Horace bushnell was born in 1802 and died in 1876. It is, therefore, now one hundred years since his birth, and twenty-six years since he left this world. It is, perhaps, not more remarkable that a personal in?uence which had its root in an other century should be still growing and spread ing, than that material of thought produced from thirty to sixty years ago should still have fitness to the thought of to-day, and show equal freshness and vitality. The papers offered in this collection are selected from those left in the care of his wife, and which have lain inert for more than thirty years, with the single exception as to time of that on Inspiration, begun just a year before his death under conditions of feebleness best described by himself in his introduction to it. The title of the book is appropriated from one of his sermons in the volume of Sermons for the New Life (page chosen because he once chose it, and be cause it covers the whole scope of the subjects ih cluded as well as any one title could do.