No American preacher of the nineteenth century succeeded in introducing more theology into the pulpit and in discussing theological problems in a more interesting way than Bushnell. He did not believe in a theology that could not be preached and translated from the realm of thought to the realm of life. Henry Van Dyke described him as "the most logical of mystics and the most mystical of logicians." He understood thoroughly the laws of thought and he was the better preacher because of this. He presented the truth in an orderly, logical manner. But the mystical and the poetical gradually won the ascendancy in him.

It was fifteen years after Bushnell entered the ministry before the mystical element in his religious nature came to the fore. It was then that he entered into a higher type of religious life. As a result of this experience he tells us that he gained new conceptions of the significance of Christ and this became the basis of new conceptions of the character of God. From this time on his religious life was constantly deepened and enriched. He lived more completely in the abiding presence of God.

He was not a popular preacher in the usual sense of that word but he made a strong appeal to reflective minds. The common people did not listen to him with the same intensity of emotion as they listened to Beecher. But he was in many ways the superior of Beecher as a preacher, and certainly a much more desirable model for most preachers. Sir George Adam Smith once remarked that Bushnell is the preacher's preacher as Spenser is the poet's poet and that his sermons were on the shelves of many a manse in Scotland. The Christian faith, Bushnell said, could never be based upon any system which demanded intellectual proof. Religion appeals ultimately, he insisted, to the heart and to feeling. He wrote: "When the preacher touches the Trinity and when logic shatters it all to pieces, I am all at the four winds. But I am glad I have a heart as well as a head. My heart wants the Father; my heart wants the Son; my heart wants the Holy Ghost -- and one just as much as the other. My heart says the Bible has a Trinity for me, and I mean to hold by my heart."1

Bushnell was a Christian mystic. On a winter morning in February 1848 his wife awoke to hear that the light they had waited for, more than they that watch for the morning, had arisen. She asked, "What have you seen?" He replied, "The Gospel." Like Paul's revelation on the Damascus road, Augustine in the garden in Milan, Bunyan in Bedford Jail, John Wesley at the meeting house in Aldersgate Street, this was a transforming experience. Bushnell was a practical mystic who saw the stars but kept his feet on the earth. He expressed his discovery in a sermon on "Christ the Form of the Soul," based upon the text, "until Christ be formed in you." John Winthrop Platner, in his Religious History of New England, describes Bushnell as "a seer of mystic visions hidden from the many, who was faithful to the spirit of the past, yet able to interpret to his fellow ministers the theology of the future."