Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Bush, George

BUSH, George, theologian, b. in Norwich, Vt., 12 June, 1796; d. in Rochester, N. Y., 19 Sept., 1859. He was graduated at Dartmouth in 1818, studied theology at Princeton, was a tutor there in 1823-'4, was ordained in the Presbyterian ministry, spent four years as a missionary in Indiana, and in 1831 became professor of Hebrew and oriental literature in the university of New York. He published a “Life of Mohammed” (New York, 1832), and a “Treatise on the Millennium” (1833), in which he maintained that that period was the time when Christianity supplanted Roman paganism. He also published a “Bible Atlas,” “Illustrations from the Scriptures,” a “Hebrew Grammar,” and commentaries on Exodus and other books of the Old Testament. In 1844 he published a monthly magazine called “Hierophant,” devoted to the elucidation of scriptural prophecies. The same year he issued, in New York, a work entitled “Anastasis,” in which he opposed the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the body. Attacks upon this work, which attracted much attention, he answered in “The Resurrection of Christ.” He subsequently united with the New Jerusalem church, translated and published the diary of Swedenborg in 1845, became editor of the “New Church Repository,” and published in 1845 “The Soul, an Inquiry into Scripture Psychology,” in 1847 “Mesmer and Swedenborg,” in which he argued that the doctrines of Swedenborg were corroborated by the developments of mesmerism, in 1855 “New Church Miscellanies,” and in 1857 “Priesthood and Clergy Unknown to Christianity.” A memoir of him, by W. M. Fernald, was published in 1860.