of historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an inner
Reality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to Carlyle,
who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be spoken in
words," all visible things were emblems, the universe and man symbols of
the ineffable God.

To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in
the structure of our present Christian thought:

(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