During the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century the established evangelical view of the Penal Substitution came under fire. One such theologian that took issue was man by the name of Horace Bushnell. This booklet will examine the early years of Horace Bushnell and the doubts he wrested with, how his use of language paved the way for ambiguity in theology, and how his Moral Influence theory of atonement paved the way for Progressive Christianity in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.