology and the newer views. As a student at Yale he had battled his way single-handed from doubt to faith but his mind was always the mind of the sceptic in the true sense of that word. He must prove before holding fast. "I have been greatly blessed in my doubtings," he once said. One of his most famous sermons preached in the chapel at Yale was "On the dissolving of doubts." He had an independent mind, and was by nature a solitary thinker. He loved the truth with an undivided mind and was willing to pay any price to possess it. It has been said that the neglect of what others had done and thought was the serious fault of his life.