(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct, that it is an experience of man’s whole nature, and consists largely in feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and express.  George Eliot’s Adam Bede is a typical instance of this movement, when he says:  “I look at it as if the doctrines was like finding names for your feelings.”

(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly “from within” as “from above.”  He is not external to nature and man, but penetrates and inspires them.  While an earlier theology thought of Him as breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, to us He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be more startling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them with bread and fish produced and caught in the usual way.  Men used to speak of Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that were joined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without “the inspiration of the Almighty,” and Christ is not so much God and man, as God in man.

(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to more parts of our nature than to the intellect alone.  Horace Bushnell entitled an essay that still repays careful reading, The Gospel a Gift to the Imagination. One of our chief complaints with the historic creeds and confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in which religious experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose, rhetoric into logic, and have lost much of its content in the process.  Jesus is to the mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol or sacrament of the Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formula of logic, and attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition in geometry, is to lose that which divinity is to those who have experienced contact with the living God through Jesus.

A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and from which later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, is Humanitarianism.  Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its struggle for the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own day, setting free the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against war and cruelty, protecting women and children from economic exploitation, and devoting itself to all that renders human beings healthier and happier.

It found itself at odds with current theological opinions at a number of points.  Preachers of religion were emphasizing the total depravity of man; and humanitarians brought to the fore the humanity of Jesus, and bade them see the possibilities of every man in Christ.  They were teaching the endless torment of the impenitent wicked in hell; and with its new conceptions of the proper treatment of criminals by human justice, it inveighed against so barbarous a view of God.