PHILLIPS BROOKS.
PHILLIPS BROOKS IN HIS EPISCOPAL ROBES.
PHILLIPS BROOKS:
THE MAN, THE PREACHER, AND
THE AUTHOR.
BASED ON THE "ESTIMATE"
BY NEWELL DUNBAR.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH COOK,
AND A
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER FROM
THE YEN. FREDERICK W. FARRAR, D.D.,
ARCHDEACON AND CANON OF WESTMINSTER.
TO WHICH ARE ADDED
SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF
THE LATE GREAT DIVINE.
PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS
AND VIEWS OF THE SCENES OF
HIS LIFE AND LABORS.
BOSTON:
JOHN K. HASTINGS.
OFFICE OF "THE CHRISTIAN,"
47 AND 49 CORNHILL.
1893.
COPYRIGHT, 1891,
BY J. G. CUPFLES.
COPYRIGHT, 1892,
BY J. G. CUPPLKS COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1893,
BY JOHN K. HASTINGS
All Rights Reserved.
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
JOHN K. HASTINGS, BOSTON, U.S.A.
To the Admirers of
tote
this little volume is lovingly dedicated
by the Author.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
GREAT bishop, greater preacher, greatest man,
Thy manhood far out-towered all church, all
creed,
And made thee servant of all human need,
Beyond one thought of blessing or of ban,
Save of thy Master, whose great lesson ran :
"The great are they who serve." So now, indeed,
All churches are one church in loving heed
Of thy great life wrought on thy Master s plan !
As we stand in the shadow of thy death,
How petty all the poor distinctions seem
That would fence off the human and divine !
Large was the utterance of thy living breath;
Large as God s love this human hope and dream;
And now humanity s hushed love is thine !
MINOT J. SAVAGE.
I LOOK round on the work to do, and
I do not believe that either Episcopa-
lianism or Methodism or Presbyterian-
ism or Baptism is going to assert the
victory of Christianity over sin, the
opening of the barred citadel of wicked
ness in this our land. The Church of
Christ, simple, unimpeded, armed pow
erfully because armed lightly, the es
sential Church of Christ, must make the
first entrance. Then let us have up our
methods of denominational government,
and each, in the way that he thinks
most divine, strive for the perfected
dominion of our one great Lord.
INTRODUCTION.
i.
PBERTSON, Raphael, Byron,
Burns, died each at thirty-seven.
Phillips Brooks had more years
than Napoleon, or Schiller, or
Abraham Lincoln. In the cathedral of
God s completed providences there are
no unfinished or broken columns.
Nevertheless, the pathos of Phillips
Brooks s life was in its withheld comple
tion. He died at what had seemed to
the world to be his mid-day. He was
maturing to the last. His published
pages are a precious and perpetual leg
acy. He probably performed as many
hours of important labor in his fifty-
seven years as most men do in seventy.
His balanced soul was as remarkable
for sense as for sensitiveness, for sym-
IV INTRODUCTION.
metry as for size, for humility and spir
ituality as for surcharge of life and
aspiration. But he has left nothing be
hind him which represents adequately
his magnificent depth of character, or
his unexplored reserves of growth.
II.
QUANTITY of being, amplitude of nat
ural endowment, richness of emotional,
intellectual, and spiritual power were
what impressed men most in Phillips
Brooks. He was in every way a large
man, and in almost no sense fragmen
tary or fractional. An orator easily ad
dresses every side of human nature that
he possesses. Phillips Brooks had a
many-sided soul. It is the simple fact
that he was especially skilled in the
knowledge, because he was himself opu
lent in the possession, of the loftier and
nobler sides of human endowment. A
polygonal nature is usually a powerful
nature ; but a spherical yet more so.
Size without symmetry may mean mis
chief. Phillips Brooks had both size
and symmetry, both sensitiveness and
spirituality, and so was remarkable for
quality as well as for quantity of being.
Even his commanding physical presence
was a palpable advantage to him in his
INTRODUCTION:
public work. He was unconscious of the
fact, but others -were not. Culture did
what it could for him ; birth did more.
Culture in the family, the Boston school,
Harvard University, the theological hall
at Alexandria, the toil of his life, did
not make his size, nor his symmetry
they did not unmake them.
III.
As to the matter and manner of the
most inspiring of the discourses of Phil
lips Brooks, their charm and power con
sist largely in the fact that he was a
geographer of spiritual uplands. His
delight in picturing the higher experi
ences of the soul was as profound as
his skill in doing so was remarkable.
He almost never spoke of himself, but
he had in his own nature and experience
the spiritual uplands which he described.
His most characteristic sermons are
maps of highlands of religious life and
truth. But they are more than maps.
He was an excellent, though not always
a methodical, surveyor of these elevated
regions, and could produce accurate out
line charts of them by a few bold
strokes. But his discourses have their
power, not so much in their outlines as
in their sunlight and atmosphere. Ver-
vi INTRODUCTION.
nal sunlight on spiritual uplands ; moun
tain ozone on spiritual uplands ; the
gathering rush of April torrents on
spiritual uplands ; the bursting glad
ness of May among forests clothing
spiritual uplands overlooked by majes
tic mountain peaks these phrases are
to me the best description of his dis
courses and their atmosphere.
His best sermons will bear to be
read slowly, and many parts of them
very slowly and repeatedly. But they
produce, after all, their highest effect
when the reader imagines them deliv
ered, as they were by their author, with
a speed like the rush of mountain tor
rents.
There were now and then lightning
flashes from the peaks. His epigram
matic passages never have the air of
being studied, but they often flash from
some severe quarter of his sky with the
suddenness and force of authentic thun
der bolts. These passages contain hun
dreds of sentences that ought to be
translated into many languages, and are
likely to live long in spiritual antholo
gies. In general, however, the sunlight
of his spiritual May is not interrupted
by passing showers. The sunbeams
and the waters flash, but not the light
nings.
INTRODUCTION. Vll
IV.
PHILLIPS BROOKS was the prophet of
the Parable of the Prodigal Son. His
discourses continually emphasize the
organizing and redemptive doctrines of
the Fatherhood of God, and the sonship
of men. He was the apostle of the in
dwelling God. His watch word^ was not
so much the Cross as the immanent Im-
manuel. Every human being, although
a prodigal, is yet a son, and may be ex
pected to return to his Father s house.
Phillips Brooks did not often, but he
did sometimes, emphasize the Scriptural
truth that there are prodigals of whom
we have no evidence that they will ever
return. The reconciling kiss is not
given to prodigals actually in rebellion.
Of this latter fact Phillips Brooks said
little, but there is, of course, no doubt
that he believed it. (See his remark
able discourses entitled "The Law of
Liberty " and " An Evil Spirit from the
Lord.")
Mr. Gladstone called Frederick Deni-
son Maurice a spiritual splendor. John
Stuart Mill said of Maurice that he
was the only preacher he knew who
had brains enough and to spare. Phil
lips Brooks often spoke of Maurice as
Vlll INTRODUCTION.
a theological author to whom he owed a
vast debt. Every one familiar with Mau
rice s life and system of thought will see
that he, more than any one else, except
perhaps Stanley and Robertson, stood
near to Phillips Brooks. Their views
of broad church doctrine and polity were
almost identical. Phillips Brooks s em
phasis, or omission of emphasis, on cer
tain doctrines is almost the same with
theirs. Those who think the latter
somewhat incomplete in their view of
several vital Christian truths may think
the former so.
Although Bishop Brooks was an op
timist and a broad churchman, it is
certain that he was a consistent Episco
palian. It is very unfair to assert that
he held Unitarian or Universalist views
of Christian truth. It has been well
said of him that he was liberal-minded,
but not a liberal.
He had around him, as he himself
said, four concentric circles that of
his own church nearest, but next that of
Christendom, next that of religious hu
manity, lastly, that of the whole human
race. In his native Commonwealth there
was a sense in which he was Bishop of
us all.
INTRODUCTION. IX
V.
LET a statue be erected in Copley
Square representing Phillips Brooks in
his preacher s robes, but let the posture
and look of it be such as to lead all be
holders to think of his message even
more than of the man. If we wish to
act in his spirit, let us reverence the
truths he taught more than the teacher
himself. The statue should look up
ward. No portrait of him that I have
ever seen gives adequate expression to
his best look that solar light which
came to his countenance in his most
elevated and rapt moods. St. Gaudens,
whose Puritan at Springfield and Lincoln
at Chicago are unmatched among Amer
ican statues, will succeed in such a work.
On the four sides of the pedestal ought
to stand words of his own, like these :
On the North Side.
"The freeing of souls is the judging
of souls. A liberated nature dictates its
own destiny."
On the East Side.
" Man is a son of God, on whom the
Devil has laid his hand, and not a child
of the Devil whom God is trying to
steal."
INTRODUCTION.
On the West Side.
" That book is most inspired which
most worthily and deeply tells the story
of the most inspired life."
On the South Side.
"The Divine in us reaches upward,
and the Divine above reaches downward,
and the two mingle ; and that is a living
faith in a living Christ."
No statue can fitly represent Phillips
Brooks unless in figure, face and at
mosphere it proclaims the Divine
Immanence in the human soul, the
Fatherhood of God and the brother
hood of men.
JOSEPH COOK.
BOSTON, Feb. 6, 1893.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION. By JOSEPH COOK .
I. PERSONALITY
II. BIOGRAPHICAL . .
III. THE PREACHER ....
IV. THE AUTHOR
V. WHAT HE STANDS FOR TO-DAY IN
THE "PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL
CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA" ....
VI. DEATH
VII. BROOKSIANA
VIII. INFLUENCE WITH BUSINESS MEN
xi
PAGE
iii
3
23
43
63
85
101
137
179
Xll
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PACK
IX. PHILLIPS BROOKS AT HARVARD . 187
X. SECRET OF His SUCCESS . . . 199
XI. IN ENGLISH EYES. By ARCHDEACON
FARRAR 207
SELECTIONS FROM His WRITINGS . 217
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PHILLIPS BROOKS IN HIS EPISCOPAL
ROBES Frontispiece
A MESSAGE FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS, Facing p. ii.
PHILLIPS BROOKS S FATHER ... " "14
PHILLIPS BROOKS AS A HARVARD STU
DENT " "28
PHILLIPS BROOKS IN HIS ROOM AT
ALEXANDRIA " "44
CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, PHILADEL
PHIA " "56
PHILLIPS BROOKS WHEN RECTOR OF
CHURCH OF THE ADVENT . . " "70
CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY,
PHILADELPHIA " "80
PHILLIPS BROOKS WHEN RECTOR OF
HOLY TRINITY " "94
OLD TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON . . " "112
BURNING OF OLD TRINITY CHURCH,
BOSTON . " " 126
XIV ILL USTRA TIONS.
TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON. EXTERIOR, Facing p. 140
TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON. INTERIOR " " 154
A CORNER OF TRINITY " " 168
A ONCE FAMILIAR FIGURE ON BOS
TON STREETS " 182
PHILLIPS BROOKS AND CANON FARRAR " " 194
RESIDENCE IN CLARENDON STREET,
BOSTON " " 210
Together -with HEAD and
TAIL PIECES.
PERSONALITY.
NOTE.
THE first five chapters of the Biographical portion
of this volume are taken, by permission of the
author, from " An Estimate of Phillips Brooks," by
Newell Dunbar. They were written during the great
preacher s lifetime, which accounts for the use in them
of the present tense. Chapters vi., vii., viii., ix.,
and x. were written after his death.
I.
PERSONALITY.
man (or woman) of
this world has been spoilt
by the world. He has
given himself over to standards and
methods of which the sum and sub
stance are selfishness, and has al
lowed himself to grow to state the
plain truth into a repulsive mon
strosity. Himself he regards in the
light of all but a deity to be wor
shiped ; upon his fellows he looks
about to see how best he can make
use of them. He has drifted far from
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
and reversed the healthy instincts of
his childhood and of Nature. The
scholar (signifying by that term the
man or woman, who is not merely
a receptacle for facts, but who has
thought and aspired in those broader
and deeper and more life-giving, if
less exact, departments of intellect
ual endeavor the theologies, the
philosophies, the poesies, the aesthet
ics, of the intellectual curriculum of
which the prerogative is that they
tend to decipher the meaning of
life and to give it an unrest, a
self-dissatisfaction, a distinctively
human charm, and a worthy aim)
has at least * considered the " what
ought to be," as well as the " what
is." He feels its superiority.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
5
When, as occasionally happens, he
is true to his teaching, and is
besides, in addition to being a
scholar, a man of strong will and
of virile powers, making up
his mind he will never desert that
which he knows in his heart to be
the higher for what he equally by
intuition knows is the lower, he
achieves some appreciable measure
of success in embodying "the ideal
in his own life, and in causing it
to be embodied in the life about
him. Such men constitute the
flower of our race. And it is, in
the first place, to be noted of them,
that they represent normal and con
sistent growths of humanity, are
not vitiated or warped, but such as
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Nature intended human nature to
be ; the man not contradicting the
boy, but continuing him contain
ing the boy the boy grown up
a bigger boy combining all the
youth s simple, true, generous in
stincts, and all-embracing sympathies
and affections, with the man s added
stature, strength, polish, knowledge,
culture, and wisdom. Says Novalis :
" Tugend ist die Prosa, Unschuld
die Poesie"
Such a man eminently is Phillips
Brooks. Those who have had the
privilege of knowing him intimately
have often styled him a "big boy."
The scholar, the high-bred gentle
man, the man of weight and of
influence upon the community about
PHILLIPS BROOKS."
him, if not, indeed, in the world;
but beneath all simple, unaffected,
modest, hopeful, trustful, unselfish
and well-wishing. It needs but to
see him upon the tennis-ground with
children, or in his church on a
" children s day," to recognize the
peculiar aptness of the epithet
alluded to above. Its truthfulness
no doubt accounts in large measure
for his influence with the young,
especially with young men, it being
a notorious fact that amongst
preachers he is the darling of Amer
ican universities. Those who have
beheld that vast surpliced frame in
Trinity Church chancel drop upon
its knees and lift up its voice in
all the artless effusion of unques-
8 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
tioning prayer, have the key to the
man. There is nothing studied, or
affected, or done for effect, or
sham, about him. He is natural
and genuine, and fundamental (in
the sense of clinging to and em
bodying the great underlying facts
the first principles of life and
of our common human nature), and
true. That here is a genuine man,
human through and through, and
with all his elegance and cultivation
at heart one with humanity, one
with the people, no one could ques
tion after reading his sermon preached
in the church of the Holy Trinity,
Philadelphia, after the assassination
of President Lincoln it is so
gloriously adequate to its high theme.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
No one could so speak, no one
could so appreciate the simple
grandeur of character of that remark
able man, and not be himself com
pact of true manhood.
In his Boston Latin School oration,
he praises the school because its
teaching has never been "the privi
lege of an aristocratic class, but the
portion of any boy in town who had
the soul to desire it and the brain
to appropriate it." A fact that in
dubitably attests the authenticity of
his metal is that, whenever he
preaches or speaks to what might
be termed the populace, the populace
eagerly listen to him. Just as the
gipsies and poachers were Charles
Kingsley s friends, styling him
I0 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
their "priest-king," the lower ranks
of American society flock to hear
Phillips Brooks, whenever they get
the chance, equally with the more
critical classes. They seem to be
equally abject subjects of his spell :
and as between reality and sham
the populace in any country possess
a very keen vision, that in the long
run nothing spurious cheats. His
" eye is single," one evidence of this
trait being his deliberate determina
tion to lead a celibate life, in order
to devote himself the more com
pletely to his sacred calling. Mr.
Drummond, in one of his recent
books, speaks of the fine opportunity
afforded by the Christian ministry
for devoting one s self to a high ideal,
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
undistracted by the disturbing ele
ment of money, which is so potent
a factor in most other callings.
Narrowness of means, indeed,
Bishop Brooks has been spared ; but
no one can doubt it would have
made no difference to his zeal, what
ever it might have done to his effect
iveness, if he had not been ; cer
tainly in choosing his profession he
was not actuated by mercenary
motives.
To have his name in the mouths
of the community, and to have the
community s gratitude express itself
in gifts, have fallen to him naturally ;
but they have made no difference
in the man.
As it. happens to almost every
12 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
one in Boston, at one time or another,
to meet him with his burly frame
and big eloquent eye upon the
streets, where he may be seen hustled
like any ordinary mortal by hack-
men and porters, who are apparently
perfectly unconcerned and uncon
scious that they are rubbing elbows
with a great man (or, perhaps, even
exhibit a somewhat overdone assump
tion and bravado of ignorance or of
self-assertion, as is wont to be the
way with the low-class American) ;
or running across him occasionally
in a book-shop, with his face buried
in a volume in rapt and scholarly
abstraction ; or finding him a near
neighbor in the audience at some
public place of amusement, or listen-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ing with fine modesty in the audience
or congregation to the eloquence of
another even the most careless
observer may notice in him a certain
noble intentness of countenance, and
a sober restriction of regard, that
bespeak the genuine unspoilt nature,
self-centred in the sense of being
loyally wedded to and humbly de
pendent upon the revelation of the
highest within.
Very characteristic of the man was
a little scene the writer remembers
to have witnessed, one evening in
early summer, on the Commonwealth
Avenue mall in Boston. The great
preacher was sauntering down the
walk in earnest converse with a
friend, or at least acquaintance,
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
whose hand he held in his, and was
affectionately swinging as he talked
just as children swing hands and
talk. His companion, who was
known to the writer as a man noto
riously not all unworldly and a saint,
though of average size, looked a mere
boy beside his own heroic proportions.
Brooks was expostulating with him
in regard to some point on which he
evidently wished to change him, and
his big, convincing, winning, "Non
sense nonsense, Edward put it
aside you know it is not so,"
sounded very hard to resist. It is
not always argument with him, but
oftentimes the pressure brought to
bear of a well-nigh irresistible mag
netism and potent personality.
WILLIAM GRAY BROOKS FATHER OF PHILLIPS BROOKS.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
It is amusingly told of him (and
it illustrates the modesty of the man)
by one of his clergy, who is rector
of a suburban Boston parish, and in
whose church he frequently preaches
on which occasions the pews over
flow, settees are placed in the aisles,
and all the available interstices are
occupied by people standing that
always, after the service, he says,
with the utmost good faith, " Grey,
what a splendid congregation you
have ! " It apparently never enters
his head to imagine that that is not
the usual condition of things in that
church, when preachings are afoot.
Another story told of him by his
friend Archdeacon Farrar illustrates
the same trait. When wonder was
PHILLIPS BROOKS
expressed, during one of his English
visits, by some of his English friends,
at the generous, if unaccepted, offer
made to him by certain members of
his congregation at home, to send
him abroad for a year, paying all
his expenses and those of a substi
tute during his absence, he answered
laughing, " Oh, they were tired of
me, and wanted a change ! "
Any reference to the personality
of Phillips Brooks would be incom
plete without some allusion to
his physique. To be not only big
morally and intellectually, but well-
nigh herculean bodily, constitutes a
sort and condition of man that is
eminently adapted for reaching all
classes in the community both
PHILLIPS BROOKS. \"J
those who appreciate the higher spirit
ual graces, those who delight mainly
in hard-headedness, and lastly the
more purely animal, upon whose low-
ness of grade moral and mental adorn
ments are quite thrown away, but
who recognize and respect good tan
gible thews and bulk when they see
them. When the apostle of rnercy
and forbearance comes, it is well for
him to come, if possible, equipped
in this Milonian fashion : for one
thing, he can scarcely then be sus
pected of preaching what he practices
from necessity and from motives of
interest.
Like all thoroughly healthy
natures, Phillips Brooks at once
detects and hates flattery. Intelli-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
gent appreciation is welcome to him,
as it must be to every genuine man.
The outside world exists for him as
something to be benefited : for its
adulation he does not seem to care,
preferring for society that of his inti
mate friends, with whom he is sun
shine itself. Of himself he speaks
little. His sense of humor is strong,
as any one for instance may see by
reading the delicious oration delivered
at the celebration of the two-hundred-
and-fiftieth anniversary of the found
ing of the Boston Latin School, which
has already been referred to. Nobody
seems to know when he does his
work : he is always accessible and
disengaged in the morning. He is
very optimistic, believing in the
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
intrinsic goodness of human nature.
He thinks that the world makes
steady progress in accordance with a
fixed law. His principal regret is
that he cannot live longer, since he
is convinced that at about the time
when the next generation shall have
fairly taken its place upon the scene
and settled down to work, there will
occur a sudden blossoming out in the
condition of humanity such as it has
never before beheld.
How shall the personality of
Phillips Brooks be summed up ?
Archdeacon Farrar calls him " every
inch a man." To the writer recur
the words Brooks himself spoke of
Lincoln (so different from himself
till you get down to the very core
20 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
of the two men) " the greatness
of real goodness, and the goodness
of real greatness "
BIOGRAPHICAL.
II.
BIOGRAPHICAL.
Right Reverend Phillips
Brooks, D.D., Harv., Bishop of
Massachusetts, and today doubt
less the greatest preacher in
America or in England, if not of
Protestantism and of the world,
was born in Boston, December 13,
1835, and is consequently now in
his fifty-sixth year He is in the
full vigor of a regally-endowed
manhood, and likely to be able to
devote many years to come to the
causes of religion and of education
24 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
which he has held so dear. The
original home of his family was
North Andover. That his parents
were devoted to Christianity, appears
from the fact that of their six
sons four, including him, became
Christian ministers. When he was
a boy, the family attended St.
Paul s Church, in Boston, of which
the rector was that admirable pulpit-
orator, the Rev. Alexander Hamil
ton Vinton, whose polished elo
quence, it is not unnatural to
suppose, may have had consider
able influence in arousing in young
Brooks s heart that predominant
ideal which so often makes the
boy in a great sense father of the
man. Dr. Vinton afterwards for
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 2$
a second time, as will be seen later,
exerted a beneficent influence upon
his young friend, and at a critical
point in his life. Dr. Vinton,
by the way, preached the con
secration-sermon at the consecra
tion of the new Trinity Church,
Boston.
Young Brooks fitted for college
at the Boston Latin School, and
in 1851 was admitted to Harvard
University, by which famous in
stitution he was duly graduated in
1855, being then in his nineteenth
year.
It is on record that at about the
time of his graduation that criti
cal period in the lives of educated
youth he was in doubt (as so
26 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
many such young men are) what
profession to adopt. When stiL a
senior he consulted the President
of his University on the point, and
that learned gentleman, with all
the omniscient insight of a very
wise man, said : " In deciding the
difficult question of a choice of pro
fession, I think, we may always be
helped towards a solution of the
problem by eliminating, in the first
place, the impossible vocations.
This saves much trouble and loss
of time, as it at once narrows the
field, and restricts the mind to
fewer points, from which to make
its selection. Now, in your case,
for instance, owing to the im
pediment in your speech, you could
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 27
never be a preacher, and we may
as well therefore at the outset lay
aside all thought of the ministry."
Just what profession collegiate in
fallibility recommended its young
applicant for advice to adopt, need
not be recalled here : the irony of
subsequent events has extracted
the interest from the rest ot the
little oration. The advice given
was no doubt sound, judging from
the standpoint of probability, and
weighing what seemed to be the
chances. Moreover, the speaker,
beyond a doubt, gave it with reluc
tance, as his preferences must all
have been in favor of the pulpit.
This very funny story, however,
would never have risen up and lived
2 8 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
to be told against him, if, classical
scholar as he was, he had not been
temporarily oblivious of the para
doxical case, upwards of two thou
sand years ago, of a certain
somewhat famous man in Athens,
named Demosthenes. The wreck of
his prophecy only furnishes one
more proof, what unforeseen and
wonderful things a great personality,
in " dead earnest," unaccountably
manages to achieve.
In spite of the well-meant ad
vice of the sagacious but human
President, the future preacher de
cided to make the ministry his life-
calling ; and, in order to prepare
himself for it, betook himself to the
Episcopal Divinity School at
Phillips Brooks as a Harvard Student
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Alexandria, Va., graduating here
in 1859. Many are the recollec
tions of his noble character and
promise cherished by those who
were his classmates here. Here
it was that he wrote his first sermon,
on " The simplicity that is in
Christ," of which he himself his
sense of humor being keen, even
when he himself is the victim re
counts that a classmate s criticism
of it was, " There was very little
simplicity in it, and no Christ."
If graduating from college is the
Saarbriick in a young man s career,
graduating from his professional
school is his Sedan. The perplexing
question of establishing himself,
and of making a start, then confronts
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
him. In this respect, indeed, the
young minister has the advantage
over the young lawyer and the
young doctor. Unless the latter have
some means of subsistence apart
from their professions, the outlook
for them is disheartening, indeed :
in all probability, it will be years
before their position is secure, and
their practice remunerative. The
"starting" clergyman, on the other
hand, as soon as he has secured a
parish at all, at once secures with
it a living, and a place for making
himself felt. But with a young
man of large possibilities, how great
the importance where and what
that first parish is ! If it be off by
comparison somewhere in the back
woods, with a scant, commonplace
and insignificant congregation, in
all human likelihood, to be sure, he
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
will work to the front, and win the
position suited to his powers, in time ;
but it will probably take him years
to do so, and when the opportun
ity shall have been conquered,
youth will have fled, and the
momentum and keenness of his first
onset have been dulled. Phillips
Brooks s first parish was the Church
of the Advent, in Philadelphia, of
which he became rector in 1859. The
story of his settlement here consti
tutes quite a little romance, one of
those fascinating romances of genius
with which the biographies of emi
nent men present us. At the Ad
vent, his preaching and character at
once made themselves felt ; but,
though in a general way it may be
said that the intellectual grade of
nearly all Episcopal parishes is high,
still by comparison the congregation
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
was composed mainly of plain people,
the church edifice was in an obscure
quarter of the city, and the opportun
ity afforded for the rector to become
widely-known was small. It was just
at this point that Dr. Vinton who
had in the meantime become the rec
tor of the large, wealthy and growing
Church of the Holy Trinity, in Phila
delphia rendered the essential serv
ice spoken of above. He opened his
pulpit to young Brooks Sunday after
noons : the results being that the Ad
vent presently began to overflow
Sunday mornings with Holy Trinity
parishioners, and that when Dr. Vin
ton removed to New York soon after
ward the rector of the Advent was
invited to take his place. After being
thrice asked, Brooks was installed
rector of Holy Trinity in 1862 ; thus,
with few tedious preliminaries, quickly
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 33
stepping into a first-rate position in a
great and populous city. Here his
fame as a preacher grew, and came
to extend far beyond the warm
hearted Quaker City, and indeed
beyond its State. In Philadelphia,
he remained ten years, and departed
thence greatly regretted, leaving be
hind him a memory such as it has
been given to but few men to create.
Whenever he returns thither on a
visit, his welcome resembles that of
the prodigal son.
When young Brooks was seeking
his first parish, his native city of
Boston in regard to whom, her
critics have not been slow in point
ing out how frequently she has
failed to know her greatest some
how or other did not seem burning
with anxiety to furnish him a
34
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
foothold ; but when the noise of
him had gone abroad in the land,
and it began to be said that Phillips
Brooks of Philadelphia was the
greatest preacher in the Episcopal
Church, if not indeed in the country,
Boston if somewhat tardily
opened her eyes and heart (not for
getting her pocket), and concluded
to take him in. Indeed , it has been
further remarked by those extremely
keen-sighted persons, her critics,
that after driving her unrecognized
geniuses from her door on penalty
if need be of starvation, once let
them become of mark elsewhere,
and thrifty Yankee that she is
with eye ever roving for the
"rising sun" she hastens to wel-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
35
come them back. In 1869 the
rector of the Holy Trinity, Philadel
phia, received and accepted a call
to and became the rector of
Trinity Church, Boston.
His new parish, like the one he
left, was a strong and influential
one. Its church edifice, with " its
battlemented tower, like a great
castle of the truth," was at that
time a conspicuous object in Sum
mer Street. It was destroyed in
the "great fire" of 1872. The
parish at once proceeded to erect
a new place of worship. The plans
for it were drawn by that architect
of sweetness and light, Mr. H. H.
Richardson, whose untimely death
was a loss to American art, and
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
by all odds the most complete,
thoroughly-built and beautiful church-
building in the United States, with
a seating capacity of over two-
thousand, situated on Boylston
Street in the choicest residen
tial portion of the city, and
costing over a million dollars, was
the result. For architectural beauty
it will compare with many of the
famous places of worship, hallowed
by time and by sacred memories, of
green England. As one regards it
in the bright morning or in the early
evening light, fancy adds the soften
ing of outline the mellowing and
metamorphosis of tints the more
daring spread of the ivies that
nre to come with the years, and the
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
37
heart, yielding a sigh of deep con
tent, confesses to itself : " It is
enough ! "
The new church was taken pos
session of in 1877, and from that
time to this has been the home of
Phillips Brooks s eloquence. The
audiences it has contained have
grown with the fame of its rector,
till today it often scarcely suffices
to admit the throngs that seek en
trance. In 1886 he was elected
Assistant-Bishop of Pennsylvania,
but declined. The offer of a Pro
fessorship in . Harvard University
was also at this time made him ;
but neither did he accept this.
He has at various times been a
quite extensive traveler, having
38 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
visited no inconsiderable portion of
the earth s surface, including India,
Palestine and Japan : it may be added
that he cherishes the hope of ex
tending his travels before he dies
still further. In England his visits
have been numerous, and he has
made many friends and created a
deep impression there. He preached
at Westminister Abbey ; at both
the Universities ; before the
Queen, and before many of the
first people in the Kingdom. It
was and is the opinion of Arch
deacon Farrar, that his equal as a
preacher and as a man does not
exist amongst the clergy of the
English Church.
At the death of Bishop Paddock in
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
39
1891, he was almost unanimously
elected Bishop in his stead by
the Diocese of Massachusetts. Ac
cording to the very singular, and it
is thought wholly unprecedented, ar
rangement existing in the American
Episcopal Church, however, in that
church a diocese practically cannot
elect its own bishop, the election not
being valid until it has been rati
fied by a majority of all the bishops
in the Church. The objections
urged against him, the long contest
over the matter, and all the sorry
tale of innuendo, recrimination
and partisan strife, need not be re
counted here. They are fresh in
the minds of all, and are now
happily ended. Even as you are
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
reading this little book its title has
been justified, and Phillips Brooks is
in fact Bishop of his native State.
THE PREACHER.
III.
THE PREACHER.
ONE need not be very far ad
vanced in life to remember
the time when Curtis, and Willis, and
Emerson, and Lowell, and many
another illustrious name of that
mighty generation of writers and
speakers, of which today the sur
vivors are, alas ! so few, were utter
ing their philippics against the
materiality and sordidness of Ameri
can life. American life, indeed, has
44 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
advanced since then at a giant s
pace ; it has expanded all round ;
since its birth, money was never
held by it in so high esteem as
now ; but it has grown in other
ways, too. It is not as yet much
recognized, in our crude and semi-
barbaric day, that, great as is its
power, money does not give the
best things, though that is the
fact, seen to be such by the more
civilized and sharpest minds. It is
an excellent adjunct and accompani
ment of the best, but furnishes a
poor substitute for it. Did money,
for instance, ever yet win a heart ?
Can it of itself bring happiness ?
Will it command health ? Is any
thing it ever bought to be com-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
45
pared with the joy of the artist,
who, day by day, sees grow in
visible embodiment beneath his in
spired fingers some one of the dreams
amongst which his soul habitually
dwells, in regions the world wots
not of, save as occasionally he
vouchsafes it a token from them ?
With the measureless content of an
author, as he pens the last word
of a work that he knows will
move the hearts and decide the
actions of his day, and, when those
who make his day shall have van
ished, move hearts and influence
destinies yet unborn ? What within
its reach is comparable with the
lofty existence, not like unto that
of other men, passed by a music-
46 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
composer by Schumann, for in
stance amidst celestial harmonies,
whereunto only his ears, and those
of the great tone-gods, are privi
leged to listen ? With the exultant
sense of beneficent power that
floods and fires the soul of a great
mistress of song of Christine Nils-
son, say as she stands before
three thousands of her fellow men
and women, and knows there is not
a tear in all their eyes, a drop of
blood in all their veins, that is not
her slave ? Or of an actor, who
focuses the hearts, with the eyes
and ears, of box, pit and gallery
upon the quiver of an eyelash, the
trembling of a tone ? Or of an
orator, such as Kossuth, or Phillips
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
47
or Gough? And of all orators,
what one can be likened for unique
ness of position (standing as he does
between man and God), for dignity
and momentousness of the issues
involved, to the orator of the pul
pit the preacher ?
As a preacher and that, beyond
a doubt, is the capacity in which
he is greatest the quality that, in
the writer s opinion, first strikes all
Phillips Brooks s hearers, is what
may perhaps be termed, for lack of
a better word, his copiousness. He
is like a colossal reservoir, that
seems full almost to bursting, and
well-nigh unable to restrain what it
contains. He takes his place in
the pulpit, and opens his mouth,
48 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
and without any accompaniment of
manner (whatever may be the case
with the matter) specially appro,
priate to an exordium, just be
gins right in the middle, as it
were. The parting of his lips
seems like the bursting open of a
safety-valve by the seething thoughts
and words behind, and out they
rush, so hot in their chase the one
of the other, that at times they ap
pear to be almost side by side ; and
from then till the moment when he
stops, with equal abruptness, he
simply pours pours pours ! out
out out! It seems as if he could
not possibly say enough, or begin
to express what he has to utter.
Just as in his writing, he is super-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
49
latively and superbly reckless in
lavishing his treasures apparently
feeling that the difficulty is, not to
find what to say, but to use a tithe
of the material that throngs and
beats and surges to be let out.
He gives the best he has; never
speaking, any more than writing,
down to the supposed requirements
of auditors only partially developed ;
not stopping to sort, but flinging
his words out as they come, satis
fied that each hearer will appro
priate what belongs to him, and all
will get something. Great torrents
and waves, as it were, of appeal
and aspiration and eloquence and
thought rise and fall, and whirl and
eddy, throughout the church, till they
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
seem to become almost visible and
tangible, and to beat upon the eyes
and foreheads of his hearers as
they do against their hearts. The
audience, caught in the rush and
swing of this fervid oratory, feel as
if they were rocked upon the im
passioned bosom of an ocean of
inspired speech. It is soul speak
ing to soul. Indeed, you have to
pay the closest attention, and catch
all he says only with difficulty. So
rapid and thronging is his utter
ance that, as is well known, the
English reporters, used to a more
leisurely eloquence, were at first
perplexed and even utterly baffled
in their efforts at "taking" him,
and finally succeeded in achieving
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
the ability to reach that end only
by a sort of special education, ob
tained through chasing his excep
tionally " whirling words." It is to
be hoped, by the way, this practice
may have had some appreciable
effect towards reforming the pro
fession of tachygraphy in Great Bri
tain. Bishop Brooks s oratory has
been not inaptly compared to the
headlong rush of an express-train.
In point of fact, coolly consid
ered, Phillips Brooks exhibits as a
preacher well-nigh every fault of
delivery : but he does not leave you
time to criticise. There are in
him a tremendous vitality, a vigor,
an exhaustlessness, an irresistible
onset of confident and ardent ear-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
nestness, that, whether you will or
not, take you clean off your feet,
and whirl you along at their
mercy, but pleased, and it is to be
hoped benefited. It is not to be
wondered at that when Samuel
Morley was spending three months
in the United States, he stayed over
a second Sunday in Boston in order
to hear Phillips Brooks preach
again.
As to the audiences attracted in
his native city and elsewhere by
this great American Preacher, they
are composed of persons by no
means all Episcopalians, but drawn
from almost every denomination
some, indeed, having no very dis
tinct religious affiliation or belief of
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 53
any kind. It seems to have been
the case with all the historic preach
ers that their power has sufficed to
break the bonds of denomination
thus causing something like a re
turn to the primitive simplicity
and of unbelief. There is something
elemental about pulpit utterances
of the first rank : they are the
lava-stream melting and transfusing
all it touches. One who has made
a study of the matter is forced to
confess that there is good reason
for thinking that no inconsiderable
number of those who go to hear
Phillips Brooks go, less for the sake
of any religious instruction or bene
fit to be received, or because they
believe what the preacher says,
54
PHILLIPS BROOKS,
than for the simple purpose of en
joying his oratory just as they
would go to a public place of
amusement (a concert, for in
stance), or to any literary enter
tainment. Neither probably is
this exceptional in his case. It is
deeply to be regretted ; but looking
at the subject inductively, as a
matter simply of observation and
experience, one is compelled to
recognize the fact. This is unfor
tunately a sceptical and irreligious
age, though Americans notoriously
admire a man who preeminently
"understands his business," and
performs it perfectly. Doubtless,
Chrysostom never converted all his
hearers.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
55
If, however, any amongst the
audience do not believe what the
preacher says, it is simply impos
sible for any man, woman or child
not to believe that the preacher be
lieves it. At those wonderful noon
day services in Trinity Church,
New York, last year, not one of
those clear-headed breathlessly-at
tentive Wall -Street operators
judges of men trained in perhaps
the most sceptical school on earth,
and some of them the kings and
princes of finance but knew in
his heart by intuition infallible that
the speaker before them was a
kingly man, who spoke kingly from
his soul, and simply could not lie,
palter, or pretend. They might
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
not in all cases or at all points be
able to understand him, but they
instinctively knew him to be true.
And after all it is impossible to
say what chords are genuinely
touched, what natures wakened, by
pulpit oratory, in spite of them
selves, and sometimes even to their
own hearts unconfessed. Only He
who knows all knows this too. At
any moment he who goes to listen
from curiosity or to enjoy may find
his conscience stung beyond con
trol.
Of the English clergy and their
sermons the verse runs
" They make the best and preach the worst."
Charles Kingsley in the pulpit
rested his arm upon or grasped
CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, PHILADELPHIA.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
the cushion, meaning to avoid ges
ticulation ; but as he became aroused,
his eye kindled, his whole frame
vibrated, and with his right hand
he made a curious gesture which
he seemed unconscious of and un
able to restrain the fingers moving
with a hovering motion like a hawk
about to swoop upon its prey. Car
dinal Newman in the pulpit re
sembled a tall, unimpassioned, though
piercingly earnest spectre from an
other world, with a silvery voice.
Of Whitefield indeed Southey said
his " elocution was perfect " ; he
used to preach each sermon over
and over again, till every inflection
and gesture became perfect. Frank
lin said he could always tell on
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
hearing him, from the stage of its
finish, how new the sermon was.
Bossuet s delivery was dignified yet
vehement. Jonathan Edwards stood
motionless in the pulpit, one hand
resting on it, and the other holding
up to his eyes his little closely-
written manuscript from which he
read. The first sermon Whitefield
preached after ordination to the
diaconate drove fifteen people in
sane with fright. When Edwards
preached the congregation at times
rose to its feet unable to remain
sitting, and people fainted. Great
men are great in spite of their
faults. Kingsley had an impedi
ment in his speech, which disap
peared however as soon as he began
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 59
to speak in the pulpit. Whitefield had
a cast in one of his eyes. Bossuet s
voice was too shrill. All these
men succeeded as preachers, as
Robertson succeeded, as Brooks suc
ceeds, because they were on fire
with holiness to the bottom of their
being, and back of their words lay
their lives.
THE AUTHOR.
IV.
THE AUTHOR.
T T 7ITH perhaps the single excep-
* * tion of two ventures in verse
and of his dispassionate paper on
"The Episcopal Church" in the
" Memorial History of Boston,"
Bishop Brooks s claims to be con
sidered as an author rest upon his
published Sermons, Lectures, and
Addresses. Though of course these
were written for the purpose of be
ing delivered, since they have been
made into printed books and given
to the public, they may not improperly
64 PHILLIPS BPOOKS.
be regarded as belonging to the prov
ince of authorship. Indeed, it might
with some show of justice be urged
that, when he writes any of his ser
mons or addresses, he is in that
act a writer it being only when
he mounts the pulpit or the plat
form to pronounce them, that he
becomes the preacher.
Amongst the strong and well-re
membered impressions that come
back to one, on turning over the
leaves of the five volumes of Ser
mons, of the Yale College and of
the Bohlen Lectures, and of
the rest, perhaps the best-remem
bered and strongest is that of rich
profusion. Simile, metaphor, insight ;
historic, scientific, theological and
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 65
literary allusion ; observation ; a deep
knowledge of human nature all the
wealth of an opulent scholarship and
of a teeming brain ; all the riches of
an overflowing heart are proffered
without reserve. His learning is
worn as a suit of mail-armor, never
cramping or stiffening the natural
play of his members. Pedantic he
never is ; and whenever he employs
what may perhaps be styled "library-
facts," they have become delightfully
metamorphosed : he has put more of
himself into the statement than there
is of the facts. Indeed he often
plays with them which Goethe
thought to be a sign of the master.
Especially apt, effective and beautiful
are his illustrations, though they are
66 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
never used for effect, but only as
they should be to illustrate. Take
one, where a hundred might be
given :
" We are like southern plants,
taken up to a northern climate and
planted in a northern soil. They
grow there, but they are always
failing of their flowers. The poor
exiled shrub dreams by a native
longing of a splendid blossom which
it has never seen, but it is dimly
conscious that it ought somehow to
produce. It feels the flower which
it has not strength to make in the
half-chilled but still genuine juices
of its southern nature. That is the
way in which the ideal life, the
life of full completions, haunts us all."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Such passages as this surely are
what even an adversary terms, in
the sermons of Luther, "oasis, pleins
de fraicheur et de poe sie, des pense"es
nobles et de licates, des mouvements
pathethiques et affectueux"
His pages bristle with quotable
expressions, phrases and sentences
of the most striking aptness. As
for example : " Faith is the king s
knowledge of his own kingship."
" A scramble for adherents rather
than a Christ-like love for souls."
" That first step which costs, we
know, cannot be too costly, if it
starts the enterprise aright. *
The curious thing about a ser
mon is that, though it is stated
logically, the material composing it
68 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
consists of feeling rather than of
thought ; and in this respect of
feeling logically handled Phillips
Brooks is unexcelled. He takes a
subject and expands it perhaps first,
as it were, lengthwise ; then later
ally; then downwards; and finally
upwards to its loftiest reach ; adding
room after room to the growing edi
fice, and ever and anon shooting
rays of apocalyptic light through it
diagonally in every possible direction,
till the whole theme stands devel
oped and revealed, vibrating through
all its length, and palpitating as it
were in all its pores, with a glory
of prismatic hues ; so to speak,
sounding and throbbing even with a
music celestial. Sometimes a figure
used at the outset of a discourse is
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 69
repeated or referred to again and
again, each reappearance casting a
new and wonderful light upon the
theme, and marking a fresh step in
its growth : as for example the
plant and flower illustration in the
sermon on " Withheld Completions,"
or Edom and Judah in the " Con
queror from Edom," which, hinted
at and persistently and in greater
and greater fullness recurred to
A
throughout, emerge in their co m-
plete and overwhelming splendor
only at the very end just as Gou
nod treats Margaret s apotheosis-
theme in " Faust." The beauty and
force of these repetitions, occurring
often when least expected, and each
time strangely like the familiar
though changed voice of an un-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
earthly bell knelling out of the ser
mon s progress, amount at times to
a revelation : they attack us in our
most defenceless part, in the reason
beneath reason, what may be called
our "intuitional reason," irresistibly
our tears start, and we cry aloud !
He who has read one of the best
of Phillips Brooks s sermons has
gazed upon a cartoon drawn list
ened to an oratorio composed by a
Great Master of logical and of artis
tic expression, and of the human
heart. Having as it were wafted
his reader for half-an-hour through
the heavens on rose-tinted clouds,
to close sometimes he brings him
gently to earth again in vul
gar parlance, " lets him down easy "
in a way that occasionally seems
to partake somewhat of anti-climax ;
Phillips Brooks.
FROM A PORTRAIT DURING HIS RECTORSHIP OF THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT.
V
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 71
although doubtless whenever used
it serves the good purpose of lead
ing the audience gradually into har
mony with their every-day surround
ings, while it at the same time
leaves the splendors of the sermon s
heights still ringing through their
consciousness, to be afterwards re
called at leisure and in quiet (who
shall say when or how often
throughout the years to come, or
indeed while life lasts ?). Some
times, on the very crest of the
climax, he abruptly ends with a
quick prayer to the All-Father,
which of itself inextricably clinches
in his hearer s heart the sermon s
benign invasion.
Reference has been made, in a pre
vious chapter, to his never writing
down to the level of his readers. In
72 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
addresses composed for delivery be
fore students, theological or other,
niggardliness of learning would not
perhaps be expected: but in the
Sermons, addressed to miscellaneous
audiences, the case is not far from
being as bad. His feeling in the
matter would seem to be, it is best to
give only give: if each one does
not grasp it all, he will some: and
the attempt to grasp the attitude of
reaching tip the effort to compre
hend what one has not as yet thor
oughly mastered is of itself helpful
(much preferable to the supine and
indolent mental posture of one who
is quite on the level of, or even a
little above, what he reads). It is very
noticeable in him that, whether writ-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
73
ing or speaking, he never seems satis
fied till the note struck is the octave-
note that view of the matter in hand
which is the highest his thought and
life have yielded him and every sub
ject he handles he seeks to lead up and
attach to the loftiest he knows : he is
never willing to rest till he has
reached that theme. A loyal knight,
ever alert to duty. Dr. Lyman Abbott
has recently remarked of him that
he always preaches : any of his after-
dinner speeches he might use the
next Sunday in his pulpit.
Not only is he complex, and instead
of coming down to his readers invites
them to come up to him : he is never
afraid of giving full measure, heaped
up and running over. Into every
74
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
address or chapter he puts material
enough to make, if more thriftily
spread out, four highly respectable
ones. Every page scintillates with
gems, not only gathered from widely-
distant quarters of thought and of
feeling, but packed into the smallest
space. A discourse of his is like the
" dark rich cloth bursting out into
jewels from within," which serves
him as an illustration in one of his
sermons. He may be said to compose
royally, as who has the storehouse of
the Universe and of Eternity behind
him, and nothing is further from
his thoughts than an intellectual
economy. Indeed, his resources and
the activity of his brain are such,
that it is probably easier for him
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
75
to lavish than to withhold and
dilute.
It must be confessed, he knows
how to feel his way to the deep
places of the human heart led by
an instinct infallible, and upon the
corrupt and sore spots of the soul
he lays the renovating and healing-
touch of a master. Carlyle, speak
ing of what used to be called " bil
lowy Chalmerian prose," says that
" no preacher ever went so into
one s heart" as Dr. Chalmers but
when did Carlyle ever state an opin
ion moderately ? In one of the
Yale Lectures, if the writer re
members the place correctly, Brooks
points out to his hearers, young
men preparing for the Christian
76 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ministry (and, through them, to
students of religion at large), how
wondrous and confirming, to the
young priest who goes from his
school out into life, is the revela
tion of finding that, the longer he
lives, and the deeper he sees into
the surrounding mystery of things,
the more are the teachings of the
Master and of the wise ones, which
he studied during his years of pre
paration and accepted largely on
trust, corroborated by the world,
the more are they discovered to be
applicable in the way of alleviation
to the world. This revelation has
clearly been made to him, and he
is moreover to be credited with
noticeable originality of insight and
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
77
of application. The " Lectures on
Tolerance," for instance mere
suggestion, instead of the elaborate
work on the subject that would have
been so welcome, and he would have
written so well, though they are
are of marked originality. Such
production as this it is, that causes
Dr. Abbott to indulge in the shrewd
conjecture that Phillips Brooks thinks
even more than he studies adding
that he entertains the suspicion that
he prays. In no sermons recalled
by the writer at this moment, are
there in proportion to the whole a
larger number that, once read,
stamp themselves ineffaceably and
forever upon the memory and
heart, and are found to come up,
78 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
throughout life like some of Rob
ertson s, and one or two of the late
Dr. George Putnam s alike in
our hours of revery and of crisis,
as it were, "with healing on their
wings." It seems hardly too much
to say that, in the bitterest advers
ity or affliction, he who has ever
read the sermon on the " Consola
tions of God " will have had done
for him the utmost that human
means afford.
His style is fitted for and at once
suggests his delivery : the same
abrupt start, quick getting under head
way, and sustained and out-pouring
rush. It is like a high-bred racer :
there is so much vitality in it, its speed
cannot be kept down. Indeed, when-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
79
ever you take up an address of which
you do not know though you may
begin to suspect the author, as soon
as beneath the growing statement
you hear the gathering rush you may
feel sure you are reading Phillips
Brooks. The only prose of his the
writer remembers that lacks this
decisive trait is the " Memorial His
tory " chapter already referred to
without the signature it would
never be known as his. Whatever he
writes is written to be spoken. He has
the extemporaneous instinct. The
main thought or feeling he wishes to
express is jumped at at once, and
struck out first, leaving the details to
fall into place afterwards. As Person
said of Charles James Fox, "he
3o PHILLIPS BROOKS.
throws himself into the middle of his
sentences, and leaves it to Almighty
God to get him out again." He often
feels several times for the exact
word he wants, just as one does in
speaking, though each time his word
of tentation is almost a blow. Nor
does he make any extensive experi
ments in the way of variety of man
ner. Lowell, to take a single
instance, exhibited several quite dis
tinct styles or veins, but Brooks is
always Brooks the same unchanged
instantly-recognizable quality wher
ever met with. It is as if, having in
the first place carefully studied a
thing and learned to do it well, he had
never cared to bother with excursions
after universality of form, but just
HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 8 1
goes on doing the thing over and
over again.
His vocabulary is copious, pithy and
choice. His sentences are short;
each sentence and phrase contains its
idea rolled into a pellet ; each pre
sents a totally new idea, generally
drawn from a source widely-different
from the last. They follow each
other in almost breathless suc
cession, till all the marvelous com
plexity of the subject he is presenting
has been built and welded together
and driven home.
WHAT HE STANDS FOR IN
THE EPISCOPAL
CHURCH.
V.
WHAT HE STANDS FOR TODAY.
I S it asked, what does Phillips
* Brooks stand for today in the
" Protestant Episcopal Church in the
United States of America " ?
It may be answered : Phillips Brooks
in any church stands first and fore
most for the Fatherhood of God
the sonship of Christ and of man
the inspiration of the Spirit.
If we, in the words of Arch
deacon Farrar, when speaking of
him, " want to know something of
86
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Christianity as Christ taught it, be
fore it was corrupted," we may turn
to him.
He believes, above all things, as
regards both the Founder and the
preachers of Christianity, in person
ality; in life rather than doctrine ; in
giving "not an argument but a
man." He says : " If there has been
one change which above all others
has altered our modern Christianity
from what the Christian religion was
in apostolic times, I think beyond a
doubt it must be this, the substitution
of a belief in doctrines for loyalty to
a person as the essence and the test
of Christian life. . . [The gospels]
had no creed but Christ. Christ was
their creed." " Not from simple brain
PHILLIPS BROOKS,
to simple brain, as the reasoning of
Euclid comes to its students, but
from total character to total charac
ter, comes the New Testament from
God to men." Again: "The king
must go with his counsellors at his
side and his army at his back, or he
makes no conquest. The intellect
must be surrounded by the richness
of the affections and backed by the
power of the will, or it attains no per
fect truth." "The method which in
cludes all other methods must be in
his [the preacher s] own manhood, in
his character, in his being such a
man, and so apprehending truth him-
self, that truth through him can come
to other men." This comprehension
or intuition of the supremacy of per-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
sonality, for instance, it is that forces
him, in his address upon " Biography,"
delivered at Phillips Exeter Academy,
to confess that he would rather have
written a great biography than any
other great book, and that if he were
going to be a painter he would by pre
ference paint portraits. Of his own
words it has been said that, like the
Master s, they themselves "are spirit
and are life."
To him, again, " religion presents
itself . . . as an elemental life in
which the soul of man comes into
very direct and close communion
with the soul of God." Everywhere
his utterances, his character, and his
life are full of this. In the sermon
upon the "Knowledge of God," he
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 89
points out how Christ " knew God.
He sent back adoration, trust, exu
berant love in answer to the recog
nized care which was always pouring
itself upon him." This is his ideal
for man. He impresses it upon the
students whom he seeks to help ; he
inculcates it in his congregations ; he
unconsciously illustrates it in his
career.
Personality first, uttering itself in
fullness and perfection of life. Above
all is the Father. Be led by the
Spirit to Christ, and " hid with Christ
in God" be joined to Him let
His life flow through you, and sup
ply and impel and restrain and guide
you: that is the only thing. It
renders all else superfluous. After
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
that, indeed, all else follows of
itself.
As God is our Father, so are all
men our brothers. Nothing human
is to be accounted foreign or alien to
us. We are to love even infidels
and pagans Buddhists, Moham
medans, and the worshipers of Hel
lenic Zeus as well as the Christians
of sects other than ours. Around
each one of us lie four concentric
circles : the nearest encloses the par
ticular church to which he belongs ;
the next distant, the whole body of
Christians ; the one after that, those
who cherish any religious belief what
ever ; the last, all mankind, even
those with no religion at all. Of
these four, the first the one
PHILLIPS BR O OKS. 9 1
enclosing the particular church to
which a man belongs " nestles to
its centre with a warmth of sympathy
which the others do not know:" and
there, stated in his own words, lies
Phillips Brooks s Churchmanship.
He is, it may be said, in the first
place, a son of God at first hand ;
never out of the presence or the
thought of his Father ; in direct and
intimate relation with Him ; receiving
his inspiration and credentials imme
diately from His hand : and as he is,
so would he have others be. There
is no need for the priest to over
emphasize himself, his machinery, or
his methods. He is not infallible ; he
is subject to doubt, to error, to growth,
the same as any other man, and would
92 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
do better never to feel hesitation in
saying so. To the men and women of
his congregation, whom he has so
often instructed from the pulpit, he
often finds himself in need to come for
instruction and help himself. He is
here, not to obtrude himself, but only
to do what he can towards helping
his fellow men put and keep them
selves in the same direct, original
communication with God that he en
joys, and become his brothers indeed.
He is simply a window through which
the Light may be seen ; merely a door
by which men may enter in. That it
is his privilege to be : beyond that he
may not hope nor ask.
Different sects are necessitated by
the very constitution of human nature,
PHILLIPS BROOKS
93
They have always existed, and always
will exist. We talk of the " unity of
faith," but it never was nor ever will
be possible for Christianity to be in
all respects a homogeneous unit. One
in impulse, one in purity, one in " full
ness and perfection of life," in
deed, it may be that is, one at
heart but in matters of the head,
of opinion, of doctrine, of organiza
tion, it must always contain shades
of variance. One who has reached the
bottom (or top) of things, and is
united with God, will recognize others
who are in like manner united. He
will feel that they may be so united,
and yet differ with him in doctrine or
denomination ; he will respect and
entertain tolerance for their opinions ;
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
since these are something decided,
and so better than mere indifference,
he will, up to a certain point, even
admire them for holding them, and
rejoice that they do so. "The more
men you honor the more cisterns you
have to draw from." He may argue
with them and seek to arouse their
reason to accept his views : he will
never exclude, or scorn, or seek to
coerce them. Beyond a doubt, he
may preach in their pulpits (as Phillips
Brooks himself has done). Different
men will always see different aspects
in the same thing When this is a
very large and complex and con
stantly-unfolding thing as in its
applications is Christianity no one
body of observers grasps it all. No
PHILLIPS BROOKS WHEN RECTOR OF HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
95
single denomination can appropriate
all the truth in Christianity. For
those who do not regard it in all its
details just as we do, we should rejoice
that other denominations exist, to
which they may resort. Only an
aggregation of progressing denomina
tions can hope to represent or master
it all.
And yet in essentials and at bottom
Christianity may be comprehended
in " a few first large truths." " Every
truth is necessary to man which is
necessary to righteousness, and no
truth is necessary to man which is
not necessary to righteousness."
" There are excrescences upon the
faith which puzzle and bewilder men
and make them think themselves un-
96 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
believers when their hearts are really
faithful. Such excrescences must be
cast away."
As to the future life, and punish
ment " such as God is can punish
such as men are for nothing except
wickedness : honestly mistaken opin
ions are not wicked." " Error is not
guilt." "Whatever comes to any
man in the other life will come be
cause it must come, because nothing
else could come to such a man as he
is." " Insincerity (whether it profess
to hold what we think is false or what
we think is true), cant, selfishness,
deception of one s self or of other
people, cruelty, prejudice, these are
the things with which the Church
ought to be a great deal more angry
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
97
than she is. The anger which she is
ready to expend upon a misbeliever
ought to be poured out on these."
What Phillips Brooks stands for
in the " Protestant Episcopal Church
of America " is thus seen to be some
thing at bottom very simple; very
broad, catholic, lofty and grand ; and,
it must be confessed, it seems very
like the Truth.
DEATH.
VI.
DEATH.
consecration of Bishop Brooks
was an imposing ceremony. On the
morning of October 14, 1891, Trinity
Church was completely filled by a con
gregation largely made up of the culture
and wealth of Boston. Officials of the
nation, State and city lent dignity to
the occasion, and the highest dignitaries
of the church participated in the exer
cises. Two of the brothers of the
bishop Rev. Dr. Arthur Brooks and
Rev. John C. Brooks, themselves dis
tinguished clergymen were the pres
byters who attended him as he pro
ceeded slowly and impressively from
the chapel down the north aisle of the
church and up the broad central aisle,
and all recognized the beauty and the
appropriateness of the association. His
place now was a pew in the body of the
101
IO2 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
church, from the pulpit of which for so
many years he had poured out the
wealth of his eloquence. He was ac
companied to his place by the vestry
and wardens of Trinity, and a long pro
cession of clergymen in their robes,
who marched with measured step to the
music of " Holy, holy, holy," and " The
Lord of Abraham Praise." Ten min
utes were required to reach the chancel.
When the procession reached the
altar the attending ushers stepped aside
and the bishops took their places at
the altar for the preliminary communion
service, which was conducted by Bishop
Howe of Central Pennsylvania. The
responses to the Commandments were
sung by a choir of fifty-two voices, com
posed of present and past members of
the choir of Trinity Church, to music
by Gounod. The " Gloria Tibi " was
by Durham, and the first hymn was
" Go Forth, ye Heralds, in My Name,"
after which several church announce
ments were read.
From his pew, Phillips Brooks could
see the six hundred clergymen who had
gathered about the chancel rail to do
honor to the occasion, and hear the elo
quent words of Right Rev. Henry C.
Potter, bishop of New York, who
preached the consecration sermon. It
was a noble effort, worthy of the occa-
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 03
sion and the man. There was a beau
tiful personal thread of love and friend
ship running through it, notably when
he spoke of the days of their youth
together, and when his voice thrilled
upward almcfst to breaking as he said,
turning to the subject of his discourse,
" I love you through and through."
Then followed the formal presentation
of the elected bishop, the reading of the
certificate of election and the canonical
testimonial, the consent of the standing
committee and of the bishops. The
promise of conformity was repeated in
a very low voice after Bishop Williams.
Then came a pause, and Phillips Brooks
lifted his face with a quiet and expressive
movement, and looking upward, uttered
clearly and fervently, " So help me, God."
Again was there an accent of emphasis
in the first answer to the first question,
" Are you persuaded that you are truly
called ? " etc. " I am so persuaded,"
was the answer ; " I am truly persuaded,"
with a fervent, upward glance.
The litany and suffrage, the music of
the anthem, the retirement of Bishop
Brooks and his return, wearing the rest
of the Episcopal habit in black and
white ; the " Veni Creator Spiritus," re
peated above him kneeling, and the ordi
nance of the laying on of hands, with
the adjuration to remember to "stir
104 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
up the grace of God," given him by this
imposition of hands, are part of the
solemn and impressive ceremonial that
will never be forgotten by those whose
privilege it was to witness it. The new
offertory anthem given during the col
lection of the missions, the singing of
"Sanctus" and the Eucharistic hymn,
and the " Gloria in Excelsis," and the
recessional " The Son of God," made
the strong and fitting musical expression
of all that had gone before.
The administration of the communion,
the repeating of the Lord s Prayer by
the congregation, the benediction pro
nounced by Bishop Williams, closed a
notable service.
George William Curtis, writing in the
" Easy Chair " of Harper s Magazine, said
of it : " It was a memorable event, none
exactly like it in the annals of that
communion ; a catholic incident, which
demonstrated the superficiality of mere
sectarianism and denominational differ
ence. The stalwart champion of his
faith, who does not think his own drum
ecclesiastic to be the only instrument in
the orchestra, becomes the bishop of a
wider than his titular diocese, a bishop
inpartibus of God-fearing and men-loving
fellow-pilgrims."
The newly consecrated bishop at once
set about the execution of his duties
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
105
with all his accustomed enthusiasm and
vigor. One of the reasons, indeed,
assigned for leaving Trinity had been
that the strain upon him in the bishopric
would be less, seeming to show he
felt a physical need of sparing himself.
But he never administered the episcopal
duties with concession to any such need.
Indeed as expressed by an humble
official he appeared to do as bishop
all he had done before, and the new
work besides. He preached not infre
quently a dozen times a week, and
the amount of general labor he took
upon himself was simply enormous.
Bishop Clark remarked, on once seeing
the list of his appointments, that " if he
died he would be deserving of no sym
pathy," as no man had a right to spend
himself so unstintedly. On the Sunday
following his consecration he adminis
tered the rite of confirmation in the
smallest parish church of his diocese.
In the mysterious Divine Order, his
episcopate was destined to last only a
year and three months ; but in that
short time he effected literally wonders
in the way of uniting and magnifying
the diocese. It was said that " such an
outlook, and such unity among the
clergy, as opened for the Episcopal
Church and ruled its councils had never
been known in any Episcopal diocese
IO6 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
in the country ; " "there was more life
in the Episcopal Church of Massachu
setts than at any previous time in its
history." Those who had for years been
his opponents on doctrinal or ecclesi
astical grounds, had but to meet him
personally to become his devoted friends
and admirers : this not only within his
own denomination, but outside of it.
The testimony on this point is con
clusive. Those who had opposed his
election to the bishopric became his
adherents. Wherever he went, his pres
ence seemed to be a sun that chased
away all black clouds.
He once wrote : " We are too much
in the habit of asking, when a new town
or city is offered as a possible field for
an Episcopal Church, whether there are
any Church people there ; as if that name
described a special kind or order of
humanity to whom alone we were to
consider ourselves as sent. The real
question ought to be whether there are
human creatures in that town. We are
sent to the human race."
In that belief he acted. Says Dr.
George E. Ellis, the eminent Unitarian :
"It is plain to all of us in this com
munity that while in one of such noble
ness of soul there was no lack of love
and loyalty for the views and vows and
duties which he had espoused and to
PHILLIPS BROOKS. lO/
which he had consecrated himself, he
overran all the bounds of sympathy and
charity in the universal comprehensive
ness of his prompting and purpose, not
only to recognize with respect every
form and type of religious conviction,
but to add his own strong helpfulness in
speech and influence to the aims and
work of all who were apart, and to whom
he offered all that they could crave of
fellowship."
Says the Boston Herald, editorially :
"All the clergy and the people of Boston,
and all the clergy and people of Massa
chusetts, had a part in him, and he was
their bishop by the grace of God, and
accepted as such, quite as truly as he
was the titular bishop of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in Massachusetts."
Says the Boston Transcript, editorially :
" Every man, woman, and child in Massa
chusetts felt as if they had some part or
lot in the work and career of this man."
He was called " our bishop " by mem
bers of all denominations, and even by
some perhaps who were members of
none.
After seeing him administer confir
mation, an observer wrote:
"What was there in his manner, his
tone, his soul-utterance, that caused
every one to be held spellbound, follow
ing him as he bent down in benediction,
IO8 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
and as he raised his noble face to heaven
to plead that the Good Shepherd keep
this member of the flock in the fold ?
I have seen the ceremony hundreds of
times, but never in its completeness
before. It was like hearing Way
Down upon de Suanee River, sung by
Christine Nillson, instead of by incom
plete talent, or Home, Sweet Home
by Adelina Patti. I was not the only
one affected. The scene comes to me
as vividly as then the hushed held-
breath absorption of the congregation
in the bishop behind the rail, and he,
unconscious as it were of them, but ac
tively doing his Master s work, doing it
as I had never seen it done before.
Was I wrong ? I asked those in my
company as we walked away if they had
been similarly influenced. We were
Episcopalians, but not of the Trinity
congregation ; and I found the four of
us were of one mind. It was a never-
to-be-forgotten scene. I have seen
great sights in my life. I have seen all
England welcoming the young Danish
princess to her English home ; the re
turn of the Guards from the Crimea.
The great heart of the people throbbed
on these occasions as I have never seen
it since. I saw Napoleon and Paris
welcome his African troops on their re
turn from the desert fields of battle ; I
PHILLIPS BROOKS. IOQ
have seen Grant, Sherman, and Elaine
welcomed; I have witnessed the thrill
ing effect of war standards, with strips
of the national colors still clinging to
them, carried in the streets crowded
with people; I have heard the noble
Wendell Phillips electrifying an audi
ence in his greatest oration in the Old
South ; I have heard the polished, gra
cious Devens, the sarcastic Ingalls, the
irony of Conkling, the polish of Sumner,
the home-touch of Dickens, the high
breeding of Lowell, and the wit of gen
ial Holmes but what are these in
memory to the touch of the divine I
witnessed in the -little church that Sab
bath eve when the spirit of Easter was
abroad and the typical lily symbolized
the season ! "
The summer before his death he vis
ited England again, preaching in West
minster Abbey, and creating throughout
the kingdom a more profound impres
sion than ever he had done before. It
was his first visit to England as bishop.
On the fourteenth day of January,
1893, Bishop Brooks caught cold while
officiating at the consecration of a church
in East Boston, and complained of sore
throat. Five days later, Thursday, the
I9th, he took to his bed, from which he
never again arose. His physician, who
was at once summoned, did not consider
IIO PHILLIPS BROOKS.
the case serious, though he ordered great
care and extreme quiet for the patient,
and had him placed in care of a nurse.
The physician was constant in his attend
ance during Friday and Saturday, but
saw no alarming symptoms until late
Sunday night. He then called in a
brother practitioner, the case having
assumed a diphtheritic character. A
consultation was held at three o clock
Monday morning, but even at that hour
no sign of immediate danger was de
tected. Soon after the bishop became
delirious, and then was attacked with a
slight spasm. Immediately following
the convulsion the patient s heart grew
weaker, and at exactly 6.30 o clock the
bishop ceased to breathe. His last
words were spoken to his brother, and
were in the nature of a farewell.
Beside the bishop s bedside when
the end came were the physicians, the
nurse, the bishop s brother William, and
the family servants.
It may be said here that Bishop
Brooks had known, and some of his in
timate friends had known, on competent
medical authority, for upwards of ten
years, that his death was likely to occur
suddenly at any time. During the last
five years of his life he had largely lost
his ample covering of flesh, and grown
very noticeably spare and even gaunt.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. Ill
It was a subject of frequent remark
amongst his friends and acquaintances,
that he seemed to be aging more rapidly
than is usual at his time of life. When
he came home from delivering the ser
mons at Trinity Church, New York,
three years before, he was perceptibly
older, and during the last year of his
life his hair had grown quite white.
The evidence all seemed to show that
the diagnosis of the physician, more than
ten years before, had been correct ; and
when the end came it came because,
while the attacking disease was in it
self slight, the internal powers of resist
ance were gone. Doubtless, too, the
rate at which he worked was hurtful to
him from a physical point of view.
The news of this disastrous removal
carried consternation throughout the
community, and could with difficulty at
first be believed. It was like a thun
derbolt out of a clear sky. It seemed
impossible that such an apparently all-
round impregnable tower of strength
could have been brought low, as it were,
in a moment, without a word of warn-
ing. Men stared at the newspaper bul
letin boards and refused to credit the
evidence of their senses. Ladies poured
into the stores as they began to display
in their windows draped pictures of the
departed, and inquired what it all meant,
thinking there was some mistake.
112 . /HILLIPS BROOKS.
Wherever one stood or passed in the
streets one heard the beloved and ven
erated name on men s lips. Laborers
and teamsters called out the sad news
to one another. Poor women wept at
their work, and even business men did
not attempt to hide the tears glistening
in their eyes.
The telegraph and telephone did their
work. The tidings spread far and wide,
and soon from all over the country arose
the note of regret and lamentation,
coupled with eulogy.
Said the Nation : " The death of Phil
lips Brooks strikes down the greatest
figure left to the American church. He
long ago rose above his own denomina
tion, and made his large personality a
part of broad and progressive Christian
ity everywhere. Men felt that the fact
of his being an Episcopalian was a mere
accident, and that his generous nature
would have made its own sect, or, rather,
absence of all sect, wherever he had
found himself placed. Indeed, one may
go further, and, echoing Sumner s cry
that he was a man before he was a com
missioner, say that Phillips Brooks was
a man before he was a clergyman. Cer
tainly he could never have been the
clergyman he was had he not been the
man he was. . . . What he had been as
rector, preacher, lecturer, he continued
Old Trinity Church, Summer Street, Boston.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 113
to be as bishop a lover of truth and
simplicity, a hater of shams and conven
tions. His personality and his fame
will doubtless remain unique in the his
tory of American Christianity."
Said the New York Evening Post:
" Never perhaps has the religious world
in the United States suffered so severe
and crushing a blow as that which has
been dealt it by the death of Phillips
Brooks, who, by reason of his moral
health and strength, his intellectual cul
ture, his splendid powers as an orator,
his high courage, his personal charm
and comprehensive liberality of thought
and act, was a noble representative of
the highest type of the modern church
man. . . . One man like Bishop
Brooks fills tens of thousands of the
younger generation with the noble dis
content which alone keeps the public
conscience alive."
Said Chauncey M. Depew : "The
death of Phillips Brooks is a national
calamity. The world is smaller and
poorer by his departure. He filled a
great place in connection with the in
tellectual development of the country
upon religious lines. He accomplished
the most difficult feat of any church
man in this country, and, I think, abroad.
He was placed in the midst of the highly
cultivated and brilliant Unitarianism of
114 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Boston, and substantially captured it.
He was almost the only churchman
whose death will be regretted by people
of all other sects. The principles, the
practice, and the superb expression of
his theology and his humanity, brought
him very near to the heart of the great
mass of the American people."
Said Joseph Cook : " New England
has waited a century for a man of his
magnificent depth of character, and we
are all personally bereaved. A part of
my life is buried in his grave. Some
could have wished that his attitude tow
ard certain reforms could have been
more pronounced. But his influence
was wholesome and precious. When
we remember that his sphere of activity
was national and international, we shall
regard that his loss will be felt in Eng
land as well as in New England. He
represented manly, progressive Chris
tianity."
Said Edward Everett Hale : " Too
broad for sect, too large for party, and
too wise for controversy, he accepted
every opportunity in the service of his
Master, by which he could elevate the
people to the highest and noblest life.
He was too brave to shrink from any
duty, as he was too humble to refuse
any. His matchless power of speech
was the fit result of the purity of his
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 15
life and the manliness of his purpose.
And in his sympathy with all, young
and old, high and low, he carried every
where the gospel which he loved, so as
to make it command the attention of all
who saw him, or heard him, or knew
him. There is no one left who had
so many friends."
Said Edwin D. Mead : "As we think
of his great and divine life to-day, which
we here in Boston have chiefly been
privileged to see and touch, who can
fail to feel, as the men of Florence felt
who heard and knew Savonarola, that
every poor and miserable image which
we treasure the poor political ambi
tion, the paltry love of money and the
things that money buys, the indul
gences of culture, the literary vanities,
the social jealousies, the resentments
that sterilize, the sorrow that consumes,
each thing that is not pure and univer
sal should be hurried to the square
and burned, as an expression of that
devotion and high resolve to have here
a better city, a loftier public and per
sonal life, which is the only expression
of gratitude which he ever cared for or
cares for. Phillips Brooks s influence
upon our general American religious
life and thought cannot to-day be esti
mated. Too religious, too reverent
and too great for controversy, he has
Il6 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
gone on conquering place for his deep,
broad, and catholic thought in his own
church and in all churches simply by
his positive, synthetic preaching of it,
and by living it and being it. He was
a man greater than all churches the
friend and fellow of all who live in the
spirit. Whatever his own cherished
theological doctrines and whatever his
own chosen and dear ecclesiastical re
lations, his church was nothing less
than the Church of the Living God,
the church of all just and generous and
loving men."
Said one who knew him at Oxford,
England : " There are many in Eng
land who will mourn the death of
Bishop Brooks mourn not merely
a mighty preacher, a magnificent man,
but a true friend. More than any man
I have ever known, Phillips Brooks pos
sessed that which commanded instant
trust, complete confidence, a power
not only the outcome of a splendid phy
sique, eloquent of strength and pro
tection, of a broad, quick, and ever sym
pathetic mind, but of a great heart
filled with love for all his fellow-beings,
a love blind to all differences of class
and of race, and which shone ever from
his kindly eyes, lit up his face with a
sunny smile, and made him godlike."
His funeral occurred on Thursday,
PHILLIPS BROOKS,
January 26, and was a public one. The
following description of it is taken from
the columns of the daily press :
If any testimony were needed of the
affection of the people of Boston for
Phillips Brooks, it was afforded on that
day by the great crowd that assembled
about Trinity Church at an early hour,
and continued to gather until the last
opportunity for gazing upon his beloved
face had gone by. Beginning with the
little group that appeared in Copley
Square before 7.30 o clock, it continued
to increase until at one time there was
a line of people extending from there
to Berkeley Street, almost making the
sidewalk impassable. Indeed, it would
have been so but for the services of a
large body of police, who kept the peo
ple so compact as to afford a narrow
passageway. At 7.45 the coffin enclos
ing the remains was borne from the
bishop s residence at the corner of
Clarendon and Newbury Streets, ac
companied by a guard of the Loyal
Legion, of which organization Bishop
Brooks was chaplain. It was taken
to the church and placed in the vesti
bule, the centre of which was shrouded
in the heaviest black. The coffin was
covered with the colors of the Loyal
Legion, upon which lay a cluster of
Easter lilies, intermingled with palms.
Il8 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The plate bore this inscription :
PHILLIPS BROOKS,
BISHOP OF THE DIOCESE OF MASSACHUSETTS.
December 13, 1835.
January 23, 1893.
Details from the Loyal Legion did
duty as guards of honor, relieving each
other every hour.
Fully three hundred people were in
line when the doors were opened at
eight o clock, and from that time on
there was an uninterrupted procession
of people, divided into two files after
entering the doors, one passing on one
side of the coffin and the other on the
opposite, uniting again at the south
door, through which they passed on to
St. James Avenue. A view of the bish
op s face was obtained through a heavy
plate of glass, hermetically sealed.
The people who were thus afforded
a view of a face grand and impressive
even in death, were of all conditions of
life. Gentlemen and ladies in rich and
elegant attire walked side by side with
persons wretchedly dressed and bear
ing all the evidence of severe poverty.
Large numbers of children, evidently
from poor and humble homes, waited
patiently and decorously in the long
line for an opportunity to see one
whom they remembered as having said
kindly words of cheer to them when he
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 1 9
had visited the homes of their parents
or addressed them in their Sunday
schools. When the doors were closed,
soon after eleven o clock, thousands
were yet in line and lingered about the
square for the brief service which was
to be said in their presence.
At all the other entrances there
were large gatherings of people who
had reason to suppose that a place
would be found for them inside the
church. It was a difficult task to keep
them in order and discriminate as to
their claims for precedence.
It is estimated that fully twelve
thousand people viewed the remains
of Bishop Brooks as they lay in state.
For the first hour the people had filed
by at the rate of sixty a minute. Then
it increased to eighty a minute. Among
them was an old woman, shabbily
dressed, with gray hair and careworn
face, who, when she reached the casket,
drew a beautiful cluster of roses from
her bosom and placed it upon the cas
ket. When she turned away her tears
were streaming down her cheeks. One
Chinaman was amongst the number.
A woman with wan face and the
scantiest raiment, whose every appear
ance indicated a life of penury, stood
shivering in the crowd. Tugging at
her dress was a little boy, who, like his
120 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
mother, showed traces of want and suf
fering, his clothing being thin and in
sufficient, and even his shoes being so
worn as to afford him little protection.
The woman, as the crowd surged about
the doors, gently touched the arm of a
policeman, and begged to be allowed to
enter the church. The officer, noticing
her humble appearance, roughly brushed
her aside, telling her to get into line.
" Oh, but I must see him once more ;
he paid for the operation which gave
sight to my boy, and I must see him
again."
This came in pleading tones, and she
grasped the hand of her little boy all
the more tightly, while the tears ran
down her cheeks. Her words went
straight to the heart of every one
within hearing. An usher quietly
stepped forward, told the officer to
allow the woman to enter, and mother
and boy, in their poor, humble way,
paid their last tribute to him whose
heart and hand and purse had been
used to open the world to the view of
the little blind boy.
While the host was passing through
the vestibule where the bishop s body
lay, the delegations were fast filing in
through the St. James- Avenue and Clar
endon-Street doors. By 11.30 all the
pews were taken, and many were stand-
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 121
ing in the choir-gallery and in the aisles.
About this time the professors and stu
dents of the Episcopal School of Massa
chusetts, at Cambridge, entered, attired
in their black surplices, and took their
places on the right of the broad aisle.
Soon after the rectors of the Massachu
setts diocese, attired in their white sur
plices, entered and took seats opposite
the students, the congregation standing
as they filed in. They were followed
by a number of rectors from other dio
ceses, who took seats in the chancel.
The entire north (or left) side of the
floor and the north gallery were reserved
for the congregation of Trinity Parish,
who entered at the Clarendon-Street
entrance.
Pews on the middle aisle were re
served for the clergy who could not be
provided for in the chancel, visiting
clergy from other dioceses, the imme
diate family, standing committee of the
diocese, honorary pall-bearers, the war
dens and vestry of Trinity Church, the
Governor and committee of the Legis
lature, Mayor of Boston, President of
Harvard College and the corporation,
members of the Harvard class of 1855,
delegation from the Massachusetts Com-
mandery of the Loyal Legion, and per
sonal friends. The entire south side of
the church, both floor and gallery, was
122
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
reserved for the diocesan organizations,
the officers and students of the Episco
pal Theological School, delegations from
St. Mark s School and Groton School,
the Board of Missions, directors and lay
missionaries of the Episcopal City Mis
sion, general officers of the Massachu
setts Women s Auxiliary, trustees of
donations, directors of Church Home
for Orphans and Destitute Children,
managers of the Girls Friendly Society,
St. Luke s Home for Convalescents,
Episcopal Church Association, Episco
palian Club, officers of Young Men s
Christian Union, representatives of
Young Men s Christian Association,
Trinity Club, Boston University.
The funeral arrangements were beau
tifully carried out with the aid of a large
corps of marshals. These marshals were
the same gentlemen who had officiated at
Bishop Brooks s consecration less than
two years before.
There were many clergymen present
representing many denominations.
It was much like Easter Day in the
church, for although there were the
deep draperies of mourning, there was
also the same display of flowers one
sees at the festival that marks the close
of Lent. The great cross of lilies in
the chancel, the lilies upon the coffin of
the dead bishop, and almost the first
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 12$
sweet, springlike sunshine that had
come during that cold January, all to
gether seemed to impress the feeling of
the day of resurrection upon the thou
sands of assembled people.
The interior of the church, including
the chancel, walls and railing, pulpit,
reading-desk and gallery, was all heav
ily draped, and in beautiful relief the
chancel itself was decorated with floral
and other appropriate emblems. At the
back of the chancel was an arch of
laurel fifteen feet high and nine feet in
width, flanked on each side by two
spruce-trees eight feet in height. Di
rectly in front of this arch, on a sort of
dais, rested a tall and beautiful cross of
Easter lilies, and at the side was the
baptismal font concealed by laurel and
filled with Easter lilies. The chancel
railing was wound with laurel, and upon
it, in a row, were small potted spruce-
trees. The artistic effect was of a
pyramid, and the trees were so tapered
as to conform to that idea.
During the morning hours boxes of
flowers were arriving from the florists,
principally roses and lilies, and were
piled up in the open space before the
altar. After ten o clock no attempt
was made at arranging them, and they
were simply massed wherever a suitable
place could be found for them.
124 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Just before noon the doors opened
from the vestibule and the funeral pro
cession entered, headed by Rev. Dr.
Donald, rector of Trinity, and followed
by the six bishops Bishop Williams
of Connecticut, Bishop Niles of New
Hampshire, Bishop Neely of Maine,
Bishop Clark of Rhode Island, Bishop
Randolph of Virginia, and Bishop Tal-
bot of Wyoming. The eight members
of the standing committee of Trinity
Church came next, and behind them
the bier, borne on the shoulders of eight
men picked from the various athletic
teams of Harvard College. The twelve
honorary bearers followed : Dr. W. N.
McVickar of Philadelphia, Justice Gray
of the United States Supreme Court,
Rev. Percy Browne, Hon. Robert C.
Winthrop, Dr. C. A. L. Richards of
Providence, President Eliot of Harvard
College, Rev. Leighton Parks of Em
manuel Church, Colonel Charles Russell
Codman, Rev. Professor A. V. S. Allen,
Robert Treat Paine, C. T. Morrill, and
Dr. H. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia.
The family and the wardens and vestry
men of Trinity Church brought up the
rear.
The body was placed at the head of
the broad aisle just outside the chancel.
After the silence of the moment fol
lowing the placing of the coffin, the
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
125
burial service began. The voice of
Bishop Potter shook while he read the
opening lines of the two hymns which
were sung by all the congregation,
"Jesus, lover of my soul," and " For all
the saints who from their labors rest,"
led by the old quartet ; but during the
service it was clear and firm, and at times
almost triumphant in. quality, particu
larly in the reading, " There is one glory
of the sun, and another glory of the
moon, and another glory of the stars ;
for one star differeth from another star
in glory. So also is the resurrection of
the dead. It is sown in corruption ; it
is raised in incorruption ; it is sown in
dishonor; it is raised in glory."
There was no eulogy, of course.
Only the violets of mourning spoke
to the people from the black-hung pul
pit. After the last prayer and the
benediction of grace, the coffin was
carried again down the broad aisle, and
during the service outside everybody
remained standing while the low notes
of the organ and the sound of sobbing
made the silence of the church seem
deeper.
No one in that vast throng of people
which had assembled in Copley Square
at noon can ever forget the scene.
From an early hour the crowd had been
gathering, and as it passed through the
126 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
vestibule where the body of Bishop
Brooks lay in state, many still lingered
about for the service which had been
announced after that in the church. A
hollow square was roped off about the
centre doors, and within it was a solid
row of policemen. Every inch of space
on the immense steps, the sidewalk, and
the surrounding streets was packed with
hundreds of men and women, repre
senting every walk of life. That it was
no crowd of curious idlers, a hasty look
would show, but sincere mourners, who
showed by their presence their intense
longing to pay some tribute of respect
to him who was the loyal friend of all
classes. Many found it impossible to get
near the church, and they filled the steps
of the Art Museum and all of the
neighboring buildings, while from the
private houses of the immediate vicin
ity other interested spectators looked
upon the extraordinary scene from wide-
opened windows. At half-past twelve
the great doors swung back, and the
heavily draped coffin was brought into
the sunlight and placed on the elevated
frame, which was also draped.
Rev. Dr. Donald took his position at
the left, with the pallbearers grouped
about. The short, impressive prayer
was delivered by the rector in a clear
voice, while profound silence fell upon
PHILLIPS BROOKS. I2/
the listening multitude. As he closed
his book and stretched his hands toward
the crowd, saying, " Let us all join in
the Lord s Prayer," every head was
bowed and every lip seemed to move
in prayer.
It was a thrilling scene. Strong
men, unused to any show of feeling, felt
no shame at the big tears that splashed
down their faces, and the only other
sound besides the murmur of hushed
voices was an occasional sob.
The assistant rector then read the
hymn beginning,
" O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home,"
copies of which were distributed among
the crowd. Three cornetists stood at
the left of the officiating clergyman, and
led the singing.
Dr. Donald then pronounced a bene
diction, and the mourners came from
the church to the carriages which very
in waiting, and the crowd slowly very
slowly and sadly dispersed.
The carriages being taken, a proces
sion was formed which proceeded to
Mount Auburn by way of the Harvard
Bridge. Hundreds of people had col
lected along the line of its progress ; all
128 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
places of business passed by it were
closed ; and no person gazed upon it
but showed in his demeanor solemnity
and respect.
When, coming up Harvard Street,
its head reached Beck Hall, Cambridge,
a few minutes before two o clock, the
University bell began tolling, and the
students gathered in great numbers.
They lined up on both sides of the
drive from University out to the west
gate, standing three deep, with hun
dreds of the town people who had
assembled to witness the impressive
demonstration, standing in the rear of
the lines. The procession halted at the
Main-Street entrance sufficiently long
to enable students to get into position ;
then it slowly passed into the yard.
As the carriages filed by, every head
was bared, and all remained uncovered
until the last vehicle in the procession
drove out of the gate. The scene was
as picturesque as it was impressive, and
what gave additional solemnity to the
occasion was the chiming of Pleyel s
Hymn from the belfry of Christ Church,
and the tolling of the old college bell in
Harvard Hall. The college flag was at
half-mast. A large number of students
followed the procession a short distance
on its way to the cemetery.
A funeral assembly of one hundred
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 29
or more persons was waiting at the
cemetery when the procession arrived.
Here the old-fashioned, black iron fence
that still conservatively encloses the
Brooks family lot was entirely covered
with evergreen and flowers. In the
centre, the mound formed by the earth
thrown from the grave was surmounted
by a broken shaft of lilies capped with
carnations, white roses, sheaves of wheat,
and ferns. The posts of the railing were
hung with wreaths of ivy and violets
tied with purple ribbon.
In the rear of the lot was a large
open book, inscribed "The Light of the
World." Near it was a second shaft,
encircled with an ivy wreath. There
were a number of other wreaths lying
about.
In the lot are buried the bishop s
father and mother, and his two brothers,
Rev. Frederic and George.
On a temporary platform before the
lot the burial service was read. Those
who had assembled before the funeral
procession arrived gathered at the top
of the hill in the rear while the proces
sion from the carriages gathered upon
the platform. The young body-bear
ers from Harvard tenderly brought the
coffin from the hearse and placed it
beside the open grave. The service,
which was brief, was read by the bish-
130 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
op s two brothers Rev. John Brooks
and Rev. Arthur Brooks. At the close
of the service there was a slight sur
ging toward the lot, and there was
scarcely any one present who did not
bear away with him some memento in
the shape of a flower or a bit of green
that had lain by the grave of their be
loved bishop.
From twelve o clock to two, during
the funeral services, there was a general
suspension of business throughout the
city, even the stock exchange closing
its doors; and the routes of many of the
lines of street cars were changed, in
order not to incommode the people who
desired to congregate in Copley Square.
In the First Baptist Church, across
the way from the home of Bishop Brooks,
a large congregation assembled at a sim
ple service at the same hour when the
funeral was being held at Trinity.
The proposed exercises in the Old
South were given up to allow every one
to be present at the out-door services.
In the Church of the Advent two re
quiem services were held in memory of
Bishop Brooks, the first a communion
service at 7.30. At 9.30 o clock the
rector of the church was the celebrant
at a full choral service. The church
was filled.
A special service was held in mem-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ory of Bishop Brooks in St. Augustine s
Protestant Episcopal Church, Phillips
Street, West End.
Special memorial services were held at
different times by the Boston Young
Men s Christian Association and Young
Men s Christian Union, by " clergymen
of all denominations " in the Old South
Meeting House, at Appleton Chapel,
Harvard College, in the Chapel of Bos
ton University, and in the churches or
halls of various cities and towns through
out New England and outside of it. In
the service at the Old South Meeting
House both Catholics and Protestants
united, for the first time in the history
of Boston. Bishop Potter, of New York,
who had preached the sermon at the
episcopal consecration, had intended
to preach a memorial sermon in Trinity
Church, Boston, on the Sunday follow
ing the funeral, but was prevented by
illness. Organizations, societies and
clubs of all kinds and denominations all
over the country held commemorative
meetings, or passed resolutions, and the
list of meetings business or convivial
that were adjourned out of respect to
the memory of the great dead would be
a long one. All Episcopal churches
throughout the diocese removed their
Christmas decorations, and replaced
them with mourning drapings. The
132 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
colored people of Boston passed res
olutions.
At the memorial service celebrated at
Appleton Chapel, Harvard University,
Professor F. G. Peabody during his ad
dress said :
"The life of a great man has two
sides. First, there is the public side,
the official recognized life, the power,
the eloquence ; and then there is the
private side, the personal, the intimate
life.
" Sometimes the knowledge of a man s
private life does not bring with it an in
crease of love, but when knowledge of
the inner life brings more love with it,
then we forget the greatness of the man
in the thoughts of his graciousness.
" It is our peculiar privilege here, while
the world is honoring the public life of
a great man, to honor his private life.
" He came to us not as an orator, but
as a brother, a father, a helper. He
brought us all his spiritual gifts and a
beautiful tenderness and simpleness, as
though he found himself here in the
trusted circle of domestic life.
" In the little book we have in which
our preachers record their impressions,
there are many observations in his hand
writing about the privilege he felt he
had in coming here.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
133
" In this chapel to-day there are many
men who talked with him, perhaps only
once or twice, but they feel they have
lost a friend. As some of them have
said, they went to him afraid of his
greatness, and came away impressed
with his kindness."
A popular subscription was at once
started for the purpose of erecting a
statue to him in Copley Square, in
front of the Trinity Church which he had
loved so deeply and served so well.
BROOKSIANA.
VII.
BROOKSIANA.
"DISHOP BROOKS, always an ex-
*~* ceedingly hard-working man, after
his ascendancy to the bishopric, had
his energies taxed to their utmost ca
pacity. He was never, however, known
to acknowledge that he needed rest.
His duties as bishop of the diocese of
Massachusetts were but a small part of
his work. Not a day passed but letters
and invitations asking his attendance
at banquets, clubs, and other social func
tions were received, and it was his
invariable rule to accept, if it was pos
sible for him to do so. Every letter
of whatever nature received by him
was scrupulously answered, a private
secretary being required after he had
assumed the bishopric to attend to his
correspondence. He never used postal-
cards for any purpose. Letters came
to him on all subjects from all parts
of the world.
Once while abroad he received a let-
37
138 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ter from a woman in the South who
desired to move to Boston with her two
children. She wrote to ask the bishop
if he would find some nice, moderately-
priced boarding-house for herself and
family. The bishop sent it back to his
secretary, asking him to make inquiries
and forward her the desired information.
" Be sure," wrote Bishop Brooks, " and
tell her that the answer was not delayed
any longer than absolutely necessary.
Explain to her that I am in Europe."
This woman probably never knew the
amount of trouble she had caused the
bishop and his secretary by her one
simple request.
Soon after he was consecrated, the
bishop received a letter from a widow in
Minnesota. She had been married in
Massachusetts and her husband had been
killed in the civil war. As a soldier s
widow she was entitled to a pension from
the government, but this she was unable
to obtain, although none disputed the
fact of the husband being killed in an
engagement and while fighting nobly.
But the poor afflicted widow could not
prove that this man was her husband, as
she had lost her certificate. So she
wrote to Bishop Brooks, telling him of
her condition and the necessity of re
ceiving a copy of her marriage certifi
cate. She only knew the name of the
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 139
minister who had married her, and he
had died. The bishop of Massachusetts
took a personal interest in her case, and
worked hard to obtain evidence of the
marriage, and was finally successful, and
she got her pension.
Then a man down in some Southern
State wrote to him to say that he had
got to go to New York to get a difficult
surgical operation performed, and had
no money. He wanted help. The bish
op told his secretary to write to the
clergyman in his town to inquire about
it, and say that if it was all right he
would pay it.
Then a man wrote to him to know if
he could help him get a certificate of
his baptism. All he could tell was that
he was baptized in a high church in
Montreal. The bishop showed it to his
secretary and asked if he could do any
thing for him ; and he sent the appli
cant a list of all the churches in Mon
treal and the rectors of each one, that
he might write to them.
Fond mothers (and they were not
confined to the Episcopalian fold) whose
sons were leaving home to make for
themselves a place and a name in the
busy city, wrote to Bishop Brooks and
asked him to keep an eye on their boys,
little knowing what a multitude of cares
rested upon his broad and massive shoul-
I4O PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ders. And so on with many other
cases.
A friend who knew Bishop Brooks
quite well entered his study one fore
noon. Before the great preacher lay a
heap of opened letters. Turning in his
chair he said, "Among all those letters
which I have answered, or shall answer,
not one appertains to my parish. All
are from people outside the bounds of
Trinity, and most of them from people
outside of Boston. They are on all sorts
of subjects, and several contain urgent
appeals for money."
He was very free with his money, al
though he never wasted a cent, and was
continually doing good deeds with it.
He did them quietly, and it was seldom
that any one ever heard of it. He was
always thoughtful of his brothers in the
ministry, and his sympathies for poor
clergymen were especially tender. On
one occasion he received a check for
a hundred dollars from a parish in
whose church he had preached. When
the check came back to the drawer
through the bank it bore the indorse
ment of a poor clergyman in another
part of the State to whom he had sent
it. No one ever knew of it except by
that indorsement on the check, which
told the story of his generosity.
An Episcopal chapel had been built
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 141
in one of the remoter suburban towns,
and the debt upon it was a heavy bur
den. Some jesting layman, talking the
matter over with Mr. Brooks both
having a little personal interest in
the village said to Trinity s pastor,
" I will give as much as you will give
toward the extinction of that debt."
" Very well," replied Mr. Brooks, " I
will give five hundred dollars." And
the debt was paid.
Another incident in the great preach
er s life was mentioned as having taken
place during a convention held in Bal
timore. Dr. Brooks had been invited
to preach a missionary sermon in one
of the churches. He consented, and
the fact being advertised beforehand,
the church was so crowded that it
was impossible to take up the collec
tion. Hearing of this, Bishop Brooks
went to the rector after the people had
gone and said, "Well, my dear fellow,
I am sorry to have spoiled your collec
tion, but if you can give me an esti
mate of about the amount you would
have had, I will let you have my check
for it."
The young candidates for the clergy
were his especial pride, and in their
progress he had an active personal in
terest. He helped them pecuniarily,
had them visit him, and corresponded
142 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
with them. He helped many a needy
young man through college. He said
once to a friend during one of the
very few times when he said anything,
however personal, in any way connected
with his good works : " When you spend
a night at a clergyman s house you can
generally find out a great deal." This
was a very pregnant remark, and it in
timated a great line of his charity.
It was his custom in making his visi
tations to notice the various little things
needed in the homes of the poorer clergy
men where he was being entertained.
He generally did find out a great deal,
and what he found out he remembered.
As a result, the poor churchman gener
ally received just what he had needed
and had been unable to get, and at the
hands of the bishop.
About two years ago a printer em
ployed on one of the Boston daily papers
fell sick. A subscription was raised
among the men in his office to help
him make a trip to California. One day
the cashier in the counting-room called
up through the speaking-tube to the
foreman of the composing-room and
said,
" A gentleman wishes to see you."
"All right ; send him up. I would go
down, but I can t leave my work."
In a few minutes the foreman was as-
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 143
tonished to see the familiar face and
form of Boston s great preacher enter
ing the composing-room, four flights
from the street, and there is no elevator
there. Bishop Brooks said he had
learned of what the printers were doing
for one of their fellow-workmen, and
made some inquiries as to the character
of the man. He said this man s wife
had attended his church, and he had
learned of their misfortunes. Satisfied
that it would be a kind act to a worthy
man, Bishop Brooks quietly slipped a
twenty-dollar note into the foreman s
hand, and asked him to add that to the
fund, refusing to allow his name to be
added to the subscription list.
His work among the poor and lowly
was greater than one would dream of.
People who had never entered his
church, some of whom had never heard
him preach, did not fear to ask him to
officiate when death invaded the family
circle, and they rarely asked in vain.
He never refused if he had time at his
disposal to grant the request. Once a
gentleman who had met him, but who
was not his parishioner and not a mem
ber of the Episcopal Church, lost his
little child. The father and mother
wished to have the great preacher, the
tender, loving shepherd of the flock,
read the burial service over the body of
144 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
the child. Mr. Brooks said, " I will do
so, cheerfully, if I have time." He con
sulted his list of engagements for the
day. " I have just half an hour that is
not bespoken ; if you will make your
arrangements conform to that time, I
will gladly be present."
A physician tells a story of a poor
woman who had required his services
and to whom he had said, after several
visits, " You don t need any more medi
cine. What you need now is nourish
ment and fresh air. You need to get
out." "But I have nobody to leave
with the children," she said. They
were little ones, and the poor mother s
anxiety about them had added to her
illness. The doctor repeated, "Well,
you must manage to get out, somehow."
A day or two later being a sympathetic
soul he dropped in to see if she had
found means to obey his directions.
She certainly had. She had told her
need to the man who cheerfully met all
sorts of demands upon him. He was
there taking care of the children while
the poor mother went out for air and
exercise. It was Phillips Brooks !
A visitor to the house in Clarendon
Street waited in the hall one day while
Bishop Brooks finished a little talk he
was having with a workman in the li
brary. He went to the door with this
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 145
visitor, a middle-aged man, who wore a
look of relief as if he had just had a bur
den taken off his mind. The bishop
was saying, " Yes ; that will be your best
way," and repeated some advice about
the man s work and wages, evidently
clinching advice already given. The
man hesitated a minute, while the bish
op s hand was on the knob, then said,
getting his hand towards his pocket,
" Shall I that is, how much would it
be ? " with an evident feeling that there
ought to be some sort of fee. And the
bishop said, " Nothing at all nothing
at all," so heartily and cheerily that the
man could not possibly have felt, even
after going away, that he had made a
mistake in offering to fee Bishop Brooks !
In the broad field of labor through
which Bishop Brooks s interests were
distributed, very near to his heart was
undoubtedly the work of St. Andrew s
Church on Chambers Street.
This mission was organized about
seventeen years ago, and was called the
Chapel of the Evangelists. For two
years the work was conducted under the
direction of Emmanuel parish, and then
it came fully under the ministration and
care of Trinity. After a few years of
progress two fine buildings were erected
on Chambers Street, where Bishop
Brooks s ideas could be more fully car-
146 1 IIILLIPS BROOKS.
ried out. Not only did he seek the
spiritual welfare of the people who came
under his attention, but he always
strove to solve the industrial problem ;
and what has been accomplished there
shows how energetic its laborers have
been. It was here that the first girls
club in the country was organized, and
its members will recall with much pleas
ure the many happy occasions when Dr.
Brooks entertained them with bright
talks about his travels in foreign lands.
The dispensary work excited his warm
est interest, and it was through his ener
gies that it was kept open at night to
answer calls from the sick and suffering
the first attempt in this city of a sim
ilar nature. Such a work as St. An
drew s has demanded a large outlay of
money, and it was through his personal
appeals and his own generous and fre
quent donations that its present success
has been attained.
The Vincent Hospital, too, was an
other branch of Trinity work in which
he always manifested an unfailing sym
pathy. The Guild Hall of St. Andrews
is hung with attractive pictures, which
were given by Bishop Brooks, and on
festival occasions, when the big family
was gathered there, it was his great de
light to be present and join with the
children in their merry-making. All
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 147
those who have given of their time and
service to the carrying on of Trinity s
missions can testify to the appreciation
of their labors by their beloved pastor.
Two young men who had been at
tending Trinity Church, but for some
reason or other had ceased going, tell
this story. They did not suppose they
were known to the rector even by sight.
They were rooming at the top in fact,
in the attic of an unusually high
lodging-house in a not very aristocratic
quarter of the city, when one afternoon
came a rap at their chamber door. On
opening it, they found Dr. Brooks stand
ing there, with his kindly smile, hand
outstretched, and the following words
issuing from his lips : "Well, boys, you
did not expect to see me here, did you? "
As usual careless for himself, he had
climbed all the long flights, instead of
sending for them to come down to
him. The talk that ensued made both
the wanderers permanent attendants at
Trinity.
His attitude in respect to remunera
tion for his work was best exemplified
at the diocesan convention after his
election as bishop was consummated.
Previous to this not a word had been
said as to salary, and Bishop Paddock
had been receiving six thousand dollars
and a house on Chestnut Street, owned
148 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
by the diocese. At the convention ex-
Governor Rice moved that the salary
be increased to eight thousand dollars,
the amount Phillips Brooks received
as rector of Trinity. The bishop at
once got a friend of his to object to
this, and ask an indefinite postponement
of the matter; and in deference to his
wishes it was done.
His private secretary once said of
him :
" Bishop Brooks was in the first place,
what a number of clergymen did not
believe he could be, a great administra
tor. He administered the affairs of the
diocese in a broad and warm-hearted
manner that endeared those to him who
were previously opposed.
" He always found time to talk with
any one, but never longer than the sub
ject required. If it was a matter that
necessitated a hearing for two or three
hours, he would find time for it, but if it
was only an invitation to attend some
service, a minute sufficed to settle the
matter. The bishop was a man who
had a wonderful faculty for getting at
the heart of a thing. You only had to
make a few words of explanation, and
he had grasped the whole matter with
remarkable comprehension.
" The bishop always seemed to have
time for everything, although he was
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 149
a great worker. I consider myself a
pretty hard worker, but I could not
pretend to accomplish the amount of
work Bishop Brooks did, and he never
seemed to be too busy, never hurried.
He could always bear an interruption.
Sometimes I would say, Bishop, I
would like to talk to you about a matter
when you are at leisure. Looking up
he would instantly reply, Well, now is
the best time.
"His mind was like one great reser
voir, always full and never needing re
plenishing. Most clergymen have to
labor on a sermon, but he never did.
Bishop Brooks wrote his sermons with
out any apparent effort, for his mind
was full of great thoughts. He could
write a sermon in six hours, at two sit
tings.
" I recollect just before the first dio
cesan convention, when I observed that
he was not working on his address. As
most bishops would wish to have their
first address a particularly good one, I
asked him one day if he realized how
near the time of the convention was.
He replied yes, and then I mentioned
his address. Oh ! that will be all right,
he replied.
"Sure enough, a day or two before
the convention he showed me a bound
manuscript, which was the convention
150 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
address. He had completed it by work
ing an hour or so or less at a time on it.
It was one of the grandest things I ever
heard him deliver, I think.
" People wonder how he stood such a
round of Episcopal invitations and so
much travelling. The travelling did not
seem to tire him. It rested him. The
time he spent on railway trains seemed
to be a refreshment to him. I remon
strated with him once against the way
he was driving himself, and told him
he did not have any time to himself.
Why, yes, I do ; plenty of it, he said,
with his cheery smile. I should like
to know when and where, I said.
Why, he replied, on the railway
cars. And that was about all the time
he had to himself.
" And yet, hard as he worked, Bishop
Brooks was happy. His life was filled
with happiness. He loved his work
devotedly. It was not work to him, it
was his enjoyment.
"He was the most unselfish man I
ever knew. He was always sacrificing
himself for others. Not only did he
never speak of himself, but he never
even thought of himself."
He was very careful in keeping any
appointments, and absolutely sincere in
any expression. The response, " I will
do it if I can," from Bishop Brooks did
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 151
not mean, " I will do it if, at the time,
I feel inclined," but meant the literal
significance of the words.
He never used the same sermon or
address a second time, no matter how
similar the occasions or in how distantly
separated sections of the country they
might be. ,
Socially he was the simplest and most
cordial and even jovial of men. Every
man, woman, and child who ever came
in contact with him in any of the multi
tudinous interests of which he was a liv
ing part must always remember how
completely he practisedwhat he preached
of the gospel of sincerity and simplicity
and love. He was a type of the largest,
broadest, -most benevolent humanity,
and had the keenest interest in all that
was calculated to uplift. He thought of
the whole human being, and studied
him in all his various phases. He was
easy and agreeable in his manners in
the presence of ladies, but his meanest
enemy if the good man had one
would never accuse him of being a
" ladies man." On the contrary, Bishop
Brooks treated a woman in the same
frank, open manner he would if he were
talking with a man, which was always
gratifying to the intelligent woman, wnt>
was at once placed at her best in his
society.
152 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
In connection with Dr. Brooks s celi
bacy many amusing stories were told,
intimating that his bachelorhood was,
to say the least, not a matter of neces
sity. His treatment of all hints and
remarks on the subject of the admira
tion alleged to be heaped upon him by
female parishioners and friends in gen
eral, showed his innate modesty and
avoidance of self-assertion. In tones
of comic protestation he would say,
" Talk about my being overwhelmed
with slippers ! Why, often I haven t a
pair to put on*when I really need them."
"Ah, I suppose that s a gift from
some admirer, Phillips ? " said his
brother on one occasion, pointing to a
handsome basket of fruit standing on
the table. With an air of nonchalance,
Dr. Brooks pushed the basket before
his brother, saying, " They re good,
aren t they ? Eat them, boy, eat them,"
and nothing more definite could be got
from him.
His love for children was well known.
A group of children pleased him more
than a group of elders. He could so
easily enter into their joys. A child at
the Church Home, South Boston, just
fresh from reading "Jack, the Giant
Killer," looking at his height, accosted
him one day with these words, " Be you
a giant?" "Yes, my dear," was the
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 153
reply. Others would take delight in
climbing into his lap, and he would
show them some relic from Japan,
which he always carried, to their great
amusement.
Helen Kellar of the blind school was
very dear to him ; he loved to talk with
her about the Divine Being. After ser
vice in a church, if he knew she was
there, he would go at once, after disrob
ing, from the vestry room, and with ex
tended arms most affectionately greet
the afflicted girl.
It is believed that a correspondence
was kept up between Helen Kellar and
Bishop Brooks up to the time of the
latter s death. Bishop Brooks s simpli
city of faith was never better illustrated
than in his beautiful letter to Helen
when her alert mind began to consider
the questions of the soul and immor
tality.
It is told of the bishop that one time,
at some informal meeting where there
were a great many children, he felt a
strange sensation about one of his
knees a queer, repeated jabbing sen
sation. And when it came the third
time he realized that it was external,
and looked down to see a tiny girl
gravely sticking in a pin. " Well, well,
little girl, what are you doing ? " he
exclaimed; and she lisped, "I just
154 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
wanted to see if you s stuffed ! " His
great size had impressed her ; her in
quiring turn of mind proved to be an
introduction which greatly amused her
new friend, who afterwards did a good
deal for the child, whose mother too
needed help,
It was at the Christmas sale at Trin
ity Church. A little girl who had some
dolls for sale begged the bishop to buy
one from her table. Just to make talk
with her, apparently, the bishop asked,
" Now, what kind of dolls are you sell-
ins: ? " " Brides," said the child. The
O *
bishop laughed. " Won t you have
one ? " persisted the little girl. She
was too young to know why the bishop
laughed so much after her answer to
his next question. " Now, what should
I do with a bride ? " " Why, you could
give her away ! "
Said a writer in the Boston Tran
script: "I cannot help referring to Dr.
Brooks s superb personal unconscious
ness, which was a rare and striking
quality in so popular a man. I once
witnessed a striking example of this
quality. It was at an exhibition at
the Kindergarten for the Blind that
blessed institution which Dr. Brooks
had so special an affection for. Many
people, men and women, filled the
rooms. Dr. Brooks had taken up poor
Interior of Trinity Church, Boston,
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 155
little deaf, dumb, and blind Tommy
Stringer, who had just come to the
Kindergarten, and who knew nothing
whatever, but who seemed somehow to
be aware when he had come close to a
kind heart. He clung tightly about the
big man s neck, like a little old-man-of-
the-sea, and the remarkable thing about
it was that Dr. Brooks did not seem in
the least anxious to dislodge him, or at
all disconcerted by his persistent atten
tion. He went about with the poor boy
clinging there ; he conversed with peo
ple without any sort of embarrassment,
and also without that superior sort of
condescension which almost any other
great man would have exhibited under
such circumstances. Afterward, speak
ing in Helen Kellar s behalf, he made
an earnest appeal for Tommy."
The same writer said again : " No one
has yet fully explained the secret of Dr.
Brooks s hold upon the great mass of
people who were not Episcopalians, who
never saw him in private life, and who,
perhaps, had never heard him speak but
once or twice. Thousands of such peo
ple felt a sharp pull upon their heart
strings when they heard of his death.
Probably a little of a good many things
went to make up this sentiment. There
was the feeling that the bishop was not
only a wonderfully good man, but also
156 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
a man of hearty human sympathies,
and without cant or pretence. But
that was more or less an abstract sen
timent. My idea is that a great part of
Dr. Brooks s popularity came from the
mere sight of the man on the street or
in other public places ; and this is not
in the slightest degree a depreciation of
his greatness, for he would not have
looked the man he did unless he had
been the man he was. On the street
he always had a certain splendid boyish
unconsciousness a natural and unaf
fected air of liking for the world and
the people in it which, joined with
the magnificence of his stature, impres
sive to all except little men, made peo
ple s hearts warm toward him definitely
and for all time. And when these
same people saw him once or twice at a
public meeting of some kind, and had
seen his perfectly fitting bearing, and
had listened to his perfectly fitting
words so swiftly spoken, their liking
was re-enforced by a strong admiration.
Every one, Anglican or not, came to
feel a sense of ownership in him. The
influence which he wielded by reason of
his peculiar and gifted personality made
his episcopal office a little thing in com
parison."
Bishop Brooks was only fifteen years
old when he entered Harvard College,
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 157
and at that time he was almost as tall
as at any period in later life, although
he had not developed into the magnifi
cent specimen of physical manhood
which he presented in later years.
Speaking of him, Mr. Robert Treat
Paine said : " At college he cared little
for sport, but preferred to read omniv-
orously almost everything and anything
that came in his way. His literary
work was marked, even then, by the
same incisive, thorough-going style that
we have become familiar with in his
published sermons, and was nothing
less than a natural gift which he culti
vated at college to the highest point
that wide reading would assist."
Mr. J. S. Ropes remembers distinctly
the college boy s appearance at the
initiation of the class of 57*5 repre
sentatives into "Alpha Belt." The
bishop-to-be was lounging on a cush
ioned window-seat smoking his college
pipe and watching the novitiates quizzi
cally and quietly, till somebody had to
break the ice. Then the big college
student came down from his perch and
charmed everybody with his frank, open
personality. His manners were never
made over to fit any new position he
might attain, but were always* the same
from his college days.
One of the stories told relates to
158 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
some of the Lenten services held by
Phillips Brooks when he was rector of
Trinity Church. His friend, ex-Gov
ernor Rice, met him one morning in
the street-car, and said, "Aren t you
getting a little weary with the Lenten
services ? "
Dr. Brooks s face brightened as he
replied, " I guess I can stand it if the
congregation can."
When in England, he was " com
manded " to preach before the Queen,
and was asked on that occasion if he
felt afraid to do so. He replied : " No ;
I have preached before my mother."
When he visited England after his elec
tion as bishop he was warmly greeted
and honored. It was " My Lord Bish
op" here and " My Lord Bishop " there,
and all the sturdy Americanism of Phil
lips Brooks rose in protest. " I am not
a lord bishop ! " he exclaimed ; " we have
no such titles in our country, and you
will oblige me by not using that form
of address."
The following is from Miss Lilian
Whiting :
" When he entered upon the pastor
ate of Trinity Church he found his field
to lie in one of the most conservative
and intensely aristocratic parishes of
America. The pew-holding is from a
a peculiar system of title-deeds almost,
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 159
and the prevailing spirit was rather to
resent than to invite the presence of
strangers. A story is still told that on
one Sunday a dame of high degree
coming late to service found her pew
occupied by two or three persons, al
though there, was still room for her
accommodation. But, to the dismay
of the strangers, she waved them out,
one by one, with a grand sweep of the
ostrich feather fan which she carried,
and left them to their fate standing in
the aisle. The young preacher, from
his desk, saw this performance and pon
dered upon its significance. My in
formant, who was also an eye-witness
of the scene, tells me that a more in
dignant man than the rector at that
moment could hardly be imagined.
From that time he resolved that, al
though by the parish laws the church
must still be one of rented pews, rather
than free, it must still rise to the true
spirit of Christian courtesy and hospi
tality. Nor were his efforts in vain,
and for many years Trinity has been
noted for its marked courtesy and gen
erous hospitality a hospitality, in
deed, that so overflowed all considera
tions of the right of possession that it
came to be laughingly remarked that
the unfortunate pew-owners seemed to
be the only persons who could not
160 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
be accommodated in Trinity. By the
rector s desire a row of chairs was
placed all around the chancel, and sev
eral long seats placed in rows on either
side, all free to the occupants ; and as
many as can come and sit in my pulpit
with me are welcome/ characteristically
asserted the rector."
During the last years of his life the
members of the Harvard class of 1855,
resident in Boston and its vicinity, were
in the habit of dining together every
two or three months. At these reun
ions youth seemed renewed, and all were
like boys again. Phillips Brooks was
almost always present at them, allowing
nothing but the most unavoidable en
gagement to keep him away. In that
room he always appeared to be the same
charming, frank, simple-hearted boy he
had been in undergraduate days, and
never seemed to feel himself, or so far
as he was concerned allow any one else
to feel, that his rank, there or outside
in the estimation of the world, was any
different from that of the most insignifi
cant or " unsuccessful " person present.
In conversation d propos of a clergy
man who had been detected in some
offence and had brought himself into
disrepute, he once solemnly said : "How
wretched I should be if I felt that I was
carrying about with me any secret which
PHILLIPS BROOKS. l6l
I would not be willing that all the world
should know!" And indeed morally
and socially he seemed perfectly trans
parent as if one could look him through
and through, and find nothing amiss.
He loved and admired Richardson,
the architect. Looking at his design
for the Pittsburg Jail, he said in his
presence : " What Richardson really
likes is a jail. When he can t get a
jail, he wreaks himself on a church."
Towards the end of his life it was
thought by one whose opportunities of
judging were excellent he seemed,
after having apparently long resisted the
thought, to have at last yielded to the
irresistible conviction that his position
in, and the manner in which he was re
garded by, the world were unusual.
Only then did he consent to enter the
episcopate. Yet this conviction was
for him simply a stimulus to larger
labor for others : it never led him to
"give himself airs " towards them. As
bishop he was as simple and genuine
and unaffectedly devoted to well-doing
as ever he had been as a boy.
Said a writer in the Boston Globe ; " I
stood on the curbstone on Clarendon
Street the morning of the funeral,
watching the great long line of hu
manity which was wending its way to
the west porch of Trinity Church. By
1 62 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
my side was an Irishman of perhaps
sixty years of age. Addressing me he
said, Well, he s gone, and Boston
never saw a better man. He was a
good man, generous, open, and liberal.
I can well remember him as a young
man taking his meals at the Parker
House. This was twenty-seven years
ago, and at that time I was a waiter at
Parker s. Many a time I ve served
him. Did he remember the waiter?
He never forgot him, and his remem
brances were not those of a small soul,
either. He was a lucky fellow who
waited on Phillips Brooks. >:
Bishop Potter once said of him :
" I first met Bishop Brooks while I
was a student at the Alexandria Semi
nary. I had been there a year or two
when he entered, and I recall a humor
ous incident of the time. He was quite
a tall man. When he arrived there as
a student he was placed in one of the
rooms of the old building, the ceiling of
which was so low that he could not
stand erect. I heard of the awkward
ness of his situation, and exerted such
influence as I possessed to secure his
removal to a hall some distance off,
which was known as St. John s in the
Wilderness, and so he came to be es
tablished there. He made a very apt
and striking reference to this incident
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 163
a few years ago on the occasion of my
consecration as bishop. He said he
hoped that it would continue to be
Henry Potter s business to see that men
stood up straight in the world.
" I recall an incident illustrating his
simplicity. A member of the semi
nary, George A. Strong, was recorder
at a parish at Medford, Mass., and upon
one occasion Dr. Brooks and I were
driving out there to see him. When
we were crossing a railroad track one
of the whiffletrees broke. I immedi
ately jumped out of the carriage to
repair the damage. But Brooks never
stirred. There he sat looking at me
with apparently no more concern than a
wooden idol might be expected to have
until, with some degree of impatience,
I ordered him to get out and hold the
horses heads while I was making re
pairs. It had never occurred to him
that he could be of the slightest use.
" I remarked to a gentleman after
ward, It is astonishing how little Brooks
knows about horses. Well/ said the
gentleman in reply, he spoke much
more handsomely of you, for he told
me he was amazed to see how much
Henry Potter knew about horses.
" I watched him with great interest
on the occasion of the recent conven
tion of the House of Bishops in Balti-
164 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
more. I knew how attention to details
and the slow progress of legislation
would weary him. His seat was far
back among the younger bishops, as the
bishops are always seated in the order
of precedence with respect to the time
of their election and consecration. I
was not surprised, therefore, when pass
ing along the aisle near where he sat
I felt some one pulling at my skirts. I
looked around and saw it was Brooks.
Glancing up at me in that peculiar pleas
ant way of his, he asked, Henry, is it
always as dull as this ? I leaned over
and said to him, If you will be patient,
my dear boy, you will find it animated
enough.
" I was not surprised, in the largest
sense of the word, to hear of his death.
He had for so many years lived a life of
regularity as rector, to change from that
routine suddenly, to take up and dis
charge the duties of a large diocese,
involved a tremendous physical risk.
He went into his work with his whole
heart."
How fast the bishop talked is shown
by the following interesting statement
of the swiftest of English shorthand
writers, Thomas Allen Reed, about his
attempts to report the sermons preached
by Rev. Phillips Brooks : " I have never,
in a long and varied experience, listened
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
i6 S
to a public orator, whether in the pulpit,
on the platform, or even in a law court,
where perhaps the fastest speaking is
heard, who kept up such a continuous,
uninterrupted flow of rapid articulation.
However large the building, the speed
of delivery is the same. Even the open
ing sentences, which many habitually
rapid speakers will utter quite deliber
ately, are jerked out with the most pro
voking glibness, and the reporter no
sooner puts pen to paper than he finds
himself dashing forward, helter skelter,
his energies taxed to the utmost to get
up and maintain the necessary speed.
He is eagerly expecting the end of the
first sentence, where he naturally antici
pates a pause. Vain expectation ! The
full stop is a grammatical expression ; it
has no reality for the speaker or the
writer. One sentence ended, the next
begins, and, like the Dutchman s cork
leg, the sermon goes on the same as
before.
" Having recently had occasion to
report Mr. Brooks, I have had the curi
osity to note his exact speed. The ser
mons were accurately timed (by two
watches in each case), and the words,
as they appeared in the printed report
in the Christian World Pulpit, were
counted. One sermon, preached at
Caterham, lasted thirty-five minutes,
1 66 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
and the average rate of speed came out
at a hundred and ninety-four words
per minute. But in a sermon preached
in Westminster Abbey, Mr. Brooks ex
ceeded even the rate of the Caterham
sermon. Notwithstanding the size of
the abbey, and the effort needed to
articulate with sufficient distinctness to
be heard, the sermon, which lasted thirty
minutes, came out two hundred and
thirteen words per minute. I repeat,
then, if any aspiring young shorthand
writer wishes to meet a foeman worthy
of his steel (or any other) pen or pen
cil, let him take an opportunity of
attacking the Rev. Phillips Brooks of
Boston, and the chances are that at the
close of the encounter he will find the
taking of a Turkish bath a superfluous
operation. Fortunately for the short
hand fraternity on this side of the
Atlantic, Mr. Brooks does not often
visit these shores. If he did, I am
afraid that, instead of being cordially
welcomed, he would be received, at
least by the knights of the pen, with
the greeting of the Quaker in * Uncle
Tom s Cabin, Friend, thee isn t
wanted here.
His rapid delivery was one of the
chief characteristics of the man, and
to take him verbatim usually in this
country required the work of two sten-
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 67
ographers working in concert, the one
filling in the gaps left by the other. It
was in this way that the verbatim re
ports of his famous Lenten noon-day lec
tures at St. Paul s Church were made.
His rapidity of speech was indulged in
for the purpose of overcoming a lingual
defect, and when he reached his topmost
speed his effort was comparable to noth
ing except that of a steam-engine. In
deed, the phrase "a human dynamo,"
applied to another well-known clergy
man, would also fit Bishop Brooks s case
as well. Despite the rapid gait at which
he talked, however, there was nothing
involved or hazy about his spoken ser
mon, and it was easy to follow his line
of thought when one had once got used
to his mannerisms.
The memory of the stalwart figure
standing in the pulpit, the rhythmic words
flowing from his lips like a silvery cas
cade from a mountain, the face flushed,
the eyes flashing, and the eye-glasses
dropping downward with the uncon
scious twitching of the nose, will al
ways be a pleasant and abiding one with
the scores of newspaper men whose duty
called them to report his utterances.
One of the swiftest of Boston s short
hand writers, and who has reported the
bishop many times, said :
" Bishop Brooks was the fastest talker
1 68 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
I ever reported. So many ideas on the
subject under treatment would float to
the surface of his mind in a second s
time that the tongue seemed, as it were,
too slow a vehicle to convey them to
his audience, and with scarcely a com
ma s pause, the words would flow natu
rally forth, in a manner that suggested
to the imaginative reporter undercur
rents of more crowded ideas, which
must follow in rapid succession. An
other difficulty in reporting Bishop
Brooks was the confidential tone he
would assume, lowering his voice to al
most a whisper, and leaving the reporter
to transcribe his meaning out of a sort
of impressive, though one might say
eloquent, rumbling sound, and quickly
changing facial expressions, but which,
to one in the habit of hearing him, were
sometimes as translatable as words."
One of the members of the Trinity
Club, an organization composed largely
of young men, tells the following, which
he heard from Mr. Brooks s own lips as
he narrated it in a moment of confidence.
Speaking of his well-known rapidity of
speech, he said that many people sup
posed that it was due to a habit of stam
mering when he was young, and that he
avoided the defect by rapid utterance.
Mr. Brooks said that the idea that he
ever stammered or had any trouble
A CORNER OF TRINITY, BOSTON.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 169
with his speech was entirely erroneous.
When he was young, he said, and began
public speaking, he was afraid that peo
ple would not hear him if he spoke at
much length, so he used to get as much
as possible into a short time, and this
intentional fast speaking became by
practice a permanent habit. Speaking
of the diffidence he felt on entering the
pulpit, he told his young friends that it
was something he could not shake off ;
when he thought what a great responsi
bility it was to preach to such a congre
gation, it gave him a feeling of dread
and hesitation in the extreme. " It is
something fearful " was the expression
which he used.
To the newspaper men of Boston
Bishop Brooks naturally bore a very im
portant relation, and, in fact, he had
done so for a great many years. He
was easily the foremost preacher in this
part of the country, and his sermons and
addresses and social functions always
had a conspicuous place in the printed
news of the day.
No one had more respect for him
than the newspaper reporters, and yet
he was one of the most unapproachable
men from the standpoint of the inter
viewer. He would always treat a news
paperman in a pleasantly dignified way,
but would seldom say anything for pub-
170 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
lication, his nature seeming to rebel
against this particular form of publicity.
Before Dr. Brooks became bishop,
his photographs, though much in de
mand, could not be had by every one.
He was much averse to having them
placed on public sale, and once, when he
was asked to allow some to be sold at a
fair in aid of St. Andrew s mission, he
showed some disinclination to comply,
and remarked that they would not real
ize much. This was met with the state
ment that it was expected that about fifty
dollars would be the result of such a sale.
The next day Dr. Brooks sent his check
for fifty dollars to the managers of the
fair, but the photographs were not forth
coming. At length he was prevailed
upon to sit for his picture, and just be
fore Christmas in 1887 he sat to a pho
tographer in the Studio Building. Three
positions were taken, and all were per
fectly satisfactory, but the picture which
proved the most attractive to the public,
and the one which his parishioners
greatly admired and were eager to pos
sess, is the one showing the full face.
During the eight months subsequent to
the development and finishing of the
negatives, more than three thousand
photographs were sold. Two orders
were for five hundred each. There has
been a large sale ever since of all three
PHILLIPS BROOKS. I/ 1
positions, but the one especially sought
after is the front position. In June,
1891, a private business arrangement
was entered into with the photographer
whereby a royalty was to be paid on
each picture of the bishop sold, the pro
ceeds to be used for mission purposes.
This arrangement has been carried out
according to the wishes of the bishop
and his associates.
Whether a similar arrangement was
entered into with the London photog
raphers, who secured two fine negatives
of the bishop while in England last
year, is not known. Probably not. One
of the pictures taken by the London
artists represents Dr. Brooks sitting in
a chair, with an open book on his knee ;
the other shows him standing. Both
are considered good likenesses. Con
spicuous on each photograph are the
lines, " The Lord Bishop of Massachu
setts, the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D."
In the August, 1891, number of Sttn
and Shade is a beautiful reproduction
of a photograph of the bishop standing
in his library, a copy of the picture
taken by Dr. Mixter.
A photograph from a painting of Dr.
Brooks by Wallace Bryant, made in 1891,
is published.
There are undoubtedly other photo
graphs of the bishop, copies from origi-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
nals, etc., other than the above and
those reproduced in this volume.
One of the earliest incidents of Dr.
Brooks s pastorate at Holy Trinity,
Philadelphia, was the flurry of alarm in
1862 over the menace to that city from
the near approach of the Confederate
army. When the "three-months men "
were called out and the available forces
remaining in the city were gathered
together to protect the Quaker town, it
was the stalwart figure of the young
rector of Holy Trinity which was seen
in the van of those marching out, shovel
on his shoulder, to throw up protecting
earthworks in front of Philadelphia.
Bishop Brooks, before he was conse
crated to the episcopate, was generally
known as a representative in Massachu
setts of the " broad-church " party as
opposed to the " high-church " tenden
cies. One day Dr. Brooks was walking
in a long procession "of. clergymen who
were attending some church festival of
considerable importance. Beside Dr.
Brooks in the procession walked a
short, thin priest, Dr. Spalding. Dr.
Spalding was at that time an extreme
high churchman. As the procession
moved along and approached the robing-
room, Dr. Spalding looked up at Dr.
Brooks, who towered above him, and
said : " You are, after all, Dr. Brooks,
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
in some respects at least a high church
man." " Yes," replied the rector of
Trinity, glancing at his own enormous
physique and then looking at the thin-
chested man beside him, "but in no
sense can you be called a broad church
man."
Just after the close of the war, it will
be remembered that there was a com
memoration meeting at Harvard Col
lege. Phillips Brooks was asked to de
liver the prayer. Colonel Henry Lee,
the Harvard marshal for that day, said,
"The services on that occasion were
not equal to what men felt. Every
thing fell short, and words seemed to
be too weak. Phillips Brooks s prayer
was an exception. That was a free
speaking to God, and it was the only
utterance of that day which rilled out
its meaning to the full extent. Low
ell s Commemoration Ode was great,
and so was General Devens s speech, but
Mr. Brooks surpassed them both." The
eager inquiry of that day "after that
prayer was " Who is Phillips Brooks ? "
It was the first time that he had ap
peared before the most distinguished
audience that could be collected in New
England ; and from that moment the
growing thought at Trinity Church was
to call Phillips Brooks to be rector of
that church.
1/4 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The following characterization is from
a brilliant article in the New York Trib
une, in 1884 : " He is a Brahmin of the
Brahmins so far as the intellectual caste
of the man is concerned; and yet his
individuality is crowded with perplexing
contrarieties, for there is not a trace of
his New England lineage to be found in
an analysis of his springs of action or
the outgrowth of his professional life.
For while the New England cultus is
cool, dry, crystalline, and rhythmic, his
is hot, heady, effervescent, daring, spon
taneous. Boston is Scandinavian, dashed
with Teutonic. Mr. Brooks is half Med
iterranean, half Oriental. He is severely
scholastic in his discipline, but a tropical
exuberance of glowing effervescences,
with the hidden fire of compressed
metaphors, pre-occupies and kindles his
utterances. The New England ideal
never loses sight of self, is always at
home with a stately deference for the
conventionalities of schools and society,
while Mr. Brooks is verily possessed
with an imperious and tremendous dae
mon, as Plato interprets, and so is ac
countable to no man or precedent."
Said the Boston Transcript, in one of
its editorials : " The famous John Cot
ton, minister in Boston in old England
and New England, in whose honor our
city was named, was a worthy ancestor
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
175
of Phillips Brooks; the famous Phillips
Academy was founded by another an
cestor ; the bequest from which have
been made the statues of Winthrop and
Samuel Adams was given to the city by
another ancestor. But the greatest gift
to the city from any of his family was
Phillips Brooks his own life and ex
ample, to which the good citizen, inde
pendent of city, State or national boun
daries, rising above all differences of
religious creeds, pays universal homage
to-day. Such homage proves that ma
terialism has not swallowed up this
people."
INFLUENCE WITH BUSINESS
MEN.
VIII.
INFLUENCE WITH BUSINESS MEN.
A MONG the many thousands of people
* who will regard the death of Bishop
Brooks as a personal loss are the busi
ness men of Boston whose privilege it
was to attend the noon-day services in
St. Paul s Church during the penitential
seasons of 1891 and 1892, when he de
livered two series of sermons remarkable
alike for their fervent piety and for their
adaptability to the every-day life of the
busy men to whom they were addressed.
All shades of belief were represented at
these meetings, and many of the most
interested listeners to the solemn truths
he uttered probably had no settled reli
gious convictions. But so broad was
the mantle of Christian charity which
he offered them, that it is doubtful if
even the most intolerant sceptic did not
find them suited to his needs. If any
179
ISO PHILLIPS BROOKS.
cavillers yet remained, the bold chal
lenge was sent forth in the most meek
and modest manner that the speaker
himself would gladly listen to any ob
jections that could be made to the doc
trines which he taught, let them come
from what source they might. He even
went further than this in his famous
declaration that he had as much respect
for the opinions of the honest unbe
liever, and could regard him with as
much toleration, as though he was a pro
fessor of his own faith. Little wonder
was it, then, that _men who seldom or
never attended church flocked at the
busiest hour of a busy day to listen to
one who welcomed them as sons of the
same Father and brothers of the same
Redeemer. To many it was a revela
tion that the greatest bishop of a great
church could so near approach his Mas
ter in meekness and humbleness of
spirit.
But these men were probably not more
astonished and delighted than were those
whose walks in life had been among the
familiar paths of church dogma and
creed. They learned many of them
for the first time that the great repre
sentative of a church, which they had
been taught to believe was made up of
forms and ceremonials and rituals, cold
and conventional, regarded all these
PHILLIPS BROOKS. l8l
symbols of little consequence as com
pared with the vital truths of Christian
ity. With an eloquence and fervor that
carried conviction to every mind, he
swept aside as of little consequence
everything that had not for its essential
the all-pervading love of the Saviour of
the world for all mankind under what
ever circumstances or in whatever con
dition of life it might be found. All
that was essential in Christianity was
that there should be some one to re
ceive it. The Church was, to him, an
organization through the medium of
which revealed religion could be taught
and disseminated ; a religion that could
be found in all its integrity as readily in
the humble little chapels of the primi
tive Methodist as in the great temples
of Episcopalianism ; in the rude bar
racks of the Salvation Army as in the
sumptuous cathedrals of the Holy City.
No wonder, then, that clergymen and
laity, churchmen and non-communicants,
believers and unbelievers, united in these
services, and approved of the great and
unanswerable truths announced.
He even went a step further in his
broad and comprehensive liberalism and
in his belief in the infinity and pres
cience of God. It was not necessary,
he said, in the divine plan of salvation
that the sinner should consciously seek
1 82 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
God. And to emphasize this belief of
his, he used the startling and striking
metaphor of the prisoner in a dungeon
cell so completely shut out from the
light that he knew not of its existence.
It was then that Bishop Brooks, in a
great burst of eloquence, described as
only he could describe the desperate
seeking for the light that was so ne
cessary for his very existence by the
poor benighted wretch. He knew not
whether it was night or day ; but there
was that craving within him for the
unseen light that with desperate energy
he tore at the rough walls of his cell
till the blood flowed from his lacerated
fingers, and he sank exhausted, disheart
ened at the hopelessness of his ever
reaching what his inner consciousness
told him must exist, for it was essential
for his growth and happiness. All this
time, on the outside of these walls, the
bright rays of the sun were seeking for
the man who needed them so much.
Every crevice between those great
stones was filled with light and sun
shine, which insinuated its life-giving
properties into the most remote place
in that gloomy mass of rock. The light
which the prisoner sought so blindly,
unconscious that it even existed, was
as persistently seeking him. Such, said
the preacher, is the relative position of
PHILLIPS BROOKS
A ONCE FAMILIAR FIGURE ON BOSTON STREETS.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 183
the sinner and his God. Knowing noth
ing of the existence of the Divine Mercy
so essential to his salvation, the poor
outcast is not deserted, for his God, like
the sunlight of heaven, is constantly
and persistently seeking him.
At such moments as these it seemed
as though the great preacher was in
spired, and men looked at him and won
dered. Everything that he said evi
dently carried conviction to their souls.
He pleaded with them only as a man
thoroughly in earnest could plead, to
lay aside their vices and tricky business
methods, and become Christians. He
pointed out to them the satisfaction and
peace of mind that would come from
leading a grander and better life. He
told them it was no hardship to be a
Christian ; it was a pleasure and a de
light, and his beaming, smiling coun
tenance, as he made these appeals, told
how completely happy he himself was.
Christ, as he described him in these
discourses, was not a mean and humble
appearing personage, but so grand and
lofty and magnificent that should he
walk through the busy marts of trade
all men would recognize in him the
Saviour of the world.
During the two series of sermons St.
Paul s Church was crowded long before
the hour for the services to begin, and
1 84 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
the rapt attention that accompanied
every word that was spoken was the
strongest commentary that could be
made on the earnestness of the speaker
and the conviction that his words car
ried to the hearts of men.
PHILLIPS BROOKS AT
HARVARD.
IX.
PHILLIPS BROOKS AT HARVARD.
HP HE following appeared in The Boston
* Transcript :
To most men it would be a suffici
ent task to fulfil the exacting require
ments of such a pastorate as that of
Trinity. Add to these requirements a
wide range of philanthropic sympathies
and endeavors, and also a very consider
able amount of literary work, and the
most energetic of men might consider
that his powers were fully exercised.
Phillips Brooks, in addition to accom
plishing all this work, and accomplish
ing it most effectively, found time to
make his influence felt at Harvard as
no other preacher ever did.
It is of this latter work that the
writer wishes to speak. During his
junior and senior years he became very
familiar with the sight of Phillips Brooks,
187
1 88 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
both in the chapel pulpit and upon the
college campus. Many a morning, after
chapel, one might see President Eliot
and the great divine crossing the quad
rangle together, or coming down the
avenue in front of Gore Hall. Presi
dent Eliot is himself a tall and stalwart
figure ; but he was completely dwarfed
by the great bulk and towering height
of his companion. Clad in a volumin
ous ulster, with a large broad-brimmed
silk hat tipped back a little on his head,
and usually with a big walking-stick
under his arm, Dr. Brooks strode along
in Brobdingnagian ease, looking like a
walking tower. His face in repose sug
gested benevolence and placidity rather
than power, and irreverent college
younglings used to comment wittily
on his habit of keeping his mouth ajar
as he walked along. He was usually
wrapped in profound abstraction, often,
it is said, passing his best friends with
out recognition.
The system of "preachers to the uni
versity," which was established at the
time referred to, was an attempt to
supply what was felt to be a most seri
ous lack in Harvard life. Dr. Brooks
was one of those who had implicit
faith that plenty of spiritual life lay
dormant in the college ; and he of all
men did the most to call that spiritual
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 189
life into conscious power and activity.
The old notion that the students were
like the inmates of Dotheboys Hall,
and that the alma mater was a sort of
Mrs. Squeers whose pleasant duty it
was to call them up and dose them with
the brimstone and treacle of compulsory
religion, gave way at length to more
enlightened ideas. Faith in the better
nature of man, and in that craving for
the bread of life which the husks of
dogma will not satisfy, was the basis of
the new movement. Compulsory pray
ers were abolished. A number of emi
nent preachers took turns in leading
morning devotions, and the present
system of university preaching was
adopted.
The system is merely this, that some
well-known preacher is invited to con
duct morning prayers every day for a
month, and during that month he also
preaches each Sunday evening in Apple-
ton Chapel ; and on every week-day dur
ing the month, from nine o clock in the
morning until noon, he may be found
in a study set apart for that purpose,
where any student who may desire to
consult him on any subject will be sure
of a cordial welcome and friendly coun
sel. During his month the preacher is
said to be " in residence." Invitation
is extended, in the college bulletin, to
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
all who choose to seek the acquaint
anceship or assistance of the preacher.
Thus, as month follows month, and one
eminent preacher follows another, an
unusual and valuable opportunity is af
forded for students to get personally
acquainted with men of wisdom and
spiritual power. The students avail
themselves freely of this privilege, and
there can be no doubt that much good
has resulted from it.
The writer well remembers the day
when he sought the comfortable, attract
ive parlor in old Wadsworth House and
knocked at the door. A hearty " come
in " responded, and in a moment he
stood face to face with Phillips Brooks.
A cordial grasp of the hand, a few sim
ple, kindly words of greeting, and the
visitor felt quite at home. During the
half-hour of conversation that followed
much was said which will always remain
with the student as both a pleasant
memory and a valuable acquisition.
Theological doctrines were the nat
ural subject of our talk. Suggestions of
doubt and difficulty in regard to current
dogma were met by sympathetic insight,
by patient logic, by eloquent illustra
tions.
" We all know," said Dr. Brooks,
" that life is a tangle of mysteries,
that the simplest phenomena of nature
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 9!
baffle us completely when we attempt
to explain them. Men differ, and al
ways will differ, about a thousand minor
matters relating to religion and the
Bible."
" But difference is not tolerated in
ecclesiastical circles," was demurred.
" We are told that certain beliefs which
we find revolting to our reason must be
accepted, if we would be identified with
Christianity and Christian people."
The great brown eyes kindled, and a
glow of enthusiasm lighted up the ear
nest face.
" Christianity is reasonable, or it is
nothing. It cannot conflict with reason ;
it is a supplement to it. The truths of
salvation best appeal to the heart.
Sweep away sophisms and intricacies
and ask yourself, What is Jesus Christ
to me and to my life ? "
" But a belief in miracles is not a
trivial matter, nor can the reason be
ignored in examining it. We either
believe them or do not believe them.
Many of us find it impossible to accept
them on any terms."
" Miracles ! " he exclaimed. " How
many stumble over them, yet how simple
and natural they are, and how unim
portant ! "
He clasped his knee and rocked back
and forward, speaking at full speed, and
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
swaying his head as the torrent of words
fell from him.
"Miracles are marvels. Anything
that we don t understand is a marvel;
My power to produce fire by scratching
a match is a tremendous marvel to any
savage. From his standpoint I am
actually possessed of the most unques
tionable power of performing miracles.
Whence comes my power ? From my
superior nature, from my higher devel
opment, from my better understanding
of the laws of the universe. Given my
higher development, and you would ex
pect to find me able to do things mirac
ulous, or marvellous, to the savage on
his lower plane. So, given Jesus Christ
and his vastly higher development, his
immeasurable superiority to the wisest
and best of us, we should expect to find
that he had a grasp on laws of which
we know nothing, and to be able to per
form things wonderful in our sight. A
man is not saved by his belief in mira
cles no man ever was no man ever
will be. Speaking for myself, the mir
acles of the Old Testament have very
little significance to me ; I have no be
lief in them, and consider them of very
little importance. The miracles of Jesus
seem to me very reasonable and prob
able, though I cannot say that I con
sider them of any vital importance.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 193
That Christ rose from the dead, I most
earnestly believe, and I believe that he
became the first-fruits of those who will
rise to immortality and the presence of
the Father. That is the vital question,
my friend. What is Christ to you and
your life ? That Christ should work
miracles is to me the most natural thing
in the world. But what are outer mir
acles compared with the wondrous mir
acle of transformation which he can and
does work in poor, weak, sinful human
hearts ? Christ in us, and we in Christ,
and the immortality of love and worship,
these are the vital things. It is this
co-relation of the human and the Christ-
like which has made him the Redeemer
of men. I have no patience with carp
ing criticisms, while the essential, vital,
redemptive truth is wholly overlooked.
But there is nothing coercive in Chris
tianity, no fettering of the best and
highest thought of which we are capa
ble, no overriding of our common-sense
or manly freedom of thought and utter
ance. It chains us, not by force, but
by attractiveness. It subdues us be
cause we yearn to be subdued by its
power. The Divine in us reaches up
ward, and the divine above reaches
downward, and the two mingle, and that
is a living faith in a living Christ."
To have omitted all the punctuation
194 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
points from the above quotation would
better have represented the rapidity and
breathlessness of its utterance. The
exact words that he used are not
quoted, but the thoughts are substan
tially recorded.
Much more was said, but to the same
purpose. Nothing simpler or more un
assuming could be imagined. Two stu
dents at ease in their own room could
not have discussed any subject more
freely. I think that Dr. Brooks was
incapable "of talking down" to any
human being. He was always the
friend, the modest counsellor, the
affectionate elder brother.
The influence of such a man at Har
vard was tremendous and was much
needed. That intellectual paralysis
and moral dry-rot which some of its
wretched victims complacently style
"Harvard indifference" could not en
dure the presence and inspiration of a
man like Phillips Brooks. One of his
last efforts was an appeal to educate
young men to do something. He
lamented that so many delayed enter
ing upon the fight of life until they had
passed the first flush of youthful ardor.
Do something, he adjured them, do
something, do something ! It was his
last appeal to young men.
Many who visited him in the parlor of
PHILLIPS BROOKS AND CANON FARRAR.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 195
the Wadsworth House carried away a
lasting impression of reverence and admi
ration. He was practical as well as spir
itual. One student came to him with a
practical difficulty a controversy in
which he was engaged with some other
students.
The facts were stated. " What shall
I do about it ? " inquired the student.
" Weed yourself out of the matter for
a moment, and then see how the case
stands. After that, if you are still in
doubt I shall be glad to give you any
advice I can."
No further advice was needed.
Another student, to whom Dr. Brooks
quoted Christ for guidance in an affair
of every-day life, hinted that this was a
practical matter. The great preacher
looked at him a moment, and an
amused twinkle came into his eye.
" I have always regarded Christ as
an eminently practical man," said he
mildly.
The student retired with some food
for thought.
Dr. Brooks was not lacking in humor.
It is said, I know not on what author
ity, that in lecturing before a class of
theological students one day he con
fessed that making pastoral calls was a
difficult matter, requiring much tact,
and often giving rise to perplexing situ-
196 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ations. Fond mothers, he said, would
sometimes thrust their babies upon his
notice, and he felt that he must compli
ment the little one or grieve the fond
parent. But one s stock of praises soon
runs out, and there are dangerous possi
bilities of invidious discrimination in
praises. It is not always easy to think
up just the right thing on the spur of
the moment, especially if the baby hap
pens to be unprepossessing. He had
adopted one simple formula. When
the baby was produced, he looked at it
and exclaimed, " Well, that is a baby ! "
This was strictly true in every case, and
he never knew it to fail of giving satis
faction.
It is fitting that Harvard men should
bear the bier of the loyal son of Harvard
who did so much to show his filial grati
tude. His place will not be filled. Such
men are not found often. His influ
ence will be long in fading from the
minds and hearts of Harvard men. The
serene yet enthusiastic nature of the
man will be an eternal legacy to the
university.
SECRET OF HIS SUCCESS.
X.
SECRET OF HIS SUCCESS.
UNLESS it bring with it a sense of
keen personal pain to the individual
mind, the death of no man, however
great, is genuinely mourned. How fares
it with each one in person ? Is the
world distinctly the poorer and more
prosaic to you yourself for this death ?
Has it left you bereft of a great inspira
tion to joy, love, and hope ? Apart from
the distinct, sorrowing yes ! to these
questions the yes ! spoken out of tens
of thousands of sincere hearts all in
vain will the newspapers drape their col
umns in black and call upon the entire
community to mourn. The community
as a community, like the corporation as
a corporation, has no heart to mourn
with. It can issue the command for
splendid public obsequies, and bring out
trains of hired mourners in crape, but it
199
200 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
cannot cause one genuine tear to flow.
Only the tears of each separate man or
woman of a mighty host swell into the
flood which attests as reality the grief
of the actual community these sorrowers
themselves aggregate into.
When the intelligence of the death
of Bishop Brooks was suddenly flashed
out on the bulletin-boards, it caused a
quick, startling arrest on the busy streets.
Men and women spoke with bated breath ;
their voices were choked with emotion.
" We have lost him ; we have lost him ;
we shall never see or hear him again on
earth ! " was the universal exclamation.
Not one of a thousand of these men
and women had ever spoken a word with
the great preacher, or ever expected to.
But none the less the sense of personal
loss, the sense of something priceless
gone out of their individual lives, was
sadly there. Where, then, lay the secret
of all this?
A great deal of vague and profitless
talk is indulged in over what is termed
the quality of "personal magnetism" in
a man. Here is one of those accepted
phrases that are made to take the place
of adequate thought, and to explain
without the need of explanation. Will
not the currents of the magnetic battery
cause the nerves to quiver and the mus
cles to contract, even in a dead body ?
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 2OI
Well, in the same way one man is mag
netic, while another is not ! Why not
rather say one man has fervid passion,
and another not ; one man glow of hu
manity, and another not ; one man a
torrent of thought, emotion, imagination,
and divine vision, and another not. No
sham fire ever warmed a man, no painted
food ever nourished him. Mass and
momentum of being alone never threw
vast throngs into sympathetic vibration
with itself.
"The tragedy of life," says Emerson,
" lies in the poverty of human endow
ment." Yes, in the poverty of human
endowment, in the sadly self-confessed
reality that men and women in the aver
age have such puny bodies, such scant
affections, such feeble grasp of thought,
such torpid imaginations, that nothing
inspiring is begotten of them here
lies the tragedy of human life. And
yet there goes along with this self-con
sciousness in countless minds an un
speakable yearning for a richer and
diviner experience. Ah ! if they could
love more ardently, think more vigor
ously, see more glorious visions of faith
and cheer. For lack of those their daily
round is so largely a dreamy treadmill
to them. In sad depression they re
spond to Tennyson s words :
2O2 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
" Tis life, of which our nerves are scant,
Tis life, not death, for which we pant,
More life, and fuller, this we want."
Then in some happy hour these nerve-
scant men and women find themselves
brought into contact with a battery of
life like that which was coiled away in
Bishop Brooks. The superb body, with
such tides of ruddy blood circulating
through every artery and vein, the great
brain,teeming with such freighted wealth
of ideas, the immense emotional power
flowing out like a fiery lava flood, the
splendid spiritual imagination glorifying
with a celestial "light that never was
on sea or land" the commonest details
of life, the capacity for breathless ado
ration which makes the presence of God
or Christ ecstatic passion to him
here is the living, breathing image of
what every poor, halting, half-made shred
of humanity yearns for in his own heart
of hearts. And the grand, unconscious
man, wholly lost in his divine message,
believes in it for them all, however
narrow now in intellect or cramped in
spirit. Health and vigor ! Whole
oceans of it are in God, in store for all
who seek it. Range of mind ! Not the
high seraph s mighty thought, who
countless years his God has sought, can
faintly image forth what lies before each
soul made in the image of the eternal
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 2O3
reason. Love ! It will flood in, tide on
tide, as revelation after revelation of the
Divine Fatherhood breaks through eter
nity upon each passionate heart.
No wonder the auditors of such a man
are swept away. He is doing for them
what they cannot do for themselves
charging them with the fervor of his
own love, opening out to them his own
glorious vistas, lifting them up on the
wings of his own soaring imagination.
And, best of all, he is doing it by
quickening into action their own latent
religious powers, by bringing into con
sciousness their own hidden spiritual
endowment. Apart from the contagion
of this great glowing man of being,
they may not be able to keep up of
themselves this sense of exaltation.
But how great a thing do they feel it,
what a beatitude never to be forgotten,
to have been even for once in a lifetime
lifted into such a higher realm of con
sciousness, and so made alive to what
there really is within their being, which,
under more favoring conditions than
here on earth, God may lift to higher
reaches !
This, then, and this alone, explains
the sense of personal loss, of genuine
private grief with which thousands re
ceived the intelligence of the death of
Bishop Brooks. It was the grateful,
204 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
unselfish tribute of the consciously halt
and maimed and blind to one created so
much more fully and grandly than them
selves in the image of God ; to one who
all unconscious of it himself, was yet
living prophecy to them of what, in the
endless resources of God, shall be the
final inheritance of all struggling souls.
IN ENGLISH EYES.
XL
IN ENGLISH EYES. 1
TN writing these words about my
* friend Dr. Phillips Brooks, I shall not
pander to the curiosity which hungers
for personal details, but shall mention
those large and sunny qualities of heart
and mind which make Dr. Brooks one
of the most enviable and one of the
most widely loved of men.
He was born in Boston on December
13, 1835, and is therefore fifty-five years
old. He went to Harvard University,
where he graduated in 1855 ; and,
after taking his degree, he studied at
a divinity school in Virginia, and was
ordained in 1859. From 1859 to 1869
he labored in Philadelphia, and partly
as rector of the principal church in that
i This chapter, written by the Venerable FREDERICK
W. FARRAR, D.D., Archdeacon of Westminster, appeared
In an English journal for young men in 1891.
207
2O8 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
city. In 1869 he was called to Boston,
and for twenty-two years he has been
rector of Trinity Church, in the city of
his birth. The church is by far the
finest ecclesiastical building in America,
and was designed by an American
architect of genius, Mr. Richardson,
whose premature death was universally
lamented. The church holds upward
of two thousand people ; and, as Boston
is considered to be the most intellectual
city in America, it is probable that the
congregation to which Dr. Brooks has
preached for so many years is repre
sentative of the best culture of the
great Western Hemisphere. The mem
bers of that congregation are devotedly
attached to their eminent pastor. It is
undoubtedly the case, as Professor
Bryce observes in his great work on
America, that the average American
clergyman is better off than the average
English clergyman. Any rector who,
like Dr. Brooks, has won the attach
ment of his hearers, is sure to be the
frequent recipient of such generous
acts of kindness as are exceedingly rare
in England. A few years ago, thinking
that he looked a little tired, some mem
bers of his parish met together, and at
once begged of him to leave them for a
year, and to travel in Europe and India,
without once thinking of them; they
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 209
offered to pay all his expenses for the
year, and also to pay and provide for
his substitute during his absence. The
generous and noble offer was, I believe,
at once declined, except so far as leave
of absence was concerned ; for Dr.
Brooks has always been in comfortable
circumstances, and is still a bachelor. I
told him that in England a clergyman
might be worn out with overwork, and
his face assume a deathly pallor, and
that yet, in thousands of parishes, it
would not occur to those for whom he
was spending and being spent, to come
forward with such spontaneous consid-
erateness. "Oh," he replied, laughing,
" it was only because they were tired
of me, and wanted a little change ! "
When I was in America I was twice
the guest of Dr. Phillips Brooks in his
beautiful and delightful home in Claren
don Street, Boston. That home is full
of objects of interest which he has col
lected in his travels, and is replete with
comforts ; but the infinite charm of its
hospitality depends on the unaffected
kindness, the rich culture, and the never-
flagging brightness of spirit which char
acterize the host himself.
Surrounded by admirers, he is wholly
unspoiled by their adulations. His in
vincible manliness rises superior to all
mere flattery, while he enjoys as any
2IO PHILLIPS BROOKS.
good man may well enjoy all honest
and sincere appreciation. Dearer to
him than the applause of thousands is
the undying attachment of a small circle
of intimate friends ; and no one who has
met him in the familiar intercourse of
this happy circle is likely to forget the
Sunday evenings which he has spent in
the rectory of Holy Trinity, Boston.
But all America knows and loves and
is proud of Phillips Brooks. I travelled
with him to various large towns, and it
was delightful to see the enthusiasm
which his presence evoked in every
audience ; for his face and figure are uni
versally known throughout the United
States. He is a man of magnificent
physique, at least six feet four high,
and of proportionate mould. Ordinary
men look mere children beside him.
Whenever I appeared with him on any
platform, there was sure to be a call for
him, and this was most of all the case
when he visited any university ; for
young men usually know a man when
they see him, and Phillips Brooks is
every inch a man. There is nothing
artificial about him.
The most cultivated and the ablest
preacher in America, he is wholly free
from self-consciousness, the artificial
mannerism and the petty pomposities
which mark the commonplace ecclesias-
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
211
tic in every country. He always acts
and speaks like a man among men, and
the youths of America, to whatever
religious denomination, they may belong,
recognize in him a man who feels a
deep sympathy with them in all their
temptations and difficulties, and who
has set them an example of that stain
less chivalry and large-hearted tolerance
which marks the* true gentleman and
the true Christian.
If there be any living man whose
mere presence seems to dispel all acri
mony and cynicism, it is he. He enjoys
life with all the heartiness of a boy, and
in this respect he resembles Dr. Nor
man McLeod. He has travelled widely,
carrying everywhere a quick power of
observation and a receptive spirit. Be
fore he dies he hopes to have seen at
least something of most regions of this
fair world. The heat of summer and
e arly autumn in the American cities is
so intense that the great majority of the
worshippers in the Episcopal churches of
wealthy districts and the poor are
mainly Roman Catholics spend some
months among the mountains or by the
sea. Many churches are closed, or have
fewer services for an inappreciable frag
ment of their usual congregations.
This is the reason why American cler
gymen can travel far more than we can.
212 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
In any ordinary gathering of a hundred
English clergymen not more than two
would have visited America; in any
ordinary gathering of a hundred Ameri
can clergy and I met such gatherings
frequently there would scarcely be
one who had not visited England. Few,
however, have had the delights of such
extensive journeys as have fallen to the
lot of Dr. Phillips Brooks.
Dr. Brooks, like Robert Browning,
"believes in the soul and is very sure
of God." He has the keenest interest
in the rising generation, and envies
them the share which they will have, as
"the trustees of posterity," in a future
which he not only views without alarm,
but with the most glowing spirit of
optimism. He thinks that the progress
of the human race, in all things beauti
ful and noble, has all the certainty of a
law. While he has rejoiced as it has
been given few to rejoice, in all the rich
beauties of a useful and honored life,
his one regret is that the brevity of life
will prevent him from witnessing the
beauty of those far horizons, which, as
he believes, will unfold themselves be
fore the happy eyes of those who are
young now. The age through which
we and he have lived has been a very
wonderful age ; but he thinks that its
wonders are but preludes to those thai
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 21 3
lie just beyond the entrance door of the
age which is to come.
Sympathy for all that is human, sunny
geniality, unquenchable hopefulness, de
light in all that is good and beautiful, a
quick sense of humor, a large breadth
of views, and the difficult combination
of intense personal convictions with
absolute respect and tolerance for the
views of others, are the distinguishing
features of his intellectual and spiritual
character. They give to him the per
sonal fascination which not even his
opponents can resist. The High Church
party in America look on his views
with scant patience, and he has had to
bear the brunt of their bitter criticisms ;
yet when one of the Cowley Fathers
was elected to a bishopric, he found a
supporter in Dr. Brooks, who knows
that opinions must differ, and that there
is room for diversity of methods and
views in the divine charity of the
Church of God. He is one of those
man to whom the Americans apply the
epithet " magnetic," and his very recent
election to the bishopric of Massachu
setts was received with a perfect storm
of enthusiasm by men of all shades of
thought.
In England he was first heard in
Westminster Abbey and in St. Marga
ret s church. In St. Margaret s many
214 PHILLIPS BROOKS.
of the first men in the kingdom came
to hear him. He has since been invited
to preach before the Queen and at both
the Universities. Many of those who
have listened to his large utterances
must have felt that if we had even four
or five such men as he in the Church of
England, the atmosphere of her eccles
iastical assemblies would be more sunny
and less suffocating than it sometimes
tends to become. But I cannot recall
the name of a single divine among us,
of any rank, who either equals him as a
preacher, or has the large sympathies
and the rich endowments which distin
guish him as a man.
As a preacher, he is marked by a cer
tain fervid impetuosity, which reminds
the hearer of an express train sweeping
all minor obstacles out of its path in its
headlong rush. His utterance is ex
ceptionally rapid. He speaks many
more words in a minute than our most
rapid orators, and reduces reporters to
absolute despair. This is so far a de
fect that it is exceedingly difficult for
the hearer to keep pace with the se
quence of his thoughts, conveyed, as
they often are, in language of great
beauty. The term " popular preacher"
is mixed up with so many connotations
of superficiality, of effeminacy, of van
ity, of emptiness, of verbosity, that any
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
one to whom it is applied may well re
gard it as a term of humiliating insult.
But Dr. Brooks is most popular as a
preacher, and yet has gained his popu
larity by qualities the very opposite of
those which are supposed to attract con
gregations of young ladies and enrap
tured devotees. He is thoughtful, plain
spoken, fearless, essentially manful, and
entirely alien from the petty tricks and
intrigues which are too often visible in
the favorites and fuglemen of parties.
I have no space to enter into his style
or his theology ; but if my readers wish
to be brought face to face with teaching
which is profoundly and genuinely reli
gious, with no trace of artificial scholas
ticism, or the phrases and shibboleths
and half-truths of party theology ; if we
want to know something of Christianity
as Christ taught it, before it was cor
rupted by a thousand alien influences
of sacerdotalism and ecclesiasticism, let
them read the books of Dr. Phillips
Brooks on " Tolerance," and on the
" Influence of Jesus," or his three vol
umes of sermons preached in English
and American churches. Such books
may serve to sweep away many cobwebs,
and to show them that, as the great di
vine, Benjamin Whichcot, said, "Reli
gion means, above all, a good mind and
a good life."
TO PHILLIPS BROOKS.
ON HIS ELECTION TO THE VACANT SEE OF
MASSACHUSETTS.
Noluimus Episcopari te :
" Shepherd and bishop of our souls ! " we said
When men gave thy name for the vacant see,
"Thou shalt not leave thy people!" yet thou
went st.
So long had we abundantly been fed
On goodly pasturage, and snugly fenced
In our own fold, that selfishness was bred;
Like those in Jesh-urun we kicked against
The course that called thee to a broader field;
This was our error, for a power like thine
Should not be bounded by one flock and sealed
To special service; therefore we resign
Our claim, and like good Christians cheerly cry
" Give thee good bishopric ! but not good -by."
T. W. PARSONS.
MAY i, 1891.
CONTENTS.
EDUCATION
THE STATE
WAR . 13
THE CHURCH 27
SCEPTICISM 49
LIFE 55
1HE true future does not re
peat but enlarges the pres
ent. And every present
which accepts this law ac
cepts with it its appointed work, to
gather the stones and the timbers for
the temples which the future is to
build. It makes this the principle on
which it proceeds in training a new
generation. It disciplines the child
with reverence, as destined to a com-
pleter life than the parent. It tran
scends selfishness, and prejudice, and
jealousy, and, with a large and lov
ing hope, a complete faith in human
progress, it imagines no perfection for
CO
inspiration and Crutb.
itself except this relative one of perfectly
filling its place in the gradual perfection
of the whole.
You will see how this truth, which
makes the teacher in this great world-
school always recognize that the scholar
is to have larger work than his to do,
will make all education of necessity a
profound and thorough thing. It insists
on teaching principles and truths, and is
not satisfied with just imposing forms.
WE look back over history, and we
see the same sight always. Wherever any
age has given its successor nothing but
forms and institutions ready-made, the
new age has not merely made no ad-
BDucatton. 3
vance upon the old ; it has invariably
shrunk and shriveled till it lived a life
too small even to fill the narrow limits
which its father claimed. But wherever
any age has given its child an education
in any vital truths, the child has always
taken those truths, developed them into
an effectiveness and built them into a
beauty that the father never guessed.
THE Jew was so used to the sublime
thought of human life held fast in the
hands of the Divine authority, shaped
into gradual rectitude by the continual
pressure of command and prohibition ;
the decalogue so supremely represented
to him the first thought of religion, that
his prayer for a new generation s relig
ious life touched of necessity first of all
4 Inspiration anfc
upon the moral side, the keeping of the
commandments of the Lord. And here,
I take it, the Jew simply conceives the
course of all successful culture.
THE order of the Testaments is not an
accidental, but an essential order. Cal
vary, in its idea, in its divine conception
was "from the foundation," long before
Sinai ; but in man s apprehension of
them, Sinai antedated Calvary by fifteen
hundred years. The conscience must
bow itself to the supreme " Thou shalt "
and "Thou shalt not" of authority, be
fore grace can enter in to win the heart
with the gentle persuasiveness of its
"Believe and live." John the Baptist
must preach repentance before Christ
can proclaim regeneration.
je&ucation. 5
GOD wastes no history. In every age
and every land He is working for the
elucidation of some moral truth, some
riper culture for the character of man.
State.
GOVERNMENT is an incor
porated, an embodied truth.
Get any high idea about it,
get beyond the thought that
a nation is just a multitude of men
who have happened to come together
in a certain country, and who have
bargained among themselves not to
hurt each other, not to rob and kill
each other, and you must come to
this, that every nation is a divine utter
ance before the world of certain prin
ciples, of providence, of brotherhood,
of justice, of the divine and human lives.
The highest conception of the state, as
of the world, is that it is an uttered
thought of God, a certain colossal utter
ance of truth.
8 inspiration an& Grutb.
THE healthy state, like the healthy
human body, can tolerate nothing within
it that will not become part and parcel
of itself, ready to share its fortunes,
ready to do its work. A scholarship
which tries to live in the state and yet
not be of it, setting itself apart, fastidious,
critical, captious, however thorough or
elegant it may be, is mischievous. The
politician who lives the life to which all
politicians tend, of isolation from the
common public interests, thinking that
the state and government are things for
him to use, and not that he is their
instrument; that they exist for him, not
he for them, he is a terrible curse
always. May God rid us of him speed-
ily.
A GREAT public life moving healthily
State. 9
will warn us of any coming dangers, as
the ocean itself rings the storm-bell that
tells of its own tumults.
THE time has . . . passed when a Sun
day-school book need count it unworthy
of its pages to help some boy in the city
or on the prairies to gather up, with the
love of the Lord who is to save him, a
love of the land he may be called to die
for, and of all the great race to which,
if he lives at all worthily, his life is to be
given.
I PLEAD with you for all that makes
strong citizens. First, clear convictions,
deep, careful, patient study of the gov
ernment under which we live, until you
not merely believe it is the best in all
10 f nspiration anO Grutb.
the world, but know why you believe.
And then a clear conscience, as clear in
private interests, as much ashamed of
public as of private sin, as ready to hate
and rebuke and vote down corruption in
the state, in your own party, as you
would be in your own store or church ;
as ready to bring the one as the other
to the judgment of a living God. And
then unselfishness: an earnest and ex
alted sense that you are for the land,
and not alone the land for you ; some
thing of the self-sacrifice which they
showed who died for us from 61 to 65.
And then activity : the readiness to wake
and watch and do a citizen s work un
tiringly, counting it as base not to vote
at an election, not to work against a bad
official, or to work for a good one, as it
would have been to shirk a battle in the
war. Such strong citizenship let there
State.
be among us ; such knightly doing of
our duties on the field of peace.
A STATE is not merely an idea, or an
accident, or a machine, but is a being
with the privilege of force.
SOMEWHERE, sometimes, it will assert
itself strongly in the action of the world.
Busied mostly within itself, in its own
self-regulation, in the development of
its own resources, and in the extension
of its influence through the peaceful
machineries of commerce and negotia
tion, there must be in it a power to
enforce itself at the call of justice upon
the unwilling action either of its own
12 Inspiration an&
subjects who separate themselves in re
bellion from it, or against other nations
who wantonly set themselves in the way
of its just growth.
SINCE truth lives in outward struc
tures, and embodies itself in govern
ments, it has not merely its spiritual
relations to wills, but its physical rela
tions to actions. It is hindered not only
by unconverted hearts, but by armed
rebellions. And so it has a right and
need to say not merely to the will
" Believe," but to the action " Submit."
It has not merely its higher functions of
persuasion, but its lower functions, too,
of force.
Mar,
H, how alike all history seems !
How old, and yet eternally
how new, these elementary
emotions are ! How the
first instincts that make men fight for
freedom, and good government, and
truth, last on from age to age ! old and
yet ever young, like the eternal skies,
the ever self-renewing trees, the gray
and child-like sea !
DISPERSING armies and hanging trai
tors, imperatively as justice and necessity
may demand them both, are not the kill
ing of the spirit out of which they
sprang.
03)
1 4 Inspiration and Crutb.
IT is not the least of the debts that
we owe to our Union soldiers that their
very graves are vocal that though dead
they speak to us still.
THE men who from the bloody shore
of the Rebellion embarked into the other
life have left their foot-prints inefface
able upon the margin where they planted
them, and made it recognizable and dear
forever.
IT is because in them, in what they
were and what they did, the best of our
national character shone out, that these
soldiers have won a dearness and a per-
Idar. 15
manent memory that do not belong
merely to their personality. The nation
honors in them its truest representatives.
The real life of the land sees in them the
ideal life which is the true outcome of its
institutions. They were the flower of its
principles, and so it sprinkles its memo
rial flowers on their graves.
IT was a noble gift of Providence that
in one man [Washington] should be
comprised and pictured, for the dullest
eyes to see, the majesty and meaning of
the struggle that gave our nation birth.
OH, the mysterious power of a death
for a noble cause ! The life is truly
given. It passes out of the dying body
into the cause, which lives anew.
1 6 Ungpiratton an& Ucutb.
WHEN the great ship had hardly
rounded into port; while, standing on
the shore of peace, we felt the solid earth
still rocking under our feet with the re
membered heaving of the sea, they who
had watched and labored for her safety
through the nights and storms out on
mid-ocean, one by one, as if their work
was done, began to pass to their reward,
and to what other tasks we cannot know,
awaiting them in other worlds. What
have they left behind them, they and the
humbler dead whom votive monuments
and tender hearts remember still in every
town and hamlet of their land? Not
only what they did, not only even what
they were, but new tasks like their own
for us who stay behind them. They did
not merely clear the field of treason.
By the same labor they built up a new
possibility of national character and life.
War. 17
They were like the men who, in these
stony pastures of Andover, clear the
rough field of stones and build the gray
wall that is to surround and shelter it,
out of the same material, at the same
time By purer social life, by finer
aspirations, by more unselfishness, by
heartier hatred of corruption, let us be
worthy of them, and in our quiet duties
build the true memorial to the characters
of those who found their duty in the
camp, the prison and the field, and where
they found it did it even to the death.
They saw that their country was like a
precious vase of rarest porcelain, price
less while it was whole, valueless if it
was broken into fragments. What they
died to keep whole, may we in our seve
ral places live to keep holy ! So may
we be worthy of them.
l & Unsptration anD Gru*b.
As the merchant, the scholar, the
statesman, the diplomatist represent the
other elements of power in the state, by
which she impresses her will upon other
wills ; so the soldier represents the ele
ment of force by which she must be
ready to rule action without ruling will
when the clear need shall come.
A MERCIFUL Providence kept our first
history from becoming a military history.
And if we ask how Providence did this
good work for us, the answer can be only
in the way in which God made the
thought and the devotion of the time so
strong that force was always kept in its
true place, their servant.
19
His [the Puritan soldier s] was the
great, homely, intelligible utterance of
strength, ringing out clear and sharp in
the midst of the often thin and over-
subtle theologizings of the time, as the
dazzling and bewildered atmosphere
compresses and discharges its electri
city in the piercing lightning and the
pealing thunder.
WHEN we look at Washington, we are
at once struck by seeing how in him,
who represented as a military man the
force of the new ideas which were at
work, we have also as a thinker, as a
statesman and political philosopher, the
clearest example of the reason of which
that force was the expression. Often
the two are disunited. One man does
the thinking, another man does the fight-
20 Inspiration anD tTrutb.
ing. One man develops the idea in the
closet, and another makes it forcible
upon the field. Rarely have the two so
met in one man. Washington was at
once the clearest thinker and the most
effective soldier of our Revolutionary
struggle.
NEVER was there a fighting-man with
less of the purely military passion. He
was the armed citizen, armed for a cause
that belonged to the very essence of his
citizenship. When that cause had tri
umphed on the field of battle, he laid
down his arms and was the unarmed
citizen, the citizen, the same man still
contending for precisely the same cause
on the field of statesmanlike debate for
which he had fought at Trenton and
suffered at Valley Forge.
21
TRUTH in her armor is apt to be a
very clumsy giant. Men will forget or
deny what must be our belief all through,
that the divine mission of force implies
that force has no mission save for divine
tasks, none for the mere brutalities of
selfishness, or ambition, or jealousy, or
worldly rage; none for the mere punc
tilios of national dignity.
FORCE has no right here in the world
except as it is simply truth in armor.
THE presence of the distinct military
element, the ruler of, or the slave of, but
not a part of the nation, not bound up
in the nation s fortune, nor sharing the
nation s feeling, not springing from the
Inspiration anfc Grutb.
nation s heart, this is what has made the
weakness, and at last brought the death
of many a noble nation, both of the old
and of the modern times. May God
save us from it forever.
IT is not necessary to excuse all our
people s early or later treatment of the
Indian. From earliest to latest from
the Pilgrim times down to the Indian
policies of these last days there is too
much that never can be excused.
WE are suffering to-day [June 5, 1864],
whatever be the secondary causes, for
the violation of two of God s great moral
laws, the law of the sacredness of govern
ment and the law of the brotherhood of
War. 2 3
man. Gradually, grandly, from between
these fearful wheels that drip with blood,
are being ground forth into shapes which
men s eyes, quick-sighted with anxiety,
must see, these two eternal ordinances
of God, that government has a divine
right to be honored, and that man has a
divine right to be free. Those two
truths, burned into the very fibre of our
people as they walk the fire, are to be
the great moral acquisition of American
character.
Is there one of us that can look about
him and think without a shudder of an
other generation of our people working
out this same education that we are go
ing through ? What ! all these fearful
years again? Again these battles that
the eye cannot count or the heart re-
24 Inspiration anD rutb.
member? Again this waste of precious
blood, this bitter hatred, these wild
blazings-up of the devilish in man, this
land with State on State where the har
vests find no room to grow for the
crowded graves? Must it all come
again, this dark Egyptian Passover-
night of history, wherein God leads the
bondmen out, and, in all the stricken
land that held them slaves, leaves in
their deliverance " not a house where
there is not one dead " ? We have no
right to leave a chance behind us that
this work will have to be done again.
But it must be, unless we can bring out
of it all, clearly and definitely and forever
settled, and lay down before the next age
of Americans, the truths of national au
thority and human liberty, to be the
materials out of which it is to build the
future.
War. 25
A TRUTH starts on its way across the
world, sent by God to possess the world ;
and that truth meets its obstacles, ob
stinate and resisting men. It lays itself
against the wills of those men. By
every method of approach, through the
affections and the conscience and the
sense of beauty, and in every other way,
it tries to get power over those wills and
make them yield to it. It tries to rule the
will and so to reach the actions which
will be spontaneously obedient when the
will has once submitted. It largely suc
ceeds. That is the success it most de
sires. But when its efforts of persuasion
and conviction have failed to remove any
one obstinate enemy out of its path,
what then? Surely, unless physical
force be of a wholly immoral nature, we
must believe that God has so arranged
his universe that this beleaguered and
26 f nspiration and
4lf
hindered truth may claim the powers
that can compel the action even when
they cannot turn the will, and force out
of its way an enemy who will not turn
into a friend.
Cburcb*
j O ! it dawns upon you that the
Church is not to be made,
that the Church is here al
ready. In the aggregate of
all this Christly life you have the
Church of Christ, just as truly as in
the aggregate of human existence you
have humanity. One has no more
to be made than the other. Both exist
in their components.
THE Romish idea is that the Church
thinks and struggles and receives help
and revelation. The Protestant idea is
that thought and struggle and help and
light come to the Man.
28 Inspiration an& tttutb.
THE living souls must go before the
living Church, which has no life except in
them. . . . Churches live in their souls.
O, the old struggles, so endless and so
fruitless, that history has to show, of men
and times that tried to keep a Church
alive without caring for the life of souls ;
men and times which seem to have
strangely fancied that there was a certain
power of vitality in the very Church it
self, so that every soul on earth might
cease to receive inflow of Christ and yet
somehow the Church live on ! It is the
danger of the ecclesiastical spirit. It is
the danger for all Churchmen and all
Church times to fear.
THE Church, whose purpose in being
is merely to feed her children s life and
Cburcb. 29
so increase her own, may harm the very
life that she was meant to cultivate.
This is nothing strange. Nothing is so
likely to stop a stream of water as
the broken or displaced fragments of
the very earthen pipe through which it
was meant to flow.
IF a Church, in any way, by hindering
the free play of human thoughtfulness
upon religious things, by clothing with
mysterious reverence, and so shutting
out from the region of thought and study,
acts and truths which can be thoroughly
used only as they are growingly under
stood, by limiting within hard and mi
nute and invariable doctrinal statements
the variety of the relations of the human
experience to God, if, in any such way,
3 Inspiration and
a Church hinders at all the free inflow of
every new light which God is waiting to
give to the souls of men as fast as they
are ready to receive it, just so far she
blinds and wrongs her children s intelli
gence and weakens her own vitality.
This is the suicide of Dogmatism.
IF, again, a Church, in any way, sets
any technical command of hers to stand
so across the path, that a command of
God cannot get free access to the will of
any of the least of all God s people ; if
there be, as there has been again and
again, a system of ecclesiastical morality
different from the eternal morality which
lies above the Church, between the soul
and God, a morality which hides some
eternal duties and winks at some eternal
Cburcb. 3 1
sins, just so far as there is any such ob
liquity turning aside the straight, bright
ray that is darting right from the throne
of the God-soul to the will of the Man-
soul, just so far the Church maims and
wrongs her children s consciences, and
weakens her own vitality. This is the
suicide of Corruption.
AGAIN, if the symbols of the Church,
which ought to convey God s love to
man, become so hard that the love does
not find its way through them, and they
stand as splendid screens between the
Soul and the Love, or have such a pos
itive character of their own, so far forget
their simple duty of pure transparency
and mere transmission, that they send
the Love down to the Soul colored with
3 2 ffnspfration an> Grutb.
themselves, formalized and artificial; if
the Church dares either to limit into
certain material channels, or to bind to
certain forms of expression, that love of
God which is as spiritual and as free as
God, then yet again she is false to her
duty, she binds and wrongs her children s
loving hearts, and once again she weak
ens her own vitality. This is the suicide
of Formalism.
THE time must come when Religion
shall no longer make artificial virtues
and vices of her own, and when with more
unsparing tongue she shall detect and
praise or denounce those virtues and
vices which are essential and eternally
the same. Then a thousand rills of life
will be open into her which are closed
to-day, and she will live a thousand-fold.
ftbe Cburcb. 33
OF the essential life of the Church, of
the truly living Church, what can we say
but this, that it is that which most com
pletely feels that it was made for men,
not men for it ; which, therefore, lives
only as it lives in them ; which strives for
nothing but to open more and more the
channels of life from Christ to them?
In such a church and such a church
alone can be real unity. To be full of
such a care for, and spirit of servantship
to, the human soul, is the only power
that can keep our own Church one in
the midst of all her distractions. No
outer bond of history or government can
permanently hold her. Only this com
mon purpose, freely working in the
Church at large, can keep the true or
ganic unity of life, which is the only
unity worth having. The live pome
granate holds itself together with no
34 Unsptration an> Grutb.
string tied round it. The dead pome
granate cracks and breaks. No tight
est string can hold it. The Living
Church of truth, obedience, and spiritual
love, will guard its own integrity. The
disintegration of error, corruption or
formalism, what compactest system can
withstand !
THE Church does not become the
world s savior by furnishing it with a
powerful police.
THE true relations between moral law
and religious life are certainly not so
difficult as men have made them. Moral
action is, in one sense, the end ; that is,
it is the necessary result of religion, not
its final purpose. In another sense,
moral law is the means by which the
Cburcb. 35
religious impulse steadies and supports
itself, and mounts to higher spiritual
heights. In this last sense, it is the very
highest order of machinery, but it is
machinery still. So that even if the
Church were, what she has tried to be
often, and has sometimes been to some
extent, the great Reformer, breaking
down sins, turning wrongs into rights,
ruling men s actions everywhere ; glori
ous as such a sight would be, it would
not be the Church communicating life.
She would be purifying and cultivating
her own life. She would be making the
world ready for the life she had to give
it, but not giving it yet.
WONDERFULLY adapted to be the
channel of the highest devotion, the
3 6 Inspiration and Gtutb.
deepest utterance of faith, submission
and repentance, the very perfect ma
chinery of Christian living, the Church
system is dead without some power of
Christian life.
So again of every sacred rite which,
through the senses, opens a way for
power to reach the heart. It is ma
chinery still. The sensuous impression
may make the soul receptive, no doubt
it does, to some of the more external
messages of God. But the impression
itself is not soul-life. It is not a new
birth, though its frightened or ecstatic
shiver is easily enough mistaken for an
other Genesis.
tTbe Cburcb. 37
WHO of us has not seen, nay, who of
us in the deader moments of his parish
life has not done, Church work enough
Sunday-schools, Bible-classes, night-
schools, parish visiting, mothers meet
ings and reading-rooms and all that
which he knew was only the mechanical
whirling of the spindles by hand, with
the vital fires utterly gone out in the
furnaces below.
WHAT shall we say of Preaching?
Only that if men can preach, and preach
the very truth of Christ, year after year,
and yet souls, thirsty for the water of life,
sit at the dry mouths of their well-built
channels and thirst in vain for help and
salvation, then it must be that the mere
telling the Truth as the mind can under-
3 8 flnspf ration anD ftrutb.
stand it and the lips can speak it, is not
necessarily the communication of the
Gospel Life.
THE Church . . . needs more of the
Lord ; more knowledge, more obedience,
more love of Jesus Christ. Unless we
get that, and make that bear upon men s
hearts and souls, we may chant our own
sweetest praises in their ears, and our
appeal for sympathy will be only very
piteous. It will sound to the world as
the plaintive cries of the Church do
sound to many men under their windows,
like the beggar s violin, which neither
claims tribute by the right of a gov
ernor, nor wins acknowledgment by the
skill of an artist, but only extorts charity
by the forlornness of the mendicant.
Cburcb.
39
IF behind muscles, and blood, and
brain, you know that there is a vital
force, which utters itself through them,
but which is another thing than they,
which would live even if they were dead,
then it is not strange to say that behind
all morality, and order, and rites, and
work, and preaching, there is a vital
power of the Church, which utters itself
through them, but which is another thing
than they, without which they were dead,
but which might live though every one
of them should die. That life-power is
Christ always entering into the Church,
as truth, and guidance, and love ; and
always passing out from the Church into
humanity by the otherwise dead func
tions, vitalized by Him, of teaching and
government, and active work.
4 Inspiration an& TTrutb.
As in the world of science men fear
materialism which would crowd spirit
and vital force out of the universe, and
make all life exist and spread itself in
the mechanical arrangement and re
arrangement of material atoms ; so there
is always fear, and never more fear than
now, of an ecclesiastical materialism,
which shall make little of spiritual force,
and try by the mechanical arrangement
and re-arrangement of ecclesiastical
atoms, of dioceses, and conventions,
and canons, and rubrics, and the like,
to make the dead world live the life of
God. Such a materialism turns ma
chineries from being the homes into
being the tombs of force, and makes us
dread each step we see it take in ad
vance.
Cburcb. 4 1
IF ever our Church goes back, and
cumbers herself with the precedents, and
submits herself to the influence or author
ity, of the English Church, her power in
this land is gone. She must be part and
parcel of this people. She must be in
heart and soul American, or she is noth
ing. She must have her sympathies
here, and not across the sea. She must
have her gaze and enthusiasm fixed upon
the future of America, and not upon the
past of England.
WE can conceive of a parish going on,
the same parish still, though thought
shall change and all religious speculation
flow in new channels. But if men s souls
cease to repent, and trust, and live by
the divine communion, all is gone ; the
4 2 Inspiration an& rutb.
Church is dead ; the spiritual building
crumbles in decay.
I KNOW that you will more than ac
cept under the great, glowing, all-em
bracing hospitality of this bounteous
roof [that of Trinity Church, Boston],
you will enthusiastically assert, that such
a Church as this has no right to exist, or
to think that it exists, for any limited
company who own its pews. It would
not be a Christian parish if it harbored
such a thought. No, let the world come
in. Let all men hear, if they will, the
truths we love. Let no soul go unsaved
through any selfishness of ours.
THIS is the modern notion of a Church,
not luxury, but work.
Cburcb. 43
ANY man or any institution which
attempts a great religious work in behalf
of the growing generations of a country,
must undertake, as preparatory to it, and
as a necessary part of it, a great moral
work as well. A faithful ministry, we
hold, must not merely declare the Savior,
but must attack and beat down those
special sins which stand in the very door
ways and keep the Savior out of the
hearts of men.
THERE are cases in which the move
ment of the will is everything; where to
move action without moving will is to
fail entirely. In such cases there can be
no room for force. This is why our
Lord, founding a religion whose whole
life was to be in converted wills, found
44 Inspiration an& tlrutb.
no place in its establishment or propaga
tion for the sword.
THE Church has been spread by force,
but Christianity never. To try to think
of extending a faith by force, is to try
to think a contradiction. It is like
thinking of raising enthusiasm with levers,
or crushing genius with sledge-hammers.
The tools have no relation to the mate
rial or the task.
I LOOK round on the work to do, and
I do not believe that either Episcopalian-
ism or Methodism or Presbyterianism
or Baptism is going to assert the victory
of Christianity over sin, the opening of
the barred citadel of wickedness in this our
Cburcb. 45
land. The Church of Christ, simple, un
impeded, armed powerfully because
armed lightly, the essential Church of
Christ must make the first entrance.
Then let us have up our methods of de
nominational government, and each, in
the way that he thinks most divine, strive
for the perfected dominion of our one
great Lord.
JUST as in God s great sea there is a
tide-power and a wave-power, and both
are the outputtings of the one same
force ; just as neither denies the other,
each lends the other impulse ; and the
qujck waves, which fall like lashes, and
the slow, heaving, laboring tide, have
both their work to do in the eternal bat
tle of the sea upon the land : so it is not
inconceivable that in the Christian world
4 6 Inspiration anO Crutb.
there may be a church-force and a de
nomination-force, which yet are both the
expression of one same purpose and de
sign of Deity.
THE waves that crest themselves with
angry foam, and beat and beat and beat
from sunrise round to sunrise endlessly
upon the stubborn beach, are the most
visible agents of the work that is done.
But who will find anything but thankful
ness, if once in every world-day the great
hand of the Maker and the Watcher is
put down under the great mass of the
sea itself, and the deep tide of -Christian
law and Christian truth, with all the
waves running their eager races on its
bosom, is driven, mightily, silently, far
ther up than any wave had reached upon
the conquered shore? Who will com-
Gburcb. 47
plain if Christian union, for certain pur
poses, in certain efforts, develops a new
sort of power that the narrower individu
ality of denominational life has not at
tained?
THE everlasting principle remains, that
no moral authority or doctrinal correct
ness or spiritual impulse can last from
generation to generation unimpaired, un
less it incorporates itself in some recog
nized manifestation, and yields to the
crystallization which its essential life de
mands.
Scepticism.
1HE countless assaults of a
speculative time, testing
every approach, bringing
the manifold artillery of
modern knowledge to bear, calling
both the frivolity and the earnestness
of our strange age to its aid, enlisting
an internal treason as well as an exter
nal enmity no wonder that they
make the boldest fear sometimes. The
rain is descending, the floods are coming,
the winds are blowing and beating, and
when loose houses are sliding off the
slippery sand on every side of them, no
wonder that the dwellers in the house
(49)
5 Inspiration an& rutb.
upon the rock, with dazzled eyes, think
sometimes that they see their own foun
dation waver. And yet the case does
not seem hard to understand.
CHRISTIANITY is one and everlasting.
Its work of salvation for man s soul is
the same blessed work forever. But its
relation to the world s life at large must
be forever changing with the changes
of that world s needs and seekings.
The larger applications of Christianity
must of necessity be from time to time
readjusted, and in their readjustments its
power may be temporarily obscured or
unrecognized as it passes into new forms
of exhibition. Is it strange, then, in a
day of readjustments such as ours, when
so many forms are going to pieces, so
Scepticism. 51
many old relations broken up and
changed for new ones, when so many of
the accidents of Christianity are being
taken down, that men should be ready
enough to think that Christianity itself
is worn out and obsolete?
WE feel no doubt of the eternal issue.
Our faith in Christ comes not from
seeing how men treat Him, but from
reading what God says of Him and feel
ing how He works. We are sure of the
end ; that all this overturning, overturn
ing, overturning, must bring at last the
day of Him whose right it is.
MEANWHILE, what can we do but
keep alive by earnest and continual
5 2 Inspiration anfc
utterance those truths which we believe,
no matter how utterly men may disown
their names, are doing the work of the
world all the while ? This is one of the
great values of such a time, that it sifts
and ordinates truths, and makes us find
out which are the few precious ones
that we will not let go at any risk.
AND when we look about and ask,
How can we best preserve these truths ?
I think there can be but one answer.
The highest truth has always found its
own best guardians. Christ Himself
pointed to the younger generation thc.t
was growing up about Him, and declared
its hands to be the place where His gos
pel would be safest, purest and most
fruitful. Other years have their work to
Scepticism. 53
do old age, and middle manhood, and
the fresh enterprise of originating youth.
But, after all, these are not the surest
guardians of truth.
THROUGH the life of every people
winds an endless procession, which ap
pears to totter with its feebleness, which
again and again is lost out of sight
among the hurrying crowd that seems to
tread it under foot, and yet whose tiny
hands bear safest and most pure forever
the sacred treasures of all time. And
if you once get a truth into the circle of
that endless childhood, it makes its way
to unfound hearts, and, through the
crazy passions and cold bigotries of life,
wins for itself an influence which men
feel because they do not fear.
54 Inspiration anD Crutb.
IT was not far from the time when
this Church [Trinity Church, Boston]
was founded, that Bishop Butler wrote
in England words which seem strange,
I think, to us as we read them now.
He said, " It has come to be taken for
granted, by many persons, that Christi
anity is not so much a matter of inquiry,
but that it is now at length discovered
to be fictitious." And, after all that, see
what life came out of what men called
dead. A great many people are saying
now what people used to say in Bishop
Butler s day, but it is no truer now than
it was then.
Xife.
JHERE are two souls in the
world, the soul of God and
the soul of man ; no other.
.... The God-soul is the
centre of all things. The souls of men
stand around and gather all their culture
and their growth from it.
No enumeration of qualities or facul
ties of matter accounts to us for physical
vitality ; and no description of man taught
and ruled and loved by God, makes clear
to us that life of God imparted to man
which we call holiness. Only this we
are sure of, that all Spiritual Life, whether
(55)
5 6 inspiration an& Crutb.
in these its elements, or in this subtle
force which blends the elements into a
true vitality, is an inflow from the soul of
God into the soul of Man. "
LIFE can only be truly communicated
by truly living methods. Nothing else
will do. This takes all power away from
mere machineries from the highest to the
lowest.
THAT is what we want, strong, deep
convictions which are unshakable, and
then a glad and constant expectation of
new and richer light from God forever ;
a perfect assurance of the safety of the
ship in which we sail, and then a perfect
willingness to sail into whatever new seas
Xife. 57
God may open to us ; an absolute cer
tainty of the sufficiency of Christ, and
then a passionate desire that no Christ
of our own fancy may satisfy us, that He
may show Himself to us more and more
completely as He really is ; the rock un
der our feet and the limitless air over our
heads.
THROUGH our fathers wisdom and
devotion, we must become wiser and
more devoted^ than they. Friends, we
must rise to thoughts beyond our fathers,
or we are not our fathers worthy chil
dren. Not to do in our days just what
our fathers did long ago, but to live as
truly up to our light as our fathers lived
up to theirs, that is what it is to be
worthy of our fathers.
5^ flnspfration anfc Grutb.
THOSE be our prayers: More
strength ; more light. More constancy ;
more progress.
THE man of the nineteenth century
thinks very differently irom the man ol
the eighteenth, but the love with which
he worships God, is the same love. The
Evangelical has different dogmas from
the old Georgian Churchman, but they
bow before the same mercy-seat, and
resist the same temptations by the same
grace.
A MAN is always more precious than
his work.
EVERYWHERE, always, good culture
OLffe. 59
and the championship of principles be
long together.
THAT men should be true to their best
convictions, and to their simple duty,
this is the blessing that gives all bless
ings with it, and is the fountain of all
charity and progress.
IT is Truth that we want in every de
partment of our life. In State and
Church we need it, at home and on the
street; in the smallest fashions and in
the most sacred mysteries; that men
should say what they think, should act
out what they believe, should be them
selves continually without concealment
and without pretense. When we have
60 Unspiratfon an> Erutb.
that, then we shall have at least a solid
basis of reality on which to build all
future progress. It is the benefit of
great and solemn crises that they give us
some characters which manifest this sim
ple Truth, that they make it to some ex
tent the character of all the time.
ONE period collects materials, the
next period builds the palace. The long,
hard-working winter gathers with infinite
toil the conditions of growth, stores them
about the dead unanswering seed, then
dies like David, and the spring-time, its
successor, bright as Solomon in all his
glory, comes and finds the preparation
made, and, in the sunshine, builds the
temple-plant.
ILife. 6 i
You have seen fathers, not cultivated
or educated men, who just accepted it
as their task to gather the materials of a
cultivated and educated life for their
children. Not for them to build the
gracious beauty or the massive strength
of scholarly attainment ; but they were
content to get everything ready, and
then lay the work of construction into
their children s hands, in whose fulfil
ment of their wise ambitions they them
selves should live again. And so it is in
human history. Age gathers materials
for age. One century with slow and
painful labor beats out a few crude ideas,
which lie like David s logs of wood and
blocks of stone and seem merely to
cumber the ground. A new century
comes, and, inheriting the unfinished
plan, it takes these crude ideas, and, lo,
they are just what it needs. It finds
6 2 Inspiration anfc Crutb.
them hewn to fit each other, and out of
them it builds the compact and graceful
beauty of its institutions.
TRUTHS are the roots of duties. A
rootless duty, one that has no truth below
it out of which it grows, has no life, and
will have no growth.
MEN talk about morality as one thing,
and religion as another. Sometimes
they pit them one against the other,
as if there were some sort of natural an
tagonism between the two. We take a
higher ground, insisting that there can
be no such thing as morality without
religion, and that morality becomes more
Xife. 6 3
and more genuine just in proportion
as religion becomes more and more
sound and true. We do not believe
in any reform which finds its whole
motive within the region of human
relations. We look for the permanent
success of no effort, however noble its
appointed aim may be, which does not
draw its impulse from some association
of humanity with a power and a will
above its own.
WITHOUT settling detailed judgments,
which it is not our place to do, we feel
sure, in general, that God has bound our
whole nature into such a perfect unity
that no man can hold wrong opinions
without incurring, just so far, danger of
injury to his moral life.
64 flnspfratfon an& Grutb.
ONCE accept this supreme importance
of truth, and every part of our nature
becomes anxious for the preservation of
the testimonies of God. The great doc
trines of our faith become the great pil
lars of our life.
ALL union between such complicated
individualities as men involves surrender,
the temporary stripping off of non-essen
tials that the essential may go on and do
its work unhindered. Afterward, in the
later stages of its labor, each portion of
the union may resume its non-essentials,
which are not therefore non-importants.
i
IT is the great boon of such characters
as Mr. Lincoln s, that they reunite what
Xffe. 65
God has joined together and man has
put asunder. In him was vindicated the
greatness of real goodness and the good
ness of real greatness. The twain were
one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes
who stood and looked up to him for
direction with such a loving and implicit
trust can tell you to-day whether the wise
judgments that he gave came most from
a strong head or a sound heart. If you
ask them they are puzzled. There are
men as good as he, but they do bad
things. There are men as intelligent as
he, but they do foolish things. In him
goodness and intelligence combined and
made their best result of wisdom.
THE simple natures and forces will
always be the most pliant ones. Water
66 Ungpiraticm and rutb.
bends and shapes itself to any new chan
nel. Air folds and adapts itself to each
new figure. They are the simplest and
the most infinitely active things in nature.
So this nature, in very virtue of its sim
plicity, must be also free, always fitting
itself to each new need. It will always
start from the most fundamental and
eternal conditions, and work in the
straightest even although they be the
newest ways to the present prescribed
purpose. In one word it must be broad
and independent and radical.
PERFECT truth consists not merely in
the right constituents of character, but
in their right and intimate conjunction.
This union of the mental and moral into
Xife. 67
a life of admirable simplicity is what we
most admire in children, but in them it
is unsettled and unpractical. But when
it is preserved into a manhood, deepened
into reliability and maturity, it is that
glorified childlikeness, that high and
reverend simplicity which shames and
baffles the most accomplished astuteness,
and is chosen by God to fill his purposes
when he needs a ruler for his people of
faithful and true heart.
IT is inevitable, till man be far more
unfeeling and untrue to his convictions
than he has always been, that a great
wrong asserting itself vehemently should
arouse to no less vehement assertion the
opposing right.
6S Unspfration an> Grutb.
WHEN shall we learn that with all true
men it is not what they intend to do, but
it is what the qualities of their natures
bind them to do, that determines their
career?
WITH a reverent and clear mind to be
controlled by events, means to be con
trolled by God.
TRUTH and justice are in their very
nature mighty and intolerant, and must
fight with and conquer falsehood and sin
in any region of this many-regioned uni
verse where they may meet.
IT is not possible until the need comes,
I suppose, that we should feel how legit-
Xife. 69
imate and true an accompaniment of
every perfect nature is Force ; that is,
the ability to clear its field and do its
work even by the violent destruction of
the hinderances that block its way.
SHALL we say that force, or compul
sion, is something that is so low that it
can belong to the devil only? that God
can have nothing to do with it, and so
that great truths and causes, high prin
ciples, which are the angels of God, his
Michaels, have no right to strive; that
they must not fight with their dragons?
Very important it seems to me that we
should understand the opposite.
THE more we see of events the less we
7 flnspfration an& Grutb.
come to believe in any fate or destiny
except the destiny of character.
WE make too little always of the phys
ical. . . . Who shall say that even with
David the son of Jesse, there was not a
physical as well as a spiritual culture in
the struggle with the lion and the bear
which occurred among the sheepfolds,
<5ut of which God took him to be the
ruler of his people?
THERE is a certain wide-spread nerv
ousness and fear of giving force any true
place in the world. It seems a horrible
intruder, soon, we pray, to be cast out.
And yet force is as truly the companion
Xife. 7 1
of reason as body is of spirit. Righteous
force is the reaction of truth upon oppos
ing matter.
THIS great and gracious nature tempts
me with all her alluring motherliness to
bow my will to hers and use her only in
obedience to her own laws. But if I re
fuse, she flings her tempest at me, or
she sinks my ship, or scorches my un
shielded head with her fiery suns, or
paralyzes me with disease, and compels
me back into the obedience from which
I foolishly and arrogantly tried to escape.
ANY baby may set his will against the
will of Mother Nature, and refuse to
listen to her reason ; but the most colos-
7 2 Inspiration and ftrutb.
sal giant must yield his actions to her
requirements and submit to her majestic
force.
I CANNOT draw my picture of the per
fect and perfectly effective man or state,
unless I lodge the tenderest sympathy
and the wisest judgment in a strong,
healthy body that shall compel respect
and demand obedience when the higher
powers fail.
FROM his boyhood up he [Abraham
Lincoln] lived in direct and vigorous
contact with men and things, not as in
older states and easier conditions with
words and theories ; and both his moral
convictions and his intellectual opinions
gathered from that contact a supreme
Xtfe, 73
degree of that character by which men
knew him that character which is the
most distinctive possession of the best
American nature that almost indescrib
able quality which we call in general
clearness or truth, and which appears in
the physical structure as health, in the
moral constitution as honesty, in the
mental structure as sagacity, and in the
region of active life as practicalness.
EVERYWHERE this earnestness of de
sire that truth should work, should move,
should go. And what then? Why, of
necessity, that if in going it should meet
perhaps some obstinate resistance which
will not yield, then it must break down.
The brute circumstance must not tyran
nize over and stop the progress of the
spiritual essence.
74 Unsptration an& Grutb.
IN all the simplest characters the line
between the mental and moral natures is
always vague and indistinct. They run
together, and in their best combinations
you are unable to discriminate in the wis
dom which is their result, how much is
moral and how much is intellectual. You
are unable to tell whether in the wise
acts and words which issue from such
a life there is more of the righteousness
that comes of a clear conscience or of
the sagacity that comes of a clear brain.
In more complex characters and under
more complex conditions, the moral
and the mental lives come to be less
healthily combined. They co-operate,
they help each other less. They come
even to stand over against each other as
antagonists ; till we have that vague but
most melancholy notion which pervades
the life of all elab R-ate civilization, that
Xffe. 75
goodness and greatness, as we call them,
are not to be looked for together, till we
expect to see and so do see a feeble and
narrow conscientiousness on the one
hand and a bad unprincipled intelligence
on the other, dividing the suffrages of
men.
THIS truth comes to us more and
more the longer that we live, that on
what field or in what uniform, or with
what aims we do our duty, matters very
little, or even what our duty is, great of
small, splendid or obscure. Only to
find our duty certainly and somewhere,
somehow do it faithfully, makes us good,
strong, happy, and useful men, and
tunes our lives into some feeble echo of
the life of God.
ADDENDUM.
CHAPTER VIII. is taken from the columns of
the Boston Transcript," chapter X., from those
of the Boston Herald. The latter appeared as an
editorial. The book is indebted to the Boston
Transcript for the description of Bishop Brooks s
consecration. The anecdotes and facts in the
chapter entitled "Brooksiana" hare been
gathered from various sources, printed and
oral.
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