CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 092 458 904 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092458904 LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILLIPS BROOKS VOLUME II LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILLIPS BEOOKS BY ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN Trofessar in the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge WSSiiti) pomaiw anD ^lllugtrations VOLUME II NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN WILLIAM G. BROOKS, ELIZABETH W. BROOKS, JOHN C. BROOKS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS CHAPTER I. 1869-1872. FAQB Trinity Church. — The Reception in Boston. — Contempo- raneous Comments on Phillips Brooks's Preaching. — Record op Work in the First Three Years 1 CHAPTER II. 1869-1872. Extracts from Correspondence and from Note-Books. — Social Life. — The Summer Abroad. — Formation of the Clericus Club. — Destruction of Trinity Church in the Boston Fire 35 CHAPTER III. 187a-1874. Ecclesiastical Controversies. — Relation to the Evangeli- cal School. — Extracts from Correspondence. — The Sum- mer Abroad. — Death of Frederick Brooks 72 CHAPTER IV. 1873-1877. Services in Huntington Hall. — Extracts from Note- Books. — Method of preparing Sermons. — Essay on Cour- age. — Contemporaneous Accounts of Phillips Brooks as A Preacher. — Testimony of Principal Tulloch .... 101 CHAPTER V. 1873-1877. The Building of the New Trinity Church. — The Motives IN ITS Construction. — The Consecration Services . . . 124 CHAPTER VI. 1877-1879. Extracts from Correspondence. — Invitation to preach FOR Mr. Moody. — Summer Abroad. — Sermon at West- vi CONTENTS MINSTER Abbey. — Harvard University confers the Degree of Doctor of Divinity. — Comments on the Gen- eral Convention. — Visit of Dean Stanley to America. — Illness and Death of William Gray Brooks 146 CHAPTER VII. 1877-1878. Lectures on Preaching. — First Volume of Sermons. — The Teaching of Religion. — The Pulpit and Popular Skepti- cism 174 CHAPTER VIII. 1879. The Bohlen Lectures on the Influence of Jesus .... 209 CHAPTER IX. 1879-1880. Visit to Philadelphia. — Convention Sermon. — Correspond- ence. — Death of his Mother. — Sermon before the Queen of England. — Westminster Abbey. — The New Rectory 241 CHAPTER X. 1881. The Call to Harvard University as Preacher and Profes- sor OF Christian Ethics. — Extracts from Correspondence 276 CHAPTER XI. 1881-1882. Memorial Sermon on Dr. Vinton. — Death of Dean Stanley. . — Speeches at Church Congress. — Second Volume op Sermons. — The Stanley Memorial. — Death of Dr. Stone. — Request for Leave of Absence for a Year 305 CHAPTER XII. 1882. Plans for the Year Abroad. — Germany. — Correspondence. — Religious Convictions. — Extracts from Note-Book and FROM Journal of Travel 329 CONTENTS Vll CHAPTER XIII. December, 1882-March, 1883. India. — Letters and Extracts from Journal 383 CHAPTER XIV. May-July, 1883. The Journet from India. — The Visit to Spain. — Reception IN England. — Visit to Tennyson. — Letters. — Extracts from Journal 417 CHAPTER XV. September-December, 1883. The Return to Boston. — Extracts from Sermons. — Address ON Luther. — Correspondence. — Extracts from Journal 441 CHAPTER XVI. 1869-1892. Theology. — Tendencies of the Age. — Freedom of Inquiry. — Authority and Conscience. — Orthodoxy. — Freedom through Dogma. — Progress. — Tolerance. — The New Theology. — Dangers of Freedom. — The Bible. — The Prayer Book. — Creeds. — Anglicanism. — The Incarna- tion. — The Trinity. — The New Theism. — Pantheism. — Miracles. — Sin. — Endless Punishment. — The Atone- ment. — Emphasis on the Will. — Supernatural Exist- ences. — Mysticism. — Morality 481 CHAPTER XVII. 1884-1885. Extracts from Letters. — Visit to Washington. — The Old House at North Andover. — Theatre-Going — The New- ton Controversy. — Missions. — Latin School Address. — Degree of D. D. conferred by Oxford University. — Sermon at Cambridge University. —Extracts from Note- Book CHAPTER XVIII. 1886. Portraits of Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty. — Mis- apprehensions OF HIS Position. — Essay on Biography. — 646 viii CONTENTS Election as Assistajji Bishop of Pennsylvania. — Visit to California. — Abolition of Compulsory Attendance on Religious Services at Harvard. — North Andovbk. — Chautauqua Address on Literature and Life. — Death OF Richardson. — Fourth Volume op Sermons. — Protest against changing the Name of the Episcopal Church . . 691 CHAPTER XIX. 1887. Incidents in Parish Life. — Invitation to deliver the Bampton Lectures. — Extracts from Note-Books. — Ser- mons at Faneuil Hall. — St. Andrew's Mission Church. — Tenth Anniversary of the Consecration of Trinity Church. — Sermon at Andover. — Summer in Europe. — Illness. — Correspondence 644 CHAPTER XX. 1888. Railway Accident in Philadelphia. — Incidents of Parish Life. — Lenten Services. — Correspondence. — Sentiment AND Sentimentality. — Comments on " Robert Elsmere." — Thanksgiving Sermon 670 CHAPTER XXL 1889. Watch Night. — Occasional Addresses. — Lenten Services AT Trinity Church. — Illness. — Summer in Japan. — Extracts from Note-Books. — The General Convention. — Social and Political Reforms. — The Evangelical Aili- ANCB. — Correspondence 699 CHAPTER XXIL 1890. Speech at the Chamber of Commerce. — Lenten Addresses IN Trinity Church, New York. — Change in Manner of Preaching. — Correspondence. — Address at the Church Congress. — Thanksgiving Sermon 729 CHAPTER XXIIL 1859-1893. Characteristics. — Reminiscences. — Anecdotes. — Parish Ministry. — Estimates 762 CONTENTS IX CHAPTER XXIV. 1891. Lent at Trinitt Church. — Noon Lectures at St. Paul's. — Election to the Episcopate. — The Controversy follow- ing THE Election. — Extracts from Correspondence . . 817 CHAPTER XXV. 1891-1892. Consecration as Bishop. — The Church Congress at Wash- ington. — Administrative Capacity. — Illness. — Lenten Addresses. — Union Service on Good Friday. — Conven- tion Address. — Correspondence. — Summer Abroad. — English Volume of Sermons. — Return to Boston. — St. Andrew's Brotherhood. — The General Convention in Baltimore. — Death of Tennyson. — Correspondence . . 873 1893. Conclusion 930 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAOE Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty, from a photograph by H. Gr. Smith. Photogravure Frontispiece Phillips Brooks at the Age of Thirty-nine, from a photo- graph by F. Gutekunst. Photogravure 72 Facsimile of the Plan of a Sermon 114 Trinity Church Exterior from tece North 144 Trinity Church Interior 204 Rectory of Trinity Church, 233 Clarendon St., Boston . 274 Facsimile of a Letter to Charles H. Parker, Esq. . . . 298 Trinity Church Exterior from the West 336 Trinity Church Exterior from the East 438 Phillips Brooks at the Age of Forty-nine, from a photo- graph by the Notman Photograph Co. Photogravure .... 500 House at North Andover, Exterior 552 Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty, from a photograph by H. G. Smith. Photogravure 596 Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty, from the portrait by Mrs. Henry Whitman. Photogravure 664 Kev. Arthur Brooks 726 Rectory of Trinity Church : The Study 794 Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty, photographed by H. G. Smith. Photogravure 848 Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty-five, from a photo- graph by Pach Brothers. Photogravure 886 Phillips Brooks at the Age of Fifty-six, from a photograph by Elliott & Fry. Photogravure 936 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILLIPS BROOKS CHAPTER I 1869-1872 TEINITT CHTJECH. THE RECEPTION IN BOSTON. CONTEMPO- EANEOUS COMMENTS ON PHILLIPS BROOKS 'S PREACHmG. RECORD OF WORK IN THE FIRST THREE TEARS Phillips Brooks began his ministry in Trinity Church, Boston, on Sunday, October 31, preaching in the morning from the text, St. John ix. 4, 5: "I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work; " and in the afternoon from St. John iv. 34: "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work." From this moment began the long period of twenty-two years until he resigned his rectorship. During these years he knew himself and thought of himself primarily and almost solely as the rector of Trinity Church. He con- centrated his energies in making the church united and strong. He lavished upon it the wealth of his affection. He believed strongly in the corporate life of a parish, an organism of which he himself was a vital part. Trinity Church he believed had a great future before it, as it had also a great past behind it. To help it to realize its pos- sibilities was the single task to which he devoted his powers. A few words about its situation and its history will make more clear the picture of the work he was to do. The church edifice then stood on Summer Street, near VOL. n 2 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Washington Street, tLe sole relic of an earlier Boston when Summer Street and the adjacent territory was the scene of. fine residences with their ample gardens. The church had been built in 1829, and though robbed somewhat of its im- pressiveness by the change in its surroundings, it still pos- sessed an air of distinction and solid majesty. It belonged to a style of architecture which has since passed away. It was built of granite with a massive battlemented tower, and at the time of its erection was regarded as one of the finest churches in the city. Mr. Brooks has thus described it in his historical sermon on Trinity Church, published in 1877: — It was a noble building in its day. It was one of the first of the Gothic buildings of this country, which were built after church architecture had begun to waken and aspire, and few that followed it equalled its dignity and calm impressiveness. The lighter and more fantastic styles of building sprang up in the city. The timber spires that made believe they were stone leaped up with unnatural levity into the sky; the cheap stone sculpture covered and deformed great, feeble fronts ; the reign of imitation came; and in the midst of all of them Trinity stood, in its exterior, at least, strong, genuine, solid, with its great rough stones, its broad bold bands of sculpture, its battlemented tower, like a great castle of truth, grim, no doubt, and profoundly serious, but yet able to win from those who worshipped there for years an affectionate confidence and even tender yearning for love. Trinity Church in Boston resembles to some extent Trinity Church in New York, as being the centre and home of Epis- copal traditions and prestige. Its organization went back to the year 1729. Like the old North Church on Salem Street, it was an offshoot from King's Chapel, which was the first Episcopal Church in Boston, and had been founded in 1689. But King's Chapel had ceased to be an Episcopal Church, and the neighborhood of old Christ Church had changed until it had lost its ancient influence, so that Trinity Church was left as the stronghold of Episcopacy in Boston. During the trying days of the Eevolution it had remained open to its worshippers when most of the Episcopal churches ^T. 33-36] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 3 were closed. When the alternatives had been presented of closing its doors or of omitting the petition, in the Litany, for King George and all the royal family, it had chosen the latter with the hope that it would be "more for the interest and cause of Episcopacy, and the least evil of the two, to omit a part of the Litany than to shut up the church." It shows the tenacity of the corporate life of the church, that many of its worshippers were the descendants of the families who first constituted it. They were conservative, holding by the tradi- tions, cherishing the names of past rectors, among whom Dr. Parker, afterwards Bishop of Massachusetts, and Dr. Gardiner were men prominent in the social and civic life of Boston. It seemed to many incongruous that Phillips Brooks, the heir of a long line of Puritan ministers going back to the settlement of the colony, and of eminent Puritan laymen honored for their devotion to the "Standing Order," should be the rector of Trinity Church, with its reversal of these traditions, representing what seemed in New England an alien church, indifEerent to the highest ideal of Christian truth. But that question had been settled for him when his mother made the transition from Puritanism to Episcopacy while he was an infant, — a migration which caused her many searchings of heart, but which she never lived to regret. As for Phillips Brooks, he did not feel the situation to be incongruous. He had been brought up on the Church Catechism; he knew no other church; he was loyal to it while yet admiring and applauding the history of his ances- tors. He studied the records of Trinity Church, making himself familiar with American history in the eighteenth century and with the process of its religious thought, in order to connect himself more closely with the life of the church of which he was the minister. Trinity Church had again shown its loyalty and devotion to the cause of Episcopacy when, in 1842, Dr. Manton East- burn had been elected bishop of the diocese of Massachusetts. The diocese being unable to provide a salary for the bishop, it had called him to be its rector, and thus relieved the situa- 4 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 tion. The endowment known as the Greene Foundation sup- ported from this time an assistant minister, who divided with the bishop the burden of preaching and other parochial min- istrations, always officiating in the bishop's absence on his episcopal ministrations. Among these assistant ministers had been the Eev. Thomas M. Clark, now the Bishop of Ehode Island, the late Eev. John Cotton Smith, and Dr. Henry C. Potter, the present Bishop of New York. But this arrangement had not worked well. It was a case of divided responsibility. The assistant ministers were not free to carry out any projects of church extension, while the bishop was also hampered by the double burden he was carrying. When in 1869 the bishop resigned the rectorship, it was felt by all that a new era had dawned in the history of Trinity Church. The new rector brought with him to Boston the ways he had learned from Dr. Vinton, and which he had put into successful practice in Philadelphia, — the Wednesday even- ing lecture, the Saturday evening Bible class, and the com- municants' meeting in preparation for the Lord's Supper. These were the methods of the Evangelical school in the church. Things were beginning to change at this time, new modes of parish activity were becoming popular, and a com- plicated machinery of what was called "church work" was coming into vogue. Much of it was adopted by Mr. Brooks, though without display or ostentation. He was equal to any one in appropriating methods of activity and in administer- ing them wisely. But he preferred the Wednesday evening lecture to the observance of Saints' Days, as being a fixed occasion in the week, while the latter came irregularly and were in danger of being neglected. Thus Wednesday even- ing became a sacred occasion. One of the first fruits of his ministry in Boston was to find the chapel of Trinity Church too small for the purpose, and calling for an imme- diate enlargement. But this did not meet the need, and the service was transferred to the church, where every seat was occupied. Among the arrangements he projected at once for increas- ^T. 33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 5 ing the activity of the parish and creating a sense of respon- sibility for those without was a mission on West Cedar Street, where a Sunday-school was gathered, under the charge of a theological student from the Cambridge seminary. There was at this time an Episcopal Church, St. Mark's, on West Newton Street, which, having fallen into weakness on account of the changing population, was no longer able to maintain a rector. He proposed that this church edifice should be pur- chased and become a dependency of Trinity Church, and that the income of the Greene Foundation be devoted to the sup- port of its minister. This project was carried out after some delay, and the Eev. Charles C. Tiffany, now Archdeacon of New York, was called in 1871 to be its rector, and assist- ant minister of Trinity Church on the Greene Foundation. These things are mentioned as showing the energy of the new rector, and the large spirit of religious enterprise with which he began his parish ministry in Boston. But these yield in importance to another scheme, which he broached to the par- ish during the first year of his incumbency, 1870, that the church should be removed to another part of the city, where it could do a greater work and better meet the needs of its parishioners. There was some opposition to the scheme, even among his warmest friends and supporters, for it meant a violent uprooting of sacred associations. In the vaults be- neath the church lay the remains of relatives and friends. There were other difficulties to be overcome. But Mr. Brooks continued to urge the removal as an indispensable condition of progress, until the plan was approved by the wardens and vestry. To overcome opposition, to create sympathy and agreement, and even enthusiasm, to recommend himself to the confidence of men of affairs in so important an undertak- ing, is an illustration of the many-sided capacity of the new rector. It took time to carry out this large plan. All through the years 1870 and 1871 it was the one foremost purpose in Mr. Brooks's mind, on which he concentrated his energies and his interests. He was studying the city of Boston and the possible directions of its growth, in order to the most 6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 available site. Before any other steps could be taken, it was necessary to gain the permission of the legislature to sell the old edifice. On December 3, 1870, the first meeting of the Proprietors of Trinity Church was held to consider the question of removal. Early in the next year Mr. Brooks appeared before a committee of the legislature and stated the reasons why the removal of the church was desired : — I think there is necessity for a removal of Trinity Church for the best interests of the parish, and a necessity which is more and more strong constantly. There has been a growing convic- tion with me ever since I have been rector of the parish that it would be necessary to move. The reasons are simply these : the entire change of the population in Boston which has removed all the residences from Trinity Church, leaving literally no residences within that region round the church which is usually considered the parochial line. All our congregation are therefore obliged to come from a great distance, which looks badly for us in two ways; in the first place by rendering their attendance unstable and preventing the church from accumulating any permanent parish; for a family coming from a great distance is loosely at- tached, and unless it is in some way geographically connected with the parish it cannot be counted upon to sustain the church. The instability and lack of adhesion and difficulty in conducting any of the educational and charitable work of the parish, arising from teachers and taught residing at very great distance, is one reason that has forced itself upon me. These difficulties are increasing every day. Every removal that has taken place — I niay say almost every removal since I have been in the parish — has been a removal to a greater distance from the church. Therefore look- ing forward a few years, we can see how much the present diffi- culties are likely to be increased. Then there are difficulties that attach to the location of the church, — the nearness of a busi- ness street, and the extreme noisiness during the Lent services. These have been much greater this season than last season. Then in addition to these two reasons there are the very serious ones attaching to the accommodations of Trinity Church, which are entirely incapable of remedy in our present location. The church originally was simply a structure for the church proper and since then there has been added a Sunday-school or lecture room, and this is the only room we have at present. We have no rooms for class instruction and for carrying on the work of the parish. Our lecture room is inadequate for our lecture-room pur- ^T. 33-36] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 7 poses. For this reason I think almost any one who is associated with the work of the church, who is engaged in the actual chari- table and educational work of the church, feels the necessity of a change of location ; and without knowing personally the opinion of each one of those who are so engaged, I should say that with three or four exceptions they all favor the removal. The permission to sell having been granted by the legisla- ture, it was accepted by the Proprietors of Trinity Church. The question of the new site was not an easy one, and delib- erations proceeded slowly. Not until the end of the year 1871 was the lot purchased on which the present Trinity Church now stands. Mr. Brooks was at first strongly at- tracted by the lot on the corner of Beacon and Charles streets facing the Common. But the wisdom of the final choice needs no justification. On March 6, 1872, the building committee was created, consisting of George M. Dexter, Charles Henry Parker, Kobert C. Winthrop, Martin Brim- mer, Charles E. Codman, John C. Kopes, John G. Cushing, Charles G. Morrill, Eobert Treat Paine, Jr., Stephen G. Deblois, and William P. Blake. The committee voted at once to notify Mr. Brooks of all meetings and their readi- ness to receive any suggestions from him. Six competitors were invited to furnish plans, and in June the late H. H. Kichardson, of the firm of Gambrill & Kichardson, was chosen as the architect. "The building committee were at once impressed," writes Mr. Eobert Treat Paine, in his final report, "with the importance of purchasing the triangle of land which now forms the whole Huntington Avenue front of our estate. An appeal was made to the parish for gifts of money, and a generous response enabled the committee to make the purchase." The additional amount thus called for was 175,000, but the contribution reached 1100,000. "The church," continues Mr. Paine, "thus completed its title to the whole domain of over an acre, enclosed by four public streets, and making the church visible in all directions. So far as the committee know, this is the only site of the Back Bay where these advantages could have been secured." Plans for the new church had already been drawn by Mr. 8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Eichardson, when the enlargement of the estate by the pur- chase of the triangle called for their entire remodelling. It was while the building committee were engaged in this study for a new design that the great Boston fire, on Novem- ber 10, 1872, swept away the old Trinity Church on Sum- mer Street. Whatever indifference or opposition there had been to the removal of the church could now exist no longer. A new interest and enthusiasm united the parish in the determination to make the new edifice a grander one than the old had been. The building committee appointed an executive committee out of its numbers, Messrs. Eobert Treat Paine, C. H. Parker, and C. W. Galloupe, "with full powers to prosecute with all despatch the erection of the new church." Mr. Eichardson encouraged them to think that in two years the new edifice would be completed. In this hope and expectation the large hall in the Institute of Technology on Boylston Street was hired for the Sunday services. The expectation was not fulfilled; it was more than twice two years before they saw the consummation of their desires. But meantime in this secular hall, with no accessories or associations of sacred worship, Mr. Brooks entered upon a still more powerful phase of his ministry, under the influence of which Trinity Church not only re- mained united, but received large additions to its member- ship. When Phillips Brooks came to Boston it was his study to be the rector of Trinity Church, to carry out the ideal of a parish minister as he conceived it in all its scope and in all the detail of its relationships. To give himself up to the work of preaching the gospel of Christ to the congregation over whom he was set to minister was his single purpose. To this end he sought to know the people to whom he preached, to study their needs, to share their joys and sorrows, to lead them into larger conceptions of the mission of a parish to the church and to the world. No one could have written the "Lectures on Preaching" who was not first and foremost and always the parish minister, devoted to his people, giving them of his best, and in the relationship of mutual love and ^T. ss-sB] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 9 service finding his satisfaction and reward. He does not indeed record any vow of exclusive faithfulness to this special purpose, but that it was his purpose, his single aim, is writ- ten on all his work after coming to Boston, and finds expres- sion in unmistakable manner. During the year before he came to Boston, while the call was under his consideration, he must have been solemnly deliberating with himself and reaching a determination as to his line and method of work. We must therefore note at this point a significant change and epoch in his ministry. In Philadelphia he had appeared almost as a reformer and agitator, with a work to do outside the pulpit, which rivalled in importance and popular interest his work as a preacher. He had thrown himself into the cause of the abolition of slavery with an intensity and rare eloquence which was not surpassed by any one. He had espoused the cause of the emancipated slaves, pleading in most impassioned manner for their right to suffrage in order to their complete manhood. In the interest of the Freed- men's Aid Society he had made stirring platform addresses in the greater cities of Pennsylvania and in New York. He was more prominently identified than any other citizen in Philadelphia with the local issue whether the negroes should be allowed to ride in the street cars. From his activity in these moral causes he had become as widely known as by his eloquence in the pulpit. But from the time when he came to Boston he ceased to be identified with any special reform. There were others, who, as soon as the war was over, had addressed themselves to the cause of the working people, seeking the redress of social evils, enlightening the popular mind, and securing the needed legislation for the amelioration of social burdens. Phillips Brooks might easily have followed in the same direction. It was in him to have become a reformer, and to have used the pulpit and the platform as his levers of influence. But he did not take this role. He gave himself to his parish, and exclusively to the preacher's task, and for seven years he was supremely interested in the work of building the new Trinity Church as if that should be the crown of his labors. lo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 "We have seen that his father was dismayed when his son devoted his strength to what seemed like preaching politics ; how he earnestly dissuaded him from carrying polities into the pulpit. The advice may not have been without its in- fluence. But apart from this a man like Phillips Brooks could not have had his Philadelphia experience without studying its bearing upon his work as a preacher. As he studied it, he saw that the two functions were incompatible, and that of the two the mission of the preacher of the gospel of Christ was the higher, the more important, the more far reaching and fundamental in its influence, — the primary condition of all successful enduring reforms. It must not be supposed for a moment that he was not interested in every social or moral issue which aimed at the improvement of man. His interest was recognized and presupposed. He never failed when he was called upon to advocate any good cause. He sympa- thized with those who devoted their lives to such ends. On occasions in his own pulpit, and especially on Thanksgiving Day, he uttered himself freely on the questions of the hour. But he did not identify himself exclusively with any of them, nor work for them in direct manner, but always indirectly through the power of Christian truth, brought home to the heart by the preaching of the gospel. Of all the cities in the land, Boston, more than any other, was associated with ideal issues and moral reforms. It might be almost called the home of reformers since the days when the preparation began for the American Revolution. It puzzled Boston people, therefore, when Phillips Brooks came among them and began at once to exert his magic influence. They found it impos- sible to label or classify him. He was neither a moral, a social, nor a religious reformer. It is amusing now to look back at the efforts made to define his position by critical analysis, or by comparison with other men. Boston at last accepted him for himself without attempt at analysis or criticism. But in the earlier years it was not so. One cannot think of Boston without thinking of Unita- rianism. When the schism took place, in the first part of the nineteenth century, which divided the Congregational ^'r.33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 11 churches into Orthodox and Liberal, the latter body carried with it the social prestige, the wealth, the intellectual culture of Boston. It was represented by Harvard College also, and by a line of men eminent in literature, — Emerson and Haw- thorne, Longfellow and Holmes and Lowell, and many others. It had given birth to two great preachers and reformers, Channing and Theodore Parker, who had added to the fame of Boston by their eloquence, their high character, and their large influence. Phillips Brooks had now come to take his position by divine right among the greatest and best of her children. Her literary men recognized him at once as enti- tled to an equal place. There could be no doubt of his great- ness, but what was he, and how should he be described ? At first there was an inclination on the part of the Uni- tarians to claim him as their own. Such power, such genius, marked him as of necessity one who, though he might not be conscious of it, must be at heart a Unitarian. They were un- familiar with the breadth of the national Church of England ; they were indifferent to Maurice and Stanley and Arnold, Kingsley, F. W. Kobertson, Thirlwall and Tait and Temple, who represented liberal theology in the English Church, with whom Phillips Brooks was affiliated in spirit, and at whose feet he had sat as a pupil. Archbishop Tillotson and the liberal theologians of the English Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they had long since forgotten. They could not believe that such things were indigenous in the Anglican Church, having their roots in the Eeformation and in the Book of Common Prayer. However it was, the Unitarians flocked to the new preacher, — the man with a message to which they responded as divine. Against this disposition on the part of Unitarians to "attend the earnest and attractive ministry of Phillips Brooks," the "Liberal Christian," a Unitarian organ in Boston, gave a most em- phatic protest : — We hold the earnestness and sincerity of those Unitarians who desert their own worship and their own laborious pastors to swell the tide of hearers of Orthodox Liberals at a very cheap value. There is a certain meanness, and time-serving, and cowardly 12 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 spirit, and a carelessness about intellectual and moral distinctions which is discouraging and deserves strong rebuke. (1870.) The "Liberal Christian" was indeed very much in earnest in its protest, refusing to admit a communication in reply, which extenuated the fault of the culprits. The editor of the "Christian Eegister " (Unitarian) went with the crowd to listen and to know for himself what these things meant. He was inclined to be severe and prepared to notice flaws, yet he was also determined to be fair and to get at the truth. While he admired the noble presence of the preacher, he found defects in the voice, and thought the rapidity with which he read the service somewhat irreverent. He was on the watch for any "omissions" in the service, but could not detect them. This was his report to his readers : — The text of the sermon was "She hath done what she could." The first half of the sermon was satisfactory and impressive, that human responsibility was limited by human power and oppor- tunity. Every man, however weak and humble, has some thing especially appointed for him to do, and the harmony of the uni- verse is incomplete so long as he neglects his task. . . . All this was exceedingly impressive. He spoke with such feivor and unaffected earnestness that we felt quickened and up- lifted by his appeals in behalf of our doing our best, and making the most of our chances in life. Then came the only unsatisfac- tory passage of the discourse. It seemed to be assumed that as sinners we must not only repent, but rely upon Christ's atoning blood. No particular theory of the atonement was insisted upon, but in some way we must feel that we are ransomed and bought with a price. The room was growing darker, and we became less and less sure that we understood Mr. Brooks perfectly. But we were quite convinced that while he was only mildly "Evangelical " and used, mainly, Scriptural expressions that admit of a Unitarian interpretation, he left the plain path in which he had been walk- ing for the devious ways of theological subtleties. Still the general effect of the sermon was excellent, and we came away deeply grateful for the most that we had heard, with a new un- derstanding of Mr. Brooks's deserved popularity; and fully believing that he is as rational and independent as an honest man can possibly be while remaining within the Episcopal Church. The whole atmosphere about him was far superior in simplicity ^T. 33-36] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 13 and manliness to anything that we had ever known in his denomination. "If the Eev. Mr. Phillips Brooks," remarked the "Con- gregationalist," an Orthodox paper, commenting on this report, "has trembled and felt weakened as to the security of his position in this city, he must now take heart and dis- miss his fears. The editor of the ' Christian Kegister ' hav- ing been to hear him has come away ' fully believing that he is as rational and independent as an honest man can possibly be while remaining within the Episcopal Church. ' " These things are not recovered from the forgotten years for the purpose of illustrating the amenities of religious controversy, but in order to reproduce the moment when Phillips Brooks came to Boston. It recalls the picture of Boston, or of any Massachusetts town, in the colonial days, when a stranger entered its precincts. Before he could be accepted, he must be questioned and made to give an account of himself. The inquiring looks now directed upon the new preacher, the sharp criticism to which he was subjected, were simply the inevitable Boston greeting. It was Boston's way, — that was all. Philadelphia had a different way. It had not the suspicion ,of the stranger as such. It knew a good thing when it saw it, and did not spoil its enjoyment by overanx- ious questioning. It was not perhaps so easy a thing for Boston to bow before Phillips Brooks as it had been for Philadelphia. Boston is a city with peculiarities of its own, and they are marked and strong. But on this point let another speak, one whom Boston loved and revered : — Shall I say [writes Dr. Channing] a word of evil of this good city of Boston? Among all its virtues it does not abound in a tolerant spirit. The yoke of opinion is a heavy one, often crush- ing individuality of judgment and action. A censorship, un- friendly to free exertion, is exercised over the pulpit as well as over concerns. No city in the world is governed so little by a police, and no city so much by mutual inspection and what is called public sentiment. "We stand more in awe of one another than most people. Opinion is less individual or runs more into masses, and often rules with a rod of iron.^ 1 Works, Tol. u. p. 265, ed. 1845. 14 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 It was not only the Unitarians that had questions to ask. The Orthodox or Trinitarian Congregationalists were puzzled. The Unitarians watched him to see whether he were Ortho- dox, and the Orthodox were curious to see whether he were a Unitarian in disguise. At this time the antagonism be- tween these two parties was strenuous and even bitter, for the painful associations of the schism which Channing had led were still fresh in the memory of many then living. The influence of Theodore Parker had only intensified these reli- gious antipathies. Parker had divided the Unitarians into two wings, the conservative and the progressive ; but he had also aggravated the prejudices of the Orthodox against the whole body of Unitarians by his denial of miracles and the supernatural, by his criticism of Scripture and rejection of its external authority. But his was on the whole the gTOW- ing tendency in Boston. He was a transcendentalist, build- ing on the authority of an inner light, finding God and im- mortality and religion in the natural instinct of the human soul, and needing no external authority, whether of Scrip- ture or prophet or person of Christ, as the sanction of reli- gious truth. But there was also something better in Parker which would be apparent when the storm of controversy had died away. It was then with dark suspicions in their minds that Orthodox critics approached the new preacher. They, too, were not quite satisfied. The trouble with both these classes of critics was that they went to their inquiry with formal tests of doctrines or dogmas uppermost in their minds, while the preacher was in another atmosphere, thinking not of doctrines but of life. The Episcopalians [says the Boston correspondent of the Chris- tian Intelligencer] have a new light and popular preacher, Rev. Phillips Brooks, late of Philadelphia. Before coming here he had achieved a high reputation in the pulpit, and as a liberal in doctrine and churchly rites. However true it may be we know not, but he is said to occupy about the same theological position as Robertson of England. We heard him on Sunday evening, and he did what too many Orthodox ministers do in this region, threw out a "sop " to the Unitarians. His sermon was unex- ceptionable in almost every particular. It was, in fact, the best ^T.23-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 15 sermon on the whole we have heard here for some time. It was practical, written in a clear and forcible style, with passages of wonderful beauty and eloquence. It was delivered with that impetuous earnestness that distinguishes certain nervous natures. No one could listen to it without being moved to live for God. But a fly was in the ointment, needlessly there. He went out of his way to say, "I don't believe in total depravity," and then added that he believed there was something good in all men, giving the impression to those who did not know better that the doctrine known as "total depravity " embraced the view that every man is as bad as he can be, or is utterly destitute of what is good. But still he intimated that there is no recuperative ele- ment in the soul, an important feature, however, of the discarded doctrine. Of course all liberals delight in such statements or caricatures, and then quote them as proof of the ejEBect of their liberalism in modifying evangelical doctrines. Mr. Brooks ought to know just what total depravity as a theological doctrine involves, and while the term is confessedly objectionable as now interpreted, yet, like many legal and medical terms, can be explained. The popular verdict on the preaching of Phillips Brooks was more important than the judgment of the critics. There had been no similar event in the history of Boston which created such excitement, such widespread interest, such a veritable sensation. He stepped at once into the same rela- tive position as he held in Philadelphia. Trinity Church on Summer Street was crowded with eager hearers. It was almost unseemly the way in which the people claimed him for their own, regardless of the privileges of those whose special minister he was. They came from every direction, feeling that they must be there. Precedents and vested rights, distinctions of pewholders, the authority of the sex- ton, these seemed like an impertinence when Phillips Brooks was to preach. The true gospel of Christ, the word of life, must in the nature of the case be offered alike to all, without distinction. It was a trying situation for the stately, deco- rous parishioners, who had associated worship with calmness and dignity, and with ample accommodation in the high- backed, luxurious pews. It was no slight inconvenience and annoyance when they sought access to their pews to find them 1 6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 occupied by strangers, whose apologies did not relieve but only magnified the grievance. Mr. Dillon, the sexton, to whom it fell to manage these things, strove to rise to the occasion and struggled to meet an emergency so wholly unlike anything he had hitherto known in his long adminis- tration. He tried to sort the people who presented themselves for admission, sending some to the galleries, and allowing others, whom he judged more fiit, to occupy the waste spaces in the pews on the floor, but his expedients were futile.^ There were too many seeking to be admitted, that was the simple difficulty. There was room perhaps for a thou- sand people, and the demands were for more than double the accommodation. The people became indignant and vented their anger on Mr. Dillon, "the grim and truculent sexton, who acted as if he owned the church." Complaints found their way to the newspapers, with accounts of the "most disgraceful scenes ever enacted within the walls of a Protest- ant church." Many who came were unfamiliar with the ways of the Episcopal Church ; they regarded the morning and evening prayer as something to be tolerated, — " intro- ductory exercises " before the sermon could be reached. They rejoiced at least that "Mr. Brooks ran it off so rapidly." Mr. Brooks did what he could to facilitate matters. The pews in the galleries were declared free, and after pew- holders had taken their seats the church was thrown open to all. But this was no temporary evil to be cured by any expedient. It lasted as long as Phillips Brooks remained the rector of Trinity Church. Bishop Eastburn continued for a while to attend the services at Trinity. But he was not accustomed to such excitement, or to see people flocking in crowds to the proclamation of the gospel. He was not altogether sure that the new preacher could be "sound in his views." He betook himself to the roomier spaces of St. Paul's. * In Mr. Dillon' 8 view of the situation, the end to he aimed at was to reduce the numbers who sought admittance to the church. ' ' He once came to me in the vestry room," said Mr. Brooks, " to tell me of a method he had devised for this purpose, ' When a young man and a young woman come together, I sepa- rate them ; ' and he expected me to approve the fiendish plan." ^T. 33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 17 Many of those who went to hear Mr. Brooks for the first time were so impressed that they must needs give utterance, in newspaper articles, to the emotions which stirred them. Some went prepared to watch closely and see vividly in order to get the material for a striking literary report. There are in these early years at Trinity many of these pen-and-ink sketches of the preacher and the wonderful effect of his preaching, descriptions of the church and the congregations, and the accessories which made the scene impressive. All agree in being compelled to describe the preacher himself as though that were a part of the message. The door of the anteroom opens, and Mr. Brooks appears in his white flowing robes. There is something almost boyish, yet beautifully sweet and earnest as well, in his face and manner. He is emphatically a manly man, with no sentimental, morbid, sickly notions of life. He is a "muscular Christian " and believes in work and stout-hearted endeavor. And he walks through the earthly and tangible as beholding the things that are invisible and heavenly. All this and more we find in his strong spiritual countenance. The old building [according to another report] seems the fit- ting place of worship for the solid men of Boston. There is an air of ancient respectability about it. . . . The deep roomy pews, and thoughtfully padded, seem adjusted for sleeping, and though seven can sit comfortably in them, if you humbly ask for the fifth seat in some of them, beware of the lofty look and high-bred scorn which seems to say. Are not the galleries free for negroes, servants, and strangers? ... I shall have to let you in, I sup- pose. Take that Prayer Book, and keep quiet ; service has begun. Don't you see Mr. Brooks? Yes, we do see the Eev. Phillips Brooks, a tall, stout, power- fully built man, with a smooth boyish face, and very near-sighted eyes, which nevertheless, by the help of glasses, seem to search you out in whatever dark corner you may be hidden. He is reading the service with a thin voice and rapid, breathless, almost stutter- ing delivery, and yet with a certain impulsive and pleading ear- nestness that carries even Congregationalists on their knees and takes them with him to the throne of grace. To reproduce here the many comments upon Phillips Brooks when he first made his appearance in Boston would VOL. n 1 8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 be impossible, and yet to neglect them altogether would be a loss to his biography. The time never came when people tired of portraying him or of writing their impressions. Those who wrote were not more eager to rehearse than were the thousands, who had not heard or seen for themselves, eager to read what was written. It is part of the story of his life to give him in his relations with the great body of people who heard him gladly, who were sure that something unknown before in the history of the pulpit was now enacting, and that it behooved them to catch and preserve each slightest accent, as an almost sacred responsibility. Thus they loved to de- scribe his appearance as though in this case the symmetry of form and beauty of countenance were in some mysterious way the counterpart of the spirit within, and nature had for once succeeded in making the body the transparent revelation, the harmonious accompaniment, of the immortal soul. Such was the opinion of the many, but others dissented : — He is exceedingly portly and also very tall ; in bearing one of the most commanding men of his day. He has a line, well-pro- portioned head, covered with a short growth of thick dark hair, which he wears easily without careless indifEerence and also with- out dainty niceness. ... A certain throwing of his head up and a little to one side is his most prominent gesture ; and it is all the more effective that it is not strictly elegant. There is nothing in his voice, bearing, or look which can explain his almost unexampled popularity. For popular he is almost beyond precedent. He stands in the pulpit [says another writer] smooth-faced, full-voiced, as self-reliant a man as ever occupied such a station. He indulges in few gestures; he has no mannerisms. If, under any circumstances, he might realize the popular conception of an orator, he does not betray the possibilities here. He provokes no attention to predominant spirituality by inferior vitality. There is a splendid harmony of strength, bodily and mental, which prevents the measurement of either. It is only when he is out of his desk and level with his audience that you realize his stature. In the lecture room or crowded street he stands like Saul among the people. The well-balanced head and strong shoulders draw your eyes at once. He dresses well, lives well, and holds his own decidedly in social circles. . . . His power ^T. 33-36^ TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 19 is not limited to his church ministrations, nor is he making him- self known by some brilliant special development. It is the whole man — mentally, morally, and spiritually, leader, helper, friend — which is attaining such preeminence. But when he preaches, you are carried away to the need of men and of your own shortcomings, and have no present consciousness of the per- sonality of the speaker. A transparent medium is the purest. You do not think of Phillips Brooks till Phillips Brooks gets through with his subject. His manner of entering the church [says another observer] was quite peculiar. He hurried in, sweeping his left arm in long circuits and glancing quickly about and abruptly kneeling at the altar. In selecting his places in the Prayer Book he continued to glance nervously about. . . . And yet there was something even then that interested one in him and gave assurances of his sincerity. His complexion is dark, his forehead low, his face full, and his figure and motions those of an overgrown lad; and yet in spite of all and through all there is a struggling for good- ness and culture. . . . The sermon was a model, rapidly de- livered and yet effectively, when the preacher had advanced far enough to lose himself in it, and thrilling the hearer by every word. . . . There was apparently as little aim at effect in the preparation as in the pronouncing of the discourse, but it was exquisitely written and every sentence was a blade, though wreathed in flowers. The hearer was both transported and cut down, delighted with the rhetoric that saluted his ear and regaled his taste, and penetrated and solemnized by the truth with which he was addressed. Another listener goes to hear him at St. Mark's, West Newton Street, one Sunday evening in midsummer, allowing an ample half hour before the appointed time, only to find the edifice already nearly filled, and the silent, steady stream of worshippers appropriating every available spot with an earnestness noticeable to the merest stranger, and this al- though the heat is intense and the atmosphere almost stifling. A stranger [he continues] cannot be long in doubt of the just- ness of his popularity, as he enters in that unpretending manner and goes instantly to his work, without a seeming thought of any- thing but his duty as a worshipper. Look at the man ! Would you not look at him twice in any surroundings ? All our previous ideas of a pale, formal stereotyped Episcopal minister ... are 20 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 put to flight at once and forever, as we are instantly magnetized with the man's polished energy and the spirit he infuses into every part of the service. With a physique the embodiment of perfect health, you look in vain for any symptom of the spirit- ualized consumptive symptoms that old-time people were wont to regard as a sure advance towards saintship. A round, full, smooth face, shadowed with massive eyebrows and lighted with eyes of richest black, not flashing but deep, his whole expression so free from guile and affectation, and every movement so full of inexhaustible vitality, that he seems to retain all the wealth of a pure, boyish nature, crystallized into perfect manhood. Here are a few more descriptions of Phillips Brooks in the pulpit and of his manner of preaching : — At last the order of evening prayer is concluded and the preacher mounts the turret-like pulpit. He is clad in the plain black gown, with a collar, vest, and necktie such as ordinary mortals may wear; and carries a manuscript which his eyes, intently following, scarcely leave from the smoothing out of the first page to the turning of the last. While the choir are singing the final verse of the preliminary hymn, he somewhat nervously adjusts the tablet before him to his height and the lights at his side to his eyes, and then stands motionless, gazing forth for a moment with a pleasant and rather inquiring cast of countenance over the congregation. . . . His sermon to-night is from Romans vii. 22: "For I delight in the law of God after the inward man." . . . The sermon is scarcely over thirty minutes long, but is preached with so rapid an utterance that from the lips of another it might take a third longer. It is founded upon an exegesis which is novel, but its proposition commands assent, its argument is strong, its tone is exhilarating, and one goes from it pondering the oft-repeated question, What is the secret of Phillips Brooks's preaching? Where is the hiding of his power? When he reaches his sermon [says another observer] and plunges into his subject, as if it were a message from heaven, delivered for the first time to mortals, so fresh and earnest it is, then the real height of the man's power is reached. . . . He avoids all the old, worn grooves of reasoning, and leads you by his own routine of thought into the clearest and simplest comprehen- sion of life's duties and God's demands. And as he is lifted by his theme into a rarefied atmosphere, and with a marvellous faith catches a glimpse of still higher summits to be reached, like a mountain climber, scaling from crag to crag, you are rapidly ^T. 33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 21 borne along with him, till the worries of earth look very trifling from the crest where he pauses. After this [according to another report] he entered the pulpit in a black gown and announced his text, Hebrews ix. 22: "Wherein was the golden pot that had manna and Aaron's rod that budded, and the table of the covenant." . . . This meagre outline can convey no idea of the richness of the sermon. . . . His style was simplicity itself. Illustration and imagery are not profuse but perfect. His power, however, is what no one less gifted than he can describe to another who has not felt it. It seems to come from a deep, personal experience which gives his message author- ity. . . . He has a certain great-heartedness, and a passionate, irrepressible desire to bring others to the Saviour whom he finds so precious, that people of all shades of belief, and no belief, are carried along, for the time at least, by the same enthusiasm that seems to possess him. Out of twenty or more of his sermons which we have heard, there has not been one which would have been unsuitable for a revival meeting. Whatever the subject, the central thought is always the cross of Christ — the goodness of the gospel to a sinful soul. A stranger's earliest impressions on listening for the first time to the young preacher, whose name is already famous far beyond the limits of his own denomination, is doubtless amazement at the rapidity with which words and sentences follow each other from his lips. Utterly devoid of those pulpit mannerisms and affecta- tions of which the world is weary, his first utterance seems to fling him body and soul into his subject. . . . It is the earnest wrestling of a brilliant intellect with great and yet simple truths, evolving new and startling conceptions, or clothing familiar thoughts with rare and subtle beauty. No written words can do justice to the varied powers of this great pulpit orator. He has the keenest analytic skill, the most charming purity of style, a wonderful grasp of glowing imagery, the most evident sincerity, the most touching pathos, and the broadest catholicity. . . . There are none of our so-called popular preachers who at all resemble Mr. Brooks, either in manner and style of delivery or in peculiarities of thought. We have seen that Mr. Brooks puzzled the inquiring minds bent on detecting his theological bias. But according to the majority of the best opinion, his teaching was in the strict sense Evangelical. An Old School Presbyterian says : — 22 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Writing from an " Orthodox " standpoint, your correspondent may be pardoned for expressing the joy he felt tliat Puritan truth is the doctrine of the preacher now most admired and sought after in degenerate Boston. It was most refreshing and hope- inspiring to hear him. It is this compound [says another writer] of Broad Church lib- erality and absolute fixedness and certainty as to points of belief and faith that accounts for Mr. Brooks's wide influence in the community. Here and there [says a writer in the Congregationalist] you will find one who thinks that the Unitarians get a little more comfort out of his preaching than he ought to give them. But there is reason for the remark that such suspicions are mostly confined to those who seldom hear his sermons, if in some instances they are not unaccompanied with what is very near akin to a professional jealousy. I have never heard but one opinion from those qualified by knowledge and impartiality to judge, and that is that the current of his preaching is strongly and warmly Evangelical. One other testimony to his power as a preacher comes from New York, when he preached at Grace Church in the year 1870. The occasion rose at once to dignity and signi- ficance, calling for description and comment which found expression in the "Evening Post: " — The preacher was a man of mark in every sense, and the moment you set eye upon him you asked who he was, if you did not know him before. . . . There was no look or tone of assump- tion in him, and in fact, until he warmed in his sermon, there was nothing in his manner to impress you with remarkable power. . . . His subject was positive religion, viewed especially in its superiority over merely negative or repressive religion. It was a strong and telling and glowing argument for the brave virtue that follows the "Spirit" above the petulant asceticism that is always fighting with the "flesh." The preacher held his congregation fixed on his words for forty minutes. We listened to him with the more attention from the fact that he is a memorable sign of the times. He seems to be run after more by young people, especially of the more cultivated class, than any other preacher, and he is the most conspicuous man now in the pulpit of Boston, — that city so renowned for its theologians. ... It is not ^T. 33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 23 diiBcult to discover the secret of his power, although he has not all of the conditions which have been regarded as essentials of success among his associates. He has no remarkable qualities of voice, or elocution, or gesture. He speaks and reads very rapidly and has no dramatic touches of pathos or humor. He does not abound in original metaphors or epigrammatic points, in rare classic allusions or profound philosophic distinctions. He has none of the tragedian's startling tones and attitudes, and nothing of the buffoon's grimace and merriment, which are now not un- known in the pulpit. But the power of the man lies in the ful- ness of his nature, his thought, his affections, his purpose, and his speech. There is a great deal of him, and he lets himself out without reserve, without affectation, without conceit, without meanness. His sermon flows from its large fountain head in full, continuous course, now in easy talk, and now in swelling volume, and now in dashing force, until it pours into the open sea under the eternal heaven, and carries you on its grand tide to its glorious vision. ... It is a significant fact that Harvard, which has been so eminent for the cautious accuracy, careful elegance, and dainty reserve of its orators, should have sent such an unusual representative into the pulpit, and that her representative preacher now is this stalwart Broad Churchman, who preaches the human- ity of Channing with the creed of Jeremy Taylor, and strikes at the shirks and shams of our day with the dashing pluck and the full blood of Martin Luther. Space must be found for another calm, intelligent estimate of Phillips Brooks as a preacher. It was written by a Bostonian, as the extract just given was from the pen of a New Yorker, by a Unitarian who abandoned his fold to listen to him. No better statement than this was ever made : — One word remains to be said in regard to the ministry which it has been our privilege to attend during the last winter (1869-70), listening to those impressive utterances : — Where all is calm and deep and grave, With a ftdl soul's mature sedateness ; where the overflow of vital power, and wealth of poetic imagina- tion, and the nameless enchantment of genius are all made tribu- tary to an awful earnestness of soul, a solemn and tender sense of responsibility in preacher and hearer, which sends the latter away with very different emotions from those awakened by the rhe- torical brilliancy, or dazzling oratory, or mere theatrical perform- 24 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 ance of whatever kind. Of three points which make this ministry especially attractive we notice, first, an extraordinary mental clearness and precision, which make every word aid in guiding the hearer straight to the point intended; which admits no re- dundance in its beautiful and finished expression, and, in its most glowing imagery and felicitous illustration, never gives the idea of external ornamentation, but rather deepens the impression of the truth to be conveyed as by the exposition of a purely natural analogy or preexisting correspondence between things divine and human. And secondly, we are impressed by its rare persuasive- ness, — a power of taking for granted assent, which almost com- pels it, an emphasis laid on points of agreement, rather than on those of difference, — so that we find ourselves addressed from the broad ground of a common humanity rather than from the narrow platform of doctrinal distinctions, and are led to recognize the central truths which underlie and comprehend all our diversi- ties of opinion. But once more and including all the rest, we find in this preaching a depth of thought and purpose, a scorch- ing analysis of character and motive, that cuts clean through the crust of conventionalism (whether of worldliness or religion), and takes us to those depths (shall we say ?) or lifts us to those heights where we are set face to face with eternal realities, in whose sight the poor routine of our daily life is transfigured with new hope, made quick with grateful impulse and weighty with sacred meaning. These testimonies all belong to the first years of Phillips Brooks's ministry in Old Trinity on Summer Street, while he was making the conquest of Boston. They may suffice to show how the city was moved at his coming. There were those of course who doubted whether it was more than a passing fashion, some of whom went to analyze or criticise but for the most part remained to pray. Those were wisest who accepted the situation as inevitable, recognizing that some strange phenomenal power was in evidence ; that this was no case of the ordinary sensational preacher, but some- thing that was real and abiding, and as deep and mysterious as the mystery of life in this world. If it may have been hard at first for the Boston clergy to bend before such royal presence in the pulpit, they did not show it ; they demon- strated their own greatness by admitting that a greater had come among them. Still, it was a disturbing experience in ^T. 33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 25 all the churches. It was a source of further disquiet that it was impossible to classify the preacher according to received canons of criticism. Those who listened in order to sit in judgment sometimes thought they had discovered the secret of his strength and again frankly admitted their failure. "His power consists in his simplicity," said one, "in his earnestness and strength, exhibited in the expression of a theology free from the narrowness and technicalities of those dogmatic schemes which make religion ridiculous and weigh it down." Another said, "Of course he has a fine intellect, but it is the warm, earnest heart guiding the intellect that gives him such influence over his hearers." StiU another: "He knows what is in us all. He speaks out of the common experience and comes right to the heart of men." And again thought another : — His secret does not lie in his thought or his style ; not in his utterance, which is rapid almost to incoherency, and marred by an awkward habit of misreading his writing, a delivery unrelieved by the charm of a musical or even a pleasant voice ; but in his evi- dent honesty of conviction, sincerity of purpose, and earnestness of desire, — he does not think of himself or of the impression he is making; also, in that he approaches men on the side of their hopefulness. He is a man of exceptionally intellectual abilities, but the moral qualities are so obvious and forceful as to make the other seem secondary. Those who made no attempt to penetrate the secret were on the safer side. The preacher had the "vision and the faculty divine," beyond which it was impossible to go; of which Plotinus had said, as quoted by Coleridge : " It is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither appears hither nor again departs from hence to another place; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view to detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." Somewhat in this mood he was waited upon by the people. And the people in this case were 26 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 worthy of study, as was the preacher to whom they listened with rapt attention and in a wonderful stillness. They, too, have been described in these reports from which extracts have been made. It seemed to some as though the congre- gations were made up mostly of young men, to others as if young ladies under thirty predominated. The packed congregations of old Trinity [says one] represent the best intellect, the most cultivated minds, as well as the rich- est families in Boston. It is pleasant [says another] to see Phillips Brooks's audience and to analyze it. I had expected that it was exclusively of the more educated classes, but it is not ; from the place where I sat last Sunday evening I could pick out easily enough the sewing girls, the Boston clerks, the men of leisure and of study, the poor old women with their worn and pinched and faded, but thoughtful, earnest faces; and it was a dear sight, all those classes and con- ditions of men riveted to the countenance of Phillips Brooks and hanging on his lips. It was not long before the popular verdict was rendered : "Phillips Brooks's reputation is not to be church or city limited. So thoroughly genial, strong-brained, and strong- hearted a man will of necessity find a wider arena than can be shut in by any lines which local whim or habit may draw." Somehow [says one observer] there is a feeling that he belongs to the Church and not to the Episcopal Church; that he is too large a man for the enclosure of any denomination; and that a sketch of him in the " Congregationalist " is just as pertinent as in the "Churchman." And another writer sums up the situation with an air of finality : — • It is easy to see that Phillips Brooks has found his true sphere in Boston, and those fond souls that dream of his return to Phila- delphia, disappointed with his success here, may safely put away that delusive hope. He has not been long in Boston, but Boston knows how to improve her own advantages, and Phillips Brooks is already a household deity in her complacent pantheon. Harvard has taken him under her wing, and he is already one of her mag- nates. Boston, secular Boston, quotes him familiarly and scarcely ^T^- 33-3^1 TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 27 remembers that he ever lived out of sight of Bunker Hill. Phila- delphia appreciated and valued him. Boston appropriates and canonizes him with all the unapproachable honors of the "Cam- bridge set, " and there is only one thing that Boston will never do with him, and that is to spoil him as an honest, earnest, fearless minister and man. From Boston and the city churches the influence of Phillips Brooks went forth at once into the suburban towns. It soon became evident that he must belong to aU the people and occupy an interdenominational position, so far as was consistent with his duties as the rector of Trinity Church. Thus during the first years of his ministry in Boston we find him preaching in Tremont Temple (Baptist), in the HoUis Street Church (Unitarian), in Music Hall before the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Men's Christian Union, in the Shawmut Church (Congregational) ; also in the large Methodist Church in Charlestown, in the Congregational Church in Salem, in the Harvard Church (Congregational), Brookline, and in the Baptist Church in Old Cambridge. But we find him also in Episcopal churches in every suburb of Boston. Three times on every Sunday he now preached as a rule, and as there were not Sundays enough to go around he preached on week-day evenings, and whenever he preached it was the event of the moment. All this was not the manifestation only of ecclesiastical courtesy, it was a personal tribute to the preacher. No other Epis- copal clergyman was ever given a similar opportunity. Among the manifestations of his larger ministry, a special place must be given to the St. John's Memorial Chapel in Cambridge. It had been one of the inducements held out to him as a reason for coming to Boston, that this new and beautiful chapel, built by the munificence of the late Eobert Means Mason of Boston, for the use of the Episcopal The- ological School and for Harvard students, would be put at his disposal. It had also been urged upon him by Dr. Stone, its dean, and by Dr. Francis Wharton, one of its professors, that he should have some official connection with the school; but this proposition he does not appear to 28 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 have considered. On the third Sunday evening in January, 1870, he preached for the first time in St. John's Chapel, a memorable occasion to the residents of Cambridge, for it was the beginning of a practice to be continued full seven years before it came to an end. On the third Sunday even- ing in every month, during aU this time, he was to be found in the pulpit of the chapel, till his regular appearance became a prominent feature of Cambridge life. From the first Sunday that he preached till the last the chapel was densely jjacked, and with such an audience as Old Cambridge can furnish. The seating capacity was estimated at about four hundred, but a hundred camp stools were provided in the aisles and vacant spaces; the congregation, regardless of ecclesiastical etiquette, accommodated themselves in the spaces allotted to the clergy, around and beneath the pulpit, and during the sermon the doorways were thronged with eager hearers. Long before the service began people were to be seen rapidly wending their way toward Brattle Street, and were willing and glad to wait an hour in the church in order to secure their seats. It was not an Episcopal con- gregation, rather it was composed of those who profess and call themselves Christians and of those who do not. Profes- sors and students of Harvard College availed themselves of the opportunity in large and increasing numbers. The spec- tacle was an inspiring one at Trinity Church in Boston, but hardly more inspiring or significant than that which the seat of Harvard University afforded. If Cambridge had any intellectual prestige or superiority to other academic centres, it was represented fully in those audiences, who during these years came to hear Phillips Brooks in the chapel of the Episcopal Theological School. This was the first approach of Phillips Brooks to the stu- dents of Harvard College. He did not preach in Appleton Chapel until 1873. In the meantime, from 1870, he took a Bible class in the college, composed mostly of members of the St. Paul's Society. Among his pupils who hold this early relationship in grateful remembrance were William Lawrence, now Bishop of Massachusetts, F. W. Tompkins, ^T. 33-36'] TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 29 rector of Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, and the young- est brother, John Cotton Brooks, rector of Christ Church, Springfield. Quite as striking as this extension of his influence in ecclesiastical or religious ways was his recognition in secular Boston. He rose quickly to the place of a foremost citizen of his native town, whose presence at every civic solemnity or function seemed indispensable to its completeness. On such occasions he took his part with dignity and gravity, yet never without the sense of amusing incongruity in the formal association with great men and distinguished citizens to whom as a boy in Boston he had been accustomed to look up with reverence. The child in him was perpetuated in the con- sciousness of manhood's obligations. Thus in February, 1871, he was present at a meeting in Music Hall whose aim was to awaken public interest in a scheme for the erection of a museum of fine arts, "when a distinguished array of lead- ing citizens occupied seats upon the platform." Among the speakers were Ealph Waldo Emerson and Edward Everett Hale. Mr. Brooks in his remarks maintained that this was a thing of the people and for the people. He pictured clearly the state of the popular mind with regard to an art museum. There was a certain hardness and want of development in American character on its aesthetic side; an art museum would awaken those large ideas of life and nature which nothing but the art feeling can awake, — a boundless good, the new feeling of unworldliness, and the artistic sense it would create. The passion of our people to go abroad, when we have so much natural beauty at home, was not strange; man needs man's as well as nature's work, and hence Americans flock to the galleries of the Old World. He spoke of what he gained as a Boston boy in the Latin School out of the old room which contained the wonderful casts of LaocoOn and Apollo. He thought that an art museum would help every minister in Boston in the effort to lift the people crushed by the dead weight of worldliness to higher things. He spoke [says the reporter] with more than his usual earnestness and eloquence, and was frequently applauded. He was present as chaplain at the third reunion of the 30 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Army of the Potomac in 1871, an occasion which brought together Generals Meade, Hooker, Fairchild, Burnside, Logan, Sheridan, and Pleasanton. In introducing Mr. Brooks, General Meade spoke of the eminent services he had rendered during the war, not only by his eloquence in the. pulpit, but by his ministrations in the hospitals to the sick and dying. He attended a large meeting at Music Hall in commemoration of Italian unity, and spoke, together with Dr. Hedge and Mr. E. P. Whipple. He was the chaplain of the Bunker Hill Monument Association at its meeting on June 17, 1871, and in the fall of this year he officiated in the same capacity, making the prayer at the laying of the corner stone of Memorial Hall of Harvard University. When the Grand Duke Alexis visited Boston in 1872, the festivities were concluded with a banquet at the Revere House, at which Hon. Robert C. Winthrop presided, and speeches were made by the governor and mayor, by Presi- dent Eliot, and by Messrs. Lowell, Dana, and Hillard. Mr. Winthrop, who introduced Mr. Brooks, spoke of him as already a power in the community, as welcome to social and public occasions as he is valued as a pastor. Mr. Brooks, in his remarks, dwelt on this feature in Russian history, how all Russian life and government were everywhere pervaded with religion, — a religion different from ours, which had yet a great work to do in the world. He described the growth of the Grseco-Russian Church, claiming that the great work it had done for civilization should be recognized. America and Russia were the two young nations of the world with none of the taint or stain of age. "The youth of the guest was the fit expression of the hopefulness, the large mysterious future which was before his country and his dynasty." In 1872 he preached the sermon before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company at its two hundred and thirty- fourth anniversary. The sermon, afterwards published, was a notable one, from the text in Revelation xii. 7: "And there was war in heaven." It was characteristic of Mr. Brooks that though he hated war as an evil, and denounced its cru- ^T^- 33-3^1 TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 31 elty and inhumanity, yet when it came to representative occasions, he took a different view and subordinated personal feeling : — Force has a divine mission. It was not to be invoked save for divine tasks, never for the mere brutalities of selfishness, or ambition, or jealousy, or worldly rage, or for the mere punctilios of national dignity. So far as war had justification in a princi- ple it was this, — that what men think and what men feel should incorporate itself in action. The late civil war was not the man- ifestation of the military passion, but the passion of civil life, the passion of home, the passion of education, the passion of reli- gion. It was not war but peace that fought, strange as the para- dox may seem. This was the claim by which our republic may, with no unreasonable pride, boast to stand among nations as "Washington among men. First in war, first in peace ; first in war because first in peace. One other remarkable occasion at which he officiated was known as the Peace Jubilee, when Boston commemorated in 1872 the reign of universal peace by erecting a vast tem- porary edifice known as the Coliseum. Although the music to be furnished by a choir consisting of several thousands of voices, with a correspondingly large orchestra, was the prin- cipal attraction, yet it was thought becoming at the formal opening to have a religious service, and Phillips Brooks was invited to make the prayer. There were opportunities, however, to take part in civic solemnities which he declined. Such was the invitation by the city of Boston to deliver the oration on the Fourth of July in 1871. He drew a distinction between the pulpit and the rostrum, between the sermon and the oration or lecture, invariably declining to lecture^^n spite of the inducements pressing and attractive which were offered him. The familiar New England Lyceum still existed, and Mr. Eedpath, its once famous manager, knew well the value of PhiUips Brooks. There had been a time when Mr. Brooks would have welcomed such an opportunity. It was one of his boyhood's ideals. That he had come to some resolution to abide by the limitations of the pulpit, if limitations they were, is most evident; in this he was wise, and here lay also one source of his power, that 32 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 he confined and concentrated his energies in one direction. For the ministry is the most jealous of all professions, and the pulpit tolerates no rival. It would have been very easy at this moment for him to have been distracted from his profession, drawn off into lines of literary activity where he must have excelled, because he had for them a native aptitude. Thus he was received into literary circles in Boston as a peer among men who had won world distinc- tion. But when he was urged to domesticate himself in Boston as a man of literature, as by the editor of "The Atlan- tic Monthly," the invitation was declined and the temptation put behind him. Whatever he did must have its close rela- tion to preaching; it was the preacher who was speaking at the civil functions which have been described ; he could not talk or write without preaching. The services of Mr. Brooks were immediately demanded in behalf of philanthropic institutions and charitable occa- sions. Every movement for reform requested his assistance. Without identifying himself with any special cause he gave his support to every effort which aimed to secure the greatest good of humanity. The list is a long one of organizations to which he lent his presence and sympathy in these earlier years, — the Boston Fatherless and Widows' Society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Bos- ton Humane Society, the Children's Friend Society, the Bald- win Place Home for Little Wanderers, the Society for Dis- charged Female Prisoners, the Idiots' School Corporation, the Consumptives' Home, General Armstrong's Hampton School in the South for the education of negroes. At reli- gious anniversaries he was wanted, even the Free Religious Society feeling that his presence would not be amiss in their gatherings. Equally on special occasions in his own church was he called to speak, — before the Margaret Coffin Prayer Book Society, the Episcopal Church Association, the Ameri- can Church Missionary Society. It was with a peculiar f elici- tousness and distinctive freshness and power that he met these situations, as shown in the reports of his remarks which invariably followed in the press. ^T. 33-36^ TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 33 Amidst these many appeals to his sympathy the cause of children and of young people was most near his heart, or seemed to be. The two organizations of the Young Men's Christian Union and the Young Men's Christian Association possessed him as if he were exclusively their own. And these are included in the great scheme of educational institutions with which from the first, and through all his later years, he allowed himself to be identified as he did with no other cause, his relations with schools and colleges and theological semi- naries constantly increasing, and growing always more influen- tial, tender, and intimate. One might think that this was a compensation to him for his own exclusion from the work of a teacher, which in his early life he had chosen for a profes- sion. There was something extraordinary in the way in which schools and seminaries and colleges looked to him as the one man to give the fitting word for both scholars and teachers. He knew how to address them from within their own sphere. This could not have been unless he had shown some special enthusiasm for the cause of education or in- sight into its methods, and above all a sacred reverence for the work it was doing. In great measure it was his by in- heritance and by no effort of his own. But so it was that from the time he came to Boston he proved the teachers' ally and friend, and there was a spontaneity in the action of educational institutions and agencies who sought his aid as by infallible instinct. Thus in 1870 he was elected an over- seer of Harvard College. In 1871 he was appointed on the State Board of Education, in which capacity he visited annu- ally the normal schools of Massachusetts. He went to Vassar College where he made an address; to Andover where he spoke to the pupils of the Abbott Academy on "Methods of Instruction Human and Divine," "and the address was like the author, noble, affectionate, and winning;" he was chosen to make the address at the dedication of the new building of the Bradford Academy, and his subject was "The Personal Character of Force and Truth." He gave another address at Mr. Gannett's School in Boston at its closing exercises. As an overseer at Harvard, he was one of the VOL. n 34 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Board of Visitors at the Harvard Divinity School, and he soon came into close relations with the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. He still retained his position as a trustee of the Philadelphia Divinity School, giving to it his most loyal affection and support. In 1870 he went to Phila- delphia to preach before its alumni. To these many ad- dresses he brought the same careful and elaborate prepara- tion. He was maturing his distinctive principle, which was afterwards to appear in books in more impressive and final form. He could not visit school or college, or come in con- tact with the educational process in any of its stages, without asking himself the fundamental question of his own youthful preparation, How is the power of ideas to be brought to bear upon the will? The question of education was only in another form the problem of the pulpit. Thus in one of his note-books he gives hints of the thoughts passing through his mind : — The whole educational idea needs revision and is getting it. All these years there have been a few influences called education, but others have been doing a large part of the work. The man at thirty, what has made him what he is ? Now these are things claiming recognition. The question is how far they can be brought into the methods of a school, and how far a general basis can be found common to all trades. There is hope of this to some extent. CHAPTER II 1869-1872 EXTRACTS FROM COSRESPONDENCE AND FROM NOTE-BOOKS. SOCIAL LIFE. THE SUMMER ABROAD. FORMATION OF THE CLERICUS CLUB. DESTRUCTION OF TRINITY CHURCH IN THE BOSTON FIRE We have seen how Phillips Brooks was received in Boston, what impression was made by his preaching, and how diver- sified was his activity during the first three years of his min- istry at Trinity Church. We now turn to the more personal side of his life, to the impression Boston made upon him. What hints may be gathered about the man himself, who, while he threw a flood of light upon the souls of others, still always remained in and with himself alone, guarding, as it seemed, the shrine of his personality from the gaze of those who fain would know him in conventional ways. His manner at this time was marked by the signs of ex- uberant vitality ; he appeared to have a larger degree of life and of health than other men possess, and a boundless hope- fulness. He went up and down on his missions or in his social relations with a certain power of arousing or of excit- ing aU with whom he came in contact. His capacity for trifling, his talent for nonsense, had not diminished by the change from Philadelphia to Boston. In the photograph which best represents him at this period there is a, look of profound inward peace and contentment, but withal an amused smile, as the commentary on what he was observing. It is the eye of one who, reading others and studying the secrets of their hearts, does not impart the secret of his own life in casual conversation. In this respect he could be almost exasperating. Those who felt disposed to hold 36 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 serious discourse with him, such as they deemed becoming to his office, were disappointed when a question called for an answer revealing the inner life. He met them frankly and with the utmost kindness, with so great charm of manner that they felt drawn to him by an irresistible impulse ; but when they undertook to sound him upon opinions which would betray his inward nature, he was like a young colt watching for the first sign of harness or halter ; in a moment he had vanished in quick flight to the remotest corner of the field, and to follow him, to come near him again, was impos- sible. The passion for freedom, the refusal to be entangled or betrayed until he knew his ground and was sure of abso- lute sincerity, was his marked characteristic. But if one would be content with an hilarity which played upon life and shook together its various elements as in the pictures of a kaleidoscope, then he would meet him upon more than equal terms. His bearing seemed to indicate a man who had never known sorrow or disappointment in cherished hopes, to whom life appeared as enchanted ground, who wore the crown of the victor, and possessed some subtle power of transforming all situations into victories. And yet it had been no slight experience which had transplanted him from Philadelphia to Boston. Though he loved Boston with all his heart, and had done so from his childhood, yet it was like the love of a child for its home, to whom other homes may appear more attractive, richer in the fascinations of life. It took him several years before he ceased to hunger for Phila- delphia. Intensely tenacious as he was of old .friendships, and slow in forming new ones, there was something almost unnatural in severing the sacred ties which bound him to a hundred homes in the city he had left behind. It looked almost like disloyalty or treachery to the hearts which loved him and sorrowed for his departure that he should begin at once to create new ties in Boston homes, in a perfunctory, ministerial manner. It was long before he entirely outlived this feeling. Indeed he never quite outgrew it. Phila- delphia remained the city of joy and beauty ; it stood for the romance of life, the home of his immortal youth. ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 37 Thus hardly had he reached Boston in the fall of 1869, when he returned to Philadelphia for a flying visit. He writes to Miss Mitchell, November 7, 1869 : — I am afraid I shall be dreadfully jealous of any one who steps into my place at Holy Trinity in spite of my great desire to see it filled, which is very unreasonable and womanly in me of course, but natural. I am seeing my people and like them very much indeed. There are many more young people among them than I had supposed. I do not feel as much as I expected the embarrass- ment of old associations. Before Christmas he made a brief visit to Philadelphia, and on his return he writes to Miss Mitchell, December 24, 1869: — My visit was very bright and pleasant. I cannot tell you how pleasant it is to sink out of the strain and tension of this new life into the long-tried friendship of my few kind friends. Two weeks from to-night I shall be at your board again. Till then I am impatient. We have had a Christmas Tree at Trinity this afternoon, which went o£E very nicely. Christmas has been as pleasant as strangers could make it. To his brother Arthur, who asked him as the year 1869 was closing whether he was satisfied that he had done right in coming to Boston, he answered that he would prefer to wait and tell him at the end of another year. His correspondence with Miss Mitchell, which runs through the first five years after his coming to Boston, enables us to trace the external events of his life with the advantage of his own comment. But he rarely goes much beneath the surface of things, and the extracts from this correspondence which follow need to be supplemented from other sources, in order to a completer knowledge of the man. Oh, that they would get a rector ! The sight of the parish the other day convinced me how much they needed one to step in just now and take the loose reins. All is ready to run as steadily and vigorously as ever, but with a little longer delay there will be degeneracy and dropping to pieces, which will be hard to repair. McVickar cannot come, and they will not settle on him; why can't they call Willie Huntington? (December 31, 1869.) 38 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Trinity is doing beautifully, the church is full, the lecture on Wednesday evenings is crowded, we are just starting a mission, our collections have doubled what they were, the people have a mind to work. There is no opposition worth speaking of to the idea of a new church, and we shall get it very soon. If anybody- says that I am disappointed in Boston, tell them from me it is not so. I knew just what to expect, and I have found just what I expected. Last Sunday evening I preached for the first time at Cambridge at the new chapel. It was crowded mostly with stu- dents, and all went off very well. I am to go there once a month. (January 20, 1870.) The thing that dissatisfies me most this winter is the way I have had to live and work. I have read nothing for three months, and though I have had a very pleasant time indeed, yet three months is a big slice to take clean out of one's life and give away. But things will be better in this respect by and by, and mean- while I am getting a whole shelf full of books that I mean to read in that golden day which is always just ahead when I have leisure enough. (January 24, 1870.) The dreadful certainty of some people grows terrible to me, and the more sure I grow of what we ought to do and of what we are in the world for, the more dreadful it seems to have dropped anchor in the midstream and fancy we are at our journey's end. As to "where they will bring up " I 'm sure I don't know, but I fancy somebody does. . . . "I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive. What time, what cxvcuii first, I ask not. In some time. His good time, I shall arrive. He guides me and the bird. In His good time." (January 27, 1870.) I have been dining at Mr. Charles Perkins's. Mr. and Mrs. Brimmer, Longfellow, and Tom Appleton were there. It was pleasant and easy. The Perkinses have endless pictures and art things of all sorts. Mr. Appleton I like exceedingly, for he is not merely bright, but generous and kind and simple. (February 10, 1870.) I find my winter's record runs into a dreadful statement of whom I have seen, not what I have read or what I have done. It has been a winter of acquaintance-making. I know some five hundred people that I did n't know in October, and that is all. Except as a very general sort of basis for future work it is not very satisfactory. Lent is just upon us, and while it is a time that one would like to spend with a people that I know better than I yet know these Trinity folks, yet I shall enjoy it with ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 39 them. We are to have our usual services, just as we used to at Holy Trinity, and besides, I have undertaken what I expect to be very much interested in, a Bible class for Lent in college at Cambridge, where there are a good many young men who desire it, and who came and asked me for it. ... I can't tell you how much I am depending on my next visit to Philadelphia. . . . I am writing on Monday morning, when I am giving myself a little indulgence after a hard day yesterday. (February 28, 1870.) Have you read Emerson's new volume [Letters and Social Aims] ? How delightful it is ! I speak not from the point of a Bostonian, but with the mouth of absolute humanity. Is n't it delightful to have a creature so far outside of all our ordinary toss and tumble, describing life as if it were a smooth, intelligi- ble, well-oiled machine, running along without noise on the planet Jupiter, and seen by him with a special telescope and then described to us, instead of being this jarring, jolting, rattling old coach, which almost drives us crazy with its din, and won't be greased into silence? It 's a capital calm book to read at night before you go to bed, but I don't think it would go in the morn- ing right after breakfast, with the day's work before you. (March 9, 1870.) This is Tuesday. Do you remember the old Tuesdays ? For five years I think we hardly missed once, when we were all in town, of going to Race Street, and eating our dinner together, with a long talk afterwards. How completely that is over now. Mrs. Cooper gone, and Cooper in Palestine; and Strong and Richards, who were part of us for a while, in Kenyon and Provi- dence ; and I here. You hold the field alone. Now and then of a Tuesday it all comes over me with a little swash of blue. (March 22, 1870.) Last night I had my Cambridge class again. There were fifty young men there. I am intensely interested in it. It is the most inspiring and satisfactory teaching in the world. (March 29, 1870.) Have you read Disraeli's new novel? I like it ever so much. It is full of such swell people. One lives with dukes and duchesses in a way that delights me with mild snobbishness. (May 26, 1870.) Have you read Kent Stone's story [The Invitation Heeded] of his conversion? As an appeal it seems to me powerful, as an argument weak. It may touch some people strongly. Poor fel- 40 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 low ! there is something dreadfully sad in a man telling himself and the world over and over again that he is happy, as he does for so many hundred pages. (June 8, 1870.) On June 28 he sailed for Europe, where he had planned to spend the summer in a pedestrian trip through Switzer- land and the Tyrol. He landed at Cherbourg, and after a few days at Paris went to Geneva, to be joined there by his friend Cooper. They were disturbed by rumors of war be- tween France and Germany, but were soon out of reach of telegraph, and for some days knew nothing of the truth. They first realized the existence of war by its interference with the Miracle Play at Ober-Ammergau, which Brooks had counted upon seeing, the one great human interest for which he sighed in the midst of the wonders of nature. As to the war, he regarded it as wicked and unnecessary. His sym- pathies were with Germany, while France seemed to him in- solent and arrogant beyond herself. After some four weeks of tramping in Switzerland, face to face with Mont Blanc, lilonte Rosa, the Matterhorn, the Jungfrau, he went down into Italy and thence into the Tyrol, which was new to him. Almost every day saw a good many miles of walking accom- plished. He was a restless traveller, uneasy unless at work and seeing something new. His interest and enthusiasm in natural scenery were excited to the highest degree, but he never failed to be touched by the contact of nature with humanity. The scenery he describes as gorgeous, the towns as picturesque. Ischl " is one of the most beautiful spots on the face of the earth." "We drove through the valley of Salza, till far up among the hills we came to the very beau- tiful watering place of the Austrians, Bad Gastein. It is lovely as a dream, just a deep mountain gorge, with a wild cataract playing down through it and splendid mountains towering above." Here stray rumors reached him of the terrible war, with the unexpected defeat of the French, which had thrown all Europe into confusion. Of Meran he writes to his brother Frederick : " Cleveland is pretty, but this is prettier. A lovely old valley with vineyards at its bottom, and running up to the tops of the high hills that shut it in. ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 41 Old castles and modern chateaux looking down from every side, and in the midst this queer old town, with peasants in their picturesque Sunday clothes strolling back and forth over the ridge that crosses the little Adige, and an Italian sky and sunlight over everything." From Meran to Inns- bruck, then over the Stelvio Pass, "the grandest in Europe," till they came to Bormio, "as pretty a little spot as there is to be found anywhere." One of the chief drawbacks he experienced in travelling was the shortness of the beds. He writes to Frederick, "You and I are too long; you wiU have an awful time with the beds when you come into these parts." He speaks of having escaped from bed at an untimely hour, "because I could not stretch out straight or make the narrow bedclothes come over me." He was in Paris on the 28th of August, having met with no obstacles in getting there, though under constant apprehension. The city was still gay, even when the Prus- sians were believed to be only two or three days distant and the memorable siege was impending. Again he was in Paris on the 5th of September, "too busy and exciting a day to write ; there was a bloodless revolution, and we went to bed last night under a republic. I saw the whole thing, and was much interested in seeing how they make a government here." Meban, Tyrol, August 14, 1870. Mt deae Weir, — Cooper and I have been spending *a week among the Dolomite Mountains in the very heart of Tyrol, and we have wished so often that you were with us that I have been much put in mind of you all the week, and now that we have climbed up into this nest of vineyards for Sunday, I am going to do what I have meant to do ever since we got among the hills, and write a report of myself. The hills have been too many for me. They have piled in by the hundreds and buried my best intentions of letter-writing, — hills of all sorts, big and little, Swiss and Tyrolean, grassy and snowy, with glaciers and without glaciers, each sort always fiercer than the sort before it, and last of all these wonderful Dolomites, perhaps the most wonderful thing in the way of mountains that I have ever seen. They lie in a vast group to the east of the Great Brenner road and to the south of the Puster, that which runs through Tyrol from west to 42 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 east. The great Ampezzo road into Italy runs right through their midst. They shoot up singly or in vast groups and ranges, sheer masses of rock, black, red, or dazzling white, three, four, five thou- sand feet into the sky, with tops indescribably broken into spires and towers and castles, with great buttresses against their sides and acres of snow upon their sloping roofs. Between the groups, right from their very feet, start down the most exquisite steep, green valleys overrunning with luxuriant cultivation, with picturesque villages clinging to their sides, and wild brooks brawling along their bottoms. From valley to valley you climb over steep mead- owy passes standing between two of the giants at the top. Everywhere grand views are opening of the great Marmolata, which is the King of all these mountains with his miles of snow. The constant contrast of wild, rugged majesty with the perfect softness and beauty of the valleys is very fascinating. The moun- tains get their name, oddly enough, from a certain M. Dolomieu. He did n't make them, but some years ago he first discovered what they were made of. I believe it is some peculiar prepara- tion of magnesia. I wonder if some day a metaphysician, or, if the materialist people are right, a physician, of the future finds out at last what this human nature of ours is made of, whether the whole race will be named over again for him and we shall all have to be called by his name forever and ever. How the moun- tains must have laughed, or frowned, at the poor little Frenchman who said, "I have found out that you are magnesia, and so you must be called Dolomites eternally." These southern Tyroleans are very interesting people. There is a pleasant mixture of German and Italian in their character, as there is in their dress and language and look. They are very cheerful and very industrious, the men handsome and many of the young women pretty. Their beds are short and the bread is awful, but they always give you your candle with a "May you sleep well," and tell you that dinner is ready with a "May you dine well, " that makes the footboard seem a little softer and the bread not quite so musty. If you are unfortunate enough to sneeze, the whole country takes ofE its hat and " God bless you " resounds from every Dolomite in the land. Here on Sunday they are sunning themselves in the pleasant gardens of the Meran, looking as picturesque as possible with their tall hats and red jackets and big green suspenders and great embroidered belts and bare knees and black breeches. They are thoroughly hospitable, and help a fellow out with his imperfect vocabulary by generally knowing just what he wants, or at any rate what it is best for him to have. If you could see the route that Cooper and I have come ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 43 over, you would know that a very little German can go a great way in Tyrol. Meanwhile this disheartening war goes on, and we hear of it at intervals in the mountains. These Austrians hate both sides so thoroughly that any news of battle is welcome to them because one side is beaten and some of their enemies are killed. The great battle of last week and the unexpected rout of the French has changed the look of things. With Paris in his rear already sizzling with revolution and the Prussian cavalry afront of Metz, it does seem possible that this war may be the suicide of the wretch who has brought it on with all its horrors so needlessly and wickedly. It seems to me that nothing could make one so despondent about human nature and the world who was inclined that way as just such a war as this coming at this time of the day in history. Cooper sends you his love and wishes you had been with us among these Dolomites. The poor fellow is groaning over a letter in the next room. He and I are alone now. Newton was with us for ten days, and I liked him exceedingly. We go hence by Innsbruck, then by the Finstermiinz and Stelvio passes into Italy. Then through the Engadine north again, and I go to Paris if I can get there. I sail on the 10th of September. I hope to find at Innsbruck the letter you promised me from the Pictured Rocks. I hope you have had a good summer. God bless you always.^ P. B. The following extracts are from Mr. Brooks's letters to Miss Mitchell after his return from Europe : — I got in New York Stanley's new volume of Essays, some of which I have seen before, but all of which are interesting. There is an essay on the "Religion of the Nineteenth Century " which is the best statement I have seen of the characteristics and prospects of what we call the "Broad Church" movement. Do read it. His views about Church and State I can't agree with, but it is the only strong ground on which an Englishman can put the question, and for all Englishmen must have weight. What capital English he always writes ? I send you a number of the Harvard boys' paper with an account of Mr. Hughes's visit to them, which was very pleasantly done. I missed seeing him at Mr. Fields's by my Pennsylvania visit. (October 17, 1870.) 1 Cf . Letters of Travel, by Phillips Brooks, for fuller details of this and other jonmeys abroad. 44 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 I am reading Huxley's new "Lay Sermons." How clever it is, how much the man knows, and how brilliantly he writes. But it is like most Small Books on Great Subjects, most books for the people that popularize science. It is patronizing and mince- meaty, and he is particularly belligerent about the theologians in a way that does not do credit to his discrimination or temper. ... It does not seem as if it could be only a year ago that I preached my last sermon in Holy Trinity, and we all travelled together to New York the next morning. It seems a half dozen years at least. My first year here in Boston has been on the whole successful. I have done as much with Trinity as I had any right to expect to do, and we are on a footing now to do more. But it has not been the pleasant life that the old one was, and while there has been much to enjoy, there has been more anxiety and worry than ever was of old. But I dare say I shall like it better. Meanwhile don't think I am blue. (November 10, 1870.) I don't feel theological this morning. It is too near Christ- mas, which always upsets theology entirely. I have never been able to write a Christmas sermon yet that was in the least a theological satisfaction to me or anybody else. So we '11 put the questions on the shelf till next week. I am so glad that Christ- mas is coming, and yet I hardly know why. This is the only day whose associations have much power over me. I don't care a great deal about Anniversaries, but Christmas, with its whole spirit, into which we all seem to slip so easily year after year, is exceedingly beautiful to me, and, as I go about the streets, the details in these few days beforehand, which are vulgar enough in themselves, — men mounting up spruce boughs in churches and men carrying home turkeys by the legs, — all give me ever so much pleasure. And I like it more and more as I get older (December 23, 1870.) The smallpox was prevailing in Philadelphia, and Mr. Brooks writes to Miss Mitchell, inviting her to Boston: We will take good care of you in our cold-blooded sort of way, and when the pestilence is over, you shall return to your home with an increased measure of that respectable dislike with which Bostonians are always gratified to think that the rest of the coun- try regards them. Have you read Dickens's "Life," and isn't he a disagreeable person and isn't it an ill-written book? (Jan- uary 6, 1871.) ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 45 The Lecture (Wednesday evening) didn't go very well. The night is stormy, and though I don't care much for a full audience for the name of the thing, I need it for inspiration, and when I see a small audience I lose the impersonalness of the thing. I think of individuals and that always puts me out. I was talking about the visit of Zebedee's children and their mother to Jesus, and am much interested in the subject. But it never is yet the same thing talking in Trinity that it used to be in the old time speaking from the dear old platform. (January 11, 1871.) I have been quite stirred upon the subject of prophecy in writ- ing a sermon for last Sunday on Cephas. I am quite convinced that there were two Isaiahs. . . . Queer people come to consult me here. To-day there was a man who had been to England and got into some set of fanatics there and come home calling himself a Christadelphian. To-morrow, like as not it will be a skeptic of the widest incredulity. (January 18, 1871.) One evening this week I had my Cambridge boys, the fifteen senior members of the St. Paul's Society, in at my room to spend the evening with me, a noble set of fellows, manly and true, and helped instead of hurt by their religion. I take great pleasure in them. (February 3, 1871.) Aren't you glad that Paris is taken? I was reading last night one of Robertson's Lectures on Poetry, with its extravagant glorification of war, which is so amazing in a right-minded man like him. It seems to have been the last remnant of brutality in a nature which had been almost everywhere cultured and refined far above it. But who can look at the last ten years on both continents and not call war horrible ? Let us trust this one is over. Good must come of it, horrible as the process is. Who- ever was to blame for it, we surely can't help being thankful that Prussia and not France is to be the master in Europe. (February 13, 1871.) This is one of the evenings when I wish myself in Philadelphia ; not that anything particular is the matter with Boston, but I have an evening to myself and I am tired of reading, and there is nobody in particular that I can go and see without its being a visit, which I don't feel up to. Nobody's house where I can go and smoke and be pleasantly talked to, and answer or not, as I please. I know one such house in another town where I don't live any longer. But I am not there, and I must make the best of it. (March 7, 1871.) 46 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 As to English Church matters, I am thoroughly content with the Voysey decision, and I think the Convocation debate about (Vance) Smith disgraceful. It is published in full in the "Guard- ian." Bishop Wilberforce is worse in his way than any . . . can be. The American bishops too, it seems, went with them. (March 15,1871.) I am having a very good time, with plenty of loose reading and the days only half long enough for what I find to do. This even- ing I have been reading Tyndale's new book of Alpine stories, which is very charming, bringing back the fascination of that wonderful country and exciting one as all such accounts of ven- turesome climbing unaccountably do. The style is charming, and the man, with his splendid health and enjoyment of nature and his current of sentiment, is delightful. (July 25, 1871). Are all Button's Essays like the one which I have just been reading, republished by Dr. Osgood in New York ? It is on the " Incarnation and the Laws of Evidence, " and shows a breadth and purity and devoutness of mind which gives one great delight. I would rather have a Unitarian read it than any book I know ; and if one thinks that Broad Churchmanship is necessarily hard or indifferent of the Whately or the style, nothing could better convince him otherwise than the warmth and earnestness of this little book, which has so evidently come out of a man's soul. (August 10, 1871.) The summer of 1871 was spent in Boston. He seems to Lave adopted the rule, though it was not invariable, of taking the alternate summers abroad. Throughout the summer he preached regularly at Trinity Church in the morning, and at St. Mark's, West Newton Street, in the evening. Both churches were free to strangers, and it is needless to say were filled. The summer still continues very beautiful, cool and pleasant, and I have enjoyed the leisure of the town exceedingly. But I am already looking forward and counting on my visit to you in the fall. I shall enjoy it immensely, and you will be obliging and talk to me as much as I want to know. From that I shall take the fresh start into another winter which everybody needs, and which is mainly what one loses by keeping at work all sum- mer. "All life is tidal," as Tom Appleton said to me on the street just now, and went on to tell me how the other creatures as ^■^■33-3^1 EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 47 well as we needed ebb and flow and got it somehow at regular periods of their life. So I shall be high tide about the last of October. (August 13, 1871.) I have been reading Browning's new poem, and I couldn't help feeling vaguely all the while that there was a sort of story in it of the way that other men lose their wives nowadays, only not always with the better fruit of widowhood. The poem seems to me, by the way, very fine and beautiful, more tender and human, than almost anything that Browning has ever given us before. (August 22, 1871.) Miss was staying at the Vintons' (at Pomfret), and when I was coming up, as I had to do on Wednesday, to attend a funeral, I had the privilege of her company all the way to town. She was delightful, full of brightness and information and fun, not in the least formidable to people of imperfect cultivation, with all that is best and apparently nothing of what is worst in women. . . . On Thursday I had an hour with Mrs. , which was as good as a walk in the Alps for freshness and healthfulness. There is nothing like her in Boston, and remember we are to have an evening there when I am with you in Philadelphia whatever else may fail. (September 7, 1871.) Have you read Joaquin Miller which is brilliant in color and very picturesque sometimes, and not by any means our great poet yet. (September 16, 1871.) The old round of parish duties, which I have gone to afresh every autumn for twelve years, has opened again, and I have been rather surprised at myself to find that I take it up with just as much interest as ever. I suppose that other men feel it of their occupations, but I can hardly imagine that any other profession can be as interesting as mine. I am more and more glad that I am a, parson. I wonder if the autumn is as splendid with you as it is here. I spent last night at Waltham (at the country house of Mr. R. T. Paine), and this morning got an hour's walk before I came into town. I never saw anything lovelier than the woods, just touched with autumn color. The whole of September has been a perfect month, and next month when the glory of it is beginning to fade I shall get over it again with you in Philadelphia. (September 25, 1871.) It is very good of you to think so kindly of my visit. It was a very delightful time to me, and if you really enjoyed it all I am 48 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 truly glad. How delightfully lazy it was, and Boston seems so driven and hurried. People here seem possessed to do something without much care for what they do. The mere passion of rest- lessness is in the Yankee blood and partly in the East winds. (November 11, 1871.) I have two of your letters to one of mine, which is a good deal more than it was worth, but is very pleasant to me. I do not find that people ever are troubled at getting more than their deserts. It is my birthday and I am thirty-six years old. It seems a little strange but not unpleasant, and although I have had a pretty time indeed so far and would be glad to go back and do it all over again, yet I am not miserable that I cannot, and I am still rather absurdly hopeful about the future. To have passed out of young manhood altogether and find myself a middle-aged man is a little sobering, but I only hope that all the young fellows who come after me will have as good a time as I have had. . . . We have been seeing the Russian Grand Duke, who appears to be a fine, manly, sensible fellow. (December 13, 1871.) It is rather strange how freshly and delightfully the Cliristmas feelings come back year after year. And yet it is ten years ago the first Sunday in January, 1872, since I became your minister at Holy Trinity. I have had an awfully uneventful life. Things happen to other people, but not to me. I am ashamed to look back over any day, though I was never busier in my life. It seems made up of such wretched little details, and yet I would n't be anything else but a parson for the world. I wonder often that the work keeps up such a perpetual freshness when the days are so monotonous. I know nothing of the grace of sickness. It seems to me ter- rible, the whole idea of suffering, but even more of weakness and weariness. (January 16, 1872.) Last Sunday I spent at New Haven, and enjoyed it exceed- ingly. Stayed with Dr. Harwood, who is a fine, studious Broad Churchman ; preached for him in the morning, and in the evening preached in his church for the Berkeley Association of Yale Col- lege. The church was crowded, and Congregational professors sat in the chancel. I had never seen Yale College before, and was interested in its size and life. It is not equal to Cambridge, but it is a great college still. . . . Have you read Lightfoot's "Commentary on Philippians" ? Do get it and read the "Essay on the Christian Ministry. " It does seem to me to finish the Apostolic Succession Theory completely. (January 19, 1872.) ^T. 33-36'] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 49 The California plan is not settled yet, but I think I shall go. . . . Though it would be folly to talk about being run down, I am conscious of having been on the strain rather too long. I have preached twice every Sunday, and generally three times, since I got home from Europe, a year ago last September. I am preach- ing badly, and the trip will do me more good now than at any other time. (February 7, 1872.) I don't think that parsons really are so bad. I suspect that they are human, and I see but little evidence practically of Apos- tolic Succession, but I think there are not many who would refuse to see a smallpox patient, or who would give up parish visiting because the smallpox was in town. . . . McVickar was here on Sunday and preached a good hearty sort of sermon for me in the afternoon. They are talking about him for St. Paul's here. I went out on Sunday evening to preach the first of a course of sermons for the St. Paul's Society at Cambridge. Going there is one of the most interesting things I have to do. (February 21, 1872.) I get so tired of talking with tongue and pen that I don't feel equal to hearing myself in one unnecessary word. To-day, for instance, I have preached a Price Lecture, and attended two funerals, and carried on a Mission meeting among our poor folk, and had a regular Wednesday Evening meeting (lecture). I am sure that I shall hear my own dreary voice reading the service in my dreams. Do go and hear Miss Smith and tell me about her. The old Methodist idea of perfection, which I fancy has always more or less believers, is just now quite a favorite notion. There are several meetings held here in its interest. I have just got a note from Eev. Copley Greene, who wants me to dine to-morrow with Rev. John Hubbard, who is a great believer in it ; and Mr. Boardman of the "Higher Christian Life," Bishop Eastburn, and Dr. Vinton, and Willie Newton are to be there, — a jolly dinner party. ... I have been looking through Hawthorne's "Italian Diary, " — an interesting book that it would have been wicked to publish, if it had not been the work of a man who took delight in dissecting himself in public. (March 6, 1872.) I am very busy. My Confirmation class is to be large, and gives me much thought, hut it is very interesting. Last Sunday Dr. Harwood preached for me in the morning, and preached well. He gave a noble sermon to the College boys at Cambridge in the evening. (March 22, 1872.) I have been reading a new book, which is a rare thing with me VOL. II. 50 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 nowadays. This one delights me exceedingly. It is Dr. Sears' book on St. John (The Fourth Gospel, the Heart of Christ). Do get it and enjoy it. It is so rich and true and wise. All that he has written before is excellent, but this is best of all. I have a copy of his " Regeneration, " which you gave me once. . . . Have you read the " Life of Hookham Frere ? " It is very in- teresting. Some of his translations are wonderfully well done. (March 28, 1872.) I have perfected my plans for Europe now. The 27th of June is the day, and Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are the places, with possibly a little of Scotland thrown in. Judge Gray goes with me. We shall represent to Norwegians that we are insig- nificant specimens of the American size, and I shall tell them that they ought to see two giants we have at home, called and , if they want to see the true grandeur of the American pul- pit. (April 6, 1872.) I was very much disappointed that Weir refused to go. I had dared to hope that he might look favorably upon our plan. ... I suppose it is one of the small compensations that my lonely life brings with it, that having nobody but myself to pro- vide for, I can now and then get a chance like this. A few of the folks of Trinity surprised and embarrassed me a little the other day with a check for $3300 to go with. A week ago my friend Edward Dalton died in California. Did you ever see him? He married a cousin of Mary McBurney's. He was one of the noblest and best and bravest men I have ever known, and death has not often come nearer me than in his loss. His life for the last three or four years has been one of the saddest things I ever knew of. Wife, child, and health all went at once, and it has been a mere fight for life, as brave and cheerful as possible, ever since. (May 25, 1872.) Somehow my visits to Philadelphia, delightful as they are, always go ofE in such a rush and whirl and hurry that when I come away I have a sort of feeling that with all the pleasant time I have n't got exactly what I went for, — the quiet, placid time I used to have, especially of evenings when I dropped into your house on my way home. I suppose it is necessary that one should feel that his time is not limited before he can enjoy it thoroughly. At least it is so with me. I hate to be hurried. That will be one great advantage of heaven. . . . We shall have plenty of time for all that our hands find to do. I sometimes have suspi- cions that if I could live for five hundred years I might come to something and do something here. All is going on beautifully ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 51 about the new church. Some of the people of their own notion got up a subscription to buy an extra piece of land, and in a few days raised $76, 000, and are going on now to make it a hundred thousand, so that the church will be really something very fine. We shall have in all something pretty near half a million to put into it. ... I am getting up a sermon for the Ancient and Honor- able Artillery Company, one of the queer old Puritan organizations before which every Boston minister preaches some time in his career, and is not thoroughly initiated without. (May 30, 1872.) It is a terrible week in Boston. The Jubilee is going on with flash and bang all the time. ... It is wonderful what a row this jubilee is making. There is not a corner to be had in any hotel, and the Enormous Barn which I see from my window is thronged all day with folks curious to see what the big noise is to be. I like to see a crowd and expect to enjoy this very much, but it is all very funny and sensational, and the primness and classicism of Boston turns up its stiff nose at it. . . . We have chosen Richardson of New York for our church architect, — the best of all competitors by all means. He will give us something strong and good. (June 11, 1872.) The summer of 1872 was spent abroad in northern Europe. Mr. Eobert Treat Paine accompanied him and was with him for a month; after that he was alone, de- pendent on acquaintances made in travelling. His brother Frederick was in Europe at the time, but naturally preferred, as be was making bis first visit to the Old World, to see it in his own way. They met in London, and then separated. Mr. Brooks's summer included several weeks in Norway, where be was enchanted with the scenery and impressed with the broad daylight, which enabled him to read a letter on the street at eleven o'clock at night. From Norway be passed to Sweden, where be speaks of seeing Prince Oscar. He was delighted with Stockholm ; be went to Upsala for its university and cathedral, and to meditate upon Scandina- vian mythology. From Sweden be went to Finland and thence to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, recalling historical associations, commenting on ways and customs, drawing bis own inferences, but especially interested in the cburcbes, which be made it a rule to attend on every possible occasion. He returned from Russia to Berlin, stopped at 52 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 Copenhagen and Hamburg, then went to Paris, where he met his brother, and together they sailed for home. An incident occurred while Mr. Brooks was in Sweden, to which he makes only the briefest allusion in his " Letters of Travel," — his meeting with Prince Oscar, brother of the reigning king, and who soon after acceded to the throne as King Oscar II. A fuller account of this meeting is given by Rev. Percy Browne, from a conversation with Mr. Brooks : — When Brooks was approaching Christiania he heard that Prince Oscar was to come on board the steamer on which he was travel- ling. As the ship anchored, the royal barge drew near amidst a thunder of salutes from the forts. When the Prince reached the deck he stood for a moment between the sailors drawn up on either side of the gangway, and noticing Brooks, who modestly stood behind the sailors, said in excellent English, waving his hand toward the city, "Is it not a loyal people? " The Prince then retired to the end of the ship roped ofE for his exclusive use. At midnight, Brooks was smoking a last cigar before turning in, sitting on a part of the deck far removed from the royal en- closure, when a tall man wrapped in a cloak drew near. It was the Prince. He said in English, "Will you oblige me with a light ? " When he had lit his cigar he sat down and entered into a long conversation, asking many intelligent questions about America, especially about the Judiciary, the method of adminis- tering justice in the Courts, etc. Brooks said he spoke like a man conscious that he had come to a position of great responsi- bility, and anxious to learn all that might be of use to him. The next day the Prince disembarked. Before leaving the ship, as he stood at the gangway, he reached over the line of sailors behind which Brooks was standing, and shaking hands With him, said, "Au revoir. The earth is round and we '11 meet again." A few extracts from his note-book give us an idea of the deeper moods of the traveller, in this summer of 1872 : — As we travel, it seems sometimes as if ninety-nine hundredths of the people in this world had so hard a time, could find so little in their lot to enjoy. The reassurance must come from consider- ing that joy in mere life, often dumb, brutish, and unconscious, but very real, which every creature has, the luxury of mere exist- ence to which we cling, for which we slave, and which we really do enjoy. ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 53 As we travel, this impresses us much, I think, — the uniform- ity of nature under all the endlessly various changes of men and their ways and customs, always the same sky and ground and grass. It is a striking picture of the universality of the primary and simple emotions and affections, beneath the changing aspects of men's more complicated life, — this sight everywhere of the simplest signs of the simplest emotions. The child's smile, curiosity, love, rage, give us the same idea. This terrible longing to fasten and confine sacredness to local- ity ; this passion of holy places. We refine it and elevate it, but it is to be feared that many of its worst effects are latent in the most beautiful features of our Anglican religion. (Moscow, August 18, 1872.) After all, it is the deepest and not the superficial interest of life in which men sympathize most and come together; in religion above all other things, and as regards religion in those things which are deepest, not in forms and ordinations, but in the sense of sin, the sense of God, the hope of perfectness. I was struck with it as I travelled in Norway, where those whom I had not understood, who had lived a different life all the week, seemed as I saw them in church on Sunday to be so perfectly intelligible. The value of Sunday as thus the oommon day, the day of worship. Out of these reflections was born a sermon on the text, "Until I went into the sanctuary of God." He wrote down the leading ideas of the sermon in the note-book, following the extracts just given. The Sanctuary of God the place of solved problems. The Holy Place of God. His Presence. The contact of the soul with His soul. How it shames our ordinary talk about churchgoing. How it convicts most of our preaching. How it shows the unim- paired fitness of the custom. The solution comes with the thought of God and of the soul and of eternity and of redemption. I think one cannot go into any temple which men have built to worship God in, in however false a way, cannot enter a mosque or the most superstitious of cathedrals in a right spirit, without seeming to feel the influence of some such spiritual illumination on the problems that he has left outside in the hot street. I dare not despise the poor Russian crossing himself, etc. I went yesterday into a bookstore to find something to read on my journey hither, and the only legible thing that I could hit on — strange company for an orthodox travelling parson — was a 54 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 cheap copy of Eenan's "Les Ap6tres." I read it through yester- day, and it was dreadful ; the studious putting of the supernatural and the spiritual out of our knowledge, and almost out of our existence, the making of life its own complete solution. I pitied him for his flippant satisfaction, every page I read. What can such an one do with death? (Copenhagen, August 28, 1872.) The summer was a thoroughly successful one. So he speaks of it in letters on his return. To his friend Mrs. Lapsley of New York he writes : — I have had a superb journey, . . . that was quite unlike any- thing I have ever had of Europe before and exceedingly interest- ing. We went so far north as to get beyond the reach of dark- ness, and lived in broad daylight all night long. The scenery of Norway is wonderfully picturesque, especially the coast scenery, and the people are the oddest, quaintest, poorest, honestest, dirt- iest, ugliest folk in all the world. I found Kussia, too, intensely interesting, and altogether have had a rare summer. (October 13, 1872.) It is important to chronicle these journeys of Phillips Brooks because they constitute the breaks in a somewhat monotonous round of triumph and honors, of numberless engagements, of constantly recurring social functions where his presence was indispensable. They were indeed his only recreation, his only mode of escape from the burdens of the life that now began to press ever more heavily upon him. What strikes one forcibly in his way of living at this time and afterwards is the absence of any form of exercise or recreation. He has ceased riding horseback; his walking is mainly confined to his round of parish visiting. Occa- sionally he walks when he goes to Cambridge to preach. Now and then he mentions bathing, fishing, and sailing, as when he visits his parishioner, Mr. C. R. Codman, at Cotuit; or goes on some yachting excursion along the coast. He speaks sometimes of playing billiards at Mr. Morrill's, or of bowling at Mr. Thayer's at Lancaster. He appeared so well, however, so exceptionally vigorous, that one would hardly suppose that he was the worse for neglect of exercise. Yet even in this exceptional moment of apparently luxurious vitality and abounding spirits there were hints which were ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 55 suggestive of danger. In 1871 he was hindered from work for several days and confined to the house with a bad throat. He wrote describing his illness to Dr. Mitchell of Phila- delphia, admitting that he had been alarmed. Here was his vulnerable point. He was putting a burden upon his voice to which it was not equal. Those who were experts in the use of the voice were convinced that he did not understand the right use of the vocal organs. "When he was fairly launched in his sermon, in the storm and stress of his great effort, one seemed to hear the voice creaking and groaning, as if overstrained, and the result was sometimes harsh and unmusical. There were fears that his voice might fail him, — fears in which he shared, and which sometimes depressed him as he thought of the future. But the immediate danger passed away, and the voice recovered from its ill usage, though somewhat impaired. This was the time when he should have married and formed a home of his own. His friends introduced reminders of the subject in their letters, but his reply was only that the coming woman had not yet appeared. When he first came to Boston he took rooms at 34 Mount Vernon Street, but complained of the want of sunlight, and soon transferred himself to the Hotel Kempton on Berkeley Street. Here he was happy in his surroundings, exercising his rare gifts as a host. If he suffered at aU seriously in the separation from Philadelphia, it was not evident. He gave the impression of being the happiest of men, — a happiness whose fountain was deep and inexhaustible, as though he drank from sources more rich and full than others, and to most men inaccessible. He was now possessing or creating a rich new life in the hosts of friends whojgathered about him. In the first place his father and mother were near him. He made it a rule to dine with them every Sunday, after morning service, as in Philadelphia he had dined with Mr. Lemuel Coffin. That was a fixed engagement. At his brother's house, he found another home. He was greatly interested in the birth of his first niece as the starting of a new generation in the Brooks family. His youngest brother, S6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 John, he attended on his way through Harvard, as he had done with Frederick and Arthur. John graduated in 1872, and then the family succession closed at Harvard. "Since I entered college," he writes, "in 1851, twenty years ago, we have had one there all the time." It was a family event of rare interest, such as few family records can boast, when at the ordination of Arthur Brooks to the deaconate, his two elder brothers in the ministry were present, Frederick Brooks presenting the candidate, and Phillips Brooks preaching the sermon. The event took place in Trinity Church, June 25, 1870, Bishop Eastburn officiating. A brilliant career opened at once to the younger brother. He possessed the same family characteristics which lent power to his older brothers ; he had dignity and gravity, and effectiveness as a preacher, joined with soundness of judgment which made him even while still young a valuable counsellor. He had energy and administrative gifts, hal- lowed by a spirit of consecration to his work. His first parish was at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where in a short time he witnessed as a result of his labors the erection of a new church. In 1872 he accepted a call to the important parish of St. James in Chicago. The following letter was written to him by Phillips Brooks on the occasion of his engagement to be married : — Boston, March 23, 1872. Dear Abthitr, — I write at once to say how sincerely and with all my heart I congratulate you upon your great happiness. Of course you are very happy, and you have the best right to be, for a life is a poor, imperfect sort of thing unless a man is mar- ried, and engagement Is about the same thing. I hope it won't be a long engagement. Do be married and be wholly happy very soon. Life isn't long enough to waste any of it. ... I can rejoice with you not only on the abstract bliss of an engagement, but on your own peculiar good fortune and special prospects of being happy. A good many of my friends I have lost when they got married, but I look forward to knowing and liking you better than ever, and when it comes to the snug little cottage or the gorgeous parsonage in Chicago, I speak to be your first visitor and to have my place always in your home, as, you shall always have yours in my disconsolate and empty rooms. ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 57 So, Arthur, you are wise and good, as you always are, and may God bless you and life be always only brighter and brighter than it seems to-day. I send by you my kindest regards to Miss Willard, which I shall hope to dispatch more directly very soon. "We are counting on your visit. Yours always, P. None were quicker than his old college friends and class- mates to discern and rejoice in the signs of his greatness, many of them living in or near Boston, some of them his parishioners at Trinity, Mr. Eobert Treat Paine, Mr. John C. Ropes, Col. Theodore Lyman. He felt at first some embarrassment at the revelation of his new and greater self to these associates of earlier years. Hardly had he become fixed in Boston when it seemed as if he were transferring to it his clerical friends of Philadelphia and rebuilding his old environment. Dr. Stone had preceded him in coming to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. In 1870 Dr. Vinton came to be the rector of Emmanuel Church. Soon after followed Eev. William Wilberforce Newton to be the rector of St. Paul's, Brookline, Eev. Percy Browne to St. James's, Eoxbury, and Eev. Tread well Walden to St. Paul's, Boston. Rev. C. A. L. Eichards was almost within calling distance at Providence ; Eev. James P. Franks, at one time his pupil and now his kinsman by marriage, was called to the rectorship of Grace Church, Salem. In 1870 these clerical friends were associated in a club called the "Clericus," which met on the first Monday evening in every month. To Mr. Newton belongs the honor of being its founder, who organized it after the plan of the Clericus in Philadelphia, already mentioned, if it could be called an organization which had no constitution or by-laws. It possessed a clerk in Mr. Newton, who notified the members of the monthly meetings. In the course of years it developed a president in the person of Phillips Brooks, but no one ever knew exactly when or by what pro- cess he assumed the office. His right to it, however, was unquestioned. The meetings were held informally for a few years in the houses of the members, until finally Mr. Brooks 58 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 insisted that they should meet regularly at his rooms. The social element on the whole was the most prominent feature of these evenings, though the inevitable essay was always read. There were some who thought that the meetings would be more profitable if the members were all required to comment in turn on the essay, but to this arrangement the president positively refused to listen. The talk should be spontaneous or not at all. If a member had anything to say let him wait his chance and then hold the floor if he could get it against some one else more anxious to be heard. It was practically Phillips Brooks's Club, and so it came to be generally known. It formed a prominent feature in his life, as it surely did in the lives of all its other members. Those who had the privilege of meeting him there saw him and heard him in familiar and yet impressive ways which will never be forgotten.^ It was characteristic, too, of Mr. Brooks that he seemed to give himself exclusively to whatever occasion claimed his interest. Thus he seemed almost to live for the Clericus; he was seldom absent from its meetings; he kept track of absent members, and urged their attendance or reproved them for neglect. But he was also giving himself in num- berless other ways. The demands upon him were so great even in these early years in Boston that one wondered how he found time for reading or sermon-writing. Hospitality in Boston was extended to him as freely as it had been in Philadelphia. According to his diary there is rarely a day when he does not mention some dinner engagement. Breakfast was about the only meal that he took at his lodg- ings. He never gave the impression, however, of one who suffered from the burden of his duties, and certainly he never complained, except in familiar letters, that his life was not wholly to his mind. He attended concerts occasionally, ^ The founders and ori^nal members of the Club were Phillips Brooks, Rufua W. Clark, C. A. L. Richards, Arthur Lawrence, William W. Newton, W. R. Huntington, A. V. G. Allen, James P. Franks, Charles H. Learoyd, George L. Locke, Henry L. Jones, Charles C. Tiffany, Percy Browne, Edmund Rowland, Leonard K. Storrs, Henry F. Allen, Rt. Rey. Thomas M. Clark, Treadwell Walden, James H. Lee, C. G. Currie, E. D. Tompkins. ^T-33-36} EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 59 especially tlie Oratorios given in Music Hall. He kept late hours, not generally retiring before twelve o'clock, but was always an early riser, breakfasting at half past seven. He had one standing engagement where there was no objection to the lateness of the hour, — his Sunday evenings at Dr. Vinton's after his third service was over. If he found "the doctor favorable for conversation " the occasion was a pro- longed one. Yet amid this multiplicity of engagements, he did secure time for reading and study, and for the writing of sermons. Despite the manifold distractions, his mind was preoccupied and concentrated on his work; because he saw life in its unity and as a whole, all things were contributing to his purpose. From 1871 he was a member of the Examining Committee of the Public Library in Boston, which served to keep new literature before him. His own library, already large, was rapidly growing. He continued to make it a rule to read books as they appeared, which every one else was reading, and so kept himself in contact with the literary trend of the moment. In poetry at this time there was Browning's "Eing and the Book," A. H. Clough's poems, Morris's "Earthly Paradise," Kobert Buchanan's poems, George Eliot's "Spanish Gypsy," etc., and these he read. He writes to Kev. Arthur Brooks : — I indulged myself in a little piece of mediaevalism in Rossetti's Poems, and as I read over the "Blessed Damosel " last night I thanked you for it. Have you ever read the Poems ? They are Pre-Raphaelitism in verse, veiy curious and very lovely in their way, but you need to go at them in the right mood, perfectly dreamy, entirely untroubled with practical affairs. . . . Quick wouldn't like them because they don't preach the Gospel a bit, and Claxton would n't like them because there is not a word of parish work in them, but they are very pretty, nevertheless, when you are a trifle tired with parish work. (December 27, 1870.) There was different and more substantial reading, as in Hunt's "Eeligious Thought in England," which he greatly admired, and which still remains the one best work for intro- ducing a reader to the comprehensive character of the Angli- 6o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 can Church; or TuUoch's "Eational Theology" in the Church of England. In other books which he was reading we get the reflection of the hour: Lecky's "History of Ka- tionalism," Darwin's "Descent of Man," the writings of Herbert Sj)encer, Huxley, and Tyndall, whose "Prayer Gauge " suggested a sermon on prayer in which he main- tained its objective as well as subjective effects; Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy," Pater's " Kenaissance, " Fronde's " History of England," Stanley's "Westminster Abbey," and Parkman's "Jesuits in North America;" in biography, the lives of Lacordaire and of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the "Letters" of John Adams; in lighter books or novels, "Eealmah," Auerbach's "On the Heights," "Wilhelm Meister," and Lord Chesterfield's "Letters." There was one period of history which he continued to study with peculiar zest, — the English civil war and the age of the Commonwealth, as if he were invigorated by returning to the native atmosphere which his first American ancestors had breathed. He read Burnet, Clarendon, Hallam, and Nugent's " Memorials of Hampden." Masson's "Life of Milton " sent him to Milton himself, and especially to the "Areopagitica." He read anew "Cromwell's Letters" by Carlyle, taking notes as he read. There was another author whom he valued and kept by him, Isaac Taylor, who has furnished the seeds of thought, of sober and sane criticism to many minds. Wordsworth must be mentioned and Shakespeare particularly as writers to whom he was con- stantly recurring. There is evidence that he was carrying on some larger purpose in his more directly religious reading. He was studying the Fourth Gospel as the basis of Wednesday even- ing lectures; he had also begun a systematic study of the life of Christ, in order to the satisfaction of the deeper questionings of his mind. Then, too, he was looking into the history of preaching, and to this end was making out a list of the great preachers in the church from the time of Chrysostom. After the first six months of his rectorship at Trinity, during which he was making the acquaintance of ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 61 the parish and wrote only a few sermons, he began with renewed zeal the task of sermon-writing, but under a some- what different impulse from that which had inspired the Philadelphia preaching. He was beginning to feel the influ- ence of Boston. The religious situation was also changing; the spirit of free inquiry was growing deeper; the difficulties begotten by the scientific mind were to many overwhelming. These influences he had not felt so strongly in Philadelphia. There his task had been to arouse a living, fresher interest in what men already believed. Now he was called upon to meet the moods of those who were drifting away from the historic Christian faith. The question was before him how far it was possible to be true to one's reason, to be free to accept new truth from whatever quarter, to be honest with one's instincts and conviction, and yet to maintain the faith of childhood as given in the Apostles' and the Nicene creeds. Out of the many sermons which he wrote during the first three years of his ministry in Boston, Mr. Brooks chose but four for publication. Two of these have a distinct autobi- ographical value. The sermon entitled " The Young and the Old Christian" from Deut. xxxiii. 16,^ "The goodwill of him that dwelt in the bush," written in 1871, has the marks of the earlier Philadelphia manner when he rejoiced in dis- covering some unfamiliar passage of Scripture, whose mean- ing was not at once obvious. The thought of the sermon bears on the relation between the beginning and the end of the Christian life; on the unbroken process of growth in which the personal Christ becomes clearer to us in the years of mature manhood ; so that whatever the years may bring in the accretions of knowledge or wisdom, we shall never be called on to renounce as unreal the vision of youth by the bush side when we first heard the voice of God in our ears. The local mood of the moment when this sermon was preached called for a protest against the narrowness and illiberality which many identified with the Christian faith: "Narrowness of view and sympathy is not unnatural in a 1 The sermon is published in the second Tolume of hia sermons, The Candle of the Lord, and other Sermons, p. 39. 62 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 new believer. It is very unnatural in the maturer Christian life. ... I do not say that it is best for the young Chris- tian to be illiberal. Far better certainly if he could leap at once to the full comprehension and the wide charity which the older Christian gathers out of the experience of life." We have here the germ of his later treatise on Tolerance : — It is too apt to be the case that only by experience does the Christian reach this breadth of sympathy, which comes not from indifference, but from the profoundest personal earnestness. It is something wholly different from the loose toleration which men praise, which is negative, which cares nothing about what is abso- lutely true or false. . . . At present it seems to be assumed that narrowness is essential to positive belief, and that toleration can be reached only by general indifference. Not long ago I read this sentence in what many hold to be our ablest and most thoughtful journal: "It is a law which in the present condition of human nature holds good, that strength of conviction is always in the inverse ratio of the tolerant spirit." Against such a view he raises his protest. He does not believe that human nature is so depressed. If men can only be filled with the spirit of God, we "may still see some maturer type of Christianity, in which new ages of positive faith may still be filled with the broadest sympathy, and men tolerate their brethren without enfeebling themselves." Such was the ground he assumed at the beginning of his Boston ministry, in a city where religious differences were wider and more sharply marked than elsewhere in the country, where they threatened also to be more intense, until they should endanger Christian charity. From this position Phillips Brooks never retreated. But on the other hand, the com- prehensiveness of the preacher is evident in his bold state- ments in regard to dogma, which the liberal school of thinkers might undervalue : — And for one thing I should say that as every Christian be- comes more and more a Christian, there must be a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into life. "We hear all around us nowadays great Impatience with the prominence of dogma — that is, of truth abstractly and definitely stated in Christianity. And most of those who are thus impatient really ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 63 mean well. They feel that Christianity, being a thing of per- sonal salvation, ought to show itself in characters and lives. There they are right. But to decry dogma in the interest of character is like despising food as if it interfered with health. Food is not health. The human body is built just so as to turn food into health and strength. And truth is not holiness. The human soul is made to turn, by the subtle chemistry of its diges- tive experience, truth into goodness. And this, I think, is just what the Christian, as he goes on, finds himself doing under God's grace. Before the young Christian lie the doctrines of his faith, — God's being, God's care, Christ's incarnation, Christ's atone- ment, immortality. What has the old Christian with his long experience done with them? He holds them no longer crudely, as things to be believed merely. He has transmuted them into forms of life. . . . The young dogmatist boasts of his dogmas. The old saint lives his life. Both are natural in their places and times, as are the ripe and the unripened fruit. How soon you can tell the men whose soils have tugged at the roots of their doctrines and taken them in, and left them no longer lying on the surface, but made them germinate into life. At this time Mr. Brooks was encountering, whether as a parish minister, or as a reader of the passing literature, these divergent attitudes in regard to Christian faith : some were tenacious and defiant in maintaining the traditional doc- trines; others were calling for elimination, or modification, or restatement; others still gloried in the rejection of creeds altogether, or if there must be a creed, let it be made anew each day or year to meet the changing moods of the soul or the requirements of the passing hour. Under these circum- stances he wrote his sermon on the words of St. Paul, "I have kept the faith." ^ The history of the sermon is inter- esting. During his summer in northern Europe in 1872, when his mind was at leisure to review his work and the existing situation, the words kept recurring to his mind, "I have kept the faith." Months before the sermon was preached he was taking notes in his journal as he prepared himself to speak. He proposes to meet the popular fallacy "that a man must change his views to show his freedom." He had before him "the danger of making one's opinions matters of faith." The question of training children brings 1 Sermons, vol. i. p. 57. 64 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 the issue to a test. Shall they be brought up in the tradi- tional faith, or what is the result of the experiment which leaves them without religious tenets, until they arrive at maturer years? "What is the meaning of the Collect for Trinity Sunday, which asks of God that He would keep us in this faith ? Is it merely a prayer that pride and obstinacy may be strengthened, or that He would show us a method of keeping ideas fixed? Exactly what did St. Paul mean by ' the faith ' ? " It is evident that he meant, whatever else may have been implied, "certain fixed belief," which he had received and not originated. The conclusion is "the possi- bility of counting some things settled and going on to de- velop them into life; " and the method is through obedience. No faith is kept except as it is obeyed. There is "a strange mixture of the moral element " in all the passages of the New Testament where "the faith" is mentioned. No faith can be truly kept except by discovering in it relations to life. So it must be with the doctrines of God, of the Incarnation, of the Trinity, of the Atonement, of Immortality. Such were the hints and fragments of the preparation he made for his sermon in the fall of 1872. Some of them were incorporated in it, but the sermon when it was bom throws this meagre outline into the shade. It was delivered at a moment when people were wondering at his preaching, unable to define his position to their satisfaction. But this sermon gives the open secret. There is no bondage in hold- ing to the historic faith as expressed in Christian doctrines, but rather through them lies the way to perfect freedom. The tendency of Christian doctrines is to expansion under the vital process which reveals in them a relation to life. As we follow the preacher in the years that are to be studied, it is important to keep this sermon in view. From the position here taken he never receded. The impersonal character of entries in his note-book pre- vents one from always discerning the immediate motive out of which they spring. His fellow traveller in Norway was abruptly summoned home by the death of a child. This is his comment when left alone to his reflections: — ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 65 It seems as if a child's death and the keen, bitter pain it brings us let us see much of the feebleness of the intellectual powers to command our love, — of the possibility of that in which the intel- lectual was not at all developed holding us intensely. A few more extracts from his note-books of these years may be given without comment. They illustrate the current of his thoughts, whether at home or abroad. The positive and negative pictures of heaven, — "no night," etc., and "river of water of life," etc. This world suggesting the other by contrast and by anticipation. So the uses both of Sorrow and Joy. We have no descriptions of Jesus in the Gospels, only stories of what He did. The perfection of Biography. Contrast with novels. In utter dark, in bitter pain, I reached a vague hand out for strength, It pressed a hand that pressed again, And all my tumult calmed at length. The darkness brightened slow around ; I looked to see what friendly hand My need had grasped, and lo I found My foe of foes in all the land. One angry look of strange surprise. Then, "Take we what the Master sends; " He holds me to his heart and cries, "Brother, the Lord hath made us friends." The difEerence between sufBering and pain. Pain is accidental, suffering is essential. It is right and necessary that we should undergo and accept as our lot whatever comes in our way of work whether it is agreeable or disagreeable (and therefore note that the old Latin and Greek corresponding words were used of "suf- fering " or " experiencing " either pleasant or unpleasant things) ; but that pain in the sense of discomfort should accompany the acceptance is a mere accident, no more to be called absolutely "right" or "necessary" by the ascetic than, on the other hand, pleasure is by the voluptuary. "I will walk at liberty because I keep Thy commandments." The liberty of law, Eden ; the passage out of it, a passage into 66 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 slavery. True liberty is harmony. The slavery of self-conscious- ness that comes with sin. That is the tree of knowledge. David, so free in his goodness, so cowardly in his sin. Symf)athy with a law well kept, that is the best freedom. We may not always be consciously thinking of God, only we must think of all things through and in Him, as we do not always look at the Sun and yet see all things we know only by the Sun's . shining. The man was going somewhere else and sat down for a moment on the lowest step of the Temple of Fame, which is work; and Fame opened the door and called him in, to his surprise. Men keep their brains strangely in abeyance, or they show you and expect you to be satisfied with some certificate of deposit, which shows that they have got them put away somewhere. There is no doubt about the genuineness of the certificate and so none about the real existence of their brains, but it is not the same thing to you after all. The danger, the terrible danger of false tests! I have been told a hundred times that the Bible must stand or fall with slavery; and John Wesley says, "Infidels know, whether Christians know it or not, that the giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible." As the Hebrew Psalmist prayed, "If I forget thee, Jeru- salem, let my right hand forget her cunning," so let us in the same spirit pray that our powers may be of use to us, only while we abide in the religion of the right and the true. Let us beg that any power of reason, or imagination, or persuasion, or any other that we have may abandon us when we forget righteousness and God. Let us dread most of all to be builders for Satan with those powers which the Father gave us to build with for Him. "0 Lord and Sovereign of my life, take from me the spirit of idleness, despair, love of power, and unprofitable speaking." (Prayer of St. Ephraim of Syria, in the Eussian Liturgy.) To Miss Mitchell he writes November 7, 1872 : — I don't like to hear you talk as you have in your last two let- ters about not living long. Not that I think death is dreadful in the least for the one who goes ; he has the best of it ■ but it is dreadful to be left behind, and find how merely impossible to make new friends that are at all like the old. I am sure too ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 67 that our friends must be more and not less to us in the other world than they are here, and that this world only begins friend- ships. Otherwise nothing could be more wretched. Only I shudder when I think how one's friends who have believed in him here will find him out there, and see what a humbug he was. I don't believe it will alienate them, though, and no doubt even there the humiliation will be good for him. Promise me that however you find me out to have been a delusion and a sham you won't give me up, for I forewarn you that you don't knOw me now, and if you ever do the discovery will be a shock to you. Which does n't mean that I ever murdered a parishioner or robbed a house, but only that I know myself better than you know me. . . . I am glad on the whole that Grant is elected, but wish it had been a narrow thing instead of such a sweeping vote. He and his party will hold that the whole administration has been tri- umphantly endorsed, and that they are strong enough now to do just what they please. There won't be any great despotism, but there is no reason to look for reform or for a high-toned govern- ment for the next four years. Have you read Beecher's "Lectures on Preaching " ? It is very rich and sensible and clever. The most important circumstance in the latter part of 1872 was the destruction of Trinity Church in the great Boston fire, to which reference has been made in the previous chapter. His own account of it is given in this extract from Ms correspondence with Miss Mitchell : — Hotel Kemptok, Berkeley Stkeet, Boston, November 12, 1872. We have had terrible days. Last Saturday night and Sunday were fearful. For a time it seemed as if the thing would never stop so long as there was anything left to burn. Everybody has suffered, almost everybody severely. Very many have lost all. Scores of my parishioners have been burned out. But the courage and cheerfulness of everybody is noble and delightful. It began about eight o'clock Saturday evening, and hour after hour it went on, growing worse and worse. Street after street went like paper. There were sights so splendid and awful as I never dreamed of, and now the desolation is bewildering. There was hard work enough to do all night, and though much was lost, something was saved. Old Trinity seemed safe all night, but towards morning the fire swept into her rear, and there was no chance. She went at four in the morning. I saw her well afire inside and out, carried o£B some books and robes, and left her. She burnt majes- 68 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 tically, and her great tower stands now solid as ever, f; i"°^* picturesque and stately ruin. She died in dignity. I did not know how much I liked the great gloomy old thmg till i saw her windows bursting and the flame running along the old mg pews. I feel that it was better for the church to go so tnan to be torn down stone by stone. Of course our immediate incon- venience is great, and we shall live in much discomfort tor tne next two years. We have engaged the Lowell Institute, a, Lecture Hall that seats a thousand people, and shall begin service there next Sunday. , But Trinity is only one little bit of the great catastrophe. There is little immediate destitution, for there were hardly any dwellings burnt, but thousands are thrown out of employment, and it is pitiable to see the rich men who have been reduced to poverty in a night. My poor friend Mr. , the gentlest and best of men, is ruined in his old age. Every hour one hears of some new sufferer, but the strength and brightness of every one is amazing. My father was so happy as not to be touched in any of his little property. I myself had none to lose. It is going to be a winter of sadness and suffering, nobody can guess how much yet. I can talk of nothing but the fire, and not of that coherently. Some day I will tell you all I can about it, but the horribleness of that night nobody can tell. . . . To this account some other particulars may be added. Mr. Brooks was sitting in one of the pews of Trinity Church, with Mr. Dillon the sexton, resting after the fatigues of the awful night, when the flames were seen stealing in at the roof of the northeast corner. They waited there together, watch- ing the progress of the flames until it became unsafe to remain. As they were hurriedly leaving the building, Mr. Dillon, in his excitement, threw open the great doors of the tower and fastened them back, as had been his habit for many years when the congregation was to disperse after service was over, — this last time, as it were, for the invisible crowd of witnesses to take their final departure. There is another incident connected with that fearful night which is worth recalling. As Mr. Brooks came away from Trinity Church he went into the large jewelry establishment of Shreve, Crump cS; Low, then on the corner of Summer and Washington streets, where they were expecting the fire ^T. 33-36] EARLY YEARS IN BOSTON 69 to reach them at any moment. It added to the wild excite- ment of the hour that thieves were known to be in the neighborhood awaiting their opportunity, some of them ex- perienced in their craft, having come from a distance; and there were rumors of vessels lying at the wharf near the foot of Summer Street, which were being laden with the spoils of the burning district. Under these circumstances, Mr. Brooks offered his aid, asking if there were anything which he could do. Mr. Crump immediately responded by emptying the safe which contained the most valuable property of the firm — pearls and diamonds and other precious stones — into two hand bags, and consigned them to Mr. Brooks with directions to carry them to a house on Newbury Street, a mile or more from the conflagration, taking no certificate of deposit, and offering no bodyguard for protection on the dangerous errand, for the distance was to be walked, and no conveyances were to be had. Under these circumstances, about the hour of two o'clock in the morning, Mr. Brooks executed the commission entrusted to him. In a letter to Kev. George A. Strong, Mr. Brooks describes other aspects of the desolation which appealed to him : — November 12, 1872. Run your eye over the map and think what there was between Summer and State and Washington streets, and consider that all swept away, and it is wretched to think about. None of us knew how fond we were of the old town. The streets that are gone are those that were most familiar to us when we were boys. They were then all residences, and I was born in one, and grew up in another, and went to school in another, and had walked them until I knew all their cobblestones. I am glad to know that you are very fond of Boston too. It is the best city of the con- tinent anyhow. ... As for Old Trinity, it was sad to see it go, and we shall be much inconvenienced by living in tabernacles for the next two years, but in the end it will not hurt us, and if the parish keeps together, as I think it will, we shall find some com- pensations in the freer and heartier worship of our hall. We have got a beautiful hall as large as the old church, close by our new place, and count ourselves very lucky. To Miss Mitchell he writes : — yo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-72 My kind friend Mr. Dexter is dead. His funeral is to be this morning. I do not know of anything more calamitous that could have befallen the church, and personally I had become very fond of him for his constant kindness and thoughtfulness and the simple, bright, transparent character he always showed. I never knew a more unselfish man. His own sorrows he had enough of, and kept them perfectly to himself. He was born with every instinct of a gentleman. He had never been successful in busi- ness, for he was too good-natured and gentle. I hardly ever saw a man who had been successful in business whom I did n't dis- like. Mr. Dexter had been very busy since the fire removing the last of the Trinity dead to Mount Auburn. He took a severe cold and last Saturday was laid up, and Tuesday he died of con- gestion of the lungs. I shall miss his friendship sadly, and to the church his loss is simply irreparable. He was full of interest in the new church, and meant to give now his whole time to it. He had been warden of Trinity about fifty years, and yet was young and fresh and progressive, while his long service gave him that sort of fatherly authority in the Parish which, if it is wise, it is a good thing for somebody to have. Poor Trinity! She seems to get it pretty hard, but her people come up well, and I think she will stand, though this blow is a hard one. Our new hall is crowded, and the services there are full of such spirit as we never could get in the old church. Well, Thanksgiving Day is over, and there was a great deal to be thankful for, and it was a bright and brilliant day, and so I am glad it came, but there was a kind of sadness about it. That great blotch [the burnt district] in the middle of Boston looks more and more miserable as the smoke dies away, and there are so many people who you know are suffering that your sympathies are kept stretched all the time. (November 29, 1872.) With the turning of Trinity Church, Mr. Dillon also dis- appears from the scene of his labors. He was a man of great dignity of manner, quite the equal in this respect of Bishop Eastburn, whom in their long association he may have unconsciously imitated. He was bewildered at the time of the great fire, but it also illustrates his habit of watchfulness over the property of the church, that when the fire brigade asked for the coal in its cellars to feed the exhausted engines, even though the conflagration was raging at its worst, he re- fused the request. After his retirement to his farm in Ver- mont, he would on occasions discourse, most edifyingly it was ^T. 33-36] EAPILY YEARS IN BOSTON 71 said, to his friends and neighbors on important points in the- ology, exhibiting with fine discrimination "sound views," and warning against erroneous teaching. His neighbors listened with deference, for they knew that he had had great oppor- tunities. CHAPTEK III 1873-1874 ECCLESIASTICAL CONTBOVEESIES. RELATION TO THE EVAN- GELICAL SCHOOL. EXTKACTS FROM COKRESPONDENCE. THE SUMMER ABROAD. DEATH OF FREDERICK BROOKS It does not appear that Mr. Brooks took any active part in the controversies within the Episcopal Church which cul- minated in the year 1873. He was an interested spectator, watching the proceedings of conventions and the trend which things were taking, but he did not feel caUed upon to enter the arena as a combatant. Although he was regarded as an Evangelical or Low Churchman, yet so early as 1870 he found himself out of sympathy with the management of the Evangelical Educational Society. What moved his indigna- tion was the policy it had adopted of sending, to the young men who wished to become its beneficiaries, a circular letter containing a series of questions or tests which they were required to answer, in order to show that they were in sympa- thy with Evangelical tenets. This was made the condition on which they were allowed to receive the Society's aid in their preparation for the ministry. When Mr. Brooks became aware that this policy was approved by the Board of Man- agers, he wrote to the secretary of the society resigning his position upon the Board. Boston, November 14, 1870. Mv DEAR Mb. Matlack, — I beg you to believe that I did not write my last letter, resigning my position as a Manager of the Evangelical Education Society, without careful consideration. I thank you most heartily for the kind urgency of your note which I have just received, and am very sorry that I cannot with- draw my note as you desire me to do. I do believe with you '-■/rl. 'I') ^T. 37-38] CHURCH CONTROVERSIES 73 that these are times in which all men truly Evangelical ought to stand firmly together, but I am sure that the way to bring that to pass is not to narrow their standing ground. Do you seriously mean to count no man Evangelical who is not able and willing to answer satisfactorily to these questions of the Society? If so, it will cast out many not merely among our students, but among the clergy who have always counted themselves one with the great Evangelical section of our church. It is impossible to discuss the "questions " in a letter, nor is it of any use to do so, but I cannot help calling your attention to the strange effect which is produced upon one's mind when in one question he is asked to give up all allegiance to human authority, and fasten his faith on and define his creed by revelation, and two questions later, finds himself called upon to rank himself vmder the banner of two modern teachers as represented in two of their books. Nor can I think that the qualifying phrase "in the main," to which you point me, helps the matter at all. The degree of conformity will be left to the judgment of the candidate; as always in such cases the most worthy will be the most scrupulous and wholly uncertain how near they must come ; the less conscien- tious will content themselves with a very general sort of assent, while the more faithful will demand of themselves an entire agree- ment to the hooks, ^ to which, whatever be our respect and love for their authors, I am sure there is not one of us who is able to give his assent in every particular. Not one of us does not hesitate at some statements in any treatise of theology as long as these books. Their authors would be the last men to desire that we should blindly agree with them in every word. And yet we cast out students who cannot meet this test. If this be no new policy, but only the old one declared, then I have grievously mistaken my duty in the past. I have recom- mended students to the Society often, and I have been on critical committees to examine applicants. I never examined students with questions such as these, nor have I heard others do it. It is not so very long since we were students ourselves. I am sure that if these questions had been laid as tests upon the Alex- andria seminary when you and I were there they would have excluded all the men who have been most useful in the ministry since. I cannot doubt it, and yet I cannot at this moment think of one man of our time who has turned out a High Churchman. But I did not mean to argue the matter. I ought to have been at the meeting if I had anything to say. Only I cannot stand 1 The books here referred to were Evangelical Religion, by Dr. May of Virginia, and the Contrast, hy Dr. J. S. Stone. 74 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 apparently asking, as essential to acceptance of a candidate for education for the ministry, declarations which I do not hold to be essential, and which I do not think the best men among the appli- cants will be able or willing to make. There is no such condi- tion, as these questions imply, to any money that comes from my parish. I could hardly surprise my people more than by reading them the questions next Sunday. So I must resign, but I do it with great regret. I have had more interest in this than in any Church Society. I have rejoiced in the good work that it has done, and certainly I do not now cease to be interested in its prosperity, though I must beg you to present the resignation which I sent you. Excuse this long letter, and believe me Yours faithfully, Phillips Brooks. After long delay and with much reluctance the resignation was accepted. His attention having now been called to the whole subject of assisting students with pecuniary aid in the course of their preparation for the ministry, Mr. Brooks took a further step, refusing any longer to ask for contribu- tions from his parish to the treasury of the Educational Society, or to allow its secretary to use his pulpit for the pur- pose of soliciting funds. The following letter to his brother, in Chicago, who felt the same difficulty, reveals his state of mind : — Hotel Kempton, Berkeley Street, Bostoh, NoTember 16, 1873. Dear Arthur, — I wish you 'd ask me easier questions. Here is this Theological Education question which I have been puzzling over for years and see no light on yet, and your letter just rubs it in a little more. For myself I have nothing to say. Sometimes I have found a good student to whom I have made my appropriation, but at present I know of none such; and I have about $600 lying at interest which I do not know what to do with. I cannot deliberately send to the Increase of the Ministry Society, and the accounts which I have heard of the Evangelical Anniversaries make me less inclined than ever to send to Mr. . I am afraid that Washburn and Harwood have very little to do with the Society to which they give their names. But not to speak of myself I should think your case was easier. Your Parish has been wholly used to one way of giving. It is presumable that some of them know something about the Increase of the ^T. 37-38] CHURCH CONTROVERSIES 75 Ministry Society and prefer it. Why not let them specify their contributions to either Society as they prefer, and then tell them that the unappropriated balance is to be appropriated to the gen- eral course of Theological Education at your discretion. Mr. Brooks did not come forward as an advocate of any reform in the matter at issue. He continued to give occar sional aid to young men according to his individual judgment, but in some cases experienced grievous disappointment with the result. When his name was again placed in 1892 on the list of Vice-Presidents of the Evangelical Educational Society he wrote this letter to its secretary, the late Rev. R. C. Matlaek : — 233 CijVRENDON Street, Boston, Febiniary 17, 1892. My dear Me. Matlack, — I am very grateful to those who have done me the honor of electing an Honorary Vice-President of the Evangelical Educational Society. I do not think it best, however, to accept the position which is thus offered me, because I feel that it would lead to a misunderstanding of my position with reference to the Society. A good many years ago I came to feel that educational aid societies were not desirable and therefore withdrew from your society of which I had been a member and a manager. I have not changed my feeling with regard to it, and while I am con- vinced that a great deal of good is done by your organization, under your effective management, I cannot, with my convictions, feel it right to take a position as even associated in an honorary way with its administration. I am sure you will understand my position, and will know that I do not in the least undervalue the kindness of those who have invited me to give my name. Tours most sincerely, Phillips Beooks. Despite this action of Mr. Brooks in separating himself from the managers of the Evangelical cause, there was no break in his cordial relations with individuals who represented the Evangelical principles as he understood them. Thus to Mr. Cooper he writes, with reference to the petition which had been often sent to the General Convention, asking that the word " regenerate " might be omitted from the Baptismal office, or its use made optional : — 76 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 Hotel Kempton, Berkeley Street, Boston, March 23, 1871. Deae Coopbe, — I got your note, and last night I read your article aloud to Vinton and we talked it over. It is very strongly put, and the motive that you allude to, their possible dread of being swamped by Ritualism, is the one thing that might make the High Churchmen tolerate and concede a little to the Low Churchmen. But they don't dread Ritualism enough to make them yield their dear principle of "no change in the Prayer Book." That has become a bigotry with them. So I do not believe this General Convention is going to yield on the Prayer Book in the least. Still I believe in asking them to. Let the responsibility be on them and not on us. Let them not say we did not ask. So I hope you will put your memorial in form very soon and frankly and fairly let us sign it, and tell the Swells what we poor creatures want. I shall be on after the 12th of April, and then we '11 talk about it all. We '11 get it out in Antique Type. Many thanks for the Protest. I am to exchange with Jaggar on the 19th and preach there morning and afternoon. Always yours, P. B. When Bishop Eastburn died, in 1872, who for more than twenty-five years had been the rector of Trinity Church, Mr. Brooks paid a tribute to his memory from the pulpit, in which he took occasion to speak of the Evangelical movement which the Bishop had represented. These words may be taken as his deliberate and final judgment; they have the apparent tone of one speaking from the outside, but the tone also of one who was still within the circle from which he did not seek escape : — The Evangelical movement had its zealous men here and there throughout the land. The peculiarities of that movement were an earnest insistence upon doctrine, and upon personal, spiritual experience, of neither of which had the previous generation made very much. Man's fallen state, his utter hopelessness, the vica- rious atonement, the supernatural conversion, the work of the Holy Spirit, — these were the truths which the men of those days, who were what were called "Evangelical" men, urged with the force of vehement belief upon their hearers. They were great truths. There were crude, hard, and untrue statements of them very often, but they went deep ; they laid hold upon the souls and consciences of men. They created most profound experiences. ^T. 37-38] CHURCH CONTROVERSIES 77 They made many great ministers and noble Christians. It was indeed the work of God. To those of you who were his parishioners and friends, who heard him preach year after year, and knew what lay nearest to his heart, I need not say how entirely Bishop East- burn was a man of this movement. His whole life was full of it. He had preached its Gospel in New York with wonderful success and power. He bore his testimony to it to the last in Boston. A faith that was very beautiful in its childlike reliance upon God ; a sturdy courage which would have welcomed the martyrdom of more violent days ; a complete, unquestioning, unchanging loyalty to the ideas which he had once accepted; a deep personal piety, which, knowing the happiness of divine communion, desired that blessedness for other souls; a wide sympathy for all of every name who were working for the ends which he loved and desired; these with his kindly heart and constancy in friendship made the power of the long ministry of Bishop Eastburn. The teaching of this parish through twenty-six years was most direct and simple. There was a dread, even, of other forms in which the same awak- ening of spiritual life was manifest. The High Churchman and the Broad Churchman found no tolerance. But the preacher was one whom all men honored, whose strong moral force impressed the young and old, whose sturdy independence was like a strong east wind, and who went to his reward crowned with the love of many and the respect of all. It seems but yesterday that his familiar figure passed away. His voice is still fresh in our ears. The old Church comes back, and he stands there in its pulpit, as he must always stand, among the most marked and vigorous figures in our parish history. It would not be right to renew our Church life without cordial remembrance of his strength and faithfulness.^ One other point there was of sharp divergence between the Low Church and the High Church parties. It was the custom of the former in administering the Lord's Supper to invite the members of other religious denominations to remain to the communion. With this custom Mr. Brooks was in sympathy. When his brother Arthur came into collision with the Bishop of Illinois, the Rt. Rev. Henry J. White- house, who assumed the right to forbid such notice to be given and to enforce the principle of " close communion " in ^ From a manuscript Germon, preached at Trinity Church, September 29, 1872, from the text, St. Matt. xxv. 21 : " Well done, thon good and faithful servant." 78 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i 873-74 the Episcopal Church, Mr. Brooks wrote these letters in which he touches upon the principle involved : — Hotel Kempton, Bbbkeiet Stkeet, Boston, May 23, 1873. Dear Arthuk, — I suppose it was to be expected that you and Whitehouse would collide sooner or later, and the matter of which you wrote to me seems to be a pretty good point to meet on. I do not understand why Mr. has never objected before to your action in inviting others than Episcopalians to the Com- munion. You have been in St. James's almost a year. Have you given the invitation all that time, and has he heard it and only now since the Bishop's visit entered his remonstrance? That would seem to show that he was acting under the Bishop's suggestion, which would be a piece of parochial interference of which your Bishop perhaps may be capable, but certainly no other in the land. I certainly would not yield the matter to Mr. alone. I would go and see him and have a square, friendly talk about it. If he stands alone in his remonstrance I would not sacrifice what may be a very desirable practice to his narrow whim. If there are a considerable number in the parish who object I should dis- continue it, but certainly take great pains to say in a sermon at the same time what my real ground was, to explain the perfectly clear position of our Church on the subject, and not to seem to fall low before the footstool of the Bishop at his first assumption of authority. The position of our Church is perfectly clear. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself in the Vance Smith dispute distinctly said that the Collect which touches the question applied only to our own people. The more I think of it the more I hope you will continue it unless it is very clearly desirable to drop it. I would not give it up out of mere courtesy to any man. At the same time it is not so absolutely a thing of principle that it might not be omitted if its use would seriously wound many people and injure the parish. You surely have done right so far. Of course you can judge better than I. Excuse my venturing all these remarks, but you asked for them. . . . What an un- pleasant Christian "Whitehouse must be. . . . But with all my heart I sympathize with your dread of a con- troversy and of the cheap notoriety and the disgusting partisan- ship that comes with it. June 2, 1873. I have received the Papers. What a cheerful sheet the "Times" seems to be. It is so good and gentlemanly. Do you ^T. 37-38] CHURCH CONTROVERSIES 79 have much of that sort of Journalism in your town. As to the whole effect, I think the Church at large will only say, "There 's Bishop Whitehouse at it again," and then let the matter drop. The "Boston Journal " has a paragraph made up from the "Chicago Trihune " article on Saturday, which Father discovered, and so they knew all about it at home. Then I told them all I knew about it. They are calm. There is only one suggestion I want to make. I do not think the notice is to be in any way considered or to be either attacked or defended as an addition or interpolation in the Service. It is an address by the Minister to the Congregation. It is of the nature of Sermon and not of Liturgy, and considera- tions of Liturgical Integrity have nothing to do with it. If a minister is to be found fault with for doing it, it must be as he would be blamed for any other statement that was considered faulty in his Sermon, — on the ground of false doctrine not of rubrical impro- priety. But I dare say the breeze has blown itself out before this and all is forgotten. . . . Always yours, Phillips. It was evident in these years, the early seventies, that things were rapidly tending toward a separatist movement in the Episcopal Church. The schism was finally consummated in 1873 when the Reformed Episcopal Church was organized under the leadership of Bishop Cummins of Kentucky. With this movement Mr. Brooks had no sympathy, nor did the idea of leaving the Church present itself to him as a practical issue or as really affording any relief from the grievances which he felt in common with the Evangelical party. Despite the restrictive legislation, whose object and end he regarded as separating the Episcopal Church from intercommunion with the other Protestant churches, he held it his duty to remain and, in whatever way was open, mani- fest his sympathy for the principle of open communion and other modes . of Christian fellowship. No canon that had been enacted forbade his preaching in the churches of other denominations. He had the advantage of his brethren in this respect that such opportunities were constantly afforded him. He became conspicuous, almost the only Evangelical Churchman remaining, who was in a position where he could represent the natural affinity of the Protestant Epis- copal Church with other Protestant bodies. More and more 8o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 this was to become a distinctive feature of his attitude. To these and other similar points he alludes in his correspond- ence with Miss Mitchell : — I have been off for a day down to Ipswich where Dr. Cotton Smith had a clerical powwow for the Dean of Canterbury who has come over to attend the Evangelical Alliance. He is a solid, stolid-looking Englishman, an ecclesiastic from the rosette on his hat to the buckle on his shoes, but a man of learning, reading hard Sanscrit as you and I read easy English, and healthy and wholesome through and through. Several other interesting peo- ple are here, especially a few famous Germans, Dorner, the "Person of Christ " man, and many others. But I do not think the whole occasion promises much, and I shan't go on, though I give it my hearty blessing at this distance. (October 3, 1873.) The sermon is just done which is a rare event for Friday. It is about the Evangelical Alliance, which seems to me as it has gone on to have assumed a much larger look than it had at first, and to be really a great and noble thing. It is really so great that it can carry off a great many small faults, speeches here and there in bad taste, and an occasional piece of bad temper. 1 can- not see how such a meeting can fail to make Christianity stronger and broader. (October 9, 1873.) What do you think of the Bishop of Madagascar turning up in New York and writing a letter to Bishop Potter, complaining that the Dean of Canterbury had insulted the Archbishop of Can- terbury ? There is a roundabout confession and ingenious intri- cacy about it all which is nuts to the ecclesiastical mind. One may count upon no end of dreary controversy about whether Christ is willing that Dean Payne Smith should eat the Lord's Supper in an Episcopal Church, but not in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian Meeting House. As if all the great questions of faith and morals were settled, and that one minute squabble was the last thing left. Surely not till then will it begin to be of consequence. (October 15, 1873.) And what do you think about Cummins ? What a panic it must make among the bishops to know that a stray parson is round with a true bit of their genuine succession, perfectly and indisputably the thing, which he can give to anybody that he pleases I Nothing like it since the powwow among the gods when Prometheus stole the fire. Would n't it be queer if Cummins actually became a ^T. 37-38] CHURCH CONTROVERSIES 8i critical event by the discontented from to going off and getting the consecration of a new church from him. (November 20, 1873.) I don't know anything that makes one feel more genuinely old than to see that great recognizable changes and advances of the current of thought have been made in our time, so that while we see the new we can remember the old as something different. It used to seem as if such changes took a half century at least. Only fourteen years ago when I entered the ministry there were the two old-fashioned parties, the Lows and Highs, over against each other in a quiet, intelligent, comfortable way. Now you can hardly find a representative of either among the younger men except , and the Broad Churchmen and Ritualists divide the field. Let us be thankful that we belong to the party of the future. (December 11, 1873.) I hear that is dead : another of that fading school of Evan- gelicals who are fast passing away. One of the best of them (the Evangelicals) died the other day, my old professor and friend at Alexandria, Dr. Sparrow, one of the ablest and best men I ever knew, learned and broad, and as simple as a child. I had a let- ter from the dear old man, dated only two days before he died, in which I was delighted to hear him say, "I am disposed to re- gard the prospects of our Church brighter now than they have ever been in my day. " All the old men are croaking and help- less, and it was good to hear one of them sanguine. (January 22, 1874.) In May, 1874, the first steps were taken toward the establishment of the American Church Congress. The aim of its founders was to bring men together who differed in their convictions, to ventilate questions which were subjects of controversy in free untrammelled speech in the hope that it would lead to a mutual confidence and understanding. Churchmen of all schools of opinion were present, and amid much earnestness and enthusiasm the new institution was organized. Mr. Brooks was placed upon its Central Com- mittee whose task was to select topics for discussion and appoint the speakers. Next week we go to New Haven, all of us Broad Churchmen, to see what can be done to keep or make the Church liberal and VOL. n 82 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 free. There is a curious sort of sensitiveness and expectancy everywhere in the Church, a sort of fear and feeling that things cannot remain forever just as they are now, and a general looking to the General Convention of next Fall as the critical time. The last impression may he wrong hecause General Conventions are not apt to be critical, but the other feeling has its foundation, and one wonders what is coming out of it all. Certainly some sort of broad church. A meeting such as this I speak of could not have been possible ten years ago. Then the men could not have been found to go ; now men are asking to be invited. (May 12, 1874.) The Convention of the diocese of Massachusetts which met in May to elect a successor to Bishop Eastburn reflected the stormy times which were passing over the Episcopal Church. The High Church candidate was the Eev. James De Koven of Wisconsin. Mr. Brooks wanted Dr. Vinton to be the Low Church candidate, and when he declined, voted for his friend Rev. Henry C. Potter of Grace Church, New York. When it became evident that Dr. Potter could not be elected, a compromise was effected by which the choice of the Con- vention fell on the Rev. Benjamin H. Paddock of Brooklyn, N. Y. The Convention was a memorable one for the inten- sity of feeling which prevailed. Among the glowing speeches which were made, none equalled that of Dr. Vinton as he stood forth in all the majesty of his appearance delivering his impassioned appeal for evangelical truth. There was an- other moment, which will not be forgotten by those present, when the Rev. William R. Huntington of Worcester pre- sented the name of Phillips Brooks, as a man surpassing all others who had been named for the vacant Episcopate. But the time for Phillips Brooks had not yet come. To the bishop- elect, he wrote this letter pledging him his support : — Hotel Kempton, Berkeley Street, Bostok, May 21, 1873. Eev. and dear Sir, — I have doubted whether I have any right to add another to the multitude of letters which I know you must have received with reference to your election to our episco- pate. ^ But I feel so deeply anxious that you should consent to be our Bishop that I venture to add my assurance of cordial welcome and hearty cooperation to all the others which must have come to ^T. 37-38] CORRESPONDENCE 83 you. I think I know Massachusetts pretty well, and I am deeply convinced that our Church has a great and good work to do here. She will not do it easily, nor hy simply standing still in idle as- sertion of herself, but if she will work for the people, the people will understand her readily enough. I am sure that all the cir- cumstances connected with your election promise a cordial and unpartisan support of all your plans and labors by both the Clergy and the Laity of our diocese, and knowing this I have ventured to express to you my own sincere and anxious hope that you may be able to come to us. I beg you not to trouble yourself to answer this note, but believe me, with much regard. Most sincerely yours, Phillips Brooks, Eector of Trinity Church, Boston. It would have been a significant event for Massachusetts, as for himself, had Mr. Brooks become its bishop in 1873 ; but he refused to allow his name to be used, nor would he have accepted the office if he had been elected. He had other work to do as the rector of Trinity Church, and to this work we now turn, and to the incidents which befell him from 1873 to 1877. These years constitute a distinct group in his life. It was the time when Trinity Church dwelt in taber- nacles, awaiting the completion of its new temple. His preaching during this period was marked by increasing power as he exerted himself to meet the emergency of a church without a home. But before we come to the one lead- ing event which gives unity and connected interest to these years, we may follow him in his familiar correspondence. These extracts are from his letters to Miss Mitchell : — The worst thing that I see about getting old, or older, is that you get further away from the young people who are the best people in the world. I never see a lot of boys without wanting to be among them, and wishing they would let me into their com- pany and being sure that they won't. I hate to think that boys of sixteen think of me as I used to think of men of thirty-seven when I was their age. Most of the wisdom of old age is humbug. I was struck dreadfully by what you said about the prevalent dis- content with life that one hears so much of. It 's awful, and is the most unchristian thing one has to deal with. I fancied it was 84 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i §73-74 more the fashion here, but I suppose I have forgotten how much of the same thing I used to hear in Philadelphia, or perhaps it did not impress me so much then. I pray God that I may die before I get so tired of living. (January 29, 1873.) I have just been going again through Hessey's Bampton Lec- tures, which is satisfactory enough in all the theory of the matter ; and I don't think there is nearly as much trouble about its prac- tical aspects as there sometimes appears to be. At any rate a good conscience is the best guide about keeping Sunday or enfor- cing it in others. There is very little indeed in the way of positive law to be made out about it. It seems to me there is a strange lack of faith in the way that the strict Inspirationists and the stricter Sabbatarians are always in a panic lest the Book or the Day, which they above all others claim for God, should come to grief. I am having an off week, that is, I have no sermon to write because I go to New Haven on Sunday to preach for the students. I shall stay with Harwood, and if all goes as it went last year I shall have a good time. It is the first Sunday that I have not preached at home since I returned from Europe, except one Sunday in November when my Church burned down ; and except once, when Percy Browne preached for me, I have not had a single exchange or supply all that time. (February 7, 1873.) "Keil on the Kings " is a very good commentary as commenta- ries go, a little overburdened with linguistics, but on the whole telling you (I mean me) rather less of what I know already and more of what I don't than most commentaries. But they are all a poor set. Lange has a good deal that is interesting and valu- able, but, bless me, who couldn't have a few pennies if he swept all the gutters in town and saved all the rubbish. (March 26, 1873.) ^ I am just come back from Andover where I went to lecture to the Congregational Divinity Students about Preaching. It was quite interesting to me if not to them. . . . They ask hard ques- tions which you rather despair of answering, not because of the difficulty of the question, but because it shows such a queer state of mind in the questioner. I stayed with Professor Park, who is charming, bright, witty, and genial. . . . Have you read a book about Dissent by an English Bampton lecturer? (April 3, 1873.) I am sorry to find on getting home there is some trouble, I can't tell how serious yet, about the new church. The land ^T. 37-38] CORRESPONDENCE 85 proves not so good as the average of the made land, and the piles which we have driven in it will not probably hold a building of the weight of ours. We don't want to go down any lower than we are, and so some modification of the plan must probably be made. I hope the change will not need to be great, and will improve instead of injuring the building. (May 9, 1873.) How interesting and beautiful Tom Hughes's little book is! [Memoirs of a Brother.] I wonder whether the brother was as good as he is described. What he (the brother) actually does in the way of letters, etc., didn't strike me much. He is the first man on record, I think, who ever dedicated his life to the health of his Mother-in-law. I am homesick still when I remember my pleasant visit. I shall live now on the hope of the Fall. (May 16, 1873.) I am busy writing what is a sort of Biographical Oration for what is after a fashion my native town, Andover. It is to be delivered at the opening of their Memorial Hall next week. I don't like the work. Sermons I like to write, the more the bet- ter, as many as the deluded folk will sit and hear, but anything else except this weekly letter comes hard. I have a pretty obsti- nacy when I am asked to do anything right away, but when the task is three months off, I am apt to be feeble and assent, and by and by the day comes on like Fate. (May 22, 1873.) I have been much interested in reading up about the old Puri- tan town. What a curious set they were. So estimable and so deadly dull, sober and serious to a degree that is frightful to think of, but strong and tough as granite. The modern religion looks so gentle beside them. I came across this sentence yesterday in that most unpleasant book, Galton's "Hereditary Genius," which has just a vexatious amount of truth in it, "A gently complaining and tired spirit is that in which Evangelical Divines are apt to pass their days." . . . X made a prayer at the new Hall to-day in which he thanked the Lord for the workmen who had been engaged upon the building, that "He had given his angels charge over them that none of them should strike his foot against a stone." What do you think of that for a reverent and beautiful use of Scripture? (May 30, 1873.) After this month I am going to shut up the Hall, and use Emmanuel Church which is ordinarily closed during the summer. I shall be there every Sunday except when I occasionally get Mr. 86 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 TifEany to take my place. One Sunday in July I mean to be in Philadelphia, to preach for the Advent people. . . . Then, I am going to Newport for a few days and perhaps to Mount Desert, and so I hope to worry through the summer comfortably. Next year comes Europe again. . . . Mr. died the other day. . . . One wouldn't like to stay quite as long as he has, but with the world such as it is, there is great temptation to linger at the feast a good while yet. (June 5, 1873.) I am very much interested in the progress of my new Church. The foundations are going up very fast, and the scene is a lively and hopeful one. We hope to get all our foundations in before winter stops our work. And what a splendid Autumn we are having. Such days as these that keep coming one after another are always a surprise. (October 15, 1873.) I wonder what sort of knowledge we shall have of our friends when we get to the other side, and what we shall do to keep up our intimacy with one another. There will be one good thing about it. I suppose we shall see right through one another to begin with, and start off on quite a new basis of mutual under- standing. It will be awful at first, but afterwards it must be quite pleasant to feel that your friends know the worst of you and not be continually in danger and in fear that they will find you out. But then with all Eternity ahead there must be a constantly oppressive fear that your friends will get tired of you. (October 23, 1873.) I have been writing to-day an essay on "Heresy," and have got quite interested in the subject. I have been rather surprised to find how clearly in the New Testament and all the way down in the healthiest periods of Theology, as in Augustine and in the English Eeformation at its best. Heresy has meant obstinacy, a fault of the Will, not a mistake of the Intellect. The worst persecutors seem to me to have had some dim feeling of this when they reconciled themselves to the burning of heretics. They must have had some feeling of the moral character of heresy how- ever woefully their prejudices have blinded them in imputing it in special cases. (October 30, 1873.) We Boston folk have been celebrating our Centennial Tea Party. We got together in Faneuil Hall and drank tea and listened to speeches yesterday afternoon. And we had old Mr. Frailey and young Mr. Brown of Philadelphia, among a lot of other people, to talk to us. . . . ^T. 37-38] CORRESPONDENCE 87 Nobody can help feeling Agassiz's death. Apart from the scien- tific greatness, he was such a delightful man, so fresh and joyous and simple. It does surely seem as if he had gone at the right time, falling without decay and setting without twilight. 'T is strange to see how many people knew him here, and how many others feel as if they had known him and mourn his death as a personal loss. It was a good, cheerful, wholesome life. Three weeks from to-night I hope to start for Philadelphia. Fix which night you will for me to dine with you, and I will come up to the trial without a flinch. Please let me know when it is settled. . . . Sunday I shall give to my old Advent folk whom I am proud to find caring for me after so many years. ... I am glad that the Bible doesn't say anything about the idle words which people write. (December 17, 1873.) The clock has just struck, and I wish you a Happy New Year with all my heart. What a splendid night for the New Year to come in on. The snow and moonlight are gorgeous and promise glorious winter days. I wonder what will happen before the year grows old! Certainly lots of pleasant things and probably some that will be ugly enough. We have had a service this evening which reminded me of the old-time watch-meeting at St. Philip's. You and Cooper were not there, but sat on the front seat without the blow in her bonnet, but with quite enough of the old look to bring back the old days. And the first beauty of the New Year is that I am coming on to see you all, and a week from to-night shall be upon my way. You do not know how much I depend upon it. The Saturday evening dinner will be the great event, and I will stay and smoke as long as you please after it is over. Dear me, how many things there are to enjoy in the old year and the new. I think nobody ever had altogether a plea- santer life than I have. Thalaba was nothing to me. (Janu- ary 1, 1874. 12.03 A. M.) I have come home from a Wednesday evening lecture, which I always enjoy; the only indication that I have that the people enjoy it is that they come in large numbers. Though they may talk about it among themselves, I myself never get any idea whether I hit them or not. Still I jog on and am very cheerful. I don't care for applause, but I do like to have some idea whether people are interested or not. (January 25, 1874.) All yesterday was a hard pull at a sermon which is to be preached this morning, and is n't good for much, I am afraid. It seemed pretty good and important before I began to write it; 88 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 but somehow it didn't get on to paper as I wanted it to. I am sure I have got better sermons in me somewhere than I have got out yet, but probably fifteen yeais would have brought them. (February 13, 1874.) Charles Kingsley is here, and lectured to us on Monday evening. It was good to see the author of "Hypatia" in the flesh, but the Lecture was n't much, and he is the Englishest of Englishmen. Then his laudation of this country was overmuch, and we were unnecessarily reminded of how he hated us and hoped good things for the rebellion during our war. Of course I don't read anything nowadays, but "The Princess of Thule " shall be my next novel. I didn't make much out of "Old Pendleton." The over-description worried me and I gave it up, and have not tried it again, but I dare say I shall by and by. I am reading Forster's "Life of Sir John Eliot," a book I have long meant to get at, with much delight. Eight weeks from to-day I '11 be in Philadelphia. (February 19, 1874.) How sad this sudden news of Sumner's death, and how it makes us realize the lack of great men among us. And certainly Sum- ner was in many respects a great man. The time of his depar- ture like Agassiz's seems to be just what one would wish for him. Neither of them was a man whom one would like to see crawling about in decrepitude. (March 11, 1874.) Poor Sumner's funeral was a wonderful outburst of public feel- ing about a man who had won it by sheer force of character and principle. He was never popular . . . but true as steel and capa- ble of ideas. We hope to have a good man in his place, probably Judge Hoar or Mr. Adams. The country is not as bad as you think it. Certainly no other land offers us anything to envy. Surely England settling down on Disraeli, just to get rid of the trouble and tumult of reform, is about as unpleasant a sight as one can see. Have you read the book of a Mr. Pater on the Renaissance? It is wonderfully fresh and full of its subject. Then I got a book of Masson's the other day on Drummond of Hawthornden, of which I have read a few pages that promise something charming. (March 19, 1874.) Certainly there is nothing to make us despair of our Govern- ment in the present state of things. The arrogance of able and corrupt men is something we could never have expected to escape, ^T. 37-38] CORRESPONDENCE 89 and so far it has been less powerful among us than in the his- tory of any other nation, and the present strongest sign of the times is a violent outbreak and protest against it. (March 26, 1874.) I am in the thick of Lent, with the usual enjoyment of its spirit, and the usual misgiving about the way in which we try to make it useful to our people. It is trying to see how, just as soon as we attempt to give religion its fit expression, we are instantly in danger of formalism and the mere piety of outside habits. Yet still there is a great deal in changing habits which mean sad things, for habits which mean good things, for a little while, and some of the meaning does get into people's hearts. . . . How hard it is to write an Easter sermon. The associations of the day are so dependent that it is really difiBcult to bring it close to people's lives. But it is remarkable how men like your friend , who give up so much about Jesus, still cling to the truth of the Kesurrection. (March 31, 1874.) We have had Principal TuUoch here. He was at our Church last Sunday, and I spent the evening with him at Mr. Winthrop's. I want you to see him when he comes to Philadelphia. He is a splendid Scotchman. (April 30, 1874.) I 'd like to talk with you some time about that matter of the judging of people's characters before and after death. I don't think we 'd much disagree. (May 8, 1874.) Last Sunday we tried here to have a Hospital Sunday like the English institution, and the result was very successful. The spirit was good and the collections large, and it brought all classes and denominations together. Trinity gave $3200. . . . Our new Chapel begins to look beautifully, and by the time you are here the walls will be almost done. ... So don't fail to come. My love to Weir. (May 12, 1874.) ' There are two incidents mentioned in the above extracts which call for some slight expansion. The first is treated in a casual manner, but was full of significance, — the address afterwards published, which was delivered at the dedication of the Memorial Hall in Andover. Apart from his associa- 1 Here closes the correspondence -with MUs Mitchell. She died soon after the letter was written, from which this extract is taken. 90 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 tion with tlie civil war which the hall commemorated, or his fame as a pulpit orator, Phillip Brooks had been chosen as spokesman for the occasion because he was the descendant of those who were connected with the town from its earliest history, and who, in later years, had done much to make it famous. Thus he was recognized by Professor Park of An- dover, in the impressive prayer which followed the address, " It is of Thy goodness, O Lord, that we have been permit- ted on this day of our solemnity to hear the voice of one whose godly ancestors our fathers delighted to honor." It is a suggestive coincidence that while he was looking into the history of Andover in making preparation for his address, he was also reading Galton on " Hereditary Genius," and the picture was before him of the generations of the Andover Phillipses. His address was beautiful, pervaded with a joy- ous tone, with the conviction that he had a right to speak, and that in speaking he represented what was uppermost in the minds of his hearers : — If I wanted to give a foreigner some clear idea of what that excellent institution, a New England town, really is, in its history and its character, in its enterprise and its sobriety, in its godli- ness and its manliness, I should be sure that I could do it if I could make him perfectly familiar with the past and present of Andover. Nor can one know the old town well and not feel, how- ever, its scenery has the same typical sort of value which belongs to all its life. All that is most characteristic in our New England landscape finds its representation here. Its rugged granite breaks with hard lines through the stubborn soil, its sweep of hill and valley fills the eye with various beauty. Its lakes catch the sunlight on their generous bosoms. Its rivers are New England rivers ready for work and yet not destitute of beauty. If every- where our New England scenery suggests to the imagination that is sensitive to such impressions some true resemblance to the nature of the people who grow up among its pictures, nowhere are such suggestions clearer than in this town which is so thoroughly part and parcel of New England. Mr. Brooks went often to Andover at this time to visit his youngest brother who was taking his first year of theological study. The Rt. Rev. WiUiam Lawrence, who was also in the ^T. 37-38] ANDOVER 91 seminary, has given his impressions of him, speaking of the interest that he showed in the discussion of theological ques- tions, how he always wished to hear what Professor Park had been teaching on Original Sin and other topics, but was more anxious to get at the truth of the matter, than talk over opinions, or compare them with his own. Of his address on Preaching, before the Andover students. Bishop Lawrence I have often wished that an exact report of that lecture had been taken, for as I remember it, it followed exactly the lines of bis Yale Lectures, step by step. I mention it also to speak of the impression which his closing prayer made upon the students. He finished his address and then, quite naturally, and, as it seemed, unexpectedly to himself, he felt moved to say, "Let us pray," and at the same desk from which we had heard extemporary pray- ers from the professors he ofEered a prayer which, as compared with theirs, was so beautiful that, as one of the fellows said afterwards, he had to open his eyes to see how a man looked when he prayed like that. I wonder at the amount of time that he put into talks with us when we were at college and at the seminary, but I have no doubt that he welcomed us simply as representative of what a lot of other fellows were thinking. For after a talk with him on a week day, one could sometimes feel and even discover the results of the talk in the next Sunday morning's sermon. The other incident to which allusion is made in the cor- respondence with Miss Mitchell deserves notice as a land- mark in his theological growth. The essay on " Heresy," there mentioned, was read before the " Clericus Club " in October, 1873. Though not written for publication, it has been given a place in his " Essays and Addresses." Its sig- nificance lies in his discernment that religious thought was entering upon a new stage of development, whose motive was to gain a deeper insight into the meaning of doctrines, and to give them a fuller statement, intelligible to the modern world. In this process it would become necessary to redefine the word which in the history of the past had been affixed as a stigma to every departure from received theological expressions. He therefore inquired into the meaning of the word " heresy." 92 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 He found that in the New Testament it carried a moral sig- nificance, the presupposition of a vicious wUl. In its appli- cation in ecclesiastical history, where it stands for a diver- gence from received opinions, there could still be detected the earlier use, — the assumption that any one diverging from prevailing statements of doctrine must at heart be bad. The essay raises the question of intellectual responsi- bility, — the existence of such a sin as the self-will of the intellect. Heretic is a word of personal guilt. It had that tone when Paul used it, and it has kept it ever since. But I am sure that we have all felt, and perhaps reproached ourselves for feeling, how impossible it was for us in any real way to attach the notion of personal guilt to those who were called heretics in the ordinary uses of the word. We have been unable to feel any vehement condemnation for the earnest and truth-seeking Errorist, or any strong approbation for the flippant and partisan Orthodox. There was no place for the first in the hell, nor for the second in the heaven, which alone our consciences tell us that the God whom we worship could establish. Speaking in the atmosphere of the New Testament, we cannot call the first a heretic, nor the second a saint, and our misgivings are perfectly right. The first is not a heretic, the second is not a saint. . . . The first may be a saint in his error, the second, to use Milton's fine phrase, may be a "heretic in the truth." Unless we hold to the authority of the infallible Church, the ecclesiastical conception of the sin of heresy is impossible. Unless we hold that all truth has been so perfectly revealed that no honest mind can mistake it (and who can believe that ?), the dogmatic conception of heresy fails. But if we can believe in the conscience, and God's willingness to enlighten it, and man's duty to obey its judgments, the moral conception of heresy sets defi- nitely before us a goodness after which we may aspire, and a sin which we may struggle against and avoid. In ordinary talk men will call him a heretic who departs from a certain average of Christian belief far enough to attract their attention. Men will speak of heresy as if it were synonymous with error. It may be that the word is so bound up with old notions of authority that it must be considered obsolete, and can be of little further use. And yet there is a sin which this word describes, which it describes to Paul and Augustine and Jeremy Taylor, — a sin as rampant in our day as in theirs. It is the self- ^T. 37-38] KING'S CHAPEL 93 will of the intellect. It is the helief of creeds, whether they be true or false, because we choose them, and not because God declares them. It is the saying, "I want this to be true," of any doctrine, so vehemently that we forget to ask, "Is it true?" "When we do this, we depart from the Christian church, which is the kingdom of God, and the discipleship of Christ. With the danger of that sin before our eyes, remembering how often we have committed it, feeling its temptation ever present with us, we may still pray with all our hearts, "From heresy, good Lord, deliver us. " Among the varied incidents whose only bond of connection is Phillips Brooks, there is one which caused at the moment a flutter in Episcopal circles in Boston, — the occupation of King's Chapel on Ash "Wednesday, 1874, by an Episcopal congregation. For the first time in its history an Episcopal bishop officiated within its walls. To those unfamiliar with the circumstances it seemed portentous with some hidden significance. The famous building was crowded with an eager, curious audience, studying the ancient structure, its chancel and communion table, its reading desk and pulpit, preserved unchanged, unimpaired by modern improvements, since the day when Episcopal rectors presided there, in this first home of Episcopacy in Boston. But if the event did not have the significance which some attributed to it, — the pos- sible regaining for the Episcopal Church of this honored shrine in its early history, — it did yet possess a deeper and larger significance, as the manifestation of Christian charity. It had been offered to Phillips Brooks, as the rector of Trinity Church, for the delivery of the Price Lec- tures, the condition of whose endowment required that the Lectures be given either in Christ Church, King's Chapel, or Trinity Church. The kind offer came from the late Rev. Henry W. Foote, then the minister of King's Chapel, a man of beautiful and saintly character, beloved by all who knew him, whose death in the prime of his manhood brought the deepest sense of loss and sorrow. Bishop Paddock had already been invited to deliver the Price Lecture before Mr. Foote had offered the use of his church, and so it came about that a 94 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 bishop of the Episcopal Church officiated for the first time in King's Chapel. The summer of 1874 was spent in Europe. He was accom- panied on this visit by Rev. Arthur Brooks, who was seeing the Old World for the first time, and for a great part of the summer they were together. The trip differed from previous ones, in that he saw more of people. The traditional Ameri- can prejudice against the English, which he had hitherto shared, to some extent, was disappearing. He received more hospitality than on former visits, and found everybody quite cordial and civil. It was mostly the clergy with whom he became acquainted, but he remarks that clergymen and lay- men have more common interests than in America. They were talking much at this time about the Public Worship Bill at dinner tables and in the newspapers, which surprises him, as things of this kind at home are ordinarily confined to Gen- eral Conventions. Of London, where he spent a few weeks, he writes that he saw it all over again with his brother, find- ing in it much of which he never tires. It was a special pleasure to have been shown over Westminster Abbey by the Dean. His acquaintance with Dean Stanley was now ripen- ing into friendship ; he received from him and from Lady Augusta Stanley the most cordial hospitality, and as a final mark of complete confidence was invited to preach in the Abbey, a courtesy extended in England only to leading pulpit orators or high dignitaries. Dean Stanley gave the Invitation after having assured himself that he could not be mistaken in thinking that Phillips Brooks would serve the purpose for which the services on Sunday evenings in the Abbey had been instituted. The fame of the preacher had in some way already reached England. Many were desirous to hear him, and the nave of the Abbey was filled. The subject of the sermon was the Positiveness of the Divine Life, the text taken from Galatians v. 16 : " This I say then. Walk in the Spirit and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh." 1 The friends of Mr. Brooks at home were pained by the report that his sermon was a failure in consequence of his not making himself heard. ^ This sermon is printed in the first volume of his Sermons, p. 373. ^T. 37-38] WESTMINSTER ABBEY g^ In tlie words of an American newspaper correspondent, " After the first ten minutes the speaker was inaudible at a few yards distance, having pitched his Toice too high for the old Abbey." That there was some passing embarrassment is evident, but how differently Mr. Brooks regarded it from the newspaper correspondent is seen by his allusion to his expe- rience in a letter to Rev. Charles D. Cooper, " The preach- ing went very well when I got used to the size of the Abbey." Another comment on the occurrence is interesting, because the writer of it, who was present, says that the preacher was distinctly heard : — About six o'clock p. m. we all started for church service at old Westminster Abbey where Phillips Brooks of Boston was adver- tised to preach at seven o'clock. We went quite early anticipating a crowd and secured a tolerably good position. The nave of the church where the services are held on Sunday evenings was very soon crowded. There was a choral service by men and boys. Dean Stanley read the Lessons and Mr. Brooks preached. . . . It is a very hard place to preach in . . . but he was distinctly heard, and the sermon was worthy of his reputation. It was a plain, practical enforcement of the great truths of his text, enun- ciated in simple yet elegant language, and altogether such a style of preaching as those old walls are not accustomed to. There may be better preachers here than the Eector of Trinity Church, Boston, but if so we have yet to hear them. We reached home soon after nine, grateful that we had had the privilege of hearing Mr. Brooks in Westminster Abbey, and still more grateful that God had given to Boston such a man and such a preacher. Other acquaintances among the English clergy whom he mentions are Canon Fremantle and Professor Stanley Leathes, in whose church, St. Philip's, Regent Street, he preached. From London he passed to the Continent to spend several weeks, wandering through Normandy and Brittany, thence to Venice, and back through the Tyrol over the great Ampezzo Pass that he had long wanted to see, stopping at Innsbruck, Munich, Ratisbon, Nuremberg, Heidelberg ; and at Worms, to which he was attracted by the memory of Luther. He liked to revisit spots like these with which he was already familiar, but the trip had been mainly planned 96 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 for the convenience of his brother. The sense of vacation, he writes, was complete and made Boston seem far away. The main interest was in looking at churches in Normandy and Brittany, the richness and beauty of whose architecture impressed him. He was gathering suggestions which would afterwards be of service. We went up to Eouen and spent a lovely day among its old Gothic architecture. There is nothing more beautiful in Europe. Then we struck off into the country and for a week we have been wandering among old Norman towns . . . each with its churches six or eight hundred years old, some with magnificent cathedrals. For a week we have wandered on through Brittany, looked at old castles and cathedrals. ... I have been amazed at the richness of the old architecture of the country. In little out-of- the-way villages, reached only by rickety country wagons, we have found glorious and immense churches of rarest beauty, — churches that took centuries to build, and stand to-day perfect in their splendor, with wonderful glass in their windows, and columns and capitals that take your breath away for beauty.^ As he wandered he was thinking of the new Trinity Church in Boston that was growing in his absence. To Mr. Kobert Treat Paine he sends these letters : — Tours, Fbancb, August 4, 1874. Deae Bob, — . . . And how 's the new Church? I dreamed of it when I wrote to you from London, and now I dream of it again, slowly rising, course on course. I should n't wonder if the robing room were done up to the eaves, but I would give much to step out of the hotel and look in the gorgeous moonlight at that blessed lot on the Back Bay. Sometimes I am very impa- tient at being away while it is all going on, but I comfort myself with promises of coming home to harder work with the first Sun- day in October. I think of many things at this distance which if I can really do them when I get to Boston will make the Parish more entirely what it should be than, by my fault, it has been yet. Normandy and Brittany have both been very great. O my dear Bob, such old glass as one sees in these Churches little and big. Some dreary little village off as far as Holaker or Aak will have windows, a whole nave and choir and transepts full of them, that would make our new Trinity the glory of America forever. 1 Letters of Travel, pp. 173-176. ^T. 37-38] CORRESPONDENCE 97 But we cannot have it, and the modern French glass seems to me poor, not at all equal to the best English. I should like to be with you at Waltham now. My kindest love to Mrs. Paine and the children, and do write me often. Always sincerely yours, P. B. Munich, August 30, 1874. Deak Bob, — I thank you again for your kindness in writing to me. Yours of the 4th, a right good letter, reached me a few days ago in Venice. First let me say how I rejoice with you and Mrs. Paine in the birth of your little boy. Nothing can be indif- ferent to me that comes to your household where I have been so kindly made one of yourselves, and this new joy of yours is a joy to me too. May God bless the boy and make him all your heart can wish. I hope to know him better as the years go on. I must not say much about the Church because these twenty- six days since your letter must have changed many things. Only do keep down the expense. Let 's decorate and beautify at our leisure, but start as clear as possible. I hear all sorts of good things about the new Chapel. "If the Church can equal the Chapel," says one, "it will be a great success." I look forward most impatiently to seeing it and going to work in it. The comer stone ought to be laid about the middle or last of October. We will go right about our preparations when I get home, but it will take two or three weeks to make the preparations and give the necessary notice. The notion of setting the old rosettes is first-rate. So much for the Church. My summer goes swimmingly. I came down through Switzerland from France to Italy, but did no climbing. My climbing days are over. They never amounted to much. I only looked at Chamouni and Zermatt. Five royal days I spent in Venice. It was exquisite weather, and the gondola suited my lazy mood completely. Now my face is set towards England which I shall slowly reach, and then after two or three more days in London I sail in the Siberia for Boston on the 17th. How many things I have coveted for the new Church. There was a big mosaic at Salviati's that would glorify our Chancel. But let all that wait. Shall we not all be ready to continue our subscriptions for the new Church till it is done ? On the first Sunday in October, then, we are together again and, bright as this all is, I shall be truly glad. My love to all your household, not forgetting the last born, and I am Always yours, P- B. 98 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 No traveller returns to his own country, when the long ocean passage intervenes, without some measure of suspense or misgiving, lest bad news should await him on his arrival. For Mr. Brooks there was in reserve a great sorrow, in the sudden death of his brother Frederick. The story is told in his father's words, entered in a family record, where he chronicled briefly the events in the lives of his sons. The story of Frederick Brooks's short life summarily interrupted at the threshold of what promised to be a career of unusual success ends thus : — In September, 1874, he came to the city to see a young friend who was sick, and who was to take charge of a school at Cleve- land. Finding him unable, he went to Lowell for a teacher, September 15. On returning from there in the Boston & Lowell train he left the train at East Cambridge, intending to walk home on the railroad bridge. The night being dark he fell through the draw and was drowned. This was about 8.30 P. M. He was thirty-two years of age. The body was not found until the 20th in the Charles Eiver. Funeral services were held Sep- tember 24, at Emmanuel Church, and he was laid in Mount Auburn. The friendship between these two brothers was close and beautiful. The older brother had followed with sympathetic interest and aid every step of the younger brother's progress, from his days in the Latin School, and then through Harvard College. Two years they had lived together while Frederick Brooks was at the Divinity School in Philadelphia. For the aid, the sympathy, the brotherly love he received, the younger brother showed his appreciation, as when he wrote to Phillips : " I wish you would let me say what a jump I give to get one of your letters. They are one of the things that help along my year mightily." From the time of his ordination, Fred- erick Brooks was recognized as a preacher of singular attrac- tiveness. Calls to various parishes had been the evidence that he was recognized as having some important work to do. For a time he had been at Des Moines, Iowa, to get a touch of Western life ; then he became rector of a promi- nent church, St. Paul's, in Cleveland, Ohio. To the interests ^T. 37-38] FREDERICK BROOKS 99 of this church he gave, says his brother, " devoted care, prov- ing himself a rare pastor and preacher, helping and teaching many souls, and building his parish work with singular solidity and power." He became editor of the " Standard of the Cross," and gave the paper " a marked and noble character." His inherited interest in education led him to establish a school in Cleveland, which should give the best classical preparation. In this cause he came to his lamented death. The first of the two letters that foUow was written to Dr. Weir Mitchell, the second to the Eev. George Augustus Strong : — Boston, Tuesday, September 29, 1874. Dbak Weie, — I cannot say how much I thank you for your letter. It has helped me through to-day, but I seem all lost and bewildered with such an utterly unlooked-for sorrow. It will all come right by and by, but just now there is nothing to do except to sit down and think it all over in a dull and weary sort of way. Fred was very near to me, and few people knew, what crowds would have known a few years hence, the ability and character that was in him. That is not gone out, and must have some richer field to work in than this world. But it is the terrible- ness of it all, and the way we shall miss him and need him all our lives, and the wretchedness at home where Father and Mother are as brave and forlorn as possible. Boston, October 18, 1874. Mt deab Geoege, — I never knew how good a friend you were till I got your letter last week about dear Fred. Since I came home I have thought of writing to you because I wanted to talk with you, and because I knew you had seen something of him . who was not out of my thoughts for a moment, though I had no idea how well you knew him and how much you cared for him, and because I wanted to thank you for the good kind words you sent to Father and Mother, which helped their poor hearts very much. But I did n't write, and by and by your letter came. I should be quite ashamed to say fully with what feeling I read it. It has been good to hear a great many people say kind and honor- able and appreciative things about Fred, but there were so few who knew him well enough to really love him and feel as I feel about the beauty of his simple working and thinking life. I cannot write about him, but I should like so much to be with you in your home and hear you talk of him. I do want so to see loo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-74 you, my dear George. These three weeks since I came home have been, just between ourselves, pretty wretched. I have tried and tried to get out of my mind the dreadful circumstances of it all. When I can shut them out for a moment and think only of his life here and the life he has begun beyond I am more than happy. I am thankful and full of rejoicing. But almost all the time the terrible scene is before me, and I think I have come nearer to being gloomy and out of heart with life than I ever did before. But I have n't been and I shan't be. I am talking all about myself. To my Father and Mother, who are getting old now, and whose house is empty of their chil- dren, it has been sad enough. It makes my heart ache to go up there and see them. Thank you again for yoiir kind thought- fulness. I am coming out to Cleveland this week. On Sunday the 25th of October Mr. Brooks stood in his brother's pulpit in Cleveland, Ohio, preaching in the morn- ing from the text, "Are the consolations of Grod small with thee?" (Job xv. 11),^ and in* the afternoon another well- known sermon, with the title, " The good will of Him that dwelt in the Bush " (Deut. xxxiii. 16).^ Again in the even- ing he preached, and his text was, "It became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, ... to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings " (Heb. ii. 10). This was the record of a day to be remem- bered by the preacher and his hearers. Another duty de- volved upon him, to visit the deserted room where the traces of activity suddenly interrupted were all about him. Into his musings, as he sat there alone with memory, we do not enter. He looked over the sermons of his brother, and from them selected a volume for publication. In the preface, he alluded briefly to the beauty and power of his life. At a later time, when writing his Lectures on Preaching, he made this terse reference without further explanation, " To-day I have been thinking of one whom I knew, — nay, one whom I know, — who finished his work and went to God." 1 Sermons, toI. i. p. 98. 2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 39. CHAPTER IV 1873-1877 SEEVICES IN HTINTINGTON HALL. EXTRACTS FROM NOTE- BOOKS. METHOD OF PREPARING SERMONS. ESSAY ON COURAGE. CONTEMPORANEOUS ACCOUNTS OF PHILLIPS BROOKS AS A PREACHER. TESTIMONY OF PRINCIPAL TULLOCH. During more than four years the congregation of Trinity Church worshipped in Huntington Hall on Boylston Street. If it were a disadvantage to be deprived of the accessories and associations which make religion impressive, yet there were compensations. The location was more convenient, the accommodations more ample, and to many it constituted an inducement rather than a hindrance that the reminders of conventional worship were wanting. But it required a greater effort on the part of the preacher to hold his congregation together during this unexpectedly long period of waiting. That Mr. Brooks felt the harder necessity which had been placed upon him, and summoned his strength to meet it, is apparent in many ways, but chiefly in the greater results which he accomplished. The extracts which were cited in a previous chapter might seem to indicate that he had already taken the place in Boston which he had occupied in Philadelphia. But there Is some evidence going to show that the three years in the old church on Summer Street had not exhibited the fruit anticipated. Thus the afternoon service on Sundays con- tinued to be thinly attended, however large might be the congregation in the morning. This problem of the Sunday afternoons and the second service was an unwelcome inherit- ance, not easily overcome. To a clerical friend who once preached for him to one of these small congregations, he I02 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 remarked that it was not like the old days in Philadelphia. Then the church had been filled to its utmost capacity, in the afternoon as well as in the morning. From the time that he began to officiate in Huntington Hall, there came a change so marked in the direction and the manifestation of his power that these years were not remembered or lamented as a period of deprivation of eccle- siastical privileges, but rather cherished for the richer spiritual influence which they brought. The secular hall took on a sacred character. The preacher rose high above disadvantage or limitation. The afternoon service soon be- gan to be as well attended as the morning, nor were the accommodations sufficient to meet the demands of the throng- ing congregation. It was a reminder of the early days of the Christian church, when as yet it lacked temples and altars and the symbolic pageantry of the later centuries, when the spoken word was alone in itself adequate to reach the intellect and to melt the heart. To the preacher it must have meant a setting free from the traditions and embarrass- ments of a former regime, as if like St. Paul he was at liberty to build for himself and not upon other men's founda- tions. This sense of rejoicing in a larger freedom runs through these years, giving them a character of their own ; there was a joy and happiness in the preacher which was diffused throughout the congregation. But it shoidd be mentioned as a touching instance of his dependence upon associations, or of his desire to maintain the continuousnesa of his life, that he sent a request, which at once was granted, to the Church of the Holy Trinity for the lecturn or preaching desk at which he had stood when delivering his Wednesday evening lectures. The main event, of course, during these years was the building of the new Trinity Church in Copley Square. Be- fore, however, we turn to describe it, we may dwell for a moment upon some features in the preaching of Phillips Brooks which are as interesting as they are important. He had not written many sermons since he came to Boston, for he had been occupied and somewhat distracted by the great ^T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 103 transition in his life. He had fallen back upon his old Philadelphia sermons, using as many of them as he was still willing to preach, taking, as it were, his final leave of his old self before launching out anew and letting down his nets for a fresh draught. His sermon record book shows but forty new sermons to have been written in the years from 1870 to 1873. There was here no idleness or waste of time. It was the opportunity for large and varied reading, — a period of refilling and of quiet waiting, wherein convic- tions took root and matured, till he should be ready for some larger utterance. Another forward movement in his career of triumph was slowly coming in the years of his ministry in Huntington Hall. The sig;ns of intellectual and spiritual growth maybe traced in the multiplication of the note-books. He carried them in his pocket, and at any time might be seen recording thoughts as they were flashing through his mind. Some kind of note-book was his inseparable companion. What his earlier method was of writing a sermon or of preparation for writing we do not know. That the sermon was often left tiU the end of the week, finished only in time for its delivery, is apparent from allusions in his diaries. When he first began to preach he wrote two sermons every week. After he went to Holy Trinity he wrote but one, to be preached in the morning ; while his gift for extempo- raneous preaching was brought into exercise on Sunday after- noons and in his Wednesday evening lectures. Many of the plans for these earlier extemporaneous sermons remain, show- ing that they had been carefully elaborated. It was one of his peculiarities that he remembered his work and seemed to hold it in account, so that often he turned back to these plans, as if they held an equal place in his estimation with the writ- ten sermons. He had another and a fortunate characteristic, that his mind kindled quickly with his own thoughts, even after many years had gone by, with the result that old ser- mons were as fresh to him as those that were newly written. There was always a curious interest among the clergy and theological students who cultivated the art of preaching to know the methods by which Mr. Brooks did his work. The I04 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 sense of form, the literary charm, the almost prodigal abundance of thought and illustration, the spontaneity which made a written sermon possess the full effect of an extempo- raneous utterance inspired by the moment, — this called for explanation, if so be that he could communicate to others the valued secret. Now that we know the entire process, the secret appears a simple one. Preaching was the one exclusive object that occupied his mind. The message to be delivered and the form it should take in order to be most effective, — to that simple end he devoted himself. From morning till night, in every hour of leisure or apparent relaxation, on his journeys, in vacations, in social assemblies, he was think- ing of subjects for sermons, turning over new aspects of old truths, thrilled inwardly with the possibility of giving better form than had yet been given to old, familiar doctrine. In a word, he concentrated his thought upon one thing, — it was preaching ; that was what he lived for, and for that cause he might almost be said to have come into the world. Be- neath the nonchalant, trifling manner which seemed at times to refuse to take anything seriously, the humor that played about solemn and sacred themes, the deep undertone of his spirit was sounding without cessation or interruption. The first shape which the sermon took was the brief hint in the note-book. It was an apparent necessity to put it into Writing, or it would not have been that every sermon may thus be traced in its genesis, even every casual speech on slight occasions. One might have thought that after so many years of preparation it would have been possible for him to make a few minutes' talk after dinner, or to boys in school or coUege, without first writing down the idea on which he was to touch, and then expanding it into a complete plan. In the reminiscences by Dr. Weir Mitchell ^ an account of one of these extemporaneous addresses is given, as it seemed to have been born at the moment, without premeditation. But in truth it had long been in his mind what he should say, and the analysis had been written out. He never trusted to the moment to bring him inspiration. To give other 1 Cf . ante, vol. i. p. 634. ^T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 105 illustrations, he often went to Cambridge to address the stu- dents of the St. Paul's Society at Harvard, but in every case the analysis of his remarks may be found in his note- books or on detached sheets of paper. On some occasions he availed himself of ideas which he was working up in other connections, but it still remained true that he took thought beforehand and never allowed himself to feel it would be given to him, when called upon, what he should speak. That was a privilege of the apostolic age, and it had not been reserved for him. It is not known that he ever found himself in a position where he was forced to speak when he had made no special preparation, although there were occasions having a resem- blance to emergencies when he was saved by what seems like mysterious interposition, or the working of some reserve force within him. Such an incident is described by the Rev. Percy Browne, to whom Mr. Brooks communicated it : — In one of the later years when Christmas fell in the middle of the week, Mr. Brooks had prepared two sermons, — one for Christmas Day, and the other for the morning of the Sunday after Christmas. He preached the jBrst sermon as it was intended. On the Sunday morning after Christmas he went up into the pulpit, and as the choir were singing the last stanza of the hymn he looked down at the sermon before him, when to his horror he dis- covered that he had made a mistake and had brought with him to church the sermon preached some two or three days before. He then reminded himself that he had prepared another sermon to be preached extemporaneously in the afternoon, — but both the text and the plan had vanished from his memory. In his despair he hastened down from the pulpit and went to the lecturn where he began in almost reckless fashion to turn over the leaves of the Bible in the hope that the lost text might recur to him. And then suddenly, at the critical moment when the large congregation were waiting for him to begin, the text flashed upon his mind, with a vivid picture of the plan of the sermon. Some one in the congregation, who was asked if he noticed anything peculiar, said he only remarked that Mr. Brooks seemed to have changed his mind after reaching the pulpit, and concluded that he would prefer to preach from the lecturn. The reason for the change he did not know, but he recalled that sermon as one of the most powerful and impressive he had ever heard. io6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 A few specimens are here given from tis pocket note- books in order to show the ideas germinating in his mind which were afterwards to be developed into sermons; they also serve to illustrate the character of his preaching and the tone of thought at the moment when they were written. One year is as good as another for this purpose, and we fix upon 1874, when he was preaching in Huntington HaU: — What do we mean by hope and cheerfulness about the future ? We know that despair and weariness all come, we don't ignore them. But from the distance we see the greater power envelop- ing all and working and making peace. The difference of the sense of mystery in life in different per- sons. About alike in those who think nothing about it and in those who have a settled scheme. There are days which seem to be made up of spring and autumn, which have the hope of one and the despair of the other. Our time is like such a day. The relation of the Church to social life, throughout its his- tory. The Church and the religion are not always the same, but (and it is a weighty truth) the Church cannot long lag behind the religion. Christianity the religion at once of individuality and society, and so of social life which must have both of these in it. The way the Bible strikes at the average respectability, as in the Elder Brother and Pharisees, yet never would overturn. No socialism; always full of virtue and order, always bringing up the better from below, always making growth the changing force, always developing. That the whole secret of reform. Other systems purely destructive ; have tried to appropriate Christianity, hut have failed. When an end has been made of the people's old religion, of their faith, and of the God-made man of the Gospel, do you know what was substituted ? The faith in the God-made man of social- ism. For what is socialism at bottom? It is man believing himself God, in the sense that he believes himself capable of destroying evil and suffering. (Life of Montalembert, vol. ii. p. 112.) For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, «T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 107 and ye shall live. Amos v. 4. One must be in harmony with the principles of life in order to live; for example, the forces of nature, the laws of the land, the men about us, of all good things. This must be what is meant by seeking God ; not His favor, but His nature. This is what is meant by Christ reconciling us to God. The full life of Jesus. . . . There is a rich vitality in the man who has sought God. We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. Acts xix. 2. What is perfectly real to us so often entirely strange to other men. What we cannot live without they never miss. . . . But in every such case the soul is all the time getting help unconsciously ; the Spirit not confined to those times and places where He consciously is. . . . What they lose by their unconsciousness. And there was great joy in that city. Acts viii. 8. Religion primarily personal, secondarily social. Evil of reversing this. But after the personal, the social to be considered. What would a city be with Christianity accepted universally? 1. Belief. 2. Behavior. 3. Charity. City joy is made up, independently of personal happiness, of social life, business prosperity, and public spirit. The love of company. A revival in a city. The beauty and healthiness of it. . . . The qualities wanted in civic life are just the Christian qualities. Silver and gold have I none, hut such as I have give I thee. Acts iii. 3. There is something better for us to have than money. So there must he something better to give. The greatest benefactors have not given money. Christ. So of those who have helped you most. Not make anything I say an excuse for not giving money. What we can give, — Ideas, Inspiration, Com- fort, and above all access to God for what He can give alone, — Forgiveness and Grace. ... A man must really possess himself before he can really give himself to another. Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are. James v. 17. General tendency to think the great men so much greater than we are. What is and what is not common to men (Declara- tion of Independence). Settle it that privilege must belong with character, and then there can be no arbitrary inequality. "And I will not he judged hy any that never felt the like, " said Richard Baxter on his wife's death. The first fruits of them that slept. 1 Cor. xv. 20. . . . Christ made death seem and be a sleep. He established, that is, io8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 that sleep was its true figure. This includes these ideas, (1) Its naturalness. To sleep and to awaken again is altogether natural. The sonnet of Blanco White. The relation of this revelation to the wishes and hopes of the race. (2) The refreshing, renewing power. Sleep brings back the energy of the last morn- ing, only with the added wisdom and experience of the past day. So of the resurrection life of Christ. The restoral of the first life, only with the complete and redemptive work added, all the fatigue and pain over. So your resurrection life. Restored to the Image of God, only with the experience of life put in. And when he was come into ,i)ti^«-'!^ >?*^ >^:cz:^~^i'>=^^-<^ Aa^/ i-^'- i/'*^ Au3 g/^5i^efu^g^ uM^xi ^rb /i^£..jj e^ ^ C^lr-^y-Ca X-U/T-*,^ ,yj^ a/c^..^ CviMS /-/m,,uj /^^^ ^ir^'aJj <>^ '^ A^aJ^ <^ (^^^m^ cir eZ^ /^ Xirv^ cAJO e>y Xl^— ^^'^ <:^f/C A*,.^ ^f ^ ^ <;:^^^2^ k^CUiju /-^Uvyw^/O ^S'VM^ttS, .ET. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 115 knowing just the limits it should have, with no anxiety about proportions, no fear lest his material should fail him. I have been reading these plans carefully [writes a friend of Mr. Brooks to whom they have been submitted], comparing them bit by bit with the printed sermons, and was interested to find how closely he kept to his plan as a whole, both the order of the passages and the number of pages allotted to each. How the dry bones live ! The earlier synopses seemed to me less finished than the ones written only later by a few years. For instance the "Curse of Meroz " in 1877 has an occasional outburst apparently for himself alone, "It makes one mad;" "the muddy humility of Uriah Heep." Indeed, I noticed a number of personal applications which do not appear in the sermons themselves. In the "Great- ness of Faith " opposite the words "blatant infidel " is written IngersoU." I have also found passages marked for three pages reduced to half a page, the example of a man building a house changed to one facing a great grief, and in " Christian Charity " whole passages and even ideas left entirely out. He must have feared his own facility and the glowing images that came crowding into his mind to tie himself down so, almost as a poet would, into sonnet form.^ What has been said of his method of preparing a writ- ten sermon applies equally to his •extemporaneous sermons. Always there was the plan elaborated and written out and afterwards filed for future reference. There are many hun- dreds of these plans, but this difference is to be noted, that in making them he used a full sheet of sermon paper, with the handwriting large and bold, clearly with the pur- pose in view of taking them into the pulpit. He could not thus have utilized the plans of the written sermon, for the handwriting was so small as to. have required a magnifying glass to read it. In this way he cultivated himself in the art of extempore preaching. The practice which he had in ^ How early Mr. Brooks adopted this method of making plans for his ser- mons is uncertain. Cf. Bemembrances of Phillips Brooks, where the KeT. George A. Strong writes : " A stay of a week with him in Philadelphia once, while he was stUl in charge of ' Holy Trinity,' showed me how he wrote his ser- mons. ' Take a book and pipe,' he said one morning, ' and let me map out work for to-morrow.' The pen ran on as if the note-paper ' plan ' were an ofEhand letter, and after an hour or so of ab&olute stillness the close-written sheet went into the desk." ii6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-7? amplifying his ideas in the written sermon helped him when preaching without notes, for he rarely took them into the pulpit, to keep within limits, and to build up a sermon with as much skill and success as when he wrote it out word for word in his study. But all this preparation served a greater end, to give him freedom in the pulpit. Often when he was most powerful he had departed from the manuscript before him, or ceased to follow the plan laid out. He was never more effective than when he delivered some written sermon extemporaneously. In such cases he did not use the manu- script for preparation, but went to the plan on which it had been written, coming again under the influence of the orig;inal idea which had first inspired him, and then giving to it such fresh treatment as made it seem as if he were delivering a new sermon. It is another characteristic of Phillips Brooks as a preacher that he made no effort to follow the rule enjoined in rhetorical treatises calling for a culmination at the end of the discourse, for which the most effective points or arguments should be reserved. On the contrary he often, perhaps generally, came to his climax as he began. He followed the artist's method, rather than the rhetorician's, throwing his leading idea upon the canvas in bold outline, and then holding his audience with a gaze, growing deeper in its intensity as with an artist's power he filled up the outline and made a living, speaking portrait. What he was doing in every sermon was to repro- duce the personal process through which he himself had passed from the moment when he grasped a truth till he had traced out in his own experience its relation to life and to all other truth. He first opened his soul to the influence of the truth which was. to constitute his message, devising the most forcible method in order to make it appeal t» his own heart, and then under the influence of this con- viction he wrote his sermon. He studied its effect upon him- self before studying how to reach a congregation. This process kept him natural, sincere, and unaffected, preserving his personality in all that he said, and free from the dangers of conventionalism or artificiality. No one ever charged him ^T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 117 with employing the artifices of rhetoric to accomplish his end, nor did his hearers harden themselves against his teaching under the suspicion that he moved them by sensational methods. Although the rules of rhetoric require that the strongest argument should be placed last if an audience is to be stirred by the orator to accept the truth which he advo- cates, yet in real life the strongest argument comes first, and is confirmed by the lesser reasons which may be alleged. This was Phillips Brooks's method. There was a letting down of the audience as he closed from the exaltation with which he began to the sober application of his truth in the realities of life. During these years, while Trinity Church was worshipping in Huntington Hall, Phillips Brooks, as has been said, gave himself up almost exclusively to the work of preaching. There is the record of only two important addresses which he gave, both of them significant not only for their inherent value, but as illustrations of his methods of work, and for the latter reason they may here be mentioned. He went to Worcester in December, 1874, to deliver an address before the Massachusetts Teachers' Association. His subject was " MUton as an Educator," and it was treated with apparent learning, with the marks of familiarity with his theme, as well as with its remoter scientific bearings. But why, one is tempted to ask, should an association of teachers, knowing so well the needs of their profession, call upon one who was not a professed educator for this service ? And how should the busy parish minister find time for the investigation of his subject, so that he could speak the word which would give to teachers the stimulus and encouragement for which they craved ? Or did Mr. Brooks have the art of cramming in a short time so as to give the appearance of erudition, and for the rest dress up the old platitudes under some temporary mood of enthusiasm? The truth is that six months before, while he was abroad for his summer's vacation, he was making his preparation. For years he had been studying the life and times of Milton. He took with him as he went away the important books on the subject of education by Milton, ii8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-7? Locke, Bacon, and Herbert Spencer. He studied Quick's " Essays on Educational Eeformers," then went for himself to the writings of Quintilian, Montaigne, Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Basedow. When we add to this special preparation his interest in the subject of teaching, his efforts for many years to detect the methods of success, his experience in visiting schools, his gifts of insight and of observation, his philosophi- cal capacity for tracing relationships of thought, unobvious to many, we have the evidence that he was not seeking to pose as a scholar outside of his own department, but was doing conscientious and faithful work. Another address was delivered at the anniversary of the Massachusetts State Normal School, in July, 1875, when his subject was " Courage." ^ The preparation for it was made a long time in advance, and among the writings of PhiUips Brooks it occupies a most important place. We are haunted as we read with the conviction that we have before us a chap- ter from his experience, had he chosen to give it a personal form. He tells us his method of reading : — The habit of review reading is hostile to literary courage. To read merely what some one has said about a book is probably as unstimulating, as unfertilizing a process as the human mind can submit to. . . . Eead books themselves. To read a book is to make a friend ; if it is worth your reading you meet a man ; you go away full of his spirit ; if there is anything in you, he will quicken it. . . . To make young people know the souls of books and find their own souls in knowing them, that is the only way to cultivate their literary courage. But it is the subject itself which is most suggestive. If we might fix upon one word to describe the character of Phillips Brooks, it would be courage. It was written in his appear- ance and manner, showing itself in his sermons and his conver- sation, the one quality in him which could not be suppressed or disguised. It had been manifested in Philadelphia when he espoused causes which were unpopular. Had he chosen to become a professional reformer, however obnoxious his 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses for hoiii these papers, " Milton as an Educator," p. 300, and " Courage," p. 319. ^T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 119 cause or strenuous the opposition to it, he would not have flinched from its advocacy. Those who heard him preach were inspired by his courage, as an army by the command of a fearless leader. And this q^uality was a positive one, which had been developed in spite of timidity and shyness and self- consciousness. He would not have failed a second time in the Boston Latin School. The diflSiculty he surmounted in overcoming his natural reserve contributed to the development of courage. In the earlier years a certain air of noncha- lance has been noticed, as marking his manner while preach- ing, — the mask it may have been of his still too sensitive spirit. But in later years, those who have watched him on occasions when he was to address a congregation, waiting for his word to lift up their hearts, have noticed how his face grew pale and his whole countenance straitened with a look of agony in the moment before he turned to mount the pul- pit. To preach was an act requiring courage, because he must needs, in order to be successful, unfold his inner self, and speak of the intimate phases of the soul's life in God, when no pressure could have extracted these things from him in ordinary circumstances. When, therefore, he speaks to us of courage, and g^ves us the definition of courage, he is imparting the secret of his own experience : " Courage is the power of being mastered by and possessed with an idea. How rare it is ! I do not say how few men are so mastered and possessed ; I say how few men have the power so to be." The Sundays at Huntington Hall succeeded each other with their unvarying testimony to the preacher's power. No courses of lectures on literature, art, or science with which the hall was associated ever witnessed a greater audience. It would not have been so surprising if on anniversary occasions the crowd had gone forth to meet him ; but this was the case Sunday after Sunday, like the sun each day as it rises in its strength, till people became accustomed to it as to the gifts of God, and hardly wondered at the munificence of the feast. Here is a description of one of these Sundays, which will answer for them all ; it is taken from a Boston religious paper, " Zion's Herald," in 1874 : — I20 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 Religious papers in the Middle and Southern States speak o£ Boston as if given over to religious doubts, to the gospel of modern science, and to heterodoxy generally. If their editors could see the crowd, and know the character of it, that waits upon the ministry of Phillips Brooks, their views might be somewhat modified. Last Sabbath morning the immense hall was far from being equal to the demands of the audience that crowded it. Many stood throughout the whole service, and many went away not finding even a place for the sole of the foot. Here ex-governors and senators, judges and college professors, intermingled with the humblest populace of the city. The services were most devoutly rendered. The sermon was a fervid, simple utterance of the gospel of the Lord Jesus, in the love and personal enjoyment of it. A few words of address to young men and boys, at the close, in reference to the great privilege of preaching the gospel were very impressive. A tender silence was the appropriate response from the beginning to the end of the excellent and eminently spiritual discourse. The service in the interest of "Free Religion" in Boston never draws such an audience as this. "And if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me." Another writer has described the preacher at this time in terms felicitous and true : — We sometimes read of Schleiermacher and Whitefield and Robertson and McCheyne and Chalmers and Mason, and think it must have been good to live in the times when men preached with their fire and their mighty hold on the heart ; but lo ! we have the same phenomena in Boston to-day, a man in some respects even more than the equal of some I have named. He seizes a great and living theme; he throws it out with a sentence into shape ; he then follows it in all its relations to life, never entering into quibbles, nor minute matters which pertain to some but not to all, and shows the bearing of the great central truth on the daily needs of men. He never overflows with nor lacks illustration, but uses it as the conditions of his subject require, keeping it as illustrative and not as metaphorical show. He betrays a thorough acquaintance with the thought of our time, passing into no antiquated domain, but meeting an audience fresh from the magazine and newspaper with a style which is natural and earnest and in sympathy with what is best in our day. His breadth of thought is, perhaps, that which strikes and draws one most, and in this not even Beecher is his master. Philosophic candor, and a large grasp, this separates him world wide from the common pulpit; and those who find themselves ^T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 121 always on the guard about the statements of others give Phillips Brooks a ready ear. But with all this, there is in his preaching what one must call the everlasting Gospel; that faithfulness to the conscience, that tender pleading, that dignity of condescen- sion, and yet that brotherliness and sympathy, that fidelity to dogmas, yet that absence of dogmatic expression, that lack of the sensational, ludicrous, and egotistic, and that spiritual quickening, which men sura up in one brief phrase when they say, "That is what I call preaching." For myself, I should deem no vaca- tion complete without hearing Phillips Brooks. After hearing Candish, Dyce, Hamilton, Jones, Binney, Spurgeon, Pressens^, Monod, Krummacher, and Tholuck, not to mention other dis- tinguished divines of Europe, there is no one who so exactly suits me as Phillips Brooks. There is a warmth and life and inspiration and truth from his lips that I have not found else- where. And from what I hear mine is not an isolated case.^ The late Dr. Tulloch, Principal of St. Mary's CoUege, in the University of Aberdeen, was visiting Boston in the spring of 1874. This v?as his tribute to Phillips Brooks, in a letter to his wife : — April 26, 1874 I have just heard the most remarkable sermon I ever heard in my life (I use the word in no American sense) from Mr. Phillips Brooks, an Episcopal clergyman here : equal to the best of Fred- erick Robertson's sermons, with a vigor and force of thought which he has not always. I never heard preaching like it, and you know how slow I am to praise preachers. So much thought and so much life combined; such a reach of mind, and such a depth and insight of soul. I was electrified. I could have got up and shouted. And again in a letter to a friend the comment is repeated, and the comparison with Robertson made more explicit : — I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed myself here, how kind everybody has been, and with what flattering kindness they have received me, — Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Dana, and a man in some respects as remarkable as any of them, Phillips Brooks, the great preacher here now. I never heard anything equal to his sermon to-day, and you know I don't readily praise sermons. It had all the originality and life and thought of 1 Rev. W. L. Gage, in the Congregationalist, 1874. 122 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-7? Eobertson of Brighton, with less tenderness and delicacy of in- sight, but more robustness and incision.^ That a man like Principal Tullocli could bear this testi- mony to a sermon by Phillips Brooks shows that something had happened in the history of preaching and in the history of religious thought. There was certainly no living critic who surpassed him, very few if any who could be said to equal him, in those qualities which go to making up the capa- city for final arbitration. He was distinguished as a preacher, Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, Moderator of the Gen- eral Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a man of rigid standards and exacting in his judgments, acquainted with the preachers of his time, whose profession called him to study the history of preaching and the history of theology. Those who have read his " Leaders of the Reformation," his " English Puritanism and its Leaders," or his important work on " The Rational Theologians of the Church of England in the Seventeenth Century," will know that Phillips Brooks was preaching in the presence of one whose judgment was of value. The man who could move Principal Tulloch to such an outburst had gained some vantage ground in the struggle of the Christian church to overcome the world, which it is essential that we should discover. When we turn with an interest to the sermon, it is to find that it was no excep- tional utterance compared with a hundred others that might be mentioned. And yet it contained in a marked degree that quality which now made all the sermons great. This was the text : Jesus said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God ? He answered and said. Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him ? And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee."^ The climax of the sermon was delayed till the mean- ing of the last answer of Jesus had been unfolded. As the successive points in the conversation were opened up to the hearer in the wealth of their direct and unsuspected spiritual import, the interest grew deeper, for the portrait of Christ 1 Mrs. Oliphant's Life of Principal Tulloch, pp. 292, 303. 2 Cf. Sermons, " The Opening of the Eyes," vol. v. p. 194. ^T. 37-41] METHODS OF WORK 123 was growing clearer and the nature of every man. Christ is drawn as the most real, most present power in the Christian world. Men see Him, talk with Him continually, but they do not know what lofty converse they are holding. The sub- tlety of the spiritual imagination that enabled the preacher to enter into the mind of Christ had the effect of reproducing the scene, as though Christ were standing in bodily presence before the congregation. What had taken place those cen- turies ago was repeating itself in the consciousness of many on that Sunday afternoon. CHAPTER V 1873-1877 THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TRINITY CHUECH. THE MOTIVES IN ITS CONSTRUCTION. THE CONSECRATION SERVICES The story of the building of Trinity Church reads like a romance from its first inception, through the difficulties surmounted, till it culminated in the service of consecration. In the accomplishment of the work, the building committee, the architect, the rector, labored together in a spirit of harmony, with an aim which cannot be better expressed than in the words of the report of the building committee : " the conviction that our duty to the parish, to posterity, and to God has been clear, to make the new church fuUy worthy of the piety, the culture, and the wealth of our people." It was fortunate for the architect and the rector that they had such a building committee and such a parish to support them, for as the original design of the church expanded, there came the demand for increased expenditure until the com- pleted work had cost more than double the amount originally contemplated. From beginning to end a deep enthusiasm pervaded the whole undertaking. It was impossible to bring together two such personalities as Richardson and Phillips Brooks without something great and unique as the product of their joint discourse. Mr. Richardson was not a man with ecclesiastical convictions, who endeavored to turn his religious musings into architectural expression, but endowed with a rich and generous nature, who appreciated the large- hearted rector of Trinity and responded to his suggestions. Mr. Brooks was not an architect, but he came near being one. In his journeys through Europe he had made himself familiar with historic churches in the countries he visited, and by his ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 125 intelligent interest in the subject had prepared himself for the tuition which Richardson could give. He had also certain first principles of his own, which appear embodied in Trinity Church. From one point of view the credit for the accomplishment of so large an undertaking belonged to the building committee, whose culture, judgment, and zeal, as well as business capac- ity, made the work possible, preventing misunderstandings which would have marred the plan or limited its realization. From another point the glory belongs to an architect who stood foremost in his profession for originality and boldness and power. But with Phillips Brooks originated the motives which dominate the edifice. His ideas are written in the struc- ture ; he supported and stimulated the genius of the architect, turning it to his own purpose ; he possessed the confidence of the building committee and of the members of the parish, manifested by unstinted generosity in giving, in response to increasing appeals. While the share which he took in the work cannot be exactly measured, or the influence he exerted be sharply discriminated from that of the architect or build- ing committee, yet the story may be told from his point of view. Trinity Church in his lifetime was popularly known as Phillips Brooks's Church; there is a sense in which it may be regarded as his monument. In the first place he appreciated the greatness of the opportunity. The time was ripe to make an attempt in ecclesiastical architecture which, while it respected and followed whatever was true or desirable in traditional methods, should yet be subservient to the expression of those higher aspects of religion which it had been the glory of the Pro- testant Reformation to unveil. Upon that point he was clear, that the first condition was to break away from the so-called Gothic style, to whose introduction into England and America, following in the wake of the Oxford Movement, was owing in a measure the attempted return to mediaeval religion which had characterized the Anglican Church for the last generation. That type of religion, with its priesthood and confessional, and its undue emphasis on the sacrament of the 126 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 altar, had clothed itself in a style of architecture whose chief requisite was to see, or to supplement sight by the ringing of a beU, but where the hearing of the word of God by the ear was not taken into consideration as affecting the structural necessities of the building art. Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God was the conviction of Phillips Brooks. Preaching might seem weak in comparison with gorgeous rites calculated to impress the imagination, but God had appointed the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. This was the principle kept in the foreground, as controlling the details of the construction. Even the piers of the central tower, where they are visible in the church, were made smaller than the fitting proportions seemed to demand, failing to represent the massive foundations on which they rest, and even concealing in some measure their structural purpose, in order that the symbolism of the church as a place for the proclamation of the gospel might be more effectually secured. But preaching was not the only motive to be embodied in a church aiming to represent the symmetry and fulness of the Christian faith. For the " visible church of God is a con- gregation of faithful men, where not only the pure word of God is preached, but the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same." In order that the dignity of the sacraments might not only be secured, but their true significance made prominent, there was added to the chancel end of the church, which was in the form of the Latin cross, a large semicircular apse, to be devoted to the one purpose of the administration of the Lord's Supper. This was a departure from ecclesiastical traditions, marked and even glaring, and gives to Trinity Church a distinctive character. Its motive was to represent the idea of Christian communion and fellowship as one great end which the Lord's Supper was designed to promote. In the centre of the apse stood the Lord's table, — a table according to the original institution of the feast, not an altar or a sideboard, but a table, whose importance to the Christian imagination was not ^T. 37-40 NEW TRINITY CHURCH lay obscured or dwarfed by other ornament, not even by the chan- cel windows. Whether it would be a success or not from an sesthetic or architectural point of view, whether something more impressive to the outward eye might have been devised or not, was not the question. The spirit of ecclesiastical mys- ticism, dreaming of an elaborate altar, with its imposing ac- cessories, as in Latin churches, might be disappointed at the result in a building that promised and fulfilled so much to the visual imagination. But if it were a failure in devising a form of architecture where the central truths of Anglicanism, as distinct from Eomanism, should be bodied forth in unmistak- able manner, yet it was an attempt at this end under circum- stances most favorable and rare. If it were a failure, then the inference would seem close at hand that Protestantism, which has been powerful enough to build up the modern world, and now carries the hopes and the possibilities of the world's future, is driven, in seeking a fitting shrine for worship, to resort to types of architecture that originated in and expressed the spirit of an inferior age, to which the higher forms of Christ's religion were unknown. But those who have witnessed the . feast of the Lord's Supper in Trinity Church, when the fuU significance of the divine symbolism is apparent, must feel that there has been no failure. The Protestant principle controls the edifice, securing the prominence to the pure word of God, and with it the due ministration of the monumental rite of the Lord's Supper. The baptismal font, from this point of view, is placed next the chancel, as it should be, connecting closely the two sacraments, setting forth the truth that an inward purification is the condition for participating in the heavenly banquet. There was still another motive in the mind of Mr. Brooks : to combine with these features of a Protestant church what- ever was of human and enduring significance in the earlier methods of Christian architecture. It was no part of his purpose to break with the spirit of the ages before the Refor- mation. To his mind they were the " ages of faith," and to them he made the appeal, when searching for the evidence upon which the Christian religion must repose. Therefore, 128 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 he would take from the old order the ideas of solidity and of imposing grandeur, of beauty, of adornment in form and color, which should surpass, if possible, all other beauty, as when the church seemed greater than the world, the spiritual stronger and richer than the temporal, and in its costly, deco- ration symbolizing that wealth was most worthily employed when it ministered to spiritual ends. Let the complex invo- lutions of the result stand for the rich variety of religious interests. Retain from the old, also, the sense of awe and mystery, the deep mystery of human life, that combination of effects in roof and windows, in which Milton, though a Puritan, rejoiced, whose result was to dissolve the spirit in religious ecstasy and bring heaven before the eye. The main feature in the architecture of Trinity Church both within and without is the central tower. In this respect, as well as in the rejection of the pointed arch, the departure from the so-called Gothic reproductions is apparent and strik- ing. To quote the architect's words on this point : — In studying the problem presented by a building fronting on three streets, it appeared equally desirable that the tower should be central, thus belonging equally to each front, rather than put- ting it on any corner, where, from at least one side, it would be nearly out of sight ; and in carrying out this motive, it was plain that with the ordinary proportion of church and tower, either the tower must be comparatively small, which would bring its sup- porting piers inconveniently into the midst of the congregation, or the tower being large, the rest of the church must be magnified to inordinate proportions. For this dilemma the Auvergnat solu- tion seemed perfectly adapted. Instead of the tower being an inconvenient and unnecessary addition to the church, it was itself made the main feature. The struggle for precedence, which often takes place between a church and its spire, was disposed of, by at once and completely subordinating nave, transepts, and apse, and gfrouping them about the tower as the central mass. In the discussions over the plan of the church by which this result was finally determined, Mr. Brooks took an im- portant part. Both architect and rector were agreed in the matter of the tower as a central feature, rather than a tower at one corner, as was at first intended. As to the ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 129 " Auvergnat solution," — Mr. Brooks spent the summer of 1874 travelling through the towns of middle France, where, as at Auvergne and the Angoumois, there existed from the twelfth century churches of the peculiar construction whence Mr. Eichardson drew, in some measure, his suggestion. He was thus prepared to form an intelligent opinion. But apart from this special preparation, he had an earlier predilection for the tower, as has been already shown in his experience at Philadelphia, where the Church of the Holy Trinity had been completed in accordance with his desire. This pre- ference for the tower was accompanied by another equally strong for the rounded arch, or for what is called the Romanesque style. These things may seem to be a matter of indifference from a religious point of view, but he did not so regard them. If it is admissible to supppse that religious, or intellectual, or other motives consciously or unconsciously inspire those who plan and build, then we may recall that the Romanesque style was developed in the earlier Middle Ages before the Latin Church had conquered the state, or begun the movement for suppressing freedom of inquiry, before the promulgation of the dogma of transubstantiation had car- ried the power of the priesthood to absolute supremacy over the Christian imagination. The Gothic, or as it is called the pointed style, came later, when these things had been accomplished. To the professed ecclesiologist, a church like Trinity, without a spire, without the pointed arch, is an eye- sore and hardly worthy to be called an ecclesiastical con- struction, for their rejection seems to imply the sacrifice of the ideas of solemnity and devotion, — spire and arches mounting upwards to express the soul of religious aspiration pointing forever away from earth to heaven. But there is another conception of religion than this, — the ' consecration of the world that now is, the recognition of the sacredness of earth and of the secular life. To this conception Mr. Brooks had given expression in an essay ^ read before the Church Congress in 1875 on the " Best Method of Promoting Spir- ^ Essays and Addresses, pp. 20 ff. Also pntlished separately by T. Whit- taker, N. T. 130 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 itual Life," where he had maintained that religion is not something to be added to a man's nature over and above what he already possesses, but it is rather the consecration of all his gifts and powers to the service of God. The spiritual life of man in its fullest sense is the activity of man's whole nature under the highest spiritual impulse, which is the love of God. It is not the activity of one set of powers, one part of the nature. It is the movement of all the powers, of the whole of his nature under a certain force and so with a certain completeness and effect. With this idea the architecture of Trinity Church is in harmony. Nor is it lacking in seriousness, solemnity, and devotion, but ministers to them, as also to a certain spiritual serenity, in a manner and degree unsurpassed by what is called the ecclesiological style. It had formed a part of Eichardson's design that the interior of the church should be decorated in accordance with a large plan embracing the whole and every separate part in its unity of treatment ; that this should be done by some crea- tive mind, capable of a task which in this country hitherto had no precedent ; that the church within should be rich with the luxuriance of color, as well as with paintings representing angelic intelligences and the great personages of religious history. Into this scheme PhiUips Brooks entered with en- thusiasm. For its criticism and appreciation he had prepared himself by lingering in the art galleries, the museums, the churches of the Old World, with an almost passionate devo- tion. He studied and penetrated the artistic purpose; he knew how to enjoy ; he was the natural friend of every artist. In close connection with this artistic sense, there was one peculiarity about him, so marked as to be almost extra- ordinary, — his love of color, in itself and for its own sake. There is some mystery here which we do not fathom. If it be true, as has been suggested, that color is only a subtler, higher form of music, his whole being was responding to its innumerable manifestations, and it ministered to him a per- petual inward delight. His susceptibility to color was almost feminine, so quick was he to feel and appreciate. But he ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 131 seems to have loved pure color, apart from any attempt at adjustment or harmony. This was shown in little things, as when, in one of his later journeys in Europe, he bought a piece of richly colored glass, carrying it in his pocket, simply for the pleasure it gave him to look at it. In the highest sense of the word he was not musical. But if color be only another form of the musical appeal, a higher and in some ways more intellectual and more spiritual form, then we can understand how he had more than a substitute for the melody of sound. He became also an adept and a devotee in the matter of stained glass, studying at factories abroad the method of its production. It was no indifferent subject, then, to Phillips Brooks, when the architect proposed that the church should be made glorious by the richest effects of color which the best artists could devise. But to execute these things called for a large expenditure of money as well as the artistic, creative imagination to de- vise them. Upon this point there was the inevitable sensi- tiveness partly grounded in human nature, and partly in the movements of the age. Puritanism had not hitherto been favorable to the cultivation of beauty or splendor in its churches. The reaction at the Reformation when iconoclasm marred or wrecked so many mediaeval monuments was an influ- ence which had not wholly lost its force. To this lurking mood which would have made practical necessity the ruling idea and not beauty or splendor — the mood of the disciple who exclaimed at the waste of the costly ointment, "This might have been sold and given to the poor " — there came a reinforcement in the socialistic temper of the hour, which was making good men sensitive to the uses of wealth. Upon this point there is evidence that Phillips Brooks had thought seriously and come to a conclusion. There was a danger lest men in their desire to be of service to others should lessen and reduce themselves by the neglect of the gifts of God, and so hinder and even frustrate their mission. To set forth the richness and the beauty of God's creation in a temple where these things were read as in a symbol was in itself a motive and a stimulus for which the world, the poor also whom we 132 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 have always with us, would be the better. Hence Mr. Brooks not only justified the lavish use of wealth for the beautifying and ennobling of the house of God, but his voice was inspiring as he made the appeal to his congregation. In 1897, at the twentieth anniversary of the consecration of Trinity Church, his successor, Rev. E. W. Donald, referred in his sermon to this point, when the results of the experiment were manifest : These twenty years have demonstrated a fact which I fancy will always need demonstration in the eyes of those people who immemorially have "begrudged the house of God the touch of beauty," and deplored great cost in its erection and adornment. Tou built a splendid temple; you meant to build a splendid tem- ple. You spared no cost; you nobly met every demand which enlarged plans and richer beauty year by year made upon your generosity. You had to meet the plain-spoken criticism of those who insisted that the difference between slightness and solidity, between barrenness and beauty, should have been given to works of mercy, religion, and education. If the cost of this building had been funded and the interest of the fund devoted to causes universally acknowledged to be worthy, the aggregate income of twenty years would not equal the munificent sum which, with the blessing of God upon it, has been offered and distributed by Trinity Church. The interest in watching the progress of the work grew stronger as the many anxious problems in the matter of con- struction were met and overcome. The completed edifice did not quite represent the original intention of the archi- tect. The walls were to have been several feet higher, and " the original design of the tower showed a square lantern with turrets at each corner, much like the present tower, but surmounted by an octagonal portion rising some fifty feet higher." But to carry out this plan of the tower called for walls of such thickness in the tower that, in the minds of experts who were consulted, the foundations, however strong, would not be strong enough to support the weight. To this criticism Mr. Richardson demurred, but the change was made. The lowering of the walls was partly in obedience to acoustic demands, which were an important consideration, as was also the construction of the ceiling, -— a wisdom justified by the result. ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 133 The first difficulty to be overcome lay in the nature of the ground, which was of gravel filled in, what is called " made land," incapable of sustaining the weight of a building. In the spring of 1873 the work began of preparing the founda- tions. The number of piles which were driven was some forty-eight hundred. A careful record was kept of each pile driven, " the number of blows required to drive it to a resist- ing medium, the depth to which it was driven, the height from which the hammer f eU, the weight of the hammer, and the number of inches which the head of the pile sank at each of the last three blows." The final determination of the plan of the church was delayed until this preliminary work was done. In the fall of 1873 the contract was made for the masonry of the structure. The immense weight of the central tower constituted the chief difficulty against which an excess of precaution was taken. The four piers which support it, carrying arches, fifty feet in span, — the whole tower weigh- ing nineteen million pounds, — rest upon four truncated pyrar mids, each thirty-five feet square at the base, seven feet square at the top, and seventeen feet high. Mr. Richardson has told the story of the experiments made, the failures, the work which had to be undone, the time taken for testing ex- periments, with stones and cement of different kinds, until the desired security was attained. Thus the year 1873 was spent in getting ready, a tedious year which to onlookers yielded no visible result. In the following year the work was pushed rapidly forward. The corner stone should have been laid in the summer of 1874, but owing to Mr. Brooks's absence in Europe the event was postponed till November 10, when the height of the waUs prevented the attendance of all but a few. The contract called for the completion, in November, 1874, of the chapel, connected by a corridor with the church, and at that time the congregation took possession of it, the foretaste of the greater things to come. Through the following winter the stone was cut for the remainder of the building at Westerly, Dedham, and Longmeadow, some of it also coming from Eockport, from Quincy, and from the coast of Maine. It is an interest- 134 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 ing fact that much of the granite stone from the Old Trinity on Summer Street has been worked into the foundations. The massive scaffolding was now built which was to serve for the piers and arches of towers, and which remained in place in the interior, preventing any view of the final effect until it was taken down a few days before the church was consecrated. So the work went on, until in July, 1876, the last stone was laid in the tower, and in its exterior appearance the church was completed. There now followed a period of impatient waiting for the completion of the interior decoration. Mr. John La Farge, the most eminent of American artists, to whose superintend- ence this task was entrusted, gathered about him competent assistants who labored with him, says Richardson, "in a spirit of true artistic enthusiasm for a work so novel and affording such an opportunity for the highest exercise of a painter's talents." Mr. La Farge had a magnificent scheme, but it required time for its fulfilment, and time was now becoming a condition which he could not control. He asked for an extension and it was given him, but even that was not sufficient. Still he had accomplished much and made the completion necessary and possible also at a future day. At first it had only been intended that he should paint a few pictures on the walls. But he and Richardson saw their opportunity to attempt something never before accomplished in America. He succeeded in obtaining permission to paint pictures which should be an organic part of a great scheme of color for the whole church. He did not ask for any ade- quate compensation, but only for permission to make the effort. He confined his attention to the roof and the walls of the central tower in the confidence that if this were com- pleted the rest would follow. He consented to stop his work on the thirty-first day of January, 1877, and with great doubts and misgivings the day of consecration was fixed for Feb- ruary 9. He labored tip to the last moment of the allotted time, and is reported to have spent the whole night of Jan- uary 31 at his work. Then began the task of taking down the great tower staging, which had stood for two years and ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 135 a half, when for the first time the full effect of the interior was visible. It is not possible here to go into any detailed description of the building or its decoration. At the time of its erection it awakened an unusual interest in Boston ; its progress was followed by the newspapers ; architects discussed it at their meetings. There was no standard for judgment or compari- son ; some called it the chief architectural ornament of the city ; others said it surpassed in magnificence any church in New England; and others, stiU, were not afraid, as they thought of the architect and his colaborers, to pronounce it unequalled throughout the land. A report of the impression it produced, in its then novel beauty and magnificence upon a competent judge, is taken from the " Boston Transcript " of February 5, which will stand for many similar notices written at the time : — A splendid surprise is in store for the worshippers at Trinity Church on the opening of that temple to the public for consecra- tion next Friday. The interior is impressive in its vast spaces alone, the grandeur of its wide and lofty arches spanning nave and transepts, and the height of the ceiling in the great square tower open to the sight far beyond the vaulted roof. The grand exterior dimensions of the church somewhat prepare one for the spaciousness within. But only seeing can realize the superb beauty of the decoration, rich yet not garish, elaborate and not "piled on," magnificent in splendors, yet noble and dignified, artistic yet religious and fitting for the place. Its richness is beyond compare, because there is literally nothing like it this side of the ocean. Trinity is the first church in this country to be decorated by artists, as distinguished from artisans. The result must be to make an era in American art and Church building. On February 3 the last timbers of the staging were taken down. In the five days that remained the work was carried on with great rapidity, of cleaning, finishing the floor, putting up the pews, laying the carpets, completing the organ, and on Thursday night, February 8, everything was done. The debt of 160,000, unavoidably incurred, had been paid as soon as the appeal to remove it was received. The following day was to be the greatest in the history of the parish, memorable 136 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 for the congregation, but chiefly for the building committee, the architect, and the rector : an occasion of interest, also, to more than could participate in the ceremonies, to those outside of the Episcopal Church, and to the city of Boston. To Mr. Brooks it was left to perfect the details of the function of consecration, that it might be worthily performed. The services began at eleven o'clock, and by that time the church was crowded. Among the invited guests were the Governor of the State, the Mayor of Boston, clergymen of other denominations, the wardens and vestrymen of other parishes, the architect, the artists, and builders. The late Colonel Theodore Lyman, a friend and college classmate of the rector, acted as the marshal of the day. One hundred and seven clergymen walked in procession from the chapel to the western entrance, where they were received by the wardens and vestry of the Church, and together went up the nave, reciting alternately the twenty-fourth Psalm, whose sentences seemed to take on a deeper meaning : " The earth is the Lord's and all that therein is ; the compass of the world and they that dwell therein. Lift up your heads, O ye gates ; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors ; and the King of glory shall come in." The consecration prayers were said by Bishop Paddock ; the Instrument of Donation was read by Charles Henry Parker, the senior warden, and the sentence of conse- cration by the Kev. W. R. Huntington of Worcester. It was characteristic of Phillips Brooks that he should caU about him on such a day the friends of his life who were in the min- istry, or who had been associated with him in the theologi- cal seminary. Thus the Eev. Arthur Brooks, the Rev. Thomas S. Yocum, the Rev. Wilbur F. Paddock, and the Rev. C. A. L. Richards were assigned parts in the service. The Rev. Dr. Richard Newton represented Philadelphia and its associations. The venerable Stephen H. Tyng of New York read the Com- mandments, the Rev. Henry C. Potter the Epistle, and the Gospel was taken by Rev. George Z. Gray, the Dean of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. But in the chief place of honor stood Dr. Vinton to perform the act necessary to complete and crown the occasion, — the delivery of the sermon. ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 137 He had followed Phillips Brooks from his boyhood, had advised with him when in uncertain groping after his life- work he had first thought of the Christian ministry ; he had received him to his heart and home when as a young clergy- man he came to Philadelphia; had made the way for him to the Church of the Holy Trinity as his successor ; had been his counsellor on every occasion, blessing him away from Phila- delphia to Boston, and now in Boston, once more as the rector of Emmanuel Church, had resumed the old relation in deeper, more sacred intimacy. Dr. Vinton preached the sermon, and his text was Revelation xxi. 22 : "I saw no temple therein : for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it." Then followed the Communion service at which Bishop Paddock officiated, assisted by the Bishop of Central Pennsyl- vania, the Rt. Rev. M. A. De Wolfe Howe. The music was under the direction of the organist of Trinity, Mr. James C. D. Parker; the choir consisted of Miss Parker, Dr. Langmaid, Miss Morse, and Mr. Aiken, together with a chorus of forty voices. With a lunch served at the adjacent Hotel Brunswick, the exhilarating and glorious occasion came to an end. This letter, manifesting the spirit in which the building of Trinity Church was accomplished, was written to the rector by Mr, Robert Treat Paine on the evening of the day of its consecration : — Boston, Friday, February 9, 1877. And now, my dear old Friend, at the close of this great day, which has brought the glorious consummation of our hopes and prayers, I want to send you a few words to say bow this long five years' labor, working with you and for you and for our noble church, has been to me an inexpressible pleasure. In all the difficult and doubtful questions which have met us from time to time, the hand of God seems to have guided us and to have brought us to a wise decision. I have felt throughout that your prayers were powerful to get this aid and guidance. On one matter, that of involving the Parish in debt, I have always been moved in two directions, feeling on the one hand that we were bound not to load the future of the Church with a heavy debt, and that as an agent of theirs I must be faithful to this obligation, and yet on the other hand unable myself to tolerate the idea that, in carrying out the great work of transplanting 138 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 the church from one site to another and building our new church to stand for centuries as we trust, we should strive or even be willing only to use the resources of the past. Here, too, God seems to have been with us. And the debt, which in spite of our efforts to keep it down rolled up so large a sum, has only given us all an opportunity to show the love of the whole people to you, and their readiness to follow your example of great generosity, and their devotion to our glorious new House of God. The eager and noble response to your appeal shows better than any words, not only their love to you, but how much you have done in them. Not one of the donors, large or small, but must always love it more as his church, now that he has taken his part in its comple- tion. And surely we must feel more worthy to have it and enjoy it, when we have added so largely to make it broad and beautiful and rich. May the spirit of the Living God go with us into our new Home, and fill it and you and all of us full of His presence and power and blessing in this generation and many future generations, and make it a mighty power for good so that we shall not have builded it in vain, — - this is the prayer of one whose rare privilege it has been to be in this matter your coworker, and always your friend, E. T. Paine, Jb. To this letter Mr. Brooks replied : — Hotel Kempton, Boston, Saturday evening, February 10, 1877. I wish I could tell you, my dear Bob, something of what yes- terday was to me, and of how my deep gratitude and love to you mingled with the feeling of every hour. May God bless you is all that I can say. The Church would not be standing there, the beautiful and stately thing that it is, except for your tireless devotion. How often I have wondered at your undiscouraged faith; and all my life as I look back on these years of anxiety and work, I shall see a picture of constancy which I know will make me stronger for whatever I have to do. Your kind words crown the whole and leave nothing to be desired in this complete achievement. I am almost appalled when I think what the great work in this new Church may be. I know that I shall have your help and prayers in the part of it which will fall to me to do. Many, many happy years are before us, if God will, and when we leave the great dear thing to those who come after us we shall be near one another, I am sure, in the better life. ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 139 I cannot realize to-morrow. But I know it will be a happy day. And so may God's blessings rest on you and yours always. Your grateful friend, P. B. In the following letter the Proprietors of Trinity Church acknowledge the contribution of the rector to the beauty and glory of the new edifice : — Boston, 9 Doane Steeet, April 4, 1877. Mt dear Me. Brooks, — At the annual meeting of the Pro- prietors of Trinity Church, held on Easter Monday, last, the following vote was passed and is now transcribed from the Records : — That in the midst of the rejoicing with which our people with overflowing numbers of old friends and large accessions of new- comers have crowded our new and spacious House of Worship, we cannot let this great epoch in the life of our ancient Parish pass, without placing on permanent record our sense of the deep obliga- tions of us and our whole people to our beloved Rector, Mr. Brooks. "We have heard with pleasure our Building Committee report that throughout this great five years' enterprise of building our new Church, his taste and culture, his zeal and patience and faith have largely aided in the great result ; that to him in large measure is due the beauty and the glory of the new Church ; that he has been himself the inspiration of the Architect, Builders, and Committee. We appreciate most deeply his noble generosity in contributing so largely to the treasury of the Parish, and in thus setting an example which was followed by our people so liberally that we have been able to present our church free from debt and conse- crated to God. And we accept his gift as one more proof among many of his ardent love to his parish. We cannot conclude these few words, so feebly expressing our gratitude to our noble pastor and beloved friend, without telling him how deeply we all feel indebted to him for holding our Parish so firmly united by his devotion to us, through all the dreary interval between our old home on Summer Street and our new Church. The love of our whole people, men, women, and chil- dren, is all that we can give him in return. A true copy from the Records, Attest : Stephen G. Deblois, Clerk of Corporation. It may seem to mar so beautiful a narrative, but it is necessary to allude to an incident which occurred in connec- tion with the services of consecration. To the sacrament of I40 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-7? the Lord's Supper there came many clergymen of other denominations, and among them were eminent Unitarian divines, all of whom had been personally invited to remain for the communion. Such an event might in other days have taken place without comment. But at this peculiar juncture of ecclesiastical circumstances it called forth criticism and condemnation. The late Rev. O. B. Frothingham, who re- presented the movement known as "Free Religion," com- plained in a letter to Dr. James Freeman Clarke, published in " The Inquirer " (Unitarian), that by participating in the sacrament at Trinity Church Dr. Clarke had shown himself oblivious of the high ideal of his own communion : — The dignitaries (?) who invited the liberal clergy to partake of the sacrament did what was for them a generous thing; they were liberal and magnanimous ; they forgot for a moment their ecclesiasticism, the stringency of their dogma, the exclusiveness of their institution, the anathema of their creed. . . . Their eye had caught the vision of a broad church, whose enclosing walls embraced believers of every name. But what shall we think of the liberals who accepted the invitation? Were they looking for- ward? Were their faces bathed in light? Were they straining the line of their traditions ? To this piece of fine rhetoric, beneath which was the familiar ecclesiastical exclusiveness, Dr. Clarke briefly re- plied that in his judgment it was more in accordance with the spirit of liberal Christianity to accept such an invitation than to refuse it. He distinguished between the simple rite of the Lord's Supper and any formal ceremonial with which it might be encompassed. To Mr. Brooks he wrote : " I was not at all disturbed by what was said by some Unitarians of our communing at your church. Their objections seemed to me too frivolous to deserve notice, but for the sake of the principle I thought it worth while to reply to Frothingham's strictures and may do so again. But really it seems almost too simple a matter to discuss." From the other side there came a protest by a presbyter of the Episcopal Church to the bishop of the diocese against what seemed to him " a grievous sacrilege " at the consecration of Trinity Church, in the admission to the Holy Communion ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 141 of " those who avowedly deny the faith once delivered to the saints, even concerning the fundamental doctrines of our Lord's Godhead." Such an act was to be regarded as a vio- lation of Scripture, of " Catholic " custom, and of Christian instinct, as well as contrary to the letter and spirit of the formularies of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The newspapers took up the subject, speaking of it as an unprecedented circumstance, never witnessed in the Episco- pal Church before. Mr. Brooks kept silence. He had made up his mind to keep out of ecclesiastical controversy. As to the meaning of the formularies of the Episcopal Church, he had long since come to the conclusion that they were not intended to exclude from the communion those who did not accept her articles of faith or follow her mode of worship. He was in sympathy with Dean Stanley's attitude in admin- istering the Lord's Supper to Dr. Vance Smith, a Unitarian minister, when the Communion was kept in Westminster Abbey, at the moment the revisers of the New Testament were about to begin their work. Those who objected to this act of intercommunion did not, as he thought, represent the spirit or the history of the Church of England or of the Protestant Episcopal Church in this country. He, too, dis- tinguished between the ceremonial forms or professions which accompanied the act of Holy Communion and the simple rite itself, the eating of the bread and the participation in the cup of blessing. The one essential requisition for the com- munion were the words of invitation in the office itself : " Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in His holy ways, draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort." Because he was convinced of the truth of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, it did not follow that he should refuse to associate with those who could not receive them. The " Catholic " usage which forbade Christian fellow- ship with those who denied the coequality of the Son with the Father was not necessarily Christian usage, and was no 142 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1873-77 ideal to be followed. From this position he did not recede. But, as in the case of Dean Stanley, his comprehensiveness of spirit was obnoxious to many of his brethren ; his action was not to be forgotten ; he was destined to hear from it again after many years. He had gained, however, the confidence and affection of ministers and people of every Christian denomination. The love and respect of the Unitarians in Boston were henceforth accorded to him as to no other man outside their own communion. The new Trinity Church was not what is technically known as a " free church," nor did the rector covet for it that title, knowing as he did how phrases which spoke much to the ear might in reality be hollow. The pews were owned or rented by the Proprietors, and on each pew a tax was laid for the support of public worship. But the large galleries in the transepts of the church were free in every sense ; no tax was laid on them, and no contribution solicited from those who occupied them. It had been an object kept in view by Mr. Brooks when the plans of the church were drawn, and urged by him upon the architect, that this ample accommodation should be provided. When it is remembered that the gal- leries accommodate some four hundred people, — a larger congregation than is found in most churches, thus constitut- ing as it were a church within a church, — the generosity of Trinity Church can hardly be impugned, even if it is not known in ecclesiastical parlance as a free church. Not only so, but it was understood between the rector and the congre- gation that at an early moment in the service pews not occupied should be regarded as vacant, to be placed at the disposal of the stranger. These things were making their impression upon the peo- ple of Boston and the community at large, changing what had been a long and deep-seated prejudice into a mood of expectation that with Phillips Brooks as a leader there was a great work in the city for the Episcopal Church to accom- plish. Boston was the city of the Puritans, their chief strong- hold, where memories were long and traditions tenacious. The revival of the study of American history was bringing ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 143 out again in new vividness the grievances, real or fancied, of the time of the Stuarts and the age of the Commonwealth. The people of Boston were not to be deceived with sounding phrases ; they were quicker than most people to get at the reality of things, and there were many among them who disliked or mistrusted the Episcopal Church. They did not believe that anything good could come out of it. It seemed to them like an alien church, whose spirit was hostile to liberty and to religious freedom. They watched its bishops, thinking that they detected in them as of old the tendency of ecclesiastical power to beget tyranny. Its services seemed to them cold, formal, and meagre, inadequate to the expres- sion of human sympathies or spiritual aspirations. These long-standing prejudices had been aggravated by the ecclesias- tical reaction which followed in the wake of the Oxford Movement, verifying the reasons for the ancient dislike and dread of a communion which was now seeking for fellowship with Home, and had learned to disown the Protestant churches as having no place within the bounds of organic Christianity. It was the work of PhiUips Brooks in Boston and through- out the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to overcome this dread and disarm these suspicions. The traces of his influ- ence now begin to be manifest. There was no one among the descendants of the Puritans who had a more represent- ative estimate of the situation than the late Rev. Dr. George E. EUis. He was a Unitarian minister retired from active service, devoting his leisure to historical reading and the writing of books, at a later time to become the honored pre- sident of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He was one of those who went to the Communion in Trinity Church. This letter will show how strongly he was drawn to Mr. Brooks : — 110 Maelboeough Street, February 10, 1877. Mt dear Mr. Brooks, — After thoughtfully digesting the noble and appropriate services and the delightful experiences of yesterday in connection with the consecration of Trinity Church, I feel prompted to express to you in this form my sincerest con- gratulations on the fair completion of an undertaking which must 144 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i 873-77 Ti. lias have engaged so deeply your own anxieties and interests, been something more and better than mere curiosity tna me almost daily to watch the progress of a critical and g enterprise, from the driving of the first pile to the solemn tion of the completed sanctuary. In my view, the ai character of your congregation, your own ministry, ^ " minent and honored position which you represent beiore munity conserve the very best elements of religious culture, and of a spirit of Christian comprehensiveness and liberality, associ- ated in my thought with the selectest fellowship of the class of disciples with whom I have been most intimately connected; while at the same time the original deposit of the faith and the fitness of its dispensation have found in you a wiser gua,rdianship than it proved to have with the so-called Liberal denomination as a whole. So I would venture with much respect to assure you that I am heartily interested in the effective work which, with such modest personal unobtrusiveness and with such power, you are doing among us. And I must recognize with a hearty appreciation and gratitude the delightful Christian courtesy shown towards all the miscella- neous company of ministers, including myself, in the arrangement made yesterday for our participation in and enjoyment of the seemly and impressive services, especially the Holy Communion. With sincerest respect and regard, I am Very truly yours, George E. Ellis. Rev. Phillips Brooks. The following comments from the dally newspapers of Boston are not quite free from a touch of severe kindliness. There is a tone in one of them, at least, of lingering uncer- tainty ; they warn while they praise ; but, on the whole, they are constrained to trust the larger hope for the Episcopal Church. As for Phillips Brooks, they join in the chorus of unqualified approbation. The first extract is from the " Bos- ton Globe," the second from the "Daily Advertiser : " — a Th "^P'®*'°P*^ Church is evidently to have a future in Boston, wHh r "l"^' \i ^^^^^' °°® ^°"^® °* worship to which all can point Pa^rlnnV^ ^rT'-' ^^ '■emains, however, to be seen how Bishop aChri:Lrfte"irrh*!" ^^^" develop their religious body as show forth the admirable "rr^^- Y- '""^ "^^""^'^ '^^^^ ^"'^ely well known, the spirit of i-i, i- '" ^^^°^ Phillips Brooks is so iberahty and cordial sympathy toward ^T. 37-41] NEW TRINITY CHURCH 145 all Christian people, it will rapidly gain in strength and numbers. To-day this purpose appears to be in the ascendant, and the result is a cause for rejoicing everywhere. We do not ast Epis- copalians to change their polity or their doctrines, but as a con- servative Church to be sympathetic, generous, and noble in practi- cal work ; and it is because the ovation of yesterday points in this direction that we give it mention here. Not the least interesting feature of the services yesterday was the invited presence of the pastors of nearly all the leading congregations in the city. The Episcopal Church lost nothing by this, and the whole community gained a great deal. The dedication of Trinity Church to-day is an occasion of inter- est to many more than those who will participate in the cere- monies, and to persons who do not belong to the Episcopal Church communion, as well as to churchmen and churchwomen. In the first place the parish is an historic one, and for many generations has had a conspicuous place in Boston's annals. In the next place the building to be dedicated ranks as one of the notable ornaments of the city. . . . Not a little of the wide- spread interest in this particular parish and its magnificent house of worship is owing to the respect and affection felt for its elo- quent and noble-hearted pastor. There is no doubt that when- ever he leads the worship, whether in hall or cathedral, he will exert a liberal, exalted, and powerful influence in behalf of the highest standards of Christian living. The good wishes and sincere prayers of a multitude which no church could contain will ascend with the words of solemn dedication to be uttered within the walls of the beautiful temple, that Trinity and Phillips Brooks may long be spared to Boston and to mankind. So Phillips Brooks took his place as in a cathedral, where for many years he was to sway the people with an hitherto unknown power. The enthronement of an ecclesiastical digni- tary could possess no deeper significance. He seemed now to stand at the height of his renown. He had other conquests yet to achieve, but he had accomplished the most difficult, in some respects the most important, of them all, — he had made the conquest of Boston. From this moment his friends watched him with a feeling of pride mingled with awe, while he continued to stride forward and upward, as if there had been placed no limit to his power. CHAPTER VI 1877-1879 EXTRACTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE. INVITATION TO PREACH FOR MR. MOODY. SUMMER ABROAD. SERMON AT WEST- MINSTER ABBEY. HARVARD UNIVERSITY CONFERS THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF DIVINITY. COMMENTS ON THE GENERAL CONVENTION. VISIT OF DEAN STANLEY TO AMERICA. ILLNESS AND DEATH OF WILLIAM GRAY BROOKS The chief event in the year 1877 was the consecration of Trinity Church. Next to it in importance was the delivery, before the Divinity School of Yale University, of the " Lec- tures on Preaching," which will be referred to in a subse- quent chapter. The lectures were delivered during the months of January and February. Before entering the new Trinity Church, Mr. Brooks had feared that his voice might not be found sufficient for the large edifice, but the first trial demonstrated that the fear was groundless. There were places where it was difficult to hear, but he was heard as well as any and better than most of those who officiated at its consecration.^ Dr. Tyng, then in the fifty-sixth year of his ministry, an uncompromising Evangelical divine, but none the less in sym- pathy with Phillips Brooks, wrote to him on his return to New York : — ^ In his Yale Lectures lie had said little about the manner of delivering a sermon, but his one reference to elocution is of a humorous character : " Of oratory and all the marvellous mysterious ways of those who teach it, I dare say nothing. I believe in the true elocution teacher as I believe in the existence of HaUey's comet, which comes in sight of this earth once in about seventy-six years." ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 147 St. Geoege's Rectobt, New York, February 25, 1877. My dear Bbothbk, — Two weeks ago I had the great plea- sure of being with you in your new and grand Church. I have desired to write to you since I returned home. But I have had a busy and a feeble time. The impression made upon me by all the events of my visit has been very absorbing. Familiar with the time when the Old Church was in the midst of scattered houses, and large gardens, I could hardly realize the prospect from my windows as possible. Half a mile out in the sea, I found myself in the midst of a new and wonderful city, more grand and glorious than I had ever dreamed as possible. Boston has thus become almost unrivalled as a City. The Churches now in this new place are mai'ked with a singular grandeur of as- pect. But the glory of the later house for my dear old parental Church was to me, perhaps, the chief wonder of the place. I can but congratulate you, and all your contemporaries, over the attainment you have made and at the prospect before you. In the vast liberality of their action, and the majestic scale on which they were ready to record it, they have given you a pledge for great results, by God's blessing, for your whole succeeding min- istry. . . . Farewell. Pax Vobiscum, Stephen H. Tyng. Mr. Brooks responded to this letter in a spirit of reverence and affection for its venerable writer. But he could not for- bear taking exception to statements made by Dr. Tyng in a sermon which he preached in the new church shortly after its consecration. To the Kev. Arthur Brooks he writes : — March 5, 1877. I have been amused at the way in which the New York clergy have given us their blessing since we started. Dr. Tyng preached for us on the afternoon of the first day, and told us that nobody could be a Christian who did n't believe that the world was made in six literal days. The Moses up in the New Tower laughed aloud at the statement. Yesterday afternoon Dr. Morgan of St. Thomas's in your town turned up and preached an orotund dis- course which had quite a good manly flavor to it. In conse- quence of his appearance, I find myself the surprised possessor of a discourse which I have never preached, an event which has not occurred before, except on a Saturday, for years. . . . We are in the rush of Lent. One talks until he is tired of the 148 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 sound of his own voice, and then he talks some more. There is a good healthy religious influence, I think, and underneath our little work the deep thunder of the Moody movement is rolling all the time. I hear nothing from Bristol, but have no doubt your Ordi- nation took and all goes well there.' Boston, March 7, 1877. Dearest Aethtjk, — Queer what you said about Hans Sachs's poems. I had sent for and got the volume, and here it is with some of the jolliest woodcuts and German poetry, which is pretty easy to make out, and very quaint. Oh, if we were but in Nurem- berg, you and I, to-day! As a sort of variety in Lent I have begun to read Miss Martineau's "Autobiography." It is as unlike a Lent lecture as possible. The calm complacency of her unbelief is something wonderful. Just here Mother came in to see me. The first visit she has made this winter. They really seem likely to break up and go to Andover this spring. I am talking of taking their servants and setting up housekeeping this fall. The allusion to the work in Boston of Mr. D. L. Moody, the Evangelist, recalls the circumstance that while the revival meetings were in progress Mr. Moody was for some reason unable to preach, and Mr. Brooks was invited to take his place. It was an interesting circumstance, and invested with theological curiosity, that an Episcopal clergyman, the rector of Trinity Church, should receive such an invitation. The Episcopal Church had hitherto shown but little sympathy with revivals. Many doubted whether Mr. Brooks was suffi- ciently familiar with evangelistic methods to meet a con- gregation drawn together by Mr. Moody's earnestness and eloquence. But he was invited in the confidence that the thousands who were flocking nightly to the tent, or Tabernacle as it was called, where the services were held would not be disappointed when they knew of the change. And this con- fidence was not misplaced. It was an event in the history of the revival that Phillips Brooks had taken part in it. The announcement [said one of the Boston papers] that the Eev. Phillips Brooks was to preach was sufficient to fill the Tabernacle to its utmost capacity last evening. On no occasion ' The reference is to the Eev. John Cotton Brooks, who after his ordination became rector of St. James's Church, Bristol, Pa. ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 149 has there been a larger audience, and it was composed of a much different class of people than usually gather. The regular ser- vices were opened by the congregation rising and singing, "Just as I am without one plea." The Rev. W. W. Newton of St. Paul's offered prayer, and Mr. Sankey gave the notices for the week, and sang "The Ninety and Nine." Mr. Brooks read for the Scripture lesson from the twenty-sixth chapter of Acts. The congregation joined in singing the hymn, "'T is the promise of God full salvation to give." Mr. Brooks then preached, and the services closed with benediction. The text from which the sermon was preached was the passage from St. Paul where he describes his conversion: ""Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." The preacher was at his best as he unfolded the text, expounding the principle of conversion as he himself had experienced it, — that the vision must come first, to be followed by obedience, when the sense of sin would inevitably ensue, but with the assurance of forgiveness. He condemned not only by implication, but in express language, the opposite method which sought first to produce the sense of sin, and after the conviction of forgiveness had been attained, held out the prospect of the heavenly vision. He assumed throughout that religion was natural to man, because aU men were by creation and by redemption the children of God. They had wandered ; they had forgotten or neglected or were ignorant of their birthright ; but when the vision came, it appealed to something in every man's constitution, rousing within him the dormant faculties of a divine relationship. Dr. Tyng was moved when he heard of the incident, and wrote to Mr. Brooks this letter : — St. George's Eectort, New York, March 24, 1877. Mt deae Brother, — I have read your Sermon at the Taber- nacle, as reported in the "Journal," and I am grateful for the grace which enabled you to do the thing itself in the midst of all the prejudices of Boston, and then to do it so skilfully and well, amidst the pressures of the occasion. I have always united with those faithful brethren, because I have believed them doing God's work, and in the way which His providence had planned. In all the work which they have done under my notice, I have found much to praise, much to be thankful for, nothing to reprove. I50 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 That the yaried shapes of denial, which modern Anti-Evangelism has adopted, whether the pride of opinion, or the vanity of posi- tion, or the veil of formalism, or the working of mere hatred of truth, should combine against the simplicity of Truth as these plain men present it could not surprise me, and would not in the least move me. But perhaps there is no place where authority so much opposes Freedom after all as our dear Old Boston. The Cradle of Liberty in name, but at the same time the nm-sery of much prejudice, and of much determination that no one shall violate Boston Notions, whenever they become popular. That you have given your growing influence to revival movements is to Eie and to many a call for much thankfulness. God, even our own God, will bless you and your work. I rejoice that you were not disobedient to the Heavenly Vision. It is a curious fact to remember how many have received a heavenly vision, in Old Trinity in years gone by, when there was but little Earthly, to make it probable, or to encourage it, when appearing. There was always there an undercurrent of real, vital religion. It was the home of many of the Lord's hidden ones. Your ministry is the New Testament upon the Old, the bringing out to being and view the things which were. The Gracious Lord bless you in it all, and make you an eminent Caller forth of his hidden ones to open light, usefulness, and glory. I take the greatest interest in hearing of you, and am always glad to hear from you. Faithfully yours, Stephen H. Ttnq. It had now been three years since Mr. Brooks had known a vacation which had brought him rest from preaching. In the summer of 1875 he had preached at Emmanuel Church, Bos- ton, and in the summer of 1876 at Emmanuel in the morning and at St. Mark's in the evening. His congregations were composed of dwellers in the city who could not leave, and of strangers sojourning or passing through, who availed them- selves of the opportunity. This free gift of himself met its full appreciation, and was part of the larger ministry, whose fruits would be ^ manifest in due time. But now he had resolved upon a summer abroad, for, though he does not mention it, the strain had been long and severe. When his intention was known to the people of Trinity Church, the following unanimous resolution was taken at a meeting of the Proprietors on Easter Monday : — ;et. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 151 On Motion of Mr. Winthrop, it was Resolved: "That the Proprietors of Trinity Church, deeply sensible of the great labors of their Rector during the past year, and of the invaluable ser- vices which he has rendered to the Church, desire to express their cordial concurrence in his purpose to seek rest and relaxation in foreign travel during the approaching summer, and that the sum of Two Thousand dollars be appropriated towards defraying the expenses of his tour, with the best wishes of us all that he may enjoy the vacation which he has so richly earned, and return to us with fresh vigor for his work." While in London Mr. Brooks saw many people whom he speaks of as pleasant and civil. General Grant was then in England, of whom he writes as the great sensation, eclipsing all other Americans, " as if they wondered what we had come for." He dined at the American Minister's, and met the " great warrior." He saw much of Dean Stanley and of the English clergy, was admitted to the House of Lords and the House of Commons, attended the Convocation of the southern province, listening to a discussion on the subject of the con- fessional, which ended in a vote by a large majority on the Protestant side. He carried with him abroad the interests of Trinity Church. To the late Hon. Eobert C. Winthrop, who was also in England, he wrote : — London, July 4, 1877. Deab Mk. Winthbop, — I must write you a few words to tell you how much I enjoyed my little visit to Groton yesterday, and how much I thank you for sending me there. It was a delightful day, and the drive from Sudbury to Groton was very charming. The Rector was most courteous and hospitable, and 1 saw all that must always make the place very interesting to Massachusetts men. I congratulate you upon this window in the church at Groton. It was looking very beautiful yesterday. The thick glass behind it seems to have brought it to just the right degree of brilliancy and color. The restoration of the tomb seemed to me also to have been thoroughly well done. My glass efforts in London have been very perplexing. Clayton & Bell were shamefully behindhand, and yet what they had done seemed to me even better than the window already in the Chancel. The Lord's Supper window is almost finished, and the centre window is just begun in glass from a cartoon which I like exceed- ingly. I have not definitely entrusted the other four windows to 152 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 them, but I have no doubt that I shall do so this week. I leave for the Continent next Monday (July 9). My only hesitation is in the matter of time. They promise to have them all done by nest Easter or Whitsunday at the farthest, but we know what their promises are worth. But I am sure that when they come they will be thoroughly good. I hope that the Committee will think that I have done right. I called at Burlison & Grill's the first day I was in London, but found they had just sent your window. It is probably in its place before this, and I hope it wholly pleases you. They had some beautiful work just finished for Lichfield Cathedral, and I hear them praised everywhere. I was sorry to find that Lady Rose had left town. She wrote kindly, asking me to come to Henley-on-Thames, but I was not able to command the day. I saw the Archbishop, who asked much of you. Dean Stanley is sadly changed since I saw him last, and the Deanery is a very different place. I have promised to preach for him in the Abbey on Sunday morning, which will be my only preaching away from Trinity. I beg you to remember me most kindly to Mrs. Winthrop, and I am Most faithfully yours, Phillips Brooks. On Sunday, July 8, he preached for the second time at Westminster Abbey. There was no complaint of his not being heard. Canon Farrar, whose acquaintance he now made, wrote to him, " It was a very great pleasure to me to resign the Abbey pulpit to you, and very nobly you used the opportu- nity." Dean Stanley, who was present, listened with delight to a doctrine which was after his own heart. The text was from Isaiah Lx. 19 : " The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee : but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." The subject was " The Symbol and the Eeality." At a moment when the symbolism of mediaeval ritual was urged upon the modern church as though the Pro- testant Keformation had been mistaken in abandoning it, when it was argued that an elaborate and gorgeous symbolism was a necessity of the religious life, the conviction was growing stronger in the mind of the preacher that this was not the method which brought the highest result, that no symbol was doing its true work unless it was educating those who used it ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 153 to do without it if need be. This principle was applied not only to religious symbolism, but to all the symbols of life. Everywhere the letter stands for the spirit, and to give up the letter, that the spirit may live more fully, becomes from time to time the absolute necessity. After a few weeks in England, Mr. Brooks left for the Con- tinent, going first to Belgium and Holland, then up the Rhine, pausing for a moment in Germany, then to Italy, Venice, Florence, and Milan, and finally to Switzerland. While he was in Holland he received the news that Harvard University had in his absence conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. On the diploma which was sent to him it read that the degree was given " in recognition of his elo- quence as a preacher, his dignity and purity of life as a minister of religion, and his liberality and large-mindedness as a man." To the Kev. James P. Franks of Salem, who first conveyed him the news, he wrote that he would not be called Dr. Brooks. To his friends and parishioners, and to people generally, it seemed most fitting still to call him Mr. Brooks, as though ecclesiastical titles, however deserved, somehow separated them from the man. There was a self-conscious smUe when his friends ventured to address him as Dr. Brooks. Old Biblb Hotel, Amsterdam, Sunday, July 15, ISIT. Dear Jaisies, — You are a jewel of a fellow to write me that letter. It reached me as I was dressing myself at Brussels the other morning. It was the first news I heard of the honor which Harvard had done me. I was surprised at it, and of course grati- fied. I had supposed the College had given up all idea of making any more D. D.'s, and especially that they would not give the degree to one of their own overseers. But as they have thought good to do it, I am pleased and proud, for a Cambridge man thinks that there are no honors like those which come from Cam- bridge. Only I won't be called Dr. Brooks, and you may stop that for me when and where you can. How I wish you were here to-day, sitting this morning, looking out with me on this muddy Canal, and seeing the Dutchies go to Church. It is very odd and interesting. We would go off some- where into the country this afternoon, and get under the shadow of a windmill, and talk about all sorts of things, from the day we first met in Philadelphia to the prospects of the next General 154 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 Convention. Then we would come home to table d'Mte and spend the evening in the big square which they profanely call the "Dam," looking at the people, and seeing what queer things they do. But that must n't be. You are in Salem and preparing to preach the gospel to S to-day. I honor you, and I am glad I am not in your place. Last Sunday I preached for Mr. Stanley at his church in London, and William and I were much in the little man's company while we were in his town. He is very pleasant and entertaining, but much changed since his wife's death. He has grown old, and seems to be fighting hard to keep up an inter- est in things. The usual collection of Broad Churchmen was about him, and convocation was sitting in Westminster School almost under his roof. I heard a long debate one day on "The Priest in Absolution." On the whole, London was delightful and I was glad to get out of it for the Continent, as I always am. I investigated all the Glass-makers, and found some very interest- ing men among them. We are at Holland now, and all this week we shall be here. How I wish you were here! William is well and seems to enjoy it all, and is first-rate company. My bestest love to Sally and the babies, and come and see me in September at 175 Marlborough. Always yours, P. B. Mr. Brooks returned to Boston in September to live there henceforth under changed conditions. His father and mother had given up their house on Hancock Street, and had gone to North Andover to reside in the old PhiUips homestead. Forty-four years had elapsed since in the same house, to which they now returned, they had been married and thence had come to Boston, establishing themselves in the first home on High Street. They had seen six boys go out from them into the world, four of them still living, and now that the youngest had gone from home, they looked to North Andover as a quiet retreat in the decline of life. Mr. Brooks would gladly have had them come to live with him, and would have made any arrangements for that end ; he had counted upon it as his pleasure and privilege, but the parents declined to accept such an invitation from him or any of the other sons. It was understood in the family that it was not possible. The mother refused on principle any such invitation. For many years Mr. Brooks had kept his bachelor quarters in boarding JET. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 155 houses and hotels, first on Mount Vernon Street, and then at the Hotel Kempton on Berkeley Street. He now set up housekeeping for the first time at No. 175 Marlborough Street, taking into his employment the servants who had lived with his mother. Mr. Brooks had returned to find the General Convention of the Episcopal Church sitting in Boston, but was unable to attend its sessions on account of illness, — what was called a slow fever, which confined him for a time to the house. He had at this time also some difficulty in walking, owing, it may have been, to his increasing weight. These were not favor- able conditions for judging of the work of a General Conven- tion. " Last Sunday," he writes, " I had three bishops in Trinity, and went to all the services, and by night was saturated with commonplace." 175 Mablbobough Stbbbt, Boston, October 8, 1877. Deab old Coopeb, — A thousand thanks for your letter. Well, I am home again, and once more Europe is behind my back. I had a royal time, and lots of places put me in mind of our sum- mer there which, after all, was the best of all. Let 's see : we drove again up the Inn Valley starting from Innsbruck (where they have got now a tremendous new hotel). We stopped again at Landeck and Mais and Finstermilnz, and such an afternoon and night as we had at Trafoi you never saw. It is the most gorgeous view and made me think with horror of what was hid from us on that rainy afternoon we passed there. The ride up the Stelvio was superb, but at the top we had a driving snowstorm and went over the ridge buttoned up to the chin and our hands down deep in our pockets. Then down to Bormio where was the bath, and then by Tirano to Lake Como and Venice and Bologna and Florence. It was all beautiful, and now seems like the same dream that those journeys always do when they are over. We had a quiet, dull voyage home, and the day before we landed I was taken with what the Doctor calls a slow fever which has kept me a good deal shut up ever since. It is the slowest fever that ever was got up. The seat of it is principally in the back of the knees which give way when you have walked about a square. Altogether it is an attack of general good-for-nothing- ness which I am tired of, and which I am glad to be able to hope is almost over now. 156 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 It has allowed me to ignore the General Convention which is going on in as miserable and useless a way as you can conceive. There is nothing for them to do, and they are trying hard to make something by bringing up all kinds of ridiculous proposi- tions. I was glad once more to sign the petition about the Bap- tismal service. It reminded me of good old times, and I hope we shall have it triannually as long as this church stands. It never will be granted of course. I can't come on in November. I wish I could, but I must be at work. The summer and the sickness and the Convention together have lost me so much time, and then I have promised to go to the Congress in NewYork. I hope I shall meet you there, for I do want to see you ever so much. My kindest remembrances to Mrs. Cooper. Don't forget me. Your old friend, P. B. To Eev. W. N. McVickar, who had become the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, he writes : — October 17, 1877. Mt dear William, — ... I had a splendid summer and hated to come home. I always do. But now that I am here I am reconciled, for is n't the General Convention here, and doesn't it bring all the good fellows from all over the country ? You and Cooper are the only men I want to see that I have n't seen. The thing itself, the Convention, is as funny as possible. I have n't been there myself for I have been sick, but I hear all about it, and I hope you read your "Daily Churchman " before you go to bed. They have done literally nothing. They did one piece of busi- ness week before last, and cackled over it all about town like a hen over her eggs. But the House of Bishops the next week sat down on it and vetoed it, and so they have really and literally not one thing to show. So they talk about the beautiful harmony that prevails. . . . And they swell, 0, how they swell! And each " swole " a little worse than the one before him, if it were pos- sible, except Bishop Williams. He is an old jewel and talks like a sensible man. The admiration of Mr. Brooks for the late Bishop Wil- liams of Connecticut was reciprocated. Thus Bishop Williams, who now met him for the first time, writes to him: — I am not speaking empty words, but true ones, when I say to you, that for myself I rejoice in the meeting at Boston, espe- ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 157 cially because it gave me the opportunity which I had long wished for to see you. I have very deeply felt, and I think appreciated, the great work you have done and are doing, and I pray God may long be spared to do in Boston. And I have greatly wished to take you by the hand and say something of what was in my heart. I am very thankful for the opportunity. In November he was present at the sessions of the Church Congress in New York, and on his return he writes : — 175 Marlborough Street, Boston, November 7, 1877. Deak Arthur, — I am glad to hear that my coming away did no serious harm to the Congress. It seems to have gone on most swimmingly to the end, and I am very glad I came and thank you most truly for your kind welcome and hospitality. I was all the better for it, and am now quite well. Isn't it good to have these show occasions done with and settle down into the steady pull of Parish Life. Last Sunday seemed a blessed relief. There was nobody to be civil to in the Vestry Eoom, and you could read the service yourself and preach the Gospel which had been bottled up all the time. Now there is a clear field for the winter and I don't mean to have anybody preach for me, except when you come, before next year. ... I have father staying with me for a day or two. He came down to vote and to attend the Historical Society to-morrow. He seems capitally well and goes out prowling around the town in his old fashion, as if Marlbor- ough Street were quite as good a place as Hancock Street to start from. The election does n't look well.* Massachusetts has gone all right, but New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, seem to be all wrong. The policy is right, and I hope they will stick to it. But it would be an awful thing to have the country thrown into the hands of the starved Democrats two years hence. But I suppose it is a case of "doing right though the heavens fall," about as clear as we often see. Have you read the new " Life of Sumner " ? I have finished one volume of it and found it interesting. The wonderful reception that he had in England and the sight of the boyhood of these men who are either gone, or are old men now, are very attractive. Then I have been reading Bowen's new book.^ I had forgotten what a queer, familiar, almost jocose style he has, but his expositions of the systems of philosophy are certainly very clear, though one doubts sometimes whether he has got to the bottom of them. 1 The election of Hayes for President when Tilden was the Democratic can- didate. ^ History of Philosophy. 158 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 In December there was a visit to Philadelphia. His refer- ences to it, as in this extract from a letter to McVickar, show that his heart still turned to it with a yearning affection : — December 13, 1877. Yes I am coming to Philadelphia, and am counting upon it im- mensely. It will be the shortest visit possible, but then it will be Philadelphia. As to preaching, you must speak to Charles D. Cooper. Anything that you and he agree on I will do. Only let 's not make too terrible a rush of it. Of course the pulpit of Trinity is the dearest spot on earth to me, — in other words, is home. The occasion which took him to Philadelphia was the tenth anniversary of the consecration of the Church of the Holy Apostles, of which Mr. Cooper was rector. "When Mr. Cooper invited him to come, he wrote at once: "Why, of course I '11 come. Do you think I would let the friends of the Holy Apostles gather and I not be there? " The visit was to come soon after his birthday. This letter to Miss Meredith of Philadelphia strikes the usual keynote of the birthdays : — December 18, 1877. Dear Miss Mekedith, — ... It seems as if everything out of the old times were altered so and things whirl on so fast now, sickness and health, trouble and pleasure chasing each other quickly. The quiet, smooth, unbroken life is all gone. This is not perhaps less happy, but "the time is short" seems to ring out of everything. And then again the whole of things seems of 80 much more consequence and the details of things of so much less than they used to. I wonder if everybody gets to feel so. I was forty-two last Thursday. But I am coming on to Philadelphia next month, and shall at least get in sight of the old times again. I am coming for the tenth anniversary of the Holy Apostles ! Mr. Cooper has sent for me to revive the memory of the day when we begged the money together. I shall have but a day in the good town, and am much afraid that I shall see my friends only from the pulpit. Mr. is a curious creature, not at all to be turned off in a sentence; full of learning, with a strong dash of genius and half crazy. One vision of him in a city where he is not known must be amazing and bewildering. A happy Christmas to you all, and may God bless you always. Your sincere friend, Phillips Bkooks. ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 159 The work in Ms parish in the year 1878 went on as usual. The Lenten services grew deeper in their interest and power. His Wednesday evening lectures called out very large con- gregations. His references to the season of Lent in his let- ters must be interpreted as meaning that he put his whole soul into the frequent services, but did not care that any one should know with what deep feeling and with what la- borious study he prepared himself for the penitential season. His epistolary references to it are in contrast with the note- books, with the earnestness of his mood stamped upon every page. He took up large subjects, in courses of addresses which called for thorough and comprehensive study. In his Svmday preaching the sermons followed each other on the same high level. He did not write many letters, and these inclined to brevity. He writes to Mr. Cooper, February 8, 1878: — Weir Mitchell has been here curing all the dilapidated Bosto- nians. His coming makes a great sensation, for he is a very famous man. I felt as though I were a nerve doctor myself with all the patients that swarmed about the house. After him came Dr. Newton, — the Rev. Eichard Newton of your town. He stayed with Willie, not with me, and seemed to be overcome with indignation at his recreant brother. How he does pitch into him ! So you see we have some excitement here. But on the whole Boston is dull, and nothing but the endless round of Church work keeps me from getting stagnant. I think I have never been busier about that since I was in the ministry. He asked the Proprietors of Trinity Church for permission to hold free evening services during Lent, and the request was granted unanimously without limit of time. On these occasions the great church was filled. He made an exchange with Rev. Arthur Brooks, at the Church of the Incarnation, New York, on the Sunday after Easter, and then we hear of him again in Philadelphia, where he has gone for the visit to Mr. Cooper. 175 Marlbobough Street, Boston, March 18, 1878. Deak Aethxtk, — . . . Yesterday was a queer day. In the morning I got Sankey to come in and sing to our Sunday-school i6o PHILLIPS BROOKS [i877-79 children. He made a little speech to them which was capital, as simple and earnest and affectionate as possible, and then he sang "Ninety and Nine " execrably. . . . Lent is moving on quietly and seriously., Next Sunday is our Confirmation Day, and then I shall be easier. I have never held it quite so early before, and I look forward with much pleasure to the weeks of Lent which will still remain after the anxiety of Confirmation is over. Now every minute of every week is busy as has been the case for these seventeen last springs. How alike they all are, and yet one never gets tired of them. I hear all sorts of questions about a new Church paper which is to grow up in New York. Heber has written to Percy and to others about it. I am afraid that you and I will die without seeing what we want, and the last number of " The Churchman " will be dropped into our graves. The "New Church Journal " I am afraid will not be very interesting. The perpetual symposium business will tire. Have you ever seen Chauncey Wright's "Life" ? Did you know him in Cambridge? It is very interesting, I think. His meta- physics are pretty steep and his conclusions often pretty bad. . . . The picture of a quiet, simple, thoughtful, unambitious Cambridge life is rather nice. . . . Well, after Lent we must have a meeting somehow. The time and place will be given on small bills. I see as little now of Father and Mother or of John as I do of you. I have n't been to Andover since that tremendous Saturday morning when you came down and I went up, and I have n't been to John's at all. He was up at the Club in fine spirits and seemed to like the "In- stitution," though he modestly held his peace at his first meet- ing. . . . He congratulates liis brother on a proposed trip to Europe, and speaks for the first time of Kev. Leighton Parks, who has just come to Boston as Dr. Vinton's successor : — May 20, 1878. I picture to myself the scene behind the smokestack of the Bothnia when you and your fellow travellers sit around your Bishop and he tells you what he means to do at the Pan. Don't let your contempt for the whole affair prevent you from getting just one sight of walking with the Archbishop of Canter- bury. That surely would be a sight worth seeing. I am going up to Andover to-day to see Father and Mother. I find the great Church sensation here is Parks at EmmanueL ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 161 He is impressing people very much. Dr. Vinton heard him yes- terday and says he is a remarkable fellow. I have not heard him, but called on him the other day and found him bright, intelligent, and modest, a real good fellow. He is a Broad Churchman steeped in Maurice to the eyes. He was taking an interest in little things, such as the fur- nishing of his house, at a time when antique colonial furniture was the fashion. To Mr. Cooper he writes : — May 25, 1878. Here I am safe at home again with all the fun behind me and full of gratefulness to you all for all your hospitality. Every- thing was very delightful at the good old town, the Breakfasts, and the Convention, and the talks, and the walks, and the general smell and taste of good old times that was about the whole. Boston is sadly different. I feel after I get back from one of my visits to you as if I had only just moved here and were a stranger in the streets. The clock and the corner cupboard came safely and are both up and running most satisfactorily. I know what time it is and what day of the month and of the week and of the moon. If it only gave the Golden Letter and the Dominical Number and the First and Second Lessons I should feel entirely set up. In June he was present at the centennial of Phillips Academy, Andover, of which he writes to Arthur Brooks, June 10, 1878 : — Tes, we did have a good time. I do not know when I have seen a big display go off so well throughout, and we were a sort of quiet centre to the whole thing, we Phillipses, around which it all resolved. We had the glory and they had the work; and that is always fun. It was very pleasant, too, to have you and L here. It is not often now that all four of us boys get together in one room as we did here in my study the other night. So let us be proud and happy for the way the whole thing was done, and hope for another occasion soon. . . . He went soon after this event to Phillips Academy, Exeter, to deliver the address to the graduating class, then to Vir- ginia, where he read an essay on " The Pulpit and Popular Skepticism." Of this last visit he writes, July 9, 1878 : — 1 6a PHILLIPS BROOKS [i 877-79 I went down into Virginia with Jim. We visited the old Seminary where I read an Essay to the Alumni, and got quite sentimental about old times. The old place seemed to be full of life and turned out a good many parsons of the peculiar Virginia kind which is n't a bad sort, though one would n't want a whole church made up of them. Then we went down to the Virginia Springs in the Blue Ridge, where we passed three very queer and pleasant days, taking much sulphur both inside and out. Mean- time the heat had grown to he something awful in those Northern parts, but down where we were everything was as cool and delight- ful as possible. On our way back we stopped and spent two days with Willie McVickar, saw lots of Cooper, smoked many pipes, and talked the whole Church over. He took a house at Hingham for the summer, going to Boston every Sunday to preach. Of the life at Hingham he writes to Mr. Cooper : — August 3, 1878. I never had such a profoundly quiet summer as I am having now. I am here in a queer little cottage on an obscure back bay of Boston Harbor, where there is nothing to do, or at least where I do nothing, no sailing, no fishing, no riding, no walking. Nothing in the world but plenty of books and time and tobacco. Nobody to talk to or to talk to me. And I like it first-rate, almost as well as Heiligenblut and Bad Gastein. But it is very different. The only thing I really do which I can put my finger on is to prepare my volume of sermons which is coming out in September. Every day some proof comes down which I have to correct and send back. I doubt if they are worth publishing, and I have had a hundred minds about going on or stopping them, but I am in for it now, and will send you a copy when they come out. . . . In his seclusion at Hingham, he wrote often to his brother Arthur, in Europe, following his movements with the sym- pathy of an old traveller : — August 16, 1878. I am sure you will have a delightful summer, and we shall follow you through it all with our good wishes. It is about the pleasantest thing that people can do in this fallen world. I don't think the Pan- Anglican troubled you much, and from all accounts it won't trouble anybody a great deal. I don't hear of anything said or done there which was of the slightest con- sequence. And it gets to be very funny when in General Con- ^T. 41-43] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 163 ventions and Pan Synods and all sorts of Assemblies of Ecclesias- tical people the one thing they can crow over when the meeting breaks up is the "perfect harmony " of it all, — as if it is a wonder to sing a Te Deum over, if Churchmen come together without pull- ing each other's wigs off and tearing each other's eyes out. . . . No doubt you saw the little Dean, who is well I hope, but who certainly must have seemed to you very much changed from when we saw him in '74. . . . Have you seen Grant anywhere? The prospect of making him our next President is taking shape and soon will be a settled thing. All the European tour, with its receptions and parade, has been deliberately planned for this. Ben Butler is going to try to be Governor of Massachusetts this fall, and that will keep things lively here. There has been a blackguard named Kearney about here preaching low Irish Com- munism, whom Butler has taken up, and made an ugly mess. But what do you care for American politics when you are looking at the Madonna di San Sisto. . . . You are very good to offer to do anything for me. The picture which I saw was an etching from a portrait of James Martineau, the portrait, I think, by Watts. I saw it in Dr. Peabody's Study and liked it, and should like to have it, but don't let it trouble you. The dread of an impending sorrow was hanging over Mr. Brooks through the summer in consequence of the illness of his father, whose health was steadily declining. He invited both his parents to Hingham, and they came, but, as the change was not beneficial, they soon returned to Andover. Nothing could exceed the thoughtfulness and tender devotion which he showed in the now changed relationship, — when instead of the father watching over the son with anxious affection, it was his privilege to care for both father and mo- ther. He sent his friend Dr. Lyman to Andover, in the hope that the best medical skill and experience might be of some avaU. He wrote every week to his brother abroad giving an account of his father's condition. He wrote often to his mother to encourage her ; he sent everything that his ingenious thoughtfulness could devise which would cheer or help the invalid in his weakness, who, although he continued feeble, and evidently would never again be stronger, yet was cheerful and happy on the whole, with only occasional moods of discouragement. 1 64 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 The summer passed, and September brought an event of the highest interest to Mr. Brooks as well as to people throughout the country, — the visit of Dean Stanley to Amer- ica. No Englishman ever came whose presence called forth more enthusiasm, nor did any one realize until he came how deep and widespread was the feeling which prompted the people out of pure gratitude to express their sense of indebt- edness in every form which could do him honor. It was one of the important days in the history of Trinity Church when, on Sunday, the 22d of September, he stood in its pulpit, and, with his keen perception of the romance of history and the picturesque quality inhering in representative occasions, treated the moment as a meeting of the East with the West. The sermon which he preached was afterward printed, and the manuscript given to Mr. Brooks, who preserved it among the things that he valued. The visit to Boston came to an end with a breakfast given to the Dean by Mr. Brooks, at the Hotel Brunswick, when the clergy of Boston and vicinity had the opportunity to hear his pathetic words before he left the country. A visit to Gambler, Ohio, which Mr. Brooks had projected as a holiday after the summer's preaching, was prevented by his father's illness. To the Kev. George A. Strong he wrote : — 175 Mablborough Stkebt, Boston, Saturday, October 5, 1878. Dear George, — My Father is very ill. He has been failing for a long time, but there has seemed to be every probability that it would go on slowly, and that the end -was far away. But day before yesterday there came a change which has left him so that every day we are compelled to look for what may not come for months. But I am afraid his death is very near. His mind is failing rapidly, and every day seems to draw the veil a little closer between us and any possible communication with him. I suppose it is paralysis, though there has been no recognizable shock, only a gradual benumbing of mind and body. The year as it came to an end found him in the midst of many occupations, of which the most laborious was the prepa- ration of the Bohlen Lectures, to be given in Philadelphia. But he found time for loving attentions to his father. The ^T. 41-43] DEATH OF HIS FATHER 165 thought of his father was uppermost in his mind, infusing into his work a new consecration : — 175 MAKLBOEO0OH Street, Boston, December 7, 1878. Dear Aethue, — ... I wish I was coming on to see you as you so kindly ask me to do. We would walk and talk and look at pictures, and I 'd smoke and perhaps we 'd go and see some of the brethren. But it mustn't be. This is the time to work. Wednesday Evening services and Parish Visitings and Sunday Sermons and Christmas CaroUings, and all these things chase one another too fast for one to get in a visit to New York between them. So I 've written to the New England Society that I cannot help them eat their dinner, and to the Christian Young Women that I cannot associate with them. The Mexican League I have n't heard from, but I should have to give them (or It) the same sort of an answer. I have just begun to write the Bohlen Lectures which are to come ofE in Philadelphia some time before Ash Wednesday. They are a fearful invasion of the legitimate and regular work of the ministry, and the longer I am a Parson the less I think I like special work, the more I like to keep down to the steady hum- drum of the Parish Mill. . . . I was at Andover last week. It happened to be rather a bad day with Father and he was a little more blue and helpless than usual, but on the whole I think he remains about the same. Mo- ther is well, and seems to keep up her spirits wonderfully. I feel now as if Father very possibly might go through the winter about as he is now, unless some sudden shock or cold should come. P. The experience which he had long been dreading, whose import to himself he had been sounding in advance, came on January 7, 1879. On the evening of the day of his father's funeral, which took place at Trinity Church, he wrote to his mother. Other letters that follow call for no comment. They tell the story in its simple and natural pathos. 175 Mabuboboogh Stbeet, Boston, Thursday evening, January 9, 1879. Deak Moxheb, — I am thinking about you so much to-night that I must write you a little after all, though I said I should not. Lizzie will have told you how simply and fitly everything was done to-day, and it must surely be some satisfaction to us all to know how everybody's heart is full of honor for dear Father. i66 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 His body was borne into the church by his old friends, Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Deane, Mr. Eobert Mason, and Dr. George Ellis. Dr. Vinton read the service with the deepest feeling. I have not seen him. except to get a pressure of the hand as we came out of the church. He is staying at Mr. Snelling's where he will have the best of care and will not suffer from his kind-hearted excur- sion. At Mount Auburn everything was done just exactly as you wished. As we left they were just going to strew the branches on the grave. The two evergreen crosses hung above the graves of George and Frederick, and the faithful custodian promised that this new precious grave should have the most sacred care. William and Arthur and John and James and I went out, and Edward Brooks followed in a carriage by himself. Chardon Brooks and Charles Francis Adams were in the pew directly behind us. There were a multitude of other people in the church whom I did not see. All this is pleasant to all of us, but it is nothing beside the thought of the new life which Father has begun, and which never can be broken. When we remember his weakness and restlessness a week ago, and then think of the perfect peace and joy and knowledge that he is enjoying now, it is not so hard to bear it all and even to be thankful. It was a noble, faithful, useful life here, and now he is with Christ. It will not be long before we are with him. Let us try to be brave and wait as he would want us to do. My dearest mother, you do not know how much you are to us, nor 'how we all long to have you rest upon us, and let us help and comfort you and make you happy. May God help us all to live as faithfully and die as peacefully as dear Father has. Your loving son, Phillips. Boston, Jannary 11, 1879. Dear old Coopek, — You are a good kind fellow to write to me about Father and to speak of him so kindly. He was one of the simplest, truest, healthiest, and happiest natures that God ever made. All his life long was a perpetual delight in common things and a quiet, faithful doing of the duties that some men make a fuss about, as if they were the most natural things in the world and everybody did them. His religion was as simple as all the rest of his life, always flowing on serenely, as if to be a reli- gious man and to love God and trust Him were not an exceptional and hard thing, but as true a part of human life as breathing. And at the last he grew simpler and sweeter as his strength faded ^T. 41-43] DEATH OF HIS FATHER 167 away, and died at last with calm dignity such as only a child or a strong man can have. But we shall miss him dreadfully. Life will never be again what it has been all these years with him behind us. And poor mother wanders about looking for some one to be anxious about and to take care of, and finding it a dreadful pain that her last anxiety is over, and that she has only to rest in peace till her happiness comes. Yes, I shall come in February and lecture. The lectures are poor enough for they were written in the midst of all this derange- ment and distress, but I shall fulfil my engagement, and I shall see lots of you, old fellow. I promised McVickar long ago to stay with him on this official visit, but I shall see you all the time, and I am counting on it more than ever now. My love to Mrs. Cooper, and I am Always yours, P. B. 175 MABtBOKOUGH STREET, BosTON, January 18, 1879. Oh, my dear George, how I wish I was in Gambler to-night and sitting with you and M in front of your fire, and talking over all these things which it is so unsatisfactory to write about. First, I want to thank you for your last letter about Father. I have been feeling all these last ten days as I know thousands of men have felt before me when their fathers have died, but feel- ing it just as freshly as if I were the first man that ever went through it, and with the strong belief that no father ever was to his boys just what ours has been to us. He was so bright and happy and simple and strong through all the long years while our lives revolved around his, and in these last years while he has been failing and we have had the privilege that we could do something for him, he has been so sweet and gentle and childlike and so full of happiness in his constantly narrowing life. And at last he lay down and died with the same quiet dignity with which he had lived. There is nothing that is not good to remem- ber. It was as healthy and true a life as ever was seen, and now I miss him as I never dreamed that I could miss anybody, and it will be so to the end, I know. You knew him a little. He always felt that my friends were his friends, and so he always talked of you as if he knew you well. I know that he would have been glad to think that even so far away, and with so slight a recollec- tion of him, you would care something for his death. And I should have felt more cast adrift than I do now if I had not had your words of sympathy. It sounds very stupid and cold to say that I thank you, but I love you more than ever. I am sorry for all the mishap about New Bedford. No mat- 1 68 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 ter ; perhaps sometliing else may turn up soon and may be better managed. I want you somewhere here, and somehow feel more than ever now that, as our private circles grow thinner and thinner, it would be good if we could each draw a little more together and end our ministries, when the time for it must come, in something of the same snug and pleasant group in which they began. All we can do is to be upon the watch in case that any chance of such a welcome thing turns up. I am glad that you welcomed Casaubon. He was selected with a little more discrimination than usual, for I had just been reading his life myself, and had been charmed not so much with him as with the Book. I hope that you will like it when you read it. ... I have been lame all winter with a queer weakness of the knee, which the Doctor don't seem to understand. It probably is rebelling at the amount it has to carry. But it is about well now. Give my best love to M , and I am always, Yours, P. B. February 5, 1879. Deae Paddock, — A thousand thanks for your kind and thoughtful letter. I have always felt as if you knew Father from the memory of the old meeting twenty years ago at Alexandria, and from knowing how you had met him occasionally here since then. What you saw him at those times he always was, simple, cordial, affectionate, and full of a desire that everybody should be happy. Underneath this there was a quiet strength and integrity and a true Christian faith, which made his presence one of the healthiest atmospheres for a lot of boys to grow up in. And now that he is gone I can thank God heartily for all that he was and all that he is. But it makes life a different thing. It makes the world seem at first very empty. And it makes it all the more to seem not sad when one looks forward to his own going. But meanwhile it makes one cling all the more to old friends. And I am full of gratitude that you should think of me. You are a true, kind friend, and have been for these more than twenty years. God bless you. Always yours, P. B. Boston, February 11, 1879. Dear Mothek, — I have hoped to come and have another pleasant evening with you this week, before my departure for Philadelphia, which comes next Monday. But one by one I have had to strike off my evenings for engagements which I could not escape, and now they are all gone and I must not hope to see you ^T. 41-43] DEATH OF HIS FATHER 169 until I get home again. I am very sorry, for I enjoy my little runs to Andover better than anything that I do now, and two weeks seems to be a long time to wait, but it will pass and I shall come to you as soon as I possibly can after I get home. I hope that you are all well and will keep so, for we are all thinking about you all the time, and by and by we hope to have you with us here in Boston, and in the scattered places where the Brooks boys live. So take the best care of yourself for our sakes. I send you the remarks of Mr. Winthrop about dear Father, which he made at the Historical Society on the day of the Funeral. By and by there will be a longer tribute in their published volume. But I thought you would like to see this now. It is good to know how he is valued. Almost every day some of his old friends tell me of their respect for him, and of how he is missed in the old places where he lived so long. I send you also Dr. Stone's letter which I believe you have not seen. It is just like him. Can you send me within a day or two the name and full address of the minister at North Andover who held the service at the house ? I should like to write to him before I go away. ... A little letter from John about the visit that I am going to make him in Lent to preach for him on the 13th of March. He is in the full tide of prosperity and happi- ness. I shall not see either him or Arthur on my journey to Philadelphia or on my way home, for I shall be hurried through each way. But I shall try to visit both of them after Easter. Perhaps you will go with me. I am awfully disappointed that I cannot come up, but I must bear it. Give my love to Aunt Susan and Aunt Caroline and Aunt Blossom. Always afEectionately, Phillips. To this letter his mother replied : — North Andover, February 12, 1879. My dbak Phillips, — Your kind and loving letter deserves a letter in return, and miserable as it will be, I am going to write you one. I sometimes think I '11 write and then thoughts of Father come over me, and I am too sick at heart to attempt it. But I want to write to you to-day, for I am overpowered with all the marks of love you show me, and I want to tell you how much I appreciate it. But oh, I feel so unworthy of it all that it surprises me that you can care so much for me. Now you must not say as you always do, " Oh, how humble you are, " for I really feel it all. Believe me, dear Phillips, I am as sorry as you are that you can't come up this week, for I do enjoy your visits, but I have not expected it, for I know you must be overpowered with lyo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 work all the time, and have no time to spare, for you are in your busiest season now. But I shall dwell on the pleasure of your promised visit after your return from Philadelphia. I hope you will enjoy your little trip, and that it will rest your mind and body, for both must need rest. Do enjoy all you can, and sleep all you can, for I consider that sleep is our greatest earthly blessing. I thank you for sending me Mr. Winthrop's notice of dear Father. I am glad his friends do him honor; he deserves it all. Also I thank you for Dr. Stone's letter; it is a comfort to me ; he was Father's first minister in the Episcopal Church, and he always admired him. I am very sorry to see by the paper the instant death of Governor Gardner's son in Colorado, by a snow slide. How it makes me think of our poor Frederick's sudden death! Do you remember that Tuesday of this week was the anniversary of dear George's death, sixteen years ago ! How I long for them all. But I thank God that he has spared me so many loving ones. Now, dear Philly, please don't feel anxious about me while you are gone. I am very well and very comfortably situated, near to the Aunts' rooms, who are untiring in their kindness to me, night and day, and when their time of trouble comes I hope I shall be all ready to serve and comfort them. I wish I could sew on some buttons or do something to help you before you go. Be sure I shall think of you a great deal in your absence ; perhaps you will answer this letter while you are gone. Good-by, and with many thanks for all your goodness and tenderness to me, remember I am always your fond and loving Mother. Among the tributes to the memory of William Gray- Brooks was one from Dr. Vinton, who was moved as he re- called the history of the family with which he had been closely associated. He writes to Mrs. Brooks, at North Andover : — The solemn service to which I was called last week at Trinity Church brought you to my mind with an aifectionate sadness, and awakened all the associations which began with my rectorship at St. Paul's Church and have continued ever since with some of your family. I recall your anxiety for Mr. Brooks's religious state, and how God answered your prayers for him. I remember, too, our many conversations about your children, and how again your prayers were met by seeing them all turn to Christ, and I have often thought that you ought to be the happiest of Mothers. . . . ^T. 41-43] DEATH OF HIS FATHER 171 At the first meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society held after the death of their colleague, words of grateful appreciation were spoken in behalf of the society. They are full of meaning, for they are describing qualities which reappeared in the son, with only this difference, — an adventitious one, to which the son attached no importance, — that he had filled no exalted public station. The president of the society, the Hon. Robert C. Win- throp, said, in announcing the death : — I cannot fail to make the earliest mention of the loss which comes nearest to us and to allude first to the death of our esteemed and respected friend and associate, "William Gray Brooks, Esq., a gentleman to whom we were all warmly attached, and whose companionship and hearty cooperation in our work have been so highly valued by us all. Indeed I may say that we have had but few more attentive or more useful members during the seventeen or eighteen years since he was elected. No one certainly has taken a warmer interest in our welfare, or rendered us more sub- stantial services. As repeatedly a member of our Standing Com- mittee, and occasionally its Chairman, and especially as a leading member of the committee to which our building was entrusted during the process of its reconstruction, Mr. Brooks was ever most diligent and devoted. I know not how we should have gone through with that protracted and often perplexing process without his practical wisdom and his faithful and untiring supervision. Always prompt and punctual at our meetings, as long as his health permitted him to attend them, he took also an intelligent and eager interest in our historical proceedings, and from time to time made important communications on genealogical or histori- cal topics. Tracing back his ancestry to the famous minister of old Boston and of new Boston, — John Cotton, and immediately connected with families which have given so many eminent men both to the ministry and to the magistracy of New England, his mind was naturally turned to inquiries and investigations which might aid in the just commemoration of these local worthies, and our records bear frequent evidence of his success. The Eev. Kobert C. Waterston added these discriminating words : — He was gentle and unassuming, scrupulously true to the practi- cal duties of life; his courtesy of manner, generosity of heart, and integrity of purpose won for him universal respect and love. 172 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-79 He seemed never to be troubled by that restless ambition which desires to make itself prominent. Cheerfully he pursued the even tenor of his way, satisfied with being a kind neighbor, an upright citizen, a trustworthy and honorable man. His sound sense and clear judgment gave value to his counsel. There was nothing morbid in his nature, and no tendency to unreasonable impulse or exaggeration. Calm and considerate, his words carried with them a proportionate weight. Consistent in his actions, what he did he was not obliged to undo. In his business he had no passion for unlimited accumulation of wealth. A reasonable competency satisfied his desire. He was generous; but what he imparted he sought to distribute so that it should result, as far as was possible, in permanent good. In his charities he shrank from an appear- ance of display. Whatever tended to promote the public wel- fare found in him an earnest response; and, in carrying forward plans of general enterprise, according to his means, he was ready at all times to do his part. But there was yet a higher tribute which the son was to pay to his father, when in the human relationship he saw the medium of the divine revelation. Such had been the earthly father's life that to the son it bore witness to the nature of and the evidence for the Fatherhood of God. In the year before his father died, Phillips Brooks was speaking to the students of the Yale Divinity School on the best method of teaching religion, or the relationship between God and man which constituted religion : — It is merely the completion, the transfiguration of that which we can see in any healthy family. . . . For myself, every year that I have preached, that sight, the child and the father in their deepest relationship to one another, has grown an ever clearer and richer revelation of the mystery of man and God. In it I find the clearest exhibition of the highest and most comprehensive thought of duty, which is loving obedience including in itself the power and efBect of education. At the time of his father's death he was preparing his Bohlen Lectures on " The Influence of Jesus." It was while his bereavement was still fresh that he wrote these words, in illustration of the central theme of his book, — Jesus as revealing the Fatherhood of God : — Beyond all analysis lies the relation which every true son holds ^T. 41-43] DEATH OF HIS FATHER 173 to a true father. It is a final fact. You cannot dissolve it in any abstract theory. It issues from the mysterious sympathy of the two lives, one of which gave birth to the other. It has rip- ened and mellowed through all the rich intercourse of dependent childhood and imitative youth and sympathetic manhood. It is an eternal fact. Death cannot destroy it. The grown-up man feels his father's life beating from beyond the grave, and is sure that in his own eternity the child relation to that life will be in some mysterious and perfect way resumed and glorified, that he will be something to that dear life and it to him forever. All this remains. . . . The joy and pain, all the richness and pathos of his home life, while they keep their freshness and peculiar sanctity, have in them and below them all the multitudinous hap- piness and sorrow of the larger life in the great household of the world. The child feels something of this truth by instinct. The thoughtful man delights to realize it more and more as he grows older (pp. 184, 185). CHAPTER VII 1877-1878 LECTURES ON PKEACHmG. FIRST VOLUME OF SERMONS. THE TEACHING OF RELIGION. THE PULPIT AND POPU- LAR SKEPTICISM The narrative of the first ten years of the ministry of PhiUips Brooks in Boston, which has now been given, wiU serve to confirm the impression of a change or difference when compared with that of his ministry in Philadelphia. What, we may ask, had become of that intense mysterious force, evoked by the war, by which he rose even above the high level of his work as a preacher ? What is there in these years that corresponds with his wonderful power as a platform speaker or public orator when he was advocating reforms whose neces- sity stirred the lowest deeps of his soul ? That passionate vehemence had not, like some transient flame, been extin- guished, but transmuted into some other manifestation of power. These years whose record has been traced are quiet years compared with what went before or what came after- wards, — a time of silent preparation, of study, and of inward ferment, of which but little evidence is apparent in his letters. But, as has been so often remarked, the traces of his work are concealed. We must then turn to his published writings, which now began to multiply, wherein will be seen the man in other aspects, in new phases of his personality. They will show that he had been concentrating his mind on the study of his age, and on the message which that strange and troubled world was demanding. It was in the early part of the year 1877, when the build- ing committee of Trinity Church were making strenuous efforts to hasten its completion, that Phillips Brooks went to ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 175 New Haven to deliver his lectures on Preaching before the students of the Yale Divinity School. It was a time of unusual excitement for his parish and for himself when he was writing the lectures, an excitement and enthusiasm which culminated in their delivery. So deeply was he moved that for some reason he could not bear to make the journeys to New Haven alone, and took with him one of his relatives. The event stirred him the more deeply because for the first time he was unveiling his own personal experience, as he had felt compelled to review it when he sought to explain the secret and power which made the pulpit efEective. The greatest charm of the Yale Lectures, from a literary point of view, is that they constitute the autobiography of Phillips Brooks, — the confessions of a great preacher. The book is personal throughout ; he speaks often of himself freely in the first per- son, and at other times veils the revelation. Always he is giving the result of his own reflection and observation of life. It is a book which owes nothing to predecessors in the same field, of which there are many. He confines himself to preach- ing as he had experienced its workings, or studied its method, or observed its power. In this review of his life he went back to his days at the Virginia seminary. I can remember how, before I began to preach, every book I read seemed to spring into a sermon. It seemed as if one could read nothing without sitting down instantly and turning it into a discourse. But as I began and went on preaching, the sermons that came of special books became less and less satisfactory and more and more rare. Some truth which one has long known, stirred to peculiar activity by something that has happened or by contact with some other mind, makes the best sermon (p. 159). He recalls how he had come very early to the conclusion that what was desired in the ministry, as the condition of effective preaching, was the combination of learning and in- tellectual force with the capacity for devout and deep and intense feeling. " In many respects an ignorant clergy, how- ever pious it may be, is worse than none at all " (p. 45). He was wont to say that he had not worked as hard as he 176 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 sLould have done in college, but he did not make this admis- sion regarding his time in the theological seminary. Most men begin really to study when they enter on the prepa- ration for their profession. Men whose college life, with its gen- eral culture, has been very idle, begin to work when, at the door of the professional school, the work of their life comes before them. It is the way in which a bird who has been whirling vaguely hither and thither sees at last its home in the distance and flies toward it like an arrow (p. 43). He speaks of the first sermon which he preached, " which it was at once such a terror and such a joy to preach." As he compares the earlier with the later sermons, he finds sen- tences written years ago, containing meanings and views of truth which he perceives in them now, but had not seen in those early days. The truth was there, but he had not fully appro- priated it. It has been shown that he had no taste or capac- ity for mere abstract ideas apart from their concrete rela- tionships. So far as he studied philosophies, metaphysical systems or their history, it was to catch their bearing on the practical issues of life. Ideas moved him as they did because and only in so far as he could trace this connection. The disposition to watch ideas in their working, and to talk about their relations and their influence on one another, simply as problems in which the mind may find pleasure without an entrance of the soul into the ideas themselves, this, which is the critical tendency, invades the pulpit, and the result is an immense amount of preaching which must be called preaching about Christ as distinct from preaching Christ. There are many preachers who seem to do nothing else; always discussing Christianity as a problem, instead of announcing Christianity as a message and proclaiming Christ as a Saviour. ... It is good to be a Herschel who describes the sun; but it is better to be a Prometheus who brings the sun's fire to the earth (p. 20). Here is a passage which is the climax of self -revelation. He veils himself, it is true, to a certain extent, and puts what he has to say in impersonal form, but the description corre- sponds to no one but himself : — There is something beautiful to me in the way in which the utterance of the best part of a man's own life, its essence, its ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 177 result, which the pulpit makes possible and even tempts, is wel- comed by many men, who seem to find all other utterance of themselves impossible. I have known shy, reserved men who, standing in their pulpits, have drawn back before a thousand eyes veils that were sacredly closed when only one friend's eyes could see. You might talk with them a hundred times, and you would not learn so much of what they were as if you once heard them preach. It was partly the impersonality of the great congrega- tion. Humanity, without the offence of individuality, stood there before them. It was no violation of their loyalty to them- selves to tell their secret to mankind. It was a man who silenced them. But also, besides this, it was, I think, that the sight of many waiting faces set free in them a new, clear knowledge of what their truth, or secret was, unsnarled it from the petty cir- cumstances into which it had been entangled, called it first into clear consciousness, and then tempted it into utterance with an authority which they did not recognize in an individual curiosity demanding the details of their life. Our race, represented in a great assembly, has more authority and more beguilement for many of us than a single man, however near he may be. And he who is silent before the interviewer, pours out the very depth of his soul to the great multitude. He will not print his diary for the world to read, but he will tell his fellow men what Christ may be to them, so that they shall see, as God sees, what Christ has been to him (pp. 121, 122). The " Lectures on Preaching " possess a further literary charm because they connect the pulpit with life, and with the highest, richest manifestations of life. The book took its place as an important contribution to literature, apart from its value as a treatise on homiletics. It abounds with literary allusions and illustrations new and effective, showing at once the scholar and the man widely read in the world's best books. The work that he had done in the Virginia seminary, as seen in the note-books that he had kept, is constantly re- appearing. The movement is rapid ; there is no lingering by the way ; every page is full of condensed purpose. There is nothing artificial, no posing for effect; but plainness and great directness of speech, perfect naturalness and simplicity. The book captivates the reader, simply for this reason alone, ^- the transparency of the soul of its writer, between whom and the reader there intervenes no barrier. And further it VOL. n lyS PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 is redolent with happiness and hope for the world, as if at last the new day had dawned for humanity, and mankind might enter on its heritage, long promised and seen from afar, but now ready to be ushered in. It set the standard high, yet it did not discourage ; it rather stimulated, begetting an enthusiasm which overrode aU obstacles. It abounded in sentences which linger in the mind, — the perfection of expres- sion in words. There must be a man behind every sermon. The intercourse with God in history. The intelligent speculations of the learned become the vague prejudices of the vulgar. The real power of your oratory must be your own intelligent delight in what you are doing. You grow so familiar with the theory of repentance that it is hard for you to know that you have not yourself repented. If you could make all men think alike, it would be very much as if no man thought at all, as when the whole earth moves to- gether all things seem still. To be dead in earnest is to be eloquent. The personal interest of the preacher is the buoyant air that fills the mass and lifts it. The sermon is truth and man together. It is the truth brought through the man. The temptation from being messengers to be witnesses of the faith. Say nothing which you do not believe to be true, because you think it may be helpful. Keep back nothing which you know to be true because you think it may be harmful. This value of the human soul is something more than a mere sense of the soul's danger. It is a deliberate estimate set upon man's spiritual nature in view of its possibilities. Never allow yourself to feel equal to your work. If you ever find that spirit growing on you, try to preach on your most exact- ing theme, to show yourself how unequal to it you are. Pray for and work for fulness of life above everything; full red blood in the body ; full honesty and truth in the mind ; and the fulness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart. Success is always sure to bring humility. " Recognition, " said Hawthorne, "makes a man very modest." In addition to their literary merit, or their value as the con- fessions of a soul speaking to men but always speaking before ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 179 God, the " Lectures on Preaching " have another significance in the assertion of theological or religious principles never quite so emphatically uttered before. The leading idea is that truth and moral efficiency in the will are contagious, and pass from man to man through the medium of personality. Per- sonality is defined as a conscious relationship to God, which through the spirit of obedience to the divine will unfolds and expands all human powers and brings out the revelation of man. The subject had been before his mind from the moment he turned his thought to the ministry. He had asked himself at once the leading question, how the power which existed in abundance was to be brought to bear upon the wiU so as to issue in conduct. So early as 1862, in an address before the Evangelical Educational Society, he gave the an- swer, — training for the ministry meant the development of personal power, which as an agency for moral regeneration was mightier than any other, as bringing the power of God to bear directly on human souls. He took up the same subject when he went to Providence in 1865, to give the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Brown University. His subject was " The Personality of the Scholar." On both these occasions we know from contemporary testimony that he was listened to with absorbing attention, and the atmosphere was full of the magnetism of his presence as he expounded his vision, that all which the minister or the scholar knows or loves must go out with him into all his life. If personal character were thus sought for the service of humanity, then the world would be uplifted to a higher plane, and belief in human progress would rest upon sure foundations, for it would be nothing else than belief in God. With this same message he had gone to the dedication of the Bradford Academy in 1870, and to the students of the Andover Theological Seminary in 1874. What he said was received as new truth, so vividly did he feel his force and urge it with such effect upon those who listened. His eloquence was at the highest point when he touched upon this theme. Thus his motive had for years been slowly accumulating in momentum when he went to Yale in 1877, to deliver his lectures on Preaching. i8o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 How far was his doctrine new ? Can it be called the con- tribution of some important discovery to the cause of religious progress ? In one sense the issue was as old as the history of the Christian church. It was what the Koman mind was thinking of when it devised the theory of apostolic succes- sion, that power was handed down in the church by verbal commission from apostles to their successors. It came up again when the question was broached whether purity of character was an indispensable requisite in administering the sacred rites, or whether the power which had been imparted in ordination was sufficient for their validity. It haunted the Middle Ages as a disturbing theory at a time when it was the prevailing opinion that the power given in ordination was sufficient whatever the character of the officiating priest. It was the issue which underlay the rise of the papacy, that disobedience to the papal will was a moral defect which viti- ated ecclesiastical acts. When the spiritual enthusiasm of the first age of the Protestant Reformation was declining the old issue turned up again in new form, — whether it were neces- sary that a preacher should have felt the power of the truth he proclaimed in order to make it effective by his preaching. It constituted the weakness of the eighteenth century, — the tacit assumption that character had little connection with the work of a Christian preacher. It was characteristic of the Evangelical Awakening that it called for conversion in those who should minister to the salvation of others. But in the homiletic method of the time, the conversion of the preacher was mainly important as securing the presentation from the pulpit of the pure gospel, thus constituting an occa- sion of which God might avail himself in acting on the souls of the hearers. When we review the history of this issue with which Phil- lips Brooks was now concerned, it is evident that he had penetrated directly to the heart of the difficulty which had beset the ages. His book on Preaching would not have been the event it was for arousing a new life in the churches if it had not been that he placed his finger upon the sensitive spot in the body ecclesiastic, and pointed out the remedy. No ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING i8i such utterance had been heard before because the principle he now asserted was placed in the foreground of the long perspective and given the emphasis its importance demanded. Others may have said it before, many had illustrated it in living ways, but it was left to him to give it the final expres- sion. He struck the dominant note in his first lecture, which sounded throughout the course : — Preaching is the communication of truth hy man to men. It has two essential elements, truth and personality. . . . Preach- ing is the bringing of truth through personality. . . . Jesus chose this method of extending the knowledge of himself through the world. However the gospel may be capable of statement in dogmatic form, its truest statement is not in dogma but in a per- sonal life. Christianity is Christ. A truth which is of such peculiar character that a person can stand forth and say of it, "I am the truth, " must always be best conveyed through personality. "As My Father has sent me into the world, even so have I sent you into the world." It was the continuation out to the minutest ramifications of the new system of influence, of that personal method which the incarnation itself had solved. Nothing can ever take the place of preaching because of the personal element that is in it (p. 7). In the assertion of this principle that truth in order to its effective presentation must come through personality, Phillips Brooks was planting himself upon a psychological motive, whose latent working had been manifest in history. Nothing could take the place of preaching because of the personal element in it ; no multiplication of books could ever supersede the human voice ; no newly opened channel of approach to man's mind and heart could do away with man's readiness to receive impressions through his fellow man. " It is strange how men will gather to listen to the true preacher. It is to-day as it was in past ages, when Chrysostom preached at Constantinople, or Bishop Latimer at St. Paul's Cross in Lon- don." But this principle had even a wider and more signifi- cant application. It was related to the movements of reli- gious life and thought in the nineteenth century. It met that instinct which, amid the confusions of the time, or what 1 82 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 seemed the shifting foundations of religious belief, called out for a return to " historic Christianity." This conception of preaching puts us into right relations with all historic Christianity. The message can never be told as if we were the first to tell it. It is the same message which the church has told in all the ages. He who tells it to-day is backed by all the multitude who have told it in the past. He is companied by those who are telling it now. The message is his witness, but a part of the assurance with which he has received it comes from the fact of its being the identical message which has come down from the beginning. Men find on both sides how difficult it is to preserve the true poise and pro- portion between the corporate and the individual conceptions of the Christian life. But all will own to-day the need of both. The identity of the Church in all times consists in the identity of the message which she has always had to carry from the Lord to man. All outward utterances of the perpetual identity of the Church are valuable only as they assert this real identity. This is the real meaning of the perpetuation of old ceremonies, the use of ancient liturgies, the clinging to what seem to be apostolic types of government (p. 18). And again, this principle that truth must come through personality, through the man who has himself been moved and conquered by the truth, was urged as specially needed in a New England community, or wherever the later develop- ment of Calvinism, as by Hopkins and Emmons, had parar lyzed the pulpit as well as the hearer. That man must wait till God chose to act in the process of conversion, that the preacher might give a message, but bore in himself no con- tagious witness to the truth, — this fatal assumption had acted like a subtle poison in every New England community. It had made religion something exceptional in its working, out of harmony with natural laws, something unreal also, and intangible, without relation to real life, and therefore tending to vanish away. Against this tendency, which he had recog- nized in his own experience and observation, Phillips Brooks made most effective opposition. He brought religion down from the clouds to an actual reality, communicated from man to man, not only in the pulpit, but in the daily course of life. The religion of Christ had been first implanted as a leaven ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 183 in humanity by the personality of its founder, and from that time had never been without its witnesses, — the children of God in every generation. We get here some explanation of Phillips Brooks's power as a preacher, and of the comprehensiveness of his appeal. He satisfied the High Anglican in his own communion as well as the descendant of the Puritans. He did justice alike to the human and the divine aspects of religion, as coming through man, but coming also from God, who worked in and through the human personality. Thus was solved the pro- blem of the schools which had given rise to controversy and inward perturbation and distress, — whether the wiU of man was free, and he were able in and by himself to accomplish the work of his salvation, or whether that work were solely of God, and man was so much helpless material in His hands to be galvanized into life. Upon this point he was emphatic and uncompromising, — the absolute necessity of character in the preacher, the im- portance of impressing his audience with the conviction that he possessed the character which comes from association with Christ. " Personal piety is the deep possession in one's own soul of the faith and hope and resolution which are to be offered to one's fellow men for their new life." "Nothing but fire kindles fire." He wishes that he could find words, new and overwhelming, with which to enforce his conviction that to live in Christ and to be His, and not our own, makes preach- ing a perpetual privilege and joy. He cannot believe that any one will find it hard to talk about these things for two half hours every week who lives with God, whose delight it is to study God's word, in the Bible, in the world, in history, in human nature. From this point of view he considers the pulpit problem of preaching old sermons, and of the relative merit of extempo- raneous and written discourse. No one complained when he preached old sermons, but the criticism often was that the old were better. I think that every earnest preacher is often more excited as he writes, kindles more then with the glow of sending truth to men, 1 84 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 than he ever does in speaking ; and the wonderful thing is, that that fire, if it is really present in the sermon when it is written, stays there, and breaks out into flame again, when the delivery of the sermon comes. The enthusiasm is stowed away and is kept. . . . As you preach old sermons, I think you can always tell, even if the history of them is forgotten, which of them you wrote enthusiastically with the people vividly before you. The fire is in them still (p. 173). He objected to quotations in a sermon, whether of poetry or prose, because they weakened the power of personality. He thought that there was such a thing as the gift for preaching, capable of cultivation, to some extent an innate power in every man, — it might be called also enthusiasm, or eloquence, or magnetism. Whether or no it existed in all, or could be cultivated, he defined it, and in defining it described him- self, — the quality that kindles at the sight of men, the keen joy at the meeting of truth and the human mind, the power by which a man loses himself and becomes but the sympa- thetic atmosphere between the truth on one side of him and the man on the other side of him. It was the possession of this gift of kindling at the sight of men which enabled him to write the last chapter of his book, where his eloquence culminates as he describes " the value of the human soul." He attached the highest importance to his exposition of this point. To a friend who once spoke to him of his lectures on Preaching, saying that the last lecture was the most signifi- cant, he replied that out of aU the comment made on his book, this was the first time it had been mentioned ; that he wrote for the sake of enforcing this truth ; that in the love and the reverence for human souls lay the deepest secret of power in the ministry. The doctrine of the value of the hu- man soul was not new. It had been one of the stock expres- sions of the Evangelical school that the Christian minister must be possessed with " the love of souls." He heard it at St. Paul's Church in Boston and at the Virginia seminary. But he inherited it in his blood, from a father who had an untiring interest in all that was human and personal, from a mother whose heart went quickly out to every one with ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 185 ■whom she came in contact, where there was the possibility of exerting a moral influence. It was this motive which attracted him to teaching as a profession, because in it the contact of soul with soul was more intimate and powerful than in any other relationship. The culminative force of all his generations was behind him, till it burst forth in him in complete and unprecedented expression. He loved places and things, he loved nature, but above all he loved humanity. It was this gift which made his heart leap up when he beheld the waiting congregation. No one can forget the look that he gave when he had ascended the pulpit, as if to draw in the inspiration for the effect that was to follow before he bent himself with the fervor and tumult of his powerful soul to the communication of his message. We shall see that this power of valuing the human soul, this reverence for man as such, increased in such proportion in his later years as almost to defeat the purpose of the great preacher, creating a multiplicity of demands upon his time to which he was no longer equal. But for many years he held himself in restraint, till the work he had been given to do was accomplished. This lecture, therefore, on the value of the human soul is in some ways more characteristic of Phillips Brooks than anything else he has written. To this result everything in his reading, his study, his experience, contributed. From being a conviction, it grew into a pas- sion. He was full of reverence for those whom he met. He grew in humility as his reverence for others increased. There was stamped upon his manner a lofty yet tender cour- tesy. The traditional bearing of the clergy, distant and conscious of their own importance, wherein might be read the impression of constant deference or adulation, all this was totally foreign to him. The " Lectures on Preaching " constitute an event in the liistory of the pulpit. No similar treatise ever met with such a reception. It became at once a manual for the clergy and for theological students. Some books are so thoroughly done that they pass at once into the life of a people, to reap- pear again in many ways. This book has influenced the 1 86 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 whole mass of Christian sentiment in America, leaping the bounds of denominationalism. It carried with it hope and vitality, inspiration and enthusiasm, the expansion of life and of religion. " It is the best word about preaching that has been uttered," was one of the comments upon it, " and its wise sayings deserve to pass into proverbs of the profession." '* I can hardly tell you," writes a Western bishop, " how de- lighted, charmed, and helped I have been in its perusal." An eminent Unitarian divine bore witness : " It seems to me that it will make ministers from serious young men now try- ing the shifts of the meaner crafts and not entering the min- istry because of the glamour and unreality about it. This unreality your book will certainly remove." One who heard the lectures, a professor of homiletics, wrote, " They read bet- ter than they sounded when delivered, which is saying a great deal, and we rejoice in the wide sale the volume is having and the expressions of satisfaction with it which we hear on every side." Another bishop in the Episcopal Church thanked him for the blessing the book had brought him, " It has met certain wants and touched experiences which seem hidden from every one but God." A distinguished professor of Sacred Rhetoric in a Congregational seminary wrote, " You do not need words of commendation from me, but I gratify myself more than you in telling you how helpful the book is to me in my work, every page of it. My pupils are all reading it with great avidity." An eminent historical scholar, who listened to the lectures and knew of their recep- tion, says, " I have never heard of a lisp of dissent from the judgment of those who heard them with admiration and de- light." " The charm of your book," writes an Episcopal clergy- man, himself known as a pulpit orator, " is that it makes us all forget you and leads our thoughts up to the Lord, who gives the words and makes great the company of the preachers." A Harvard professor speaks of it as " the very word that I want to carry to the many students in the College and the Divinity School who turn to me with their plans and their hesitations." A Baptist clergyman wishes him to know of " what he is doing for a multitude of the Baptist ministers of ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 187 the generations coming." From a Presbyterian theological seminary in the South came this tribute : — My mind sprang to the truths contained therein as if there had heen an affinity between the two. My crude notions found ade- quate expression and a fuller and wider development than I had imagined possible. So that while sadly conscious of my failure to attain or even realize the high standard you set up, I rejoice in more definite and vivid conception of my work. The lofty ground on which through the entire course you tread fills me with new hope, new joy, and imparts a very inspiration at the thought of the holy work before me. ... I gladly confess my obligation to you for instructions which will color my future min- istry and to the operation of which any good I may accomplish will be largely due. Dr. Stone, of the Episcopal Theological School in Cam- bridge, instead of writing to Mr. Brooks himself, wrote to his mother, whose way he had guided into the Episcopal Church : — I have just finished the reading of Phillips's "Lectures on Preaching, " and I wish you to join me in giving God thanks for such a book and for such a writer. His Lectures must have been a great blessing to those who heard them, and they must be a g^eat blessing to all who read them, specially to all young preach- ers who read them. And if it were in my power I would put them in the hands of every young preacher in the land. They could find no better human helper in the great work before them. The following estimate is by the Rev. H. C. Badger of New Haven : — I believe neither the English language nor any other has any- thing worthy to stand beside them, treating such a theme, — judging the wide reading, the wit, the wisdom, the mental grasp of the problem, the keenness of the analysis, the profoundness of the insight, or the perfect comprehension of the problems of our day. . . . That book I would lay beside the Bible of every young minister to-day. I would have every preacher read it every year as long as he lives. These testimonies, which might be greatly multiplied, are sufficient to show that Phillips Brooks had made another conquest of theological students and theological seminaries i88 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 throughout the land. He had set the standard of preaching for his age. Phillips Brooks had been preaching for nearly twenty years before he gave to the world a volume of his sermons. He had been tempted, in 1863, only four years after his ordi- nation, to prepare a volume for the press, and had withdrawn it when half printed. From that time he had resisted the pressure to publish, and when he finally yielded it was with reluctance. The first volume of his sermons, which appeared in 1878, met with an extraordinary reception, attaining a sale of twenty-five thousand. They were welcomed as literature, as a new poem or as the newest book. But they were also received as a special religious message in an age of trial and doubt and weakness. The reception accorded by the press in public criticism was favorable, often eulogistic in the high- est degree, with hardly a dissenting voice. One curious expression of dissent was given in an English newspaper, where his sermons were compared among others with Bishop Butler's, and to Butler was awarded the superiority. Others compared him with Robertson of Brighton, giving them equal honor. "We have seen how he was regarded by those who heard him preach, in the many reports which were constantly appearing in the newspapers. How he was now regarded when he was put to the test of the printed book, where the competent judge could weigh his words, is shown in a criti- cism that may be taken as representative : — Unlike Robertson, Phillips Brooks constantly reminds us of him. He has the same analytical power; the same broad human sympathy; the same keen knowledge of human nature, toned and tempered and made more true by his sympathies ; the same mys- terious and indefinable element of divine life, so that his message comes with a quasi authority, wholly unecclesiastical, purely per- sonal; and the same undertone of sadness, the same touch of pathos, speaking low as a man who is saddened by his own seem- ing success. The " Lectures on Preaching " had brought to Mr. Brooks many letters, calculated to flatter the vanity of an author, if .ET. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 189 it had been in him to be ministered to by flattery. But this volume of sermons was followed by a flood of letters, which did not speak so much of his eloquence or intellectual gifts as of the good he was doing for human souls. We are listening in them to the secrets, as it were, of a confessional, where people are pouring into his ear their sorrows, and are telling him of the relief he has given. What the public press said of his sermons was one thing, what the people were saying to him was another. From every part of the country the letters came, from those who had never heard or seen him, as well as from those who found a special pleasure in associating his voice and presence with the reading of the printed page. The principle which had guided the author, in selecting twenty sermons for publication out of some six hundred he had written, it would be difficult to teU. It was no easy task to make the selection, and we know that it was made with scrupulous care. What strikes the reader as he glances over the titles of the sermons is the large proportion assigned to topics of comfort and consolation. The volume opens with a sermon on " The Purpose and Use of Comfort ; " other titles are, " The Withheld Completions of Life," « The Soul's Eefuge in God," " The Consolations of God." One other sermon similar in tone is from the text, " Brethren, the time is short." There seems something incongruous between the prevailing tone of the sermons and the man who, as we have seen him in his letters, or as he appeared in his familiar con- versation, abounded in humor, in mirth and vitality, as if he had known neither trouble nor sorrow. One of the letters he received was from a person who had found consolation by the reading of the sermons, and who goes on to speak of the trials he had gone through, and the depths to which he had descended : — What I wished to say is this, — that I found in your first two sermons that which touched and threw new light or better light upon the crucial points of my experience and trial ; for instance, when you argue the fact and why God sometimes withholds evi- dence for a few years. It did me good as a medicine, but I I90 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 asked, " How did my brother find this out ? " "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." Are you freeborn, or have you passed all through that way that even He trod, made perfect through suffering? . . . Not since Robertson's beautiful sermons has anything found me, and found me in such deep places (as Coleridge said of the Bible), as your sermons. The question which this unknown correspondent put to him was also put by many others. But he generally turned it o£E with the remark that it was possible to enter into these things by the imagination. However it may be, he had made a study, a scientific study, if it may be so called, of the art of consolation. In his large parishes, as well as in the outer world, he was constantly confronted with the problem of sor- row and suffering. His own personality attracted as by a magnet those who were in trouble. He suffered with them through the immeasurable tenderness of his own soul and bis vast outflow of sympathy. What the meaning of it all might be, in a world which was beautiful, which God had created and loved, was the problem that haunted him. He did not undertake to solve it by any dogmatic principle. He waited for the growing light. But of one thing he was sure, that the only consolation was in God. It was characteristic of the letters that came to him that, taking them together, not one sermon in the volume but was mentioned by some one as having met some special need, or brought inspiration or joy or courage. One of the writers speaks of the sermon on the " Trinity " as having " broken down all misgivings, so that I can now say I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost." That is one of the finest sermons in the volume, showing the capacity of insight into theological distinctions, — a sermon such as would have delighted the heart of Athanasius. The sermon on " The Symbol and the Eeality," which had charmed Dean Stanley, when he heard it at Westminster Abbey, appears to have been a general favorite. It placed a common principle beneath the symbols of religion and the symbols of common life. The sermon on "Humility" seemed to reveal a new cultus for the highest of Christian virtues, " It came upon ^T. 41-42] LECTURES ON PREACHING 191 me like a flood of light," wrote a venerable divine in whose character humility was the crowning attribute. The sermon on the " Positiveness of the Divine Life " brought out anew, and with the preacher's own peculiar force, the truth which Chalmers announced and Dr. Bushnell had reiterated, — " the expulsive power of a new affection." The sermon for All Saints' Day is the only one chosen for publication out of his Philadelphia preaching, the rest of the sermons belonging to the years from 1873 to 1878. But though one of his earliest, this sermon for All Saints' Day is perhaps the most beautiful of all. It gives the modern conception of sainthood as com- pared with the Catholic or mediaeval ideal. Saints, as we often think of them, are feehle, nerveless crea- tures, silly and effeminate, the mere soft padding of the uni- verse. I would present true sainthood to you as the strong chain of God's presence in humanity running down through all history. . . . That is the true apostolical saintly succession, the tactual succession of heart touching heart with fire. . . . These saints who help us on our way were incorporations not of the power, nor of the truth, but of the spirit and the character of God. A few testimonies may be given in the words of their writers, for they are living touches in the portraiture of PhUlips Brooks. They may stand for the conviction of thousands of others in the church universal which he was then addressing. They come from young and old, from men and from women, from clergymen and from laymen, from all the walks of life : — I am sure you will rejoice to hear how my life has been made richer and fuller through your aid, and my poor blurred sight of men as trees walking exchanged for clear outlines and effulgent day. You are speaking to Tnen as no one else can. No book save the Bible gives me so much strength and holy ambition. I covet your method of presenting the truth of the Gospel more than that of any man living. The volume has become my vade mecum. Tour sermons are the highest interpretations of Christian philosophy ever uttered from an American pulpit. 192 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 You seem to me a person who understands human nature through a close study of yourself, having thoroughly tested all natural and acquired tendencies and resistances, and with sympathetic tender- ness can tell others how to live and be victorious. They have helped me in a great and almost nameless trial through which I am now passing. Do you know there are trials, compared with which even that of a lifetime of bodily pain and prostration seems almost trivial ? I cannot understand how you, who have perfect health and happiness, can know so much about the condition of those who have neither. To young ministers of all our tribes they are invaluable. I suppose that scarcely a man among our students will fail to read them, and all who can will own them. To me they are a refresh- ment for the cheer they give in the assurance that the pulpit is not waning. Among the sermons in this volume is one entitled " The Present and the Future Faith," from the text, " When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the Earth ? " which has an historical value. When the future historian of reli- gious thought turns back to the nineteenth century he wiU find that religious faith and hope reached their lowest point at this moment, and were then at their furthest ebb. It is this circumstance which may explain in part the predomi- nance of religious comfort and consolation which prevails in the volume. The sermon above mentioned was preached on Thanksgiving Day, in 1874, when the hall of the Institute of Technology was fiUed with an audience that listened in intense silence, for the preacher had gathered himself up for a repre- sentative utterance. He describes the religious situation from within with deep sympathy and the tenderest pathos. There is no complaint or condemnation for any agency which may be responsible for the dark eclipse through which the church is passing. He refers to it as existing, but as sure to disap- pear. He offers no panacea to cure the evil ; it has gone too deep for any special remedy. When Tennyson had been writing in the fifties there was a battle waging for intel- lectual freedom, for escape from the limitations and crude interpretation of a traditional theology. The battle was over, the freedom had been gained, but with it had come sadness /ET. 41-42] THE TRIAL OF FAITH 193 and uncertainty, the misery of religious doubt. The freedom seemed to be of no avail, the " larger truth " did not follow in its wake. It was the moment which Matthew Arnold has described in his poems, in " Obermann Once More," or the lines on "Dover Beach," — "the wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." This was the preamble of the sermon : — I should like to say a few words upon the religious conditions with which we are all more or less familiar. I am led to think and to speak of the disturbed condition of faith in our time. No subject is more pressing. Even the most careless man's thoughts rest very much upon it. It is discussed and talked of every- where. He proposes to trace some of the forces which have pro- duced the disaster. It is owing chiefly to the wonderful increase of men's knowledge of second causes, which inter- feres with or overclouds their belief in first causes, in provi- dences, in a personal and loving care, which is back of every- thing. There is some truth in the statement that ages of ignorance are ages of faith, in the common saying that much knowledge and elaborate life are dangerous to faith in final principles and forces. It is a magnificent story how natural science has brought out the starry host of second causes from their obscurity and shown how He who works everything works by everything in the world. This profuse discovery of means, however, has clouded thought regarding the Creator. With the religious derangement is associated corruption in political life and formalism in the church. These are really one, at bot- tom, with the scientific skepticism of the time. If one looks at them philosophically he must see that it is truly so. The magnifying of machinery in church or state follows from the loss of first principles of government. " Dogmatism and ritualism are all wrong when they think themselves supremely believing. Both are really symptomatic forms of unbelief." Another feature of the age, making it a "transition time," lies in the contradictions with which it is full. Chief among the contradictions is the conflict between individual VOL. n 194 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 freedom and authority. It is a time that takes its character from its relation to what has gone before and what is to come after rather than from what it contains in itself. This gives it an aspect of restlessness and unquiet. It is full of the sense of having broken with the past and of having not yet appre- hended the future that is to come. But to go back is impos- sible. " The man who, tired of the freedom of individual thought, wants to push the church back into the peace of mere authoritative and traditional religion, and the man who, tired of the noise and confusion of popular government, wishes to push back into feudalism, both are mistaken and will not succeed. Confusion is to be escaped, not by being repressed into stagnation, but by being developed into peace." But for the passing moment the age is dark and hopeless, those to whom we look for guidance are silent, and the best and wisest do not speak. The most pathetic sign of such a transition time is the posi- tion in which it places the best individuals who live in it. The best men in the more fixed and stationary ages speak out the loudest. They stand on certainties, and speak with clear and con- fident tones. The most noticeable and touching thing about such times as ours is the way in which so many of the best men are silent and will not speak. It is so both in politics and religion. The most thoughtful men are always tending to withdraw from a political confusion which they cannot understand and which makes them mere spectators. And how many of the purest and devoutest people whom we know refuse to speak a word in all the tumult of religious and ecclesiastical debate that always is so loud around us. To take again the words of a very remarkable poem of that most representative poet of our time whom I have twice quoted already : — Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modem thought are dumb, Silent they are though not content, And wait to see the future come. Silent -while years engrave the brow. Silent, the best are silent now. But the highest quality in this sermon for the times is the spirit of inextinguishable hope. His optimism is everywhere apparent. He is an optimist because he believes in God. iET. 41-42] THE TRIAL OF FAITH 195 It is not a shallow optimism, repeating empty phrases, but comes from one who was competent to interpret the motives of despair. " I do not certainly say that such a time is best, though really in my heart I do not think the world has ever seen a better. There must be better ones to come. The story of the world is not yet told. ' We are ancients of the earth and in the morning of the times.' " The sermon con- cludes with suggestions as to how a man is to get the best out of his time and shun the worst. He offers no solution of the conflict between religion and science. From that snag he held aloof. He does not depreciate nor denounce the men of science. But he advises his hearers in the first place to cling to the solidity and persistency of nature, the calm- ness and oldness and orderliness of this world of growth and matter. It means something that, in the disorder of thought and feeling, so many men are fleeing to the study of orderly nature. And it is rest and comfort, whatever men are feel- ing, that the seasons come and go. Whatever men are doubt- ing, the rock is firm under their feet, and the steadfast stars pass in their courses overhead. And in the second place he urges them to make much of the experiences of life which are perpetual, — joy, sorrow, friendship, work, charity, rela- tions with one's brethren, for these are eternal. And in the last place, it is not religion itself that is unsettled, but it is only the thoughts about religion that are not clear. Love is at the root of everything. The human soul responds to the appealing nature and life of Jesus Christ. Here is the great last certainty. Be sure of God and nothing can overthrow or drown you. Everything indicates that during these years, that is, from the time he came to Boston, he had concentrated his strength on the study of the religious situation, — why it was that faith had grown weak, and what was the best method of meet- ing the difficulty. As during the war he had thrown himself into the vindication of its great issues, so now he identified himself with the religious conflict, watching the phases it assumed, brooding over the subject in his hours of solitude ; 196 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 in his walks also among men, as he listened to the casual conversation or the tacit assumptions, which implied so much more than was said. At the meetings of the Clericus Club these questions formed the staple element in every discussion. He contributed his share to the talk on these occasions, but among his other endowments he had the capacity of being the best of listeners. Every meeting of the club formed a picture which he studied in silence. He neglected no source of information, and preeminently he studied his own soul in deep sincerity. He was preparing for some larger expression of himself than he had yet given, not seeking the opportunity to make it, but waiting till some call should come when he should be moved to say what was uppermost in his heart. In 1878 Mr. Brooks went a second time to New Haven, giving two lectures before the students of the Yale Divinity School on the " Teaching of Religion." In the summer of the same year he made an address before the alumni of the theological seminary of Virginia, when he took for his sub- ject, "The Relation of the Pulpit to Popular Skepticism." The two themes are closely allied ; in both he was dealing with the question, — how best to meet the spirit of modern unbelief. The lectures on the "Teaching of Religion "are specially significant as showing that he still maintained the superiority of the intellectual powers, giving to them the leadership in the approach to religious truth.^ Again we go back to his early years for that first hint of the task whose accomplishment he was now maturing. Then he had recorded in his note-book the conviction that there was adequate power in life for the transformation of humanity into the divine ideal, but the practical question was how to bring the power to bear upon the will. He had now reached the conclusion that the power of the pulpit was identical with the power of the teacher. The same method which made the ^ The first of these two lectures on the " Teaching of Religion " has been pub- lished in Essays and Addresses, the second is still in mannsoript. The essay on the " Pulpit and Popular Skepticism" was printed in the Princeton Eeview, March, 1879, and is also included in Essays and Addresses. ^T. 41-42] TEACHING OF RELIGION 197 teacher effective could be applied by the preacher. It was an encouraging fact in an age of religious doubt that the remedy might be found in the principle that Christianity could be taught. As the teacher developed the capacities latent in the pupil, so there was in every man the capacity for religion, which must be evoked by the teacher's methods. But the conviction that religion was capable of being taught met with opposition in a vague and general sentiment that it was a thing that could not and ought not to be taught. In meeting this objection, it was necessary to give a definition of religion. Among the many attempts to define it, all of them containing elements of truth, that which Phillips Brooks now gave deserves attention : " Religion is the life of man in gratitude and obedience and gradually developing likeness to God ; " and " the Christian religion is the life of man in gratitude and obedience and growing likeness to God in Christ. Religion is not service simply, nor is it grate- ful love alone, but gratitude assured by obedience, obedience uttering gratitude." ^ Having given his definition of religion, he further clears the way for his purpose by criticising three methods of teach- ing it, — the dogmatic or intellectual, the emotional, and the mechanical: the first, holding that religion is taught when doctrines or truths have been imparted ; the second, dwelling on the importance of moving the feelings ; and the last, insist- ing on the confessional and spiritual directorship. Or, as he puts it again, one teaching religion as truth, another as feel- ing, and another as law or drill. But the true method of teaching religion is where the personality of the teacher in- vades the personality of the scholar. The largest idea which covers every demand of the ministry, he avows it in his own experience, consists " in bringing the personal Christ to the personal human nature." He turns this point over and reit- erates it in many varying forms of expression : " The object of aU the teaching is to bring Christ to men." When this principle is recognized as fundamental, other methods fall ^ Essays and Addresses, p. 35. 198 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 into their true relationship ; doctrine, emotion, and conduct cease to be counted as valuable in themselves, and are valued as avenues through which Christ, the personal Christ, may come to the soul. He has much to say about Christianity considered as doc- trine. He recognizes the righteousness of the reaction in the popular mind against the assumption that men are to be saved by right opinions. But because men are not saved by intel- lectual belief is no reason for discarding doctrines. He pro- tests against any tendency to " soften " the truth or pare it down to meet men's wishes. He recalls TertuUian's words. Credo quia impossibile, as the expression of no rare experi- ence : — It is the religion of most demands that has most ruled the world. The easy faiths have been the weak faiths. Men like to feel heroic in their faith; and always it has been easier to excite fanaticism than to build up a quiet, reasonable belief. It would be a wretched falsehood, and one which would no doubt defeat itself, if a preacher tried to take advantage of this fact of human nature ; but it may at least come in to help us to resist the dis- position to omit or soften truths in order that men may receive the truth more easily. The hope of a large general belief in Christian truth, more general than any that any past age has wit- nessed, does, no doubt, involve a more reasonable and spiritual presentation of it than the past has seen, but it will never be attained by making truth meagre. . . . The only real assurance against unreal, fantastic, sensational, indulgent teaching about Christ is the teacher's own complete conviction, from his own experience, of the perfection and sufficiency of Christ, just as Christ is. There was much talk in the days when these lectures were delivered of the necessity of doctrinal preaching. It was said of Phillips Brooks that he did not treat of this or that doctrine. " A man says to me, ' Why do you not preach this truth more?' and I reply to him, 'Why should I?' and he answers, ' Because it is a truth which many men are denying, and many other men are forgetting.' But the an- swer is not sufficient. It may be because men are indifferent to it that one ought to preach it, or that may be a reason for ^T. 41-42] TEACHING OF RELIGION 199 feeling that it is not the truth most needed at the moment." As to religious controversy he has a word to say. He does not condemn it, nor dare to wish that all the great contro- versial voices of the past or of the present could be silenced or swept from the pedestals where the admiration of mankind has set them. But there are conditions of the public mind when a man must set his face against controversies. It is bad to cry, " Peace, peace ! " when there is no peace. It is just as bad, in some ways it is worse, to cry, " War, war ! " when there is no war. It seems to me as if, were I a layman in the days when some doctrine had got loose as it were into the wind and was being blown across the Common and up and down the streets, I should go to church on Sunday, not wanting my minister to give me an oracular answer to all the questions which had been started about it, which I should not believe if he did give it, but hoping that out of his sermon I might refresh my knowledge of Christ, get Him, His nature. His work, and His desire for me once more clear before me, and go out more ready to see this disputed truth of the moment in His light and as an utterance of Him. . . . Preaching Christ ! That old phrase, which has been so often the very watchword of cant, how it still declares the true nature of Christian teaching! Not Christianity, but Christ! Not a doc- trine, but a Person ! Christianity only for Christ ! The doctrine only for the Person ! ^ The first of the lectures on the " Teaching of Religion " was occupied with the intellectual aspects of Christianity, and how these were related to the personal Christ and to the actual life of man. He followed still the customary division of the human powers, into intellect, feeling, and wiU, while he protested against it as breaking up the unity of man. His own predominant tendency was intellectual, as it had been from his earliest years. To know for himself, to understand in order that he might believe, had been his ambition. But he recognized in himself other methods of knowing than through the intellect alone. The full perception of truth must come through the quickened feeling, and above all through the obedient will. In this threefold psychological 1 Essays and Addresses, pp. 49, 54. 200 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 order Christian doctrine or truth is to be regarded as a clear glass held squarely between God and man in order to the reflection of the pure reality ; feeling is to furnish the middle term between truth and duty ; and duty is obedience to God's will, which unites the service of our brethren with the culture of ourselves. But he adds : " There is one thing which I value more than this. What impresses us most in the best, the most Godlike men we ever see is, I think, the inability to tell in them what of their power is intellectual and what is moral. It is the characteristic of all spiritual advancement that it asserts more and more the unity of man, makes him less and less a bundle of faculties, more a man, made in the image of God, who is one God in the complete harmony and cooperation of all his life." But the familiar classification he stiU found convenient, and in the second lecture he considered the teaching of religion as it is related to the feeling and the will. Under feeling he in- cludes worship. He does not restrict worship to the prayer and praise of the congregation ; preaching and architecture and music have their important relation to worship as the outcome of feeling. He dwells on the mystery of feeling, " We talk about it as if we knew about it, yet what a mysterious, variable, and imponderable thing it is." There occurs a pas- sage here which is so exact a description of his own preach- ing, and his own mysterious power, that it deserves quota- tion : — A man comes and stands before a multitude of his fellow men and tells them a story. It is of something which happened long ago, yet which concerns them. It is of something whicla happened in one special time and set of circumstances, yet it is universal. As he speaks, his fellow men who listen begin to change before him. They flush and glow; . . . they tremble in their seats; they almost leap to their feet ; tears start into their eyes. It is a most attractive spectacle. It fires the speaker, and he goes on to make yet more intense and glowing the emotion that reacts on him. One who stands by and gazes, though he may not hear a word, is caught with the thrilling, beating atmosphere, and finds himself trembling with mysterious desires. The voice stops but the spell is not broken. The people rise and go away exalted. ^T. 41-42] TEACHING OF RELIGION 201 They tread the pavement as if it sprang beneath their feet and breathe the air as if it were alive with beautiful and serious thoughts. The importance of feeling in religion is strongly urged. To the lack of feeling is due the defect in modern architecture as compared with other ages, when true feeling found expres- sion in every part of the edifice : — I think it is not wrong, it is not extravagant, to say that the artistic element in almost all of it (our present ecclesiastical art) comes in as a stranger. It claims a place purely for its own beautiful conception or skilful conception. Whether it be an imitation of something old, something which once uttered truths which men do not now believe or which they realize in other ways ... or whether it be original and new embodying the sense of beauty which belongs to our own time, the reason of its unsatis- factoriness is still the same, — it does not stand genuinely between truth and duty, the truth and duty of the present day, interpret- ing one to the other. The architect draws a plan for a church building, so far as its artistic element is concerned, because as a student he admires that type of a church in some past age, or because simply as an artist he feels its absolute beauty, and not because it is the form in which he finds the natural utterance of the Christian thought of which his soul is full, nor because he is thinking of the power and inspiration which it ought to exercise upon the men who are to worship within its walls. And the decorator draws dreadful mechanical patterns or paints his artifi- cial saints upon your walls with the same imperfection of purpose, and so with the same failure of result. But none the less is it true that the architect who builds the perfect Christian church for any age must be a man who believes in the Christian truth which that age realizes, and who is enthusiastic in the desire that the Christian men and women of the age shall do the Christian duty, outward and inward, which the conditions of their age demand and make possible. . . . He must be neither the pious medisevalist nor the modern skeptic. He must be the modern Christian. He takes the opportunity of speaking about music, and especially music in the churches. Here are the thoughts which were running through his mind as he stood in church or pulpit while the service of song was performed : — I think that many of the disputes about its methods are seen 0.O2 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 to be of little consequence, and many of the dogmatic decisions about those methods appear shallow and false. Disputes about methods always grow loud and positive in proportion as the con- ception of purpose is vague. Shall all the people sing, or shall the trained and gifted voices of a few declare the praises of the Lord ? I believe in congregational singing. I believe it should altogether be the chief and preponderant method of our worship. But remember that the question altogether should come first, what is the purpose of singing at all ? I suppose it is twofold. First, church music is the general utterance of the melodiousness, the joy, the poetry of religion. And second, it is the special means by which a special truth is fastened on the soul, and a special duty made winning and authoritative. Now there are two ways in which any strong feeling finds satisfaction and increase. One is by the man, in whose heart it is, uttering it himself in what best way he can; the other is by his hearing its ideal utter- ance from the lips most gifted to declare it. . . . When a great congregation is to praise the Lord and to learn truth and duty by the melody of song, I for one should be sorry to have it lose either of the two exaltations, either that which comes of the great, simple, sublime utterance of its own emotion, or that which comes from listening while voices which the Lord has filled with the gold and silver of His choicest and most mysterious harmony reveal to us the full beauty of truth and the full sweetness and sacredness of duty. There is another passage in this lecture in which he speaks of the music of preaching, and throws light upon his own work in the pulpit : — "What I have said of music applies, I think, to all the graces and appealing tones of the preacher's art. There is a music of preach- ing. What the melody of a hymn is to its words, that the elo- quence of the preacher is to his truth. . . . The Quaker hushes the sacrilegious chant, and then listens to the hymn of the inner life. The Puritan breaks the window, and then paints in soft or lurid words a picture from his pulpit which tempts or scares the souls who listen and believe, and weep or tremble. Where is the difference ? . . . Words like notes or colors may lead from truth to duty, or they may stand helpless, leading from nothing to nothing. We are afraid of eloquence nowadays, and no doubt our fear of it has borne good fruit. There never was a time when so many men wrote and spoke good English. . . . The only mis- giving which one has, I think, the only want which one allows himself to feel m reading the great abundance of good writing ^T. 41-42] TEACHING OF RELIGION 203 which he meets with everywhere, is in a certain absence of that glow and richness, whose absence he knows is the price he pays for the crystal purity of the pages he reads. He sees that elo- quence of style or gesture has acquired a suspicion of unreality. It has gone out of favor in our colleges. It only lingers in our pulpits here and there. The fact that there is where it lingers makes us sometimes hope that there is where it shall be born into new power. We wonder whether it may not be for the pulpit, having learnt with all the other writing and speaking of the age that the primary necessity of written or spoken words is clearness, then to assert that clearness is more, not less, clear for the warm glow of earnest feeling, and to give back to the best writing and speaking of the age to come a power of personal appeal and legit- imate attractivene^ in return for the necessity of careful thought and clear expression which no doubt the pulpit has learned from the best writing and speaking of this accurate but uninspired age. Having treated of the place of the intellect and of the feel- ing in the teaching of religion, he comes to the will, and to obedience he pays high tribute. To the will as to the goal and termination come the intellect and the feeling. In his definition of religion he puts obedience as the crowning glory of the whole, — obedience, in gratitude for what we know of God in Christ. No ancient Roman, whether pagan or Christian, ever asserted more strongly the claims of obedi- ence to be the highest virtue. A most impressive catena of passages might be selected from his sermons in which he glorifies obedience. It is not the badge of servitude, but of freedom and equality. It is the mightiest of words, be- cause it stands for the final expression of the man in whom the knowledge of Christ has entered, taking possession of the whole range of being. The obedience of Christ was the crown of his glory, the badge of his divinity. And in order to obedience the freedom of the will, in every sense of the word "freedom," is the inalienable prerogative of man. The point of view from which he treated the subject of obedience in this second of his lectures on the "Teaching of Religion " was its importance and relationship in a system of ethics. It was possible to conceive the service of others as the motive of duty, or duty might be urged as a means of self-culture. He accepted both theories as legitimate, but 204 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 subordinated both to duty conceived as obedience to the will of God. The hard sense of obligation in the one, or the danger of self -consciousness in the other, disappeared when duty sprang from gratitude and love to a person, — to God revealed in Christ. This was the ground on which Christ rested when inculcating the seemingly ungracious duties of life, " I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that spitefully use you and persecute you ; " and not merely that His disciples would thus engage in the service of men, or attain higher reaches in self-culture, although these objects are implied, but " that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven." The lectures on the " Teaching of Religion " were aimed to meet the conditions of the hour, — " times like these when men's power of believing seems to be weak and sickly." He comes to the subject more directly in the essay on " The Pul- pit and Popular Skepticism." The prevailing type of skepti- cism differs from that of other ages, in that it is marked by its completeness and its despair. It does not merely reject this or that doctrine, but the whole body of the Christian faith. It goes so deep that it has a perpetual tendency to defeat itself. Because it offers no substitute for the discarded reli- gion, it leaves men's religious natures unprovided for and hungry, and in this there is hope, for it gives to Christian- ity the perpetual advantage of human nature. In speaking of the deeper sources of unbelief he says : — It is not the difficulty of this or that doctrine that makes men skeptics to-day. It is rather the play of all life upon the funda- mental grounds and general structure of faith. It is the meeting in the commonest minds of great perpetual tides of thought and instinct which neutralize each other, such as the tides of faith and providence, the tides of pessimism and optimism, the tides of self- sacrifice and selfishness. Let this not seem too large or lofty an explanation of the com- monplace phenomena of doubt, which are thick around us in our congregations in the world. The reason why my hearer, who sits moodily or scornfully or sadly before me in his pew, and does not ^T. 41-42] PULPIT AND SKEPTICISM 205 cordially believe a, word of what I preach to him, the reason why he disbelieves is not that he has found the evidence for inspiration or for Christ's divinity or for the Atonement unsatisfactory. It is that the aspect of the world, which is fate, has been too strong for the fundamental religion of the world, which is Providence. And the temptation of the world, which is self-indulgence, has seemed to make impossible the precept of religion, which is self- surrender; and the tendency of experience, which is hopelessness, has made the tendency of the gospel, which is hope, to seem unreal and unbelievable. Because this is the character of the skepticism of the time it camiot be overcome by any special skill in proving this truth or disproving that error. " The main method of meet- ing it must be not an argument, but a man. The method v^hich includes all other methods must be in his own man- hood, in his character, in his being such a man, and so appre- hending truth himself that truth through him can come to other men." Among the most needed and the rarest quali- ties that such a man must have is candor. The mind of the people, and of the clergy also, is confused and doubtful about the once received doctrine of "verbal inspiration." Another doctrine caUed in question is that of everlasting punishment ; there are those who reject it, while others are timidly asking whether a man can be a Christian and yet keep a hope for all God's children. Let the clergy be candid in dealing with these points. " A large acquaintance with clerical life has led me to think that almost any company of clergymen gathering together and talking freely to one an- other wiU express opinions which would greatly surprise and at the same time relieve the congregations who ordinarily listen to these ministers." A venerable preacher standing in his own pulpit had said not long before that no man was a Christian who did not believe that this world was made in six literal days. Such a statement should not be allowed to pass without most clear and earnest disavowal. The old talk about holding the outworks as long as possible before retreat- ing to the citadel is based upon a metaphor than which none could be more mischievous. It is a dangerous experiment 2o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 for parents to try with their children, teaching them what they themselves have long since ceased to believe. The true man must also escape from partisanship, and from the reproach of it. What hurts the clergy is the idea in the popular mind that they are committed to these things, and are no longer seekers for truth, but advocates of certain accepted positions. Let the clergy at least cease to use ques- tionable arguments, and at any rate prevent their ministry from seeming like a scramble for adherents rather than a Christlike love for souls. He repeats what he had already said in his lectures on the " Teaching of Religion," that it is a foolish and base idea to suppose that in days like these men want to have Christian truth made slight and easy for them : — In times of staggering faith, as is shown in Christian history, men need the whole truth. They should not be asked to believe just as little as possible and told that the most exacting articles of faith may be cast away. ... It would be no strange issue of such times as we are living in if out of them should come a great demand for difficult doctrine, a time of superstition, a fever to succeed the chill ; for the spirit that cries, " Credo quia impos- sihile," the heroic spirit of faith, is too deep in our human nature for any one century to have eradicated it. That we may guard against such reaction into superstition, as well as meet the present infidelity, what we need is not more easiness, but more simplicity in the doctrine which we preach, and in our way of preaching it. In other words, it is not a smaller amount of doctrine, hut it is a larger unity of doctrine. It is a more profound entrance into the heart of doctrine, in which its unity and simplicity reside, a more true grasp and enforcement of its spiritual meaning. He illustrates his meaning by reference to the doctrine of endless punishment. The best way of meeting the subject is to cease to preach about it, and to seek to bring the power of the person of Christ to bear on the lives of men, awakening in them a dread of sin and a desire for holiness. " I will not care nearly so much that a man should hold what I believe to be the truth about future punishment as that he should be deeply convinced of the enormity and persistency of sin." It is vitally important that all religious truths should be ^T. 41-4^] PULPIT AND SKEPTICISM 207 shown to have some necessary connection with righteousness of character. Only in this way can they be established in the minds of men. There are doctrinal statements, which puzzle and bewilder, which are in reality excrescences on the faith and must be cast away by the natural and healthy action of the system. There are doctrinal statements, which once were true and did vast good and yet were only temporary aspects of the truth. There are men living by them still, as men are still seeing the light of the stars extinguished in the heavens long ago. The time will come when these temporary statements will disappear, and when their light goes out it will be of all importance that they recognize the sun by whose light these accidental and temporary points of its exhi- bition have been shining. This sun of all truth is the person of Christ. The characteris- tic of our modern Christianity, which correlates it with all apos- tolic times, is the substitution of loyalty to a person in place of belief in doctrines as the essence and test of Christian life. This is the simplicity and unity by which the Gospel can become effec- tive. These are the ideas of Christianity which are in conflict to-day, — one magnifying doctrine whose great sin is heresy ; the other magnifying obedience. To follow the latter is in these days, I think, the best method of dealing in the pulpit with popular skepticism. The superiority of this method, whose essence is the personal relationship with Christ, lies in this — that it ofBers "the highest picture of the combination of stability with progress while, on the other hand, the intellectual conception is always sacrificing stability to progress or progress to stability." In this connection he takes occasion to speak of the subject of Christian Unity : — I do not see the slightest promise in any dimmest distance of what is called the organic unity of Christendom on the basis of episcopacy or any other basis. I do not see the slightest chance of the entire harmonizing of Christian doctrine throughout the Christian world, — that dream which men have dreamed ever since Christ ascended into Heaven, that sight which no man's eye has seen in any age. But I do see signs that, keeping their different thoughts concerning Him and His teachings, men, loyal to Christ, owning His love, trusting His love, may be united in the only union which is really valuable wherever His blessed name is known. In that union, and in that alone, can I find myself truly 2o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1877-78 one alike with Peter and with Paul, alike with Origen and Atha- nasius and Augustine, alike with Luther and with Zwingle and with Calvin and with St. Francis and with Bishop Andrews and with Dr. Channing, alike with the prelate who ordains me and with the Methodist or Baptist brother who is trying to bring men to the same Christ in the same street where I am working. And no union which will not include all these ought wholly to satisfy us, because no other will wholly satisfy the last great prayer of Jesus. The essay offers some practical suggestions. Since the popular skepticism is one in character with the skepticism of the scholars and of the schools, therefore the Christian min- ister should keep himself acquainted with the newest develop- ments of thought. He urges the importance of preaching Christ, but would enlarge its range. There must be no sacri- fice of the intellect. The Christian minister should be so familiar with what men are thinking and believing that he can know the currents of pre- sent thought, see where they cross and oppose, where they may be made to harmonize with the thought of Christ. This familiar- ity is something which must be constantly kept up in the active ministry. But its foundations ought to be laid in the theological school. And so he concludes with this statement of his attitude : — My one great comprehensive answer then to the question. What is the best method of dealing in the pulpit with popular skepti- cism ? is really this : Make known and real to men by every means you can command the personal Christ, not doctrine about Him, but Him; strike at the tyranny of the physical life by the power of His spiritual presence. Let faith mean, make faith mean, trusting Him and trying to obey Him. Call any man a Chris- tian who is following Him. Denounce no error as fatal which does not separate a soul from Him. Offer Him to the world as He offered and is forever offering Himself. CHAPTER VIII 1879 THE BOHLEN LECTUBES ON THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS The Bohlen Lectures on the "Influence of Jesus" were published in 1879. This work must be regarded as one of Phillips Brooks's most important contributions to the develop- ment of theological science. More even than his lectures on Preaching may it be said to be his autobiography. He has here expressed himself most fully in describing his own inner life and the deeper motives which inspired his preach- ing. Incidentally, also, he has spoken upon many important points correlated to his main theme. The treatise is a small one, allowing little opportunity for expansion, but the expan- sion will be found in his sermons. It is now nearly the lifetime of a generation since this treatise was given to the world. Issues then living have been determined and new ones have arisen. The book has fulfilled its true mission in meeting a widespread popular need and in changing the trend of religious thought. Its large circulation bears witness to its influence. But it requires some comment here in order to bring out its full significance, to show wherein its power lay in meeting the age, — in closing a chapter of confusion and contradiction in religious thought as well as introducing a new era in religious life. To those who are passing through the mood of the last generation the book has still a special mission. But it has also certain en- during qualities which secure its permanent place in religious literature. And in the first place, to touch upon its autobiographical value, it shows this to have been the main characteristic of PhiUips Brooks, whether as a man or as a preacher and theologian, — that he was from the first in search of a VOL. n 2IO PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 stronger religion and a stronger Christ than the age pre- sented. He needed it first for himself and then for others. His powerful tumultuous nature cried out for strength, for some one to obey, whose wiU would subdue him and bring him into the captivity wherein lies perfect freedom. There is a passage in his essay on the " Pulpit and Popular Skep- ticism " which must be taken not only as his appeal to others, but as the outcry of his own soul, where he calls for a powerful Christ, " a Christ so completely powerful that once perfectly present with a human soul He must master it and it must yield to Him. If the reason why men doubt Him is that they do not, cannot, will not, see Him, then I think it must be certain that what they need is a completer, more living presentation of His personality, so that He shall stand before them and claim what always was His claim, ' Believe in Me,' — not ' Believe this or that about Me,' but ' Believe in Me.' " ^ Like all great men and strong natures, Phillips Brooks could live only in contact with strength and greatness. For this reason he had been fascinated by Carlyle, by the study of Mohammed and Luther and Cromwell, — men to whom he had first been introduced in "Heroes and Hero Worship." But as Carlyle had been disappointed in his search for great men in history, so also did Phillips Brooks become disenchanted with Carlyle. For Carlyle had passed over in silence, we need not here discuss for what reason, the strongest man in history. There is one passage in his writ- ings where one would have expected at least some allusion to the Founder of Christianity, but it is not made. The passage may be given as indicating the point where Phillips Brooks made his departure from the famous teacher. It is a passage significant also as showing how men were content with talking about a situation without explaining it : — How did Christianity arise and spread abroad among men? Was it by institutions and establishments and well-arranged system of mechanism ? Not so ; on the contrary, in all past and existing institutions for those ends, its divine Spirit has invariably been found to languish and decay. It arose in the majestic deeps of ^ Of. Essays and Addresses, p. 75. ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 211 man's soul; and was spread abroad by the "preaching of the word, " by simple, altogether natural and individual efiEorts, and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it; and its heavenly light shone, as it still shines, and as sun or star will ever shine, through the whole dark destinies of man.* It is interesting to note at how early a period Phillips Brooks fastened upon the truth which was to underlie and control his thinking. He had begun his studies for the ministry with some grave misgivings as to whether the preacher could wield the power which the times demanded. He soon came to the conclusion that the preacher's influence depended on his character as a man, that truth was contar gious through personality. Thus in a sermon preached so early as 1861, at the age of twenty-five, on the text, St. John xiv. 6 : " I am the way and the truth and the life," he had expressed his conviction that the defect of the age was its tendency to seek after abstract truth divested of personal relations : — I maintain that all such impersonal truth, when it is acquired, however much it may do for the sharpening and stocking the brains and improving the outward conditions of mankind, is as bad as useless as far as any immediate effect upon the character and temperament is concerned. All truth must be brought, in order to be effective, through a personal medium. Which of us can dare to say that he would hold the most effective truths that he believes in just as much and just in the same way as he does now, if they had come to him anonymously, if they had reached him so that he could not doubt their truth, but resting on no fellow man's authority; if some night the stars had spelt out the story in their ordered courses, or it had woven itself in the filmy tissues of a dream, or the morning winds had awaked us with it, as they blew their message across our sleep ? We have some personality behind them all; a mother's voice yet trembles in them, a father's authority makes them solemn, a teacher's enthusiasm will not let us count them trivial, and so they first have gained and so they still hold their great power over us. Yes, it is the personal power that is mighty in the world. It is not merely a difference between different orders of minds, that the higher are more moved by abstract truth, while the lower, the 1 Carlyle, Miscellanies, vol. ii. p. 242. 212 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 great mass of mankind, are open only to the more palpable touch of personal power. That is the conceit of culture. All men are influenced mostly by embodied truth, by truth coming to them through some relation of a fellow man. . . . The trouble which so many have in finding any power in the truths that they believe is, that strange as it may seem, Chris- tianity is to multitudes of people a purely abstract system. It has lost its personal aspect. But Christianity is what? The service of Christ. Its very essence is its personality. It is all built about a person. Take Him out and it all falls to pieces. Just because He has been taken out of the religion which many of us call our Christianity, just for that reason is our Christianity a poor thing of the remote brain, bringing no peace to our hearts, and no strength to our hands, no comfort to our sorrows, and no benediction to our joy.' With such a conviction in his mind he had rejected the conception of Christ offered by Strauss in his " Leben Jesu," where the Christ-idea was presented as the essential thing, and His personality of no account ; so that it would have made no difference in the result if Christ had been the product of a mythical tendency, not an actual personage, but a creation of the human mind, at a moment when the tides of human aspiration were flowing strongly. All this now seems remote. It has become hard to understand that such a view should have been put forth by a serious thinker. But the work of Strauss, in its first form, and translated by George Eliot, had great vogue in the middle period of the nineteenth cen- tury. Again, Phillips Brooks felt repugnance for the conception of Christ in Eenan's " Vie de Jesu," where Christ is drawn as an amiable creature, full of soft and tender sentiment, with no strong definite purpose of a mission to the world, acted upon from without, changing His attitude, involving himself in contradiction and inconsistency, full of charming na'ive impressions, but in his softness possessing strength. It is said of the author that when the Germans were at the gates of Paris, he stood at a window watching the careless people 1 Cf. The Message of Christ to Manhood, being the William. Belden Noble Lectures for 1898, p. 12, where this passage is referred to in a study of Phillips Brooks. ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 213 as they came and went, and remarked, " Voila ce qui nous sauvera, c'est la mollesse de cette population." It was in 1865 that the book " Ecce Homo " appeared, by the late Professor J. R. Seeley, to which no one gave more earnest welcome than PhiUips Brooks. It may be called the English " Life of Jesus " as compared with the works of Eenan and Strauss. It took English ground in discussing the subject, rendering the verdict of cool common sense by an inquirer who brushed aside as irrelevant the difficulties created by Biblical criticism. The author refused to discuss the actuality or the possibility of the miracles, or whether John wrote the Fourth Gospel, whether Luke or Matthew borrowed from Mark, or what were the sources of Mark, or when exactly these narratives were written. He simply assumed that they were in the main trustworthy, and that the disciples believed that Christ worked miracles. This assumption was sufficient for his argument. One element in the strength of the book lay in this, that when the author had presented the picture of Christ, it so explained and justified the Christ of history that difficulties about the nar- ratives and sources no longer embarrassed. A strong man, the strongest man in history, with a clear view of His purpose from the moment He began to teach ; no mere teacher uttering placidly His sentiments, but from the first assuming the posi- tion of an authoritative lawgiver, enforcing His word by the most powerful of sanctions, calling into existence a society, legislating for that society to the end of time, — this was in outline the Christ in the pages of " Ecce Homo." " The achievement of Christ in founding by His single will and power a structure so durable and so universal is like no other achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the masterpieces of speculation flimsy and unsub- stantial. When we speak of it the commonplaces of admi- ration fail us altogether." ^ The welcome which Phillips Brooks gave to " Ecce Homo " did not mean that he accepted its presentation of Christ as » Cf. Am. ed. p. 354. a 14 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 complete or final. We shall see that the total picture of Jesus in his mind after years of reflection was quite different. But it included at least the conception of strength and authority, and also the method, which waived the questions raised by Biblical criticism in regard to the genuineness and authenticity of New Testament writings, as having no practi- cal bearing upon the final issue or on the work of the preacher. He followed the conflicts of scholarship on these points, but never allowed them to embarrass his mind. When Phillips Brooks came to Boston in 1869 he found that the New England Transcendentalists had left their in- fluence on the public mind. This brilliant group of scholars and thinkers were asking the question. What is truth, and what are the canons for determining its authority? The answer uniformly given was that the authority was within the soul, and faith was the direct vision of the truth. This was positive teaching, but it was accompanied by large nega- tions. No special unique authority was accorded to the books of Scripture or to the person of Christ. Christ was spoken of with respect and even reverence as a great teacher, but it was one of the conventionalities of transcendental speech to associate Him with others, more particularly with Socrates or Plato. It became a sort of commonplace among them to speak of " Socrates and Jesus and Mohammed." It is said of one of those eminent among this brilliant school of thinkers and talkers that on a certain occasion, speaking before a small audience, he ventured to place himself in the same category, — " Socrates, Jesus, and myself." He even de- clared that he was willing to make the words of Jesus his own, and to proclaim, " I am the resurrection and the life." When one of his audience demurred, querying whether he would be believed if he made such a proclamation, his reply was that such a demurrer could only come from an unregener- ate Calvinist. The Transcendental school had found its chief religious exponent in Boston in Theodore Parker (1860). He ac- cepted its principle to the fullest extent, that the inward, individual assurance of truth was its highest and sole author- ;et. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 215 ity. He was a courageous man, fighting his way through great difficulties in heroic fashion. But he became entangled in controversy ; his tone grew more aggressive and vehement as he assumed the position of an iconoclast. He made no effort to appreciate his opponent's attitude. He did not recognize that sober combination of the transcendental principle with historic Christianity which gave distinction and influence to Coleridge, marking a new era in the theology of the Church of England. In his vehement desire to enforce the truth he saw he made utterances which did him injustice, and taken without qualification did injury to others. Here are passages from his famous sermon on " The Transient and the Per- manent in Christianity" which reveal at once his strength and weakness : — That pure ideal religion which Jesus saw on the mount of his vision and lived out in the lowly life of a Galilean peasant ; which transforms his cross into an emblem of all that is holiest on earth ; which makes sacred the ground he trod and is dearest to the best of men, most true to what is truest in them, — cannot pass away. Let men improve never so far in civilization, or soar never so high on the wings of religion and love, they never can outgo the flight of truth and Christianity. It will always be above them. Yet in this same sermon he denies that the truth which Jesus taught depended on His personality for its propagating power in the world : — Almost every sect that has ever been makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, and not the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves or the authority of God who sent him into the world. Yet it seems difficult to conceive any reason why moral and religious truths should rest for their support on the personal authority of their revealer, any more than the truths of science on that of him who makes them known first or most clearly. It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, one would naturally think, must rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority.-' 1 Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion, p. 244, Boston, ed. 1842. 2i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 Even Parker's friends and sympathizers were disturbed by this last statement. Mr. Martineau called it a " painful para- dox," intimating that he used language in other places incon- sistent with it. But Parker was on fire with his conviction that every soul should be the judge and arbiter of truth in virtue of the gift of immediate vision. Painful though the paradox might be, he repeated it in his later " Discourse of Eeligion," and in more intense and aggravated form, "If Christianity be true at aU it would be just as true if Herod or Catiline had taught it." Phillips Brooks sought to avoid controversy, and his book on the " Influence of Jesus " is impersonal, reviewing the religious situation of his time, yet mentioning no names or treatises, although familiar with them all. But the following passage from its opening pages, where he states his purpose, shows that he felt called upon to resist the disintegrating tendency in the popular mind, springing from the belief that the personal character of the teacher may be disconnected from the message : — What is the power of Christianity over mankind, its source, its character, its issue ? That is the question which I wish to study with you in these four lectures I have been invited to deliver. ... I have been led to think of Christianity and to speak of it, at least in these lectures, not as a system of doctrine, but as a personal force, behind which and in which there lies one great and inspiring idea, which it is the work of the personal force to impress upon the life of man, with which the personal force is always struggling to fill mankind. The personal force is the nature of Jesus, full of humanity, full of divinity, and power- ful with a love for man which combines in itself every element that enters into love of the completest kind. . . . Every man's power is his idea multiplied by and projected through his per- sonality. The special actions which he does are only the points at which his power shows itself. . . . The power of Jesus is the idea of Jesus multiplied and projected through the person of Jesus. . . . The message entrusted to the Son of God when He came to be the Saviour of mankind was not only something which He knew and taught; it was something which He was. . . . The idea and the person are so mingled that we cannot separate them. He is the truth, and whoever receives Him becomes the son of God.* 1 Influence of Jesus, pp. 12, 13. ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 217 And again, in another passage, he makes this more definite allusion, " Not from simple brain to simple brain, as the rea- soning of Euclid comes to its students, but from total charac- ter to total character, comes the New Testament from God to man." 1 We are admitted behind the scenes, as it were, when we turn to the note-book, in which Mr. Brooks is seen making the preparation for his book on the " Influence of Jesus." He rarely changed his plan when he had once fixed upon it ; but in this case he made a notable change. He had intended to call his subject " Faith and Life." The respective lectures were to be entitled (1) " Faith and Morals ; " (2) " Faith and Society ; " (3) " Faith in Relation to Pain and Plea- sure;" (4) "Faith and the Intellectual Life." He drew up a synopsis of each lecture, rich in spiritual suggestiveness. His object was a defence of the spiritual interpretation of life. Then suddenly, and as it would seem at the last moment, he changed his subject, and hastily modified the plan of treatment. He may have felt that this first scheme was weak in that it put him in controversial or defensive attitude, not the most effective method of accomplishing his aim. As he came closer to his task the real motive which inspired him was growing more clear and definite. Behind the Christian faith and life stood the Christ. To give the portrait of Him anew to the world was better to accom- plish the end in view. Here are some of the sentences from his note-book which betray first the working of his mind : — For centuries the Christian faith has been and still is making life. We have Life from which to tell what the faith is and Faith to tell what the life must be. What is Christianity that it makes such men as these ? How far may we legitimately think that the present condition of the social and personal life of Christendom is due to Christian Faith? Very largely. Point to church, Bible, uniqueness of Christendom, and unwillingness of all men to disown first Chris- tian ideas. The Faith and the Man, then, we want to trace in relation to one another. The Faith we find in the Book to which the heart 1 Influence of Jesus, p. 234. 2i8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 of man has always returned more truly than it thinks. The man we find in History. — Observation and consciousness. — There are two questions — What has Christianity made of man ? and What, when it is freed from all hindrance and given its full power, can it make of him? Such an inquiry, it will be seen, was too vast, and almost beyond human capacity to execute. Still it is interesting to know that it was in his mind, nor could it have failed to pro- duce fruit. It was a larger background, vague, perhaps, and unexplored in all its subtle unperceived relations, yet rein- forcements came from it at every turn. The thing to do, the simplest and yet the truest, the method which could not be questioned, was to study the influence of Jesus as the seed which had been actually lodged in the heart of humanity. The lectures were written with the greatest rapidity, for the time at his disposal was short. They were begun at the Christmas season, when the claims of parish and social life were most pressing, but he brought to them the preparation of years. He wrote them out of his own soul, full of emotion and intellectual fervor. Many of his sermons were here condensed, a sermon in a paragraph ; such, for example, as he preached when Principal TuUoch was listening, with its flash of insight and reality. The constant study of the Bible and of the life of Christ, wherein he had gained more than he could give in yearly Bible class or Lenten meditations, or "Wednesday evening lectures, was yielding its unsuspected contributions. The book was done in haste, but it was the product of the long, slow processes of life. And still another circumstance must be mentioned, most important of all. As he wrote his heart was very tender, for he was passing through a great sorrow in the last illness and death of his father. That event in his experience left its impression on his theology, for his theology was the reflex of the revelation of life. It is intended in these remarks that follow to point out some features of the book, in its methods and conclusions, which will throw light on the position that Phillips Brooks occupied in his age. In the first place, he attempted the ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 219 portrayal of a strong Christ, whose mastery was capable of dominating every soul, and of subduing all humanity to Him- self. To this end he boldly identified the personality of Jesus with the essence of His religion. By personality he understood the inmost nature and character, that within a man which rules the life. He had brought out this truth in his " Lectures on Preaching," and elsewhere in his writ- ings. But now he drags it once more into the foreground of a great picture, holding it up to his hearers with tireless energy, and with all the strength of eloquent conviction. Others had thought of it, perhaps only a few would have denied it. But everything depends on the prominence which is given to a principle. This is originality, this constitutes power, to make a truth supreme through the setting which is given it. Thus it becomes a new truth. Here lay the distinctive dif- ference between him and his predecessors. It was not enough to present Christ as a moral Guide, uttering ethical precepts worthy of obedience ; nor as the Master, imparting knowledge and conveying information about the spiritual world. He was indeed the Way, and He was the Truth, but He was these because He was first the Life. This principle of the identification of the personality of the teacher with his message, the culmination of precept and of truth in a life, might be in danger of becoming a formula, another shibboleth in religion, an idea abstract and unprofit- able, unless the secret of the personality of Jesus could be un- veiled, and become the living possession of humanity. This was the task, undertaken in the " Influence of Jesus," to present the idea which inspired Him, the clue to His divine conscious- ness, and the motive of His acts. This inspiring idea is " the Fatherhood of God and the childhood of every man in Him." Upon the race and upon the individual, Jesus is always bring- ing into more and more perfect revelation the certain truth that man and every man is the child of God. This is the sum of the work of the Incarnation. A hundred other statements regarding it, regarding Him who was incarnate are true ; but all statements concerning Him hold their truth within this truth, — that Jesus came to restore the fact of God's fatherhood to man's knowledge and to its central place of power over man's life (p. 12). 220 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 There is a change in the tone of the Bohlen Lectures when compared with the Yale Lectures on the "Teaching of Reli- gion." Then religion had been defined to be the life of man in gratitude, obedience, and growing likeness to Christ. Now it is conceived as the "relation of childhood and fatherhood between man and God." Man is the child of God by nature. He is ignorant and rebel- lious — the prodigal child of God ; but his ignorance and rebellion never break that first relationship. It is always a child ignorant of his Father; always a child rebellious against his Father. That is what makes the tragedy of human history, and always prevents human sin from becoming an insignificant and squalid thing. To reassert the childhood and fatherhood as an unlost truth, and to reestablish its power as the central fact of life; to tell men that they were, and to make them actually to be, the sons of God — that was the purpose of the coming of Jesus and the shaping power of his life. . . . It is more important than we often think, that we should grasp the general idea, the general purpose, of the life of Jesus. The Gospels become to us a new book when we no longer read them merely as the anecdotes of the life of one who, with a great, kind heart, went through the world promiscuously doing good as oppor- tunities occurred to Him. The drifting and haphazard currents gather themselves together, and we are borne on with the full and enthusiastic impulse of a great river which knows itself and knows the sea it seeks. And when the ruling idea is this which fills the life of Jesus, it is doubly true that only by clearly seizing it can we get at the heart and meaning of His life (pp. 16, 17). It had been the usage in the Evangelical school, in which Mr. Brooks was reared, to speak only of the baptized or the regenerate as the children of God. The stress was laid upon the grace by which the change was accomplished that made a man a child of God, who before the change was not entitled to the name. Phillips Brooks did not deny the change, nor its necessity; he affirmed it in all his preaching, declaring it to be wrought of God. But he builds upon the antecedent truth that every man is the child of God by nature. It is because he is the child by nature that he is capable of becom- ing the child by grace. In making this truth a first principle in his teaching, he was not departing from, but rather reaffirm- ing what the Church of England, followed by the Protestant ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 221 Episcopal Church in America, had asserted in its standards. There were those in the Anglican Church who had preceded him in building on this truth, — Maurice and Kobertson, Ewing, the Bishop of Argyle, and many others. He differed from them, if he differed at all, in making it the basis of his powerful appeal in the pulpit, as also in making it the cen- tral point from which by necessary inference proceeded all other religious teaching. He brought together nature and grace, the creation and the redemption, in organic relation- ship. All men alike everywhere inherited in virtue of their birthright the privilege to pray, " Our Father, which art in heaven." Surely, we cannot be wrong if we say positively that to Christ himself the truth that man was God's child by nature was the great fact of man's existence; and the desire that man might be God's child in reality was the motive of His own life and work (p. 20). The merit and power of this idea of divine fatherhood revealed in the natural order and carried up into the spiritual is seen first in Christian morality. Ethics have often been separated from religion. Phillips Brooks identifies them. The difBerence between Christian morality and any other which the world has seen does not consist in the difference of its pre- cepts, — for these can be matched in no other codes ; the sub- stance and power of moral law does not lie in its commandments, but in the conception of the commander which breathes through it and gives it life. The motive of all the injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount is the Father, first as the standard of the moral life enforced, and then as the power by which that standard is pursued and attained. There is nothing abstract and cold. Everything shines and burns with personal affection. "Be ye perfect even as your Father which is in Heaven." "Love your enemies, that ye may be the children of your Father." "Let your light shine before men that they may glorify your Father." "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." The idea of God which fills the great discourse is the idea of the father. Most men have held separately the principles of authority and reasonableness. Lordship and command have gone with 222 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 kingship, love and care have been associated with the father- hood. But here they are combined as organically one. Kingship in its primary conception means fatherhood. The Sermon on the Mount keeps the combination of reason and authority, the essential and the arbitrary, which is charac- teristic of the child's obedience in the earthly household. I am sure that all of us have felt, as we have read those sacred chapters of St. Matthew, how exquisitely these two lights play through them and harmonize with one another, — the light that comes to any duty from the command of God that we should do it, and the light which the same duty wins because we ourselves per- ceive that it is the right thing to do (p. 32). Here is a passage in which Phillips Brooks is at one with those who have asserted the arbitrary sovereignty of God, as if in its very arbitrariness lay its charm, — Augustine and Anselm, Calvin and Edwards : — The essence of every beatitude is in the human heart, and yet the human heart loves to hear the utterance of the beatitudes from the mouth of God as if they were His arbitrary enactments (p. 32). It is the experience of the earthly home wherein is learned the reconciliation between the arbitrary will and the awaken- ing mind which calls for the reason of the enactment : — I want you to notice that this interplay of essentialness and arbitrariness is exactly what characterizes every true home life, when the children learn truth and receive commandments from their father. The child's partial and growing perception that it must be so chimes and harmonizes with the father's injunction that it shall be so. All this is so simple and clear, and withal satisfactory, that one does not at first realize the width and depth of the abyss he is bridging. This had been the question of the ages, dividing the schools from the time of Augustine, — whether the arbitrary will in God takes the precedence or the reason- ing mind ? PhiUips Brooks, we shall see it more plainly as we proceed, tends to fuse intellect and will into organic unity ; but yet if we may distinguish, where he refused to make the ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 223 distinction, at the heart of the mystery of the universe, it is will, not idea, always the loving will of the Father. The motive of ethics is the filial sense; and the standard is likeness to God. The question is raised whether this stan- dard be intelligible and practicable. The answer is derived from the first great principle of the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of every man. It is in the fact that He is your Father, and that you are His Child, that the possibility of likeness lies and that the kind of possible likeness is decreed. You are to be like Him as the child is like the father, by the attainment of that echo of the Father's nature which is the child's essential inheritance. You are to be like him by coming to that expression of Him which is the true idea of your child life. You are to fulfil the unfulfilled pro- gramme of your own life, which is involved in the fact that you are a child of God. . . . Man is to return into the idea of his own life as the son of God. He is to be equal to his own concep- tion, as that conception is written in the nature of the Holy Be- ing from whom he came and to whom he belongs. At least, that is a standard whose perpetual presence shaped our Lord's treat- ment of the men and women whom He was trying to restore (p. 36). He sums up his treatment of the ethical life by dwelling on some of the perpetual marks of a morality which is the outgrowth of such a faith. First, there is the duty of senti- ment, — thou shalt love. He notes the exaltation of senti- ment over action, — the action valuable as the utterance of sentiment. There is danger of weakness here and of senti- mentality, but in the end is vitality and permanence. No Christian should be ashamed of this quality of love and duty. Second, the harmony between the absolute standard of goodness and the various responsibilities of men, discrimina- tions which yet do not tamper with the unchangeable sanctity of righteousness. Third, the attainment of humility by aspiration and not by depression. And fourth, the morality of Jesus as involving the only true secret of courage and of the freedom that comes from courage. Courage is a positive thing, not merely the absence of fear, but "that compactness and clear coherence of all a man's faculties and powers which makes his manhood a single operative unit in the world." 224 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i879 What is now known as "sociology" had not then attained the prominence which it has since reached. The late r . D. Maurice had been the leader in England of a movement called Christian socialism, destined to become popular among the English clergy and laity; but with this movement Phillips Brooks never identified himself. He noted with some sur- prise and regret, in his later visits to England, that the rising generation of clergy were turning aside from Maurice's theology in order to devote themselves more exclusively to social studies and methods of social reform. He deprecated the change, for it seemed to him as if it waived the more vital method, out of which alone social progress must come, — a confession, also, that the theological and religious problem was insoluble. His own conception of social develop- ment is here given : — The character of Christ's own reforming spirit was clear enough. He said that he wanted not to destroy but to fulfil the agencies which he here found in the world. He never cared to reshape circumstances until he had regenerated men. He let the shell stand as he found it until the new life within it could burst it for itself. It is very wonderful to me to see how thoroughly His disciples caught His method. They could not have caught it so completely and so soon if it had not been that it was based on a large principle, if it had not been more than a special method or trick. Almost instantly, as soon as the disciples began their work, they seem to have been filled with a true conception of its divine method, — that not from outside, but from inside; not by the remodelling of institutions, but by the change of character ; not by the suppression of vices, but by the destruction of sin, the world was to be saved. That truth with whose vitality all modern life has flourished, with its forgetfulness of which all modern history has always tended to corruption, that truth only dreamed of by a few spiritual philosophers in the ancient world, — it is one of the marvellous phenomena of human thought, that it should have leaped full grown to life with the first of Christianity. A few faint flutterings about the old methods of repression, and the dis- ciples of Jesus settle at once to the new methods of development (p. 253). But Phillips Brooks was alive to the importance of the social aspect of Christianity, as is seen in his treatment of ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 225 the "Influence of Jesus on the Social Life." He takes the Madonna, prominent in ecclesiastical art, as the true type of the Christian religion, rather than the Sphinx, calm and eternal in its solitude.^ Both recognize the feminine nature of the religious instinct; but the first is Christian because so truly human; "it has not lost humanity in trying to interpret Deity." "A father, a mother, and a child are there in the scene at Bethlehem. No religion which began like that could ever lose its character." The first unit of human life is the personality of the newborn child, the second unit is the family. In showing what Jesus was to his fellow men, it is most important to recognize the growth in his consciousness from childhood to manhood mediated by the human family. I think that it is a most happy sign of the healthy reality which the life of Jesus is gaining in men's thoughts in these modem days, that this idea of the development of His consciousness, the gradual growth into the knowledge and the use of His own nature, is no longer an idea that bewilders and shocks the believer in our Lord's divinity. It is felt to be a necessary part of the belief in His humanity. . . . The seventeenth century believed the divinity of Christ, but its belief in the divine Christ was weak, and the belief in the human Christ was well-nigh lost, and with this loss I cannot but feel that we must in some way connect the dislike of Christmas and its observance which then arose and which is but just now passing entirely away. . . . The whole idea of child- hood, with its necessary concomitant idea of growth, was a be- wilderment and almost an offence to that theology whose Christ was a mysterious and unaccountable being, a true spiritual Mel- chisedec, without vivid and real human associations, without age, without realized locality, a dogma, a creed, a fulfilment of pro- phecy, an adjustment of relations, not a man. It is because Jesus to-day is intensely real, intensely human to us, that we welcome and do not dread the truth of increase and development from childhood to the fuU strength and stature of a man (pp. 78, 79). This chapter on the "Influence of Jesus on the Social Life of Man " is written with the conviction that the key to all Christ's treatment of men is the constant desire to foster the ' Cf . Tol. i. p. 570, for the first form -which is given to this striking compar- ison. See, also, Influence of Jesus, pp. 73, 74. VOL. n 226 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 consciousness of divine sonship by intercourse with those who are fellow sons of the same Father. The incidents in the life of Christ are brought together with singular felicity in illus- tration of this truth, that the social nature of man is the pro- vision at once for his most complete self -consciousness and for his fullest activity and efficiency. So important is the social life in the constitution of humanity that it must needs have its analogue in Deity. It was by losing His life in the multitude and mass of lives, in the body of humanity to which He belonged, that Jesus at once found His own life and found the lives of the lost, whom He had come to seek. At the very outset He bore witness that not in absolute singleness, not in elemental unity and perfect solitude of being, is the highest existence to be found. He recognized at once in man that multiplicity and power of relationship within the unit of humanity which makes the richness of our human life. If it be so, as we believe it is, that in the constitution of humanity we have the fairest written analogue and picture of the Divine exist- ence, then shall we not say that the human Christ gave us, in the value which He set on human relationships, in His social thought of man, an insight into the essentialness and value of that social thought of God, which we call the doctrine of the Trinity ? May it not be that only by multiplicity and interior self-relationship can Divinity have the completest self-consciousness and energy? Surely, the reverent and thoughtful eye must see some such mean- ing when Jesus himself makes the eternal companionship of the life of Deity the pattern and picture of the best society of the souls of the earth, and breathes out to His Father these deep and wondrous words, "As thou Father art in Me and I in Thee that they all may be one in us." The subject of the social life of man leads him to the con- sideration of its relation to the individual life. This is an ancient and familiar problem whose adjustment varies; the issue clear, but the application of the principle uncertain. Throughout the nineteenth century there have not been want- ing those who have condemned what they call "individual- ism " as the "source of all our woe." This has been one of the motives which has strengthened the ecclesiastical reactions of the century. Upon this point Phillips Brooks held a very definite opinion, and he has expressed it in no uncertain ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 227 words. He asserts as the fundamental truth that "society does not exist for itself, but for the individual ; and man goes into it not to lose, but to find himself" (p. 98). He then proceeds to arraign his age for having lost the true principle. His words have significance in themselves, an added interest in coming from him : — The ancient society, the heathen society of to-day, whether in some savage island or in some fashionable parlor, is ready always to sacrifice the personal nature, the individual soul. As if society itself were an ohject worthy of perfecting for its own value ; it overwhelms individual character and pitilessly sees lives lost in its great whirlpool. I think the great charge that Jesus, if He spoke to-day, would bring against our modern social life, our present society, as it in large part exists, would be this : He would see its impurity ; He would recognize the falseness that pervades it ; He would turn away from its sordidness with disappointment; but, most of all, He would miss in it that power to cultivate the personal life of the individual by the revelation of the divine side of human existence which is everywhere His ideal of social living. It is not always so. There are small groups of men gathered on such high ground that each of them becomes aware of himself, of his capacities and duties, in the association with his brethren. Especially there are friendships, the sympathetic meeting of man and man, in which each knows himself as he could not in soli- tude. But our ordinary life with one another, what, in the lan- guage of the world, we call society, has so left and lost the sponta- neousness of natural impulse and so failed to attain the highest conception of itself as the family of God, it so hangs fast in the dull middle regions of conventional propriety and selfish expedi- ency, that it becomes not the fountain, but the grave, of individ- uality. Men go to it to escape themselves. Men dread it, as they grow older, for younger men, because its influences seem to be fatal to original and positive character. Men flee to solitude to recruit their personality. Nowhere do we find on earth that picture of society reconstructed by the idea of Jesus, society around the throne of God, which shines out upon us from the mysterious promises of the Apocalypse ; the glory of which society is to be this, — that while the souls stand in their vast choruses of hundreds of thousands, and all chant the same anthems and all work together in the same transcendent duties, yet each bears the sacred name written on the flesh of his own forehead, and carries in his hand a white stone, on which is written a new name which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. It is individuality 228 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 emphasized by company, and not lost in it, because the atmosphere in which the company is met is the idea of Jesus, which is the fatherhood of God (pp. 98, 99). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, and more especially in the decade of the seventies, there was one sub- ject uppermost in the consciousness of all thoughtful miiids, — how to maintain the goodness of the existing order of things against pessimistic tendencies which were stimulated by the teaching of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. For al- though this teaching came from speculative thinkers and was presented as a system of philosophy, yet it somehow found a response in, or we may say penetrated in some mysterious way into the stratum of the common consciousness. Its influ- ence may be traced in the pulpit, in modifying the tone of the preaching, leading to more emphatic and continuous assertions of the goodness, the love, the beneficent providence of God. Among the confusing contradictory currents of the time, this tone of preaching seemed to some as though it were an effort to soften the religion, to avoid the severer aspects of the gospel. But its real motive lay in some more posi- tive purpose, — the justification of the ways of God with men. The quickened sensitiveness of an age in which human- itarian sentiment had been so dominant as in the nineteenth century, where sentiment was constantly degenerating into sentimentality, proved a congenial soil for pessimistic theories of the universe. Men were becoming more keenly alive to the evil in nature and in the moral order, so that the balance was easily disturbed in individual minds to whom the total picture of the universe presented the seeming predominance of evil. To meet this kind of doubt, which was generically different from the form of doubt which preceded it, required a different tone in the message of the pulpit. To the new necessity Phillips Brooks responded. Long before he knew of Schopenhauer and Hartmann he had become sensitive to the issue. His subtle spirit divined the coming mood because his own life was deeply rooted in his age. He encountered the pure pleasure of living more than most men, but he had also encountered human suffering on JET. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 229 a large scale in the ministrations of the pastoral charge, as well as in his own experience. Out of this experience had been born the discourses of comfort and consolation which, it has been remarked, form so large a proportion in the first volume of his sermons. To this subject he now comes anew, with a more scientific aim, with the qualifications of years of self-observation and of association with men, with a rare power of psychological insight and analysis. His third lecture was entitled the "Influence of Jesus on the Emotional Life of Man." He had before him the life of Christ as the ideal expression of humanity; he must enter into the ex- perience of Jesus by the open door of the common experience of humanity. It tells us nothing, he remarks, about a life to say that it is made up of joy and pain. We discover very early that happiness may mean much or little ; that before we can deter- mine the quality of a life we must penetrate the consciousness that lies beneath the sorrow or the joy. The joy and the pain are simply the expressions of emotion. Here is a passage bearing on this point, which is also self-descriptive : — The man who lacks emotion lacks expression. That which is in him remains within him, and he cannot utter it or make it influential. And on the other hand the man who lacks emotion lacks receptiveness. That which other men are, if it does not make him glad or sorry, if it gives him neither joy nor pain, does not become his. The emotion of lives is the magnetism that they emit, something closely associated with their substance and yet distinct from it, in which they communicate with one another. There is a condition conceivable in which the emotions should be so delicately and perfectly true to the quality of him from which they issue, that they should furnish a perfect medium of expres- sion. . . . Can any true connection be reliably traced between the way that a man lives and the joy or sorrow his life emits ? There is something, then, that lies behind the phenomena of pleasure and pain, and that is experience without regard to emotions. He now repeats what he had been impressed with as a student years before : — The words which have become exclusively appropriated to pain belonged originally to experience without reference to the distress 230 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 or pleasure it might bring. The old Greek and Latin words for suffering simply meant "to imdergo." The very word "sufCering " itself, and "patience" and "submission," and that hard word "bear " all mean nothing but experience. The first step in study- ing the life of Jesus is to get back into the actual experience of His life. His power over men to-day lies in His experience not essentially because He was happy or sad. His life in a world like this involved the cross. Yet would His life have still been the influential power of the world if His years had passed in sunny joy? The experience is separable from the pain, and in the experience, not in the pain, His true life abode. He takes another step in this analysis. The mere expe- riences considered by themselves do not constitute life. " Our histories are not our lives. The idea of life is unity. Expe- riences are manifold." Behind the experiences lies the law of life — God wills these things. God's will, not his own choice, underlies the acts and contacts that fill up the days of Jesus. "My meat is to do the wiU of Him that sent Me." That, in the deeper meaning, was the life of Jesus, — the law by which He lived, the will of God. There is one step more in this analysis of the consciousness of Jesus. A law is not the final life. It cannot be. Law is external, but life is something which may fill every inmost part of a man's being. ... A law cannot do that. It is not intimate enough. There must be some inspiring idea, moving the intelligence, firing the affections, and so possessing the whole man. . . . That idea is the fatherhood of God to man, which Jesus made known through the manifestation of His sonship. . . . Ideas make for themselves laws by their own inherent and divine creativeness. The law of Christ is obedience to God, but this obedience is fed by the idea of His sonship. In that idea is the real life of Christ. Behind this no analysis can go. All this is beautiful and true. But the writer has a remoter purpose. He is laying foundations with a view to ultimate inferences. He is not only meeting for himself and for his time the passing tendency to pessimism, but also theories of the Atonement which do not satisfy, and those forms of mediaeval asceticism whose temporary reappearance was char- acteristic of the time. ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 231 Jesus always thinks of Himself as undergoing the will of God, because God is His father. The pain and pleasure which come to Him in undergoing that will come not simply with their own inherent qualities of comfort or discomfort, but with the values they get from that obedience of which they are the signs and con- sequences. This is the key to all His attitude towards them. Jesus, with all His sensitiveness to pain and joy, never allows pain or joy to be either the purpose of life or the test of life. The sensitiveness of Jesus to pain and joy never leads Him for a moment to try to be sad or happy with direct endeavor ; nor is there any sign that He ever judges the real character of Himself or any other man l)y the sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers His life. He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from His living, and cast their brightness and their gloomi- ness back upon His life ; but there is no sorrow and no joy that He ever sought for itself, and He always kept self-knowledge underneath the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment's hap- piness or unhappiness. They were like ripples on the surface of the stream, made by its flow, and, we are ready to imagine, en- joyed by the stream that made them, not sought by the stream for themselves, nor ever obscuring the stream's consciousness of its deeper currents. The supreme sorrow of the cross was never sought because it was sorrowful, and even while He hung in agony it never obscured the certainty of His own holiness in the great Sufferer's soul. These are the perpetual characteristics of the emotional life of Jesus, which our theology has often conjured out of sight, but which are of unspeakable value, as I think; for a clear understanding of them puts the Man who suffered and en- joyed more than any other man that ever lived in a noble and true relation to His suffering and joy, and makes His pain and pleasure a gospel to men in their sadness and their gladness every- where (pp. 156, 157). The greater part of this chapter is occupied with a sug- gestive and, though complete in its outline, all too brief an analysis of the experiences of Jesus in the pleasure and the suffering they involved. But it is a careful study, too con- densed to be summarized without injury. The plan of treatment leads to the consideration (1) of the pain and pleasures which come inevitably through the medium of the himian body; (2) of the joys and sorrows which have their roots not in the senses, but in the affections ; (3) of the pleasures and the sufferings which belong to all devoted ideal natures, 232 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 which come from the acute perception of right and wrong, of moral fitness or unfitness in the things about us. Under the third head is the remark that we cannot think of Jesus as a mere moral enthusiast, because with Him everything is per- sonal : — It is this personalness of all His moral enthusiasms, as it seems to me, that keeps us from ever feeling or fearing in Jesus any of that moral pedantry — or what, with a word that has no dignified equivalent, we call that priggishness — which haunts the words of the moral enthusiasts who kindle at the harmonies and discords of abstractions, whether they talk as utilitarians or as transcenden- talists (p. 194). Under this same head is raised the interesting question whether there was anything in Christ of what we call the sense of artistic beauty, or whether He found delight in the fitness which the aesthetic nature recognizes and loves. In the treatment of this question is hardly given the answer to have been expected from one with his own aesthetic tastes. All the more, therefore, is his attitude remarkable, showing how carefully he preserved the balance of a true judgment, and responded to the finest instincts. He mentions the judg- ments that men have given on this point and their reasons : "One who was walking towards Calvary had no time in the intenseness of His moral life for art and its luxuriousness ; " or again, "He was a Jew in whose nature it was not to gather happiness from beautiful things;" and still further, "We may say that though Jesus has made nothing of artistic beauty, yet His religion has made much of it, and out of Christianity the highest artistic life has come." While there is truth in all these statements : — Still the great impression of the life of Jesus as it seems to me must always be the subordinate importance of those things in which only the aesthetic nature finds its pleasure. There is no condemnation of them in that wise, deep life. But the fact always must remain that the wisest, deepest life that was ever lived left them on one side, was satisfied without them. And His religion, while it has developed and delighted in their cul- ture, has always kept two strong habits with reference to art which showed that in it was still the spirit of its Master. It has iET. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 233 always been restless under the sway of any art that did not breathe with spiritual and moral purpose. Never has Christian art reached the pure eestheticism of the classics. And in its more earnest moods, in its reformations, in its puritanisms, it has always stood ready to sacrifice the choicest words of artistic beauty for the restoration or preservation of the simple majesty of righteousness, the purity of truth, or the glory of God (p. 201). The Bohlen Lectures culminate with the last chapter, in whicli is treated the influence of Jesus on the intellectual life of man. To understand PhiUips Brooks one must dwell upon what he here tells us ; for while his tone is still impersonal, none the less is he disclosing his own method of self -culture and his distinctive attitude towards the theologies of his time. All through the chapter we move in the atmosphere of great- ness. Only from a great soul could it have proceeded. But it is the atmosphere of poetry and beauty as well. The ease, the grace, the repose, the transparency of the style, the con- sciousness of mastery, the sense of finality, the irresistible appeal, — these are the accompaniments of a strain of divine melody. This chapter must be read, it cannot be described. But some things may be said about it. Li the first place he refuses to give the intellect in man the supremacy when taken by itself. He has said this before, but now repeats it with deeper conviction. In speaking of the Person of Christ, he asks the questions. How does Christ compare in intellectual power with other men ? How did He estimate the intellect? Was His intellect sufficient to ac- count for the unique position He holds in the world's history as the mightiest force that has controlled the development of humanity ? He finds the answer by turning to the Fourth Gospel, which gives us most that we know about the mind of Jesus. It is to the other Gospels what Plato is to Xenophon. He does not pause to allude to questions of criticism, — when it was written, or whether it was written by John. He anticipates the decision of scholars; he knows that the picture in itself is its own vindication. It is the intellectual Gospel, because in it there is one constantly recurring word. That word is "truth," which is distinctly a word of the intellect. 234 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 He whose favorite word is truth must be a man who values intellectual life, who is not satisfied unless his own intellect is living, and who conceives of his fellow men as beings in whom the intellect is an important and valuable part. This must belong to any habitual use of the word at all ; and so, when we find it ap- pearing constantly upon the lips of Jesus, in the record of that one of His disciples who understood Him best, we feel that we know this at least about Him, — that He cared for the intellect of man, that He desired to exercise some influence upon it, that He was not satisfied simply to win man's affection by His kind- ness, nor to govern man's will by His authority, but that He also wished to persuade man's mind with truth (p. 213). He takes up the word "truth " as it is used in the Fourth Gospel, finding that in every instance it is employed in a sense different from that of the schools. In its scholastic use it is detached from life and made synonymous with knowledge. But knowledge is no word of Jesus. With information for the head alone, detached from its relations to the whole nature, Jesus has no concern. Truth was some- thing which set the whole man free. It was a moral thing, for he who does not receive it is not merely a doubter, but a liar. Truth was something which a man could be, not merely something which a man could study and measure by walking around it on the outside. The objective and the subjective lose themselves in each other. Truth can be known only from the inside ; it is something moral, something living, some- thing spiritual. It is not mere objective unity ; it must have in it the elements of character. "To this end was I born," says Jesus, "and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." And upon these and sunilar utter- ances of Jesus is made this comment : — You see how the air grows hazy with the meeting of the sub- jective and objective conceptions. They are words of character. A "man of truth " is something more than a man who knows the truth, whose intellect has seized it ; that, we are sure, would be the very tamest paraphrase of the suggestive words. It would take the whole life and depth out of them. A "man of truth " is a man into all whose life the truth has been pressed till he is full of it, till he has been given to it, and it has been given to ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 235 him, he being always the complete being whose unity is in that total of moral, intellectual, and spiritual life which makes what we call character. He is the man of whom Pilate's prisoner said, "He hears my voice." No wonder that Pilate, hearing a new sound in an old familiar word, felt all his old questions stir again within him, and asked with an interest which was too weary to be called a hope, "What is truth? " (p. 218). Erom this use of the word "truth " is deduced the intel- lectual portrait of Christ, if we may call it such. The great fact concerning the intellectual life in Jesus is this, that "in Him the intellect never works alone. You never can separate its workings from the complete operations of the whole nature. He never simply knows, but always loves and re- solves at the same time. . . . What God knows is one and the same with the love with which He loves and the resolve with which He wills." "We reach now the conclusion of the whole matter. When Phillips Brooks spoke of God's knowledge as one with His love and will, he had in view the definition of the schoolmen that God is actus purus. Man was to be known by contrast ; in this respect the human had no likeness to the divine. The intellect and the will worked separately in man, and the difference could always be distinguished, so that it was easy to divide mefl into classes, and label them according to their opinions, — men of intellect and men of action. Against this inference Phillips Brooks is making a protest. It was with Jesus as it was with God. It should be the same with all men, — in this respect they should follow Christ. It is not an impossible divine ideal, but rather the feasible hu- man standard. He illustrates the possibility of this organic fusion of intellect with the affections and the will by an appeal to experience, calling it the true unity of a man. When we see how constantly it is the crudity of an unappropri- ated, unassimilated intellectuality that disappoints us in intellec- tual people ; when we find ourselves turning away from a learned man whose knowledge has not been pressed into character ; when we find that the action of the intellect forcing itself upon our notice because it is working out of proportion to or out of har- mony with the other parts of a man's nature, his conscience, his 236 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 affections, and his active powers, always dissatisfies and makes us restless, and, with aU the interest which we may feel in him, does not let us think that we have found the fullest and most perfect man, — when we see all this, it becomes clear to us what a dis- tinguishing thing in Jesus was this unity of life in which the special action of the intellect was lost. We catch something of the spirit with which His disciple, fondly recurring years after- wards to the bright days when He first knew Jesus, twice used the same description of Him: "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth." "The law was given by Moses, but by Jesus Christ came grace and truth." It is not the intellectual man as such, not the man in whom intellect stands crudely forth as the controlling element in life, that other men are drawn to most. The greatest men that ever lived are those in whom you cannot separate the mental and moral lives. You cannot say just what part of their power and success is due to a good heart and what to a sound understanding. And in every circle there are apt to appear some persons of great influ- ence and great attractiveness, of whom you never think as being specially intellectual ; it startles you ; but as you think about your wonder, you discover that it does not come from an absence of the intellectual life in those who are thus spoken of, but from the fact that the intellectual part of them is so blended and lost in the rounded and symmetrical unity of their life that you have never been led to think of it by itself. All this is very frequently true concerning women, whose unity of life is often more apparent than that of men (pp. 220, 223). He finds confirmation of this unity of life in those moments of exaltation when a man realizes himself in supreme degree, and the "intellectual action, without being quenched, nay, burning at its very brightest, blends with the quickened activity of aU the being, and is not even thought of by itself." So it is when death comes near, that with our truest, profound- est thoughts about the great mystery, we hardly know that we are thinking at all. In these and similar conditions, the intellect works vigorously, but it works in the midst of a being all quick- ened and exalted together, and so it is lost in the large action of the whole. This is the meaning of Lessing's remark, "He who does not lose his reason in certain things has none to lose." Or again in the lines of Wordsworth : — In snch access of mind, in such high hour Of Visitation from the Living God, Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 237 In the further exposition of this principle, he turns to the comparison of Jesus with Socrates. It had been in his mind as he began the book to make this the climax of his treat- ment; he comes to it finally with the momentum which had been growing with each successive chapter. He would take the last five chapters of the Gospel of St. John and place them by the side of the story of the death of Socrates which Plato has written for us in the "Phaedo." "Nowhere could the essential difference as well as the likeness of the two great teachers become more apparent." To this comparison he invites "the critics who loosely class Jesus and Socrates to- gether," showing them where their classification fails, where the line runs beyond which Socrates cannot go, "beyond which the nature of Jesus sweeps out of our sight." We recall in this mature expression of his thought his own youthful devotion to Socrates. We go back to the days when he was a boy of fifteen, just leaving the Latin School, for the first utterance of this enthusiasm. It had been Socrates, the "innocent martyr for truth," who had fired him with zeal in the immortal quest. Two sonnets entitled "Socrates" he had written while at the Virginia seminary. The "Phaedo " was then his favorite dialogue, which he exercised himself in translating into his best English. When he took his first journey to the Old World in 1865, he seems to have given an almost equal place to Athens and Jerusalem in the enthusiasm which was stirred within him, as he gazed with his own eyes upon the sacred cities. But now for twenty years he had been studying the life of Jesus, and though he had lost none of his reverence and admiration for Socrates, there had grown up in his soul a higher and a different reverence, which is mingled with love and grateful obedience. Then he was in the intellectual stage of his development, now he has passed more completely into the sphere of the spiritual. We will not spoil the beautiful comparison which he has drawn at length by attempts at quotation or condensation. But here is the concluding paragraph: — I know not what to say to any man who does not feel the dif- ference. I can almost dream what Socrates would say to any man 238 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 who said that there was no difference between Jesus and him. But how shall we state the difference ? One is divine and human ; the other is human only. One is Redeemer ; the other is philos- opher. One is inspired, the other questions. One reveals, and the other argues. These statements doubtless are all true. And in them all there is wrapped up this, which is the truth of all the influence of Jesus over men's minds, that where Socrates brings an argument to meet an objection, Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nature, — a whole being which the truth has filled with strength, to meet another whole being which error has filled with feebleness (p. 243). It had been part of Mr. Brooks's intention to show the influence of Jesus, not only by the presentation of His ruling idea, but by tracing its presence and power in His disciples and then in the actual history of the world. The scheme of course was too large. Yet he could not resist in closing to give a brief summary, where he hints at what he would have done had the opportunity permitted : — A poetic conception of the world we live in, a willing accept- ance of mystery, an expectation of progress by development, an absence of fastidiousness that comes from the possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual enlargement of thought from the arbi- trary into the essential, — these, I think, are the intellectual characteristics which Christ's disciples gathered from their Mas- ter; and I think that we can see that these characteristics make, as we set them together, a certain definite and recognizable type of mental life, one that we should know from every other if we met to-day a man in whom it was embodied. It is a type in which, according to the description which I tried to give, the intel- lect, while it is plentifully present, does not stand alone and force itself upon our thought. It is a type in which character is the result that impresses us, — character holding in harmony all the elements of the nature, rather than intellectuality, which is the predominant presence of one element. It is a type in which righteousness and reason so coincide and cooperate that you can- not separate them, and do not want to (p. 259). This book, therefore, the "Influence of Jesus," may be called the Apologia of Phillips Brooks. It is the defence of him- self and of his method, the exposition of his ideal of life, his final answer to the question how to meet the doubt, the weakness, the skepticism of the time. Although he seemed. ^T. 43] THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 239 and indeed he was, in such entire sympathy with his age, yet he also saw its defect and raised against it one mighty pro- test. A one-sided, exaggerated intellectualism was the evil which had infected every department of human inquiry, including the things of religion. He pointed out the remedy, — the influence of Jesus tended to the restoration of a lost symmetry. This was the result of his experience in the first ten years of his Boston ministry, which gives to his preach- ing in Boston a different tone from the Philadelphia life. Then he had delighted in exploiting the rich allegorical im- port of human life and human history, with Christ as its centre and interpreter. The Boston ministry led him to proclaim the stronger Christ, who was powerful enough to sub- due the world to Himself. There are hints in this book that another change was awaiting him, when he would pass into an ampler and diviner sphere. At times he seems to be tempted to give the primacy to the will. When he speaks of the obe- dience of Christ, it is clear that he is tending to divinize obedience as the potent faculty in Christ, through which His inspiration came, through which came also the wisdom of God. It is in the sphere of the will that the intimacy is closer than in the intellect. Through the perfect obedience of Christ comes the consciousness of oneness with the Father. Everywhere the inference is that perfect obedience of Christ means not subordination or inferiority, but coequality with the Father. With these eloquent words he closes the book : — I dare not, I do not hope that I have succeeded ; but I hope that I have not wholly failed. For to me what I have tried to say is more and more the glory and the richness and the sweet- ness of all life. The idea of Jesus is the illumination and the inspiration of existence. Without it moral life becomes a barren expediency, and social life a hollow shell, and emotional life a meaningless excitement, and intellectual life an idle play or stupid drudgery. Without it the world is a puzzle, and death a horror, and eternity a blank. More and more it shines the only hope of what without it is all darkness. More and more the wild, sad, frightened cries of men who believe nothing, and the calm, ear- nest, patient prayers of men who believe so much that they long for perfect faith, seem to blend into the great appeal which Philip 240 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879 of Bethsaida made to Jesus at the Last Supper, where so much of our time in these four hours has been spent, "Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." And more and more the only answer to that appeal seems to come from the same blessed lips that answered Philip, the lips of the Mediator Jesus, who replies, "Have I been so long with you and yet thou hast not known me? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." CHAPTER IX 1879-1880 VISIT TO PHILADELPHIA. CONVENTION SERMON. COEKE- SPONDENCE. THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER, SERMON BE- FORE THE QUEEN. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. THE NEW RECTORY The lectures on the "Influence of Jesus " were delivered in Philadelphia in the month of February, 1879. On the second day of December, 1878, he had written to Eev. W. N. Mc- Vickar that only one of the lectures was completed, "and is so bad that the others cannot be worse ; so I have a free mind and push on, and will be ready." Again he writes to McVickar regarding the lectures : — February 8, 1879. I was just putting the last words to the last page as your letter came in. There could not have been a better moment. Yester- day it would have seemed like a mockery to talk about the delivery of what looked as if it never would be written. And now I hate to think that I must ever read them again, and especially that I must read them to anybody whom I care about. . . . But I have one or two suggestions to make which are serious. 1. The lectures are an hour long, each of them. Can it not be arranged that there shall be little or no service ? 2. They are not in the least the things for a popular audience. Not that they are learned, but they are quiet and dry. I want to have them not in the great Church, but in your Lecture Room which will make it much easier for me to read them. I think you will agree with me in this. At any rate I wish it so, and I am sure you will oblige me. If you will do both of these things for me I will preach all day for you at Holy Trinity. If not, I will see you at Jericho before I open my mouth in the afternoon. And then I want you to let me make a very quiet visit and not go out to dinner anywhere but at Cooper's. I don't feel up to parties, and I want to see you. Won't you say so to any kind VOL. n 242 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879-80 people who want to arrange dinners and breakfasts before I come, or who desire to invite me when I am there. All this sounds foolish, but the fact is I have had a dreadful winter. These poor lectures have been worried through in all the distress and bewilderment of Father's death. I have n't known what I was writing half the time. Now I want to have a quiet, restful time, and I shall come trusting your good love and tact to get it for me. . . . I count upon my visit more than I can tell you. I hope TifBany will come. Tell him he need n't go to the lectures. James Franks is doubtful, but I hope to bring him. Give my kindest regards to your sister, and expect me Monday night. Always affectionately yours, P. B. This visit to Philadelphia was an event to Phillips Brooks, to his former parishioners, and to the city. Everything con- nected with it moved him strongly. To the memory of Mr. John Bohlen he paid this tribute in his opening lec- ture: — The subject I have chosen would not have been unwelcome to my dear friend of years ago, whose honored name this lectureship bears, and in whose behalf I shall in some sort speak. For of the men whom I have known, there has been none whose daily moral life, whose association with his fellow men, whose meeting of the joy and pain of living, and whose ways of thought and study have been more in the power of the idea of Jesus, more inspired by his Lord's revelation than his were, more obedient and trustful to his Lord's authority in order that he might become the son of God. It is needless to say that the great church was thrown open for the purpose, and not the lecture room, as he had de- manded. How the lectures were received, and how he ap- peared as he gave them, is told in a newspaper paragraph of the day. The tendency to describe his personal appearance is here again manifest, as though the man and his utterance were inseparable. Rev. Phillips Brooks of Boston lectured last night in the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, at Nineteenth and "Walnut streets, to an audience that filled every pew in that vast church and left scarcely any sitting room in the galleries. It has been ^T. 43-44] VISIT TO PHILADELPHIA 243 ten years since he left his pastorate of that church to take charge of a parish in Boston. ... A tall, broad-shouldered man, with a perfectly smooth, open face, strong lines about the mouth, bright expressive eyes and dark hair, was the personnel of the man who came out of the vestry room with Mr. McVickar last evening at eight o'clock, and after the singing of a hymn and the delivery of a brief prayer ascended the high pulpit steps. There was no pause for preparation after he got into the pulpit. He placed the manuscript before him and began the lecture. The delivery of the man was remarkable. He announced the title and intro- duction in words that came so rapidly that it required the most concentrated attention to keep up with him. He spoke for about an hour. During all that time his tremendous energy of delivery kept up at the same rapid pace, reminding one of a torrent rush- ing over rocks. The words seemed not to flow out to the audi- ence, but to shoot out. The ground he got over in an hour was equal to that of three ordinary lectures. And when he closed, the attention of the audience was as rapt as ever. Occasionally there would be a stumbling over a word. Then his head would jerk to this side and that impatiently, as though the word must come, despite all impediments. He kept his eyes on the paper almost continuously. Probably four times, certainly not more than half a dozen, he gave a glance out towards the audience. He seemed to lose himself entirely in his subject. His eyes were bent on the ■ manuscript, his whole expression, his features, the twitching of his facial muscles, showed the tremendous concentration of energy put into the efiEort. Here was an absence of all self -conscious- ness; his hearers lost sight of the man and only saw the ideas, rapid, whirling, and tremendous in their force of utterance, keep- ing up the idea of the torrent all the time. As to any attempts to save him from the invasion of his friends, while he was in Philadelphia, they were futile. If he could not go to them, they came to him. When he re- turned to Boston he wrote to McVickar, "I counted upon this visit, after this sad and dreary winter, more than ever I did on any other, and it has been to me far more than I had counted on." But he came back tired and somewhat dispirited. He was obliged to return earlier than he had intended in order to officiate at a wedding, and for a moment brides and bridegrooms lost their attractiveness to him. Boston suffered in his eyes when he thought of the happy days in Philadelphia, "And now here I am back here, and 244 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879-80 it 'a snowing, and I 'm lonely; there 's work to be done and it 's doleful generally." In March of this year he accepted the honor of an election to the Massachusetts Historical Society. There began at this time an interesting correspondence with M. Nyegaard, a clergyman of the Eeformed Church in France, whose parish was at St. Quentin (Aisne), and who had been greatly im- pressed by the "Lectures on Preaching: " — Le 4 Avril, 1879. Permettez moi de vous dire, Monsieur, malgr^ le pen de goflt que vous devez avoir pour les compliments, que vos belles confe- rences m'ont fait du bien, et de vous en remercier. EUes seront d&ormais sur mon bureau, k c6t6 de la Th^ologie pastorale de Vinet et j'^spfere qu'elles deviendront comme le manual de mon minis t^re. A second letter from M. Nyegaard asked for permission to translate the lectures into French, which was granted, but the translation was not published till 1883. Somewhat later the "Lectures on Preaching" were translated into Dutch. There came an urgent invitation from the editor of "The Atlantic Monthly," who explained his purpose by saying that he had just been reading the sermon, al- ready referred to, on the "Present and Future Faith. " A series of articles of the general tendency of that sermon would find their best audience if clothed in literary form. But any utterance from him would be welcome, secular or religious. To this and other invitations of a similar kind he gave a firm refusal. He speaks of Lent as going on most pleasantly, "I have no impatience for it to be over." He was then preaching as usual in many places, three times on Sunday, and often during the week. He gave the prefer- ence to invitations from his two brothers, for the family claim was the strongest, and the tie of blood the deepest in his nature. Easter week he spent in New York. He was at New Haven in April to lecture again before the students of the Divinity School. He seemed to be doing the work of an evangelist, preaching in various towns in churches of his own denomination, but almost as often in churches of other ^T. 43-44] CONVENTION SERMON 245 names. There were certain Congregational churches where it seemed to be a settled arrangement that he should appear once at least every year. At the annual convention of the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, which met at St. Paul's Church, Boston, May 14, Phillips Brooks was the preacher. The words of his text were the commission of Christ to his disciples, "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." In the fa- miliar^ association of these words with theories of ecclesiastical organization, or with the exclusive authority of the ministry in some one particular church, he finds a meaning had been read into them which they did not originally contain. His method of overcoming the wrong interpretation and recom- mending the true was to dwell on the purpose for which Christ had been sent by the Father and in turn commissioned his disciples. The sermon was one for the times, cutting athwart current ecclesiastical tendencies. From the most characteristic words of Christ, four passages were selected as heads for the divisions of the sermon : — I am, not come to call tlie righteous hut sinners to repentance. It seems to me that among all the warnings that the Church of Christ needs to-day there can be none that she more imperatively needs than this, — not to teach doctrine save as a means ; not to elaborate and strengthen her own organization save as a means ; but to convert, and rescue sinners. The Church so easily forgets her ends in her means. We are too apt to speak in church to artificial sins which the great universal human con- science does not recognize, to rebuke the improprieties that are not wrong, and to denounce the honest errors which good men may hold, and yet be good, as if they were the first enemies with which we and our Gospel had to fight. / am not com,e to destroy but to fulfil. All earnest life which has not reached clear religious faith, all doubt, however radical, which at its heart is truthful and not scornful, all eager study of the marvellous world of nature as if the final facts of onr exist- ence must be somehow hidden in her bosom, all glorifying of hu- manity, as if it were an object for our worship, all struggle to develop society as if by its own self-purification earth could bo turned into heaven, — all this is to the Church to-day what Ju- daism was to Christ, what He came not to destroy but to fulfil. 246 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879-80 . . . The Christian church has made and makes to-day too much of settled views of Truth which may he dead, too little of the search for truth which must be living. One trembles when he sees the Church in any way separating itself from the pure instincts and from the earnest thought of men, and counting itself the enemy to destroy them instead of the missionary to enlighten them. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. There are mean- ings in these words that can never be true of any other beside Him, not even of the Church which is to perpetuate His mission in the world. But if they declare what was the great truth of the Incarnation, that a perfectly pure obedient humanity might utter divinity, might be the transparent medium through which even God might show Himself, then is there not an everlasting sense in which the words of Jesus may become the words of the Church and the declaration of its highest privilege. . . . When one feels this, he earnestly deprecates, he deeply dreads the " clericalism " to which the church is always tending. It is not by the truth the clergy teach, it is by the lives the Christian people live that the church must be the witness of the Father. He that is not against us is with us. They are the words of one to whom ends are more than means, to whom not regularity of method but Tightness of aim and energy of purpose is the important thing. It would be interesting if we could know what became of these irregular casters out of devils in the Lord's name. By and by we hear no more of them. They seem to have disap- peared. They have not been aggravated and exasperated into a sect by the insistence of Jesus that they should not work for Him unless they worked side by side with Andrew and with Peter and exactly in their way. It would not be a surprise, if we could look into the company about the cross, or into the company which gathered after the Ascension to wait for the full commission of the Spirit, to see some of these workers there drawn into the fel- lowship of Jesus by His sympathy with the irregular, spontaneous effort they had made to do some of His work in His name. To the Kev. Arthur Brooks he wrote : — Boston, May 25, 1879. I wish we wrote of tener, but I suppose we shall always go on pretty much in this way. One of these days when I get a little further into decline perhaps I may get a country parish near New York, succeed "Wildes at Eiverdale or something, and then we shall see each other all the time. Wildes was here the other day at our Diocesan Convention, supposed to be attending to some ^T. 43-44] A SERMON AT HARVARD 247 obscure and complicated business about tbe next Church Congress. It did us all good to see him, and owing either to his presence or Jim's absence in New York the Convention went off very tamely. There was one bit of a breeze at last between the Bishop and the Advent Fathers, but it blew over. There will be no persecution of Ritualism here like the pretty mess they have made in Penn- sylvania. I thought that Dr. Hare was the sensiblest creature there. But people can never seem to see beyond their noses' ends, nor anticipate that what they break other men's heads with to- day may break their heads to-morrow. . . . We, that is William and I, have a little house down at Cohasset on the Jerusalem road where we go in two or three weeks, and where you will find us pretty nearly any time before October. Come down and look at us. To think that Garrison is dead ! What a chapter of History that closes. He was preaching often at this time in Appleton Chapel, Cambridge, before the students of the University. One of the sermons which he delivered in May, 1879, exhibited his power in extraordinary manner, — a sermon to the young from the text, "Thou . . . makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth." Some special circumstance had roused him to write it. His subject was the unity of life, the continuous- ness of all its experiences. There was no lurid picture of endless torment, with which he sought to alarm his hearers, but even Jonathan Edwards in his most terrific discourses could never have produced a more intense or fearful impres- sion. It was very rare with him to preach such sermons, but in this case the sermon was consistent throughout, — the dark side of life under the consciousness of sin. This is a passage which may serve to illustrate its purpose, but no extract can represent its power : — It is when some great trouble comes to you, the death of your friend, the failure of your business, the prospect of your own death, then it is you are dismayed to find that under the changed habits of your life you are the same man still, and that the sins of your college days are in you even now. This is what makes men dread any great event in life so strangely. It brings back the past which they want to forget, or rather it compels them to see that the past is still there in the present. It is when you fire a cannon over the pond that the dead body which is sunk there rises. 248 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879-80 It was not invective which marked the sermon, but throngh- out calm self-dissection of the conscience, and an intimate penetration of experiences unspoken. It ended wrth this sentence, "I know that there are words of comfort which I have not turned aside to speak to-day." He was asked to include the sermon in his printed volumes, but he declined. It might do, he replied, to preach such a sermon occasionally, when judgment without mercy was the theme, but he would not give it a place in the open record. The first day of July was the twentieth anniversary of his ordination to the deaconate. To one of his classmates, then rector of St. Andrew's Church, Philadelphia, he writes: — Boston, Jnly 1, 1879. Dear Paddock, — ... Do you know, old fellow, that it was twenty years ago to-day, Friday, July 1, 1859, that we were ordained deacons in the old Chapel at Alexandria? In the morn- ing at eight o'clock we had a Class Prayer Meeting in George Strong's room, at nine we met Bishop Meade in Dr. Sparrow's study, and at eleven the service began in the Chapel. Kidder and Townsend and Strong and you and I were ordained, and a certain Gibson of Petersburg preached the sermon. Twenty years ago. Old Fellow I "We must be pretty nearly halfway through our active ministry, and what do you suppose that the next twenty years will bring ? Nobody in the old Class has gone yet, and we have been something to each other, some of us, all this score of years. You know we have George Strong back in the preaching ministry. He is at New Bedford, and I see him every few weeks. Good-by, old fellow, and God bless you always. P. B. He replies to an invitation from Rev. Reuben Kidner to make an address at the meeting of the Eastern Convocation to be held in Ipswich : — Boston, August 27, 187.9. I will be with you on the evening of the 17th. Please state the subject on which you wish me to speak, as you think best, only don't say anything in it about "workingmen." I like working- men very much and care for their good, but I have nothing dis- tinct or separate to say to them about religion, nor do I see how it will do any good to treat them as a separate class in this mat- ter, in which their needs and duties are just like other men's. ^T. 43-44] CORRESPONDENCE 249 In the fall of the year he made the acquaintance of Dean Plumptre, who was visiting this country with his wife. He had come with letters of introduction to Mr. Brooks, desirous to hear him preach after having read his sermons. But the case looked differently to Mr. Brooks, and he persuaded the distinguished visitor to preach for him at Trinity Church on Sunday, September 24. In October he was in New York, preaching at Grace Church, morning and afternoon, for his friend, Dr. Henry C. Potter, and in the evening a special sermon at St. Thomas's. While there he attended the Clericus when Dr. Channing was the subject of discussion. He gives us a glimpse of the Boston Clericus in letters to Key. Arthur Brooks, where he also speaks of declining an invitation to the New England dinner in Brooklyn, N. Y., commemorating the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. November 4, 1879. We had a meeting of the Club last night, and I told them all about Channing and how we talked of him at Washburn's. We were n't very intellectual, but then we were a very jolly crowd and smoking was allowed, which was more than we did at Wash- bum's. I have had a letter from Bishop [Horatio] Potter trans- mitting the letter of the City Missionary, and ending with this remarkable aspiration, "I hope that you are none the worse for the exposure of your journey and the effort of Sunday evening at St. Thomas's." Does he think that I, too, am eighty years old? Boston, December 1, 1879. You will have to say to your friend who sends me the tind invitation that it will be quite impossible for me to come to the New England Dinner this year, just as it was last. The fact is that Christmas and these Puritans interfere with one another now just as much as they ever did. I believe that they landed just before Christmas on purpose, so that the celebration of their land- ing might forever interfere with the preparation of Christmas Trees and Christmas sermons. So I can't come. I 'd rather like to, all but the having to speak. That spoils a dinner. Next Wednesday we are going to have a time here because Dr. Holmes is seventy years old. All the folks that ever wrote for "The Atlantic Monthly," and some of us that didn't, are going to breakfast with him at the Brunswick. 250 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1879-80 On his forty-fourth birthday he writes to Mrs. R. J. Hall what was for him a long letter : — 175 Maklbokough Street, Boston, December 13, 1879. Mt deak Elise, — I do not want Christmas to come and go without sending you a word of greeting in your new home. I thanked you truly for the note you sent me so soon after you were in Vienna. I was exceedingly pleased to find that the new life had not blotted an old friend out of your mind. And I dare to think that Christmas will bring back the life at home and the life at the Church so that you will not be sorry to get a word or two. I am glad, to say that there was not a murmur of objec- tion about your wedding, and I shall always be glad to have had the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Hall to Trinity. Everything there looks just as you so well remember it. The people come and go and I hope grow better. Certainly their minister enjoys it more and more every year. The Sunday-school has its multitude of small people who never seem to fail, and I think they never looked more bright and happy. Certainly they never were more numer- ous than this year. We are just getting a new organ for their room to take the place of the Cabinet Organ on which you have so often kindly played. I think you must look back on all the days of work with real pleasure and gratitude. John Foster and the rest of them I dare say are getting a little bit dim in the New Lights. They are very hard to see from Vienna. But you were very much to them, and I think they must have been very much to you. One does not take so deep an interest as you had in them for so long, and then ever lose it entirely out of his life. It is like a minister's first parish, which he never loses or ceases to feel, however much he cares for the other parishes that come afterwards. I envy you Vienna and its brightness. No place seemed to me more full of sunshine than it was when I saw it thirteen years ago. But perhaps it has dull days like other places. I wonder if you have met Dr. Mixter and his wife, who are in Vienna for the same purpose which takes you and Dr. Hall there. She was married in Trinity a couple of months before you, and has been at the Church ever since I came there when she was a child (Miss Galloupe). Do find them out and give them welcome. If you ever come across either of the two books which I have just been reading, I am sure that you will like it. One is the " Life of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, " and the other is the "Life of Bishop Ewing " of Argyle and the Isles. The first is rather a rare book and a little hard to get ; the other you may find. Both of them were noble Christian men of the best type, ^T. 43-44] CORRESPONDENCE 251 fair and true, "without partiality and without hypocrisy," Broad Churchmen of the noblest sort. Every now and then we get a glimpse in the lives of such men of what Christianity yet has to do for the individual and for the race before its work shall be complete. I think I grow to have more and more tolerance for every kind of Christian except one, and he is the Christian who thinks that his Christian faith is done, that there is nothing greater for it to do than it has done already. He does not believe in the Second Advent, which is a true doctrine of the Gospel, not about a fantastic idea of a new incarnation and of a visible Christ in Palestine, but about a power of Christ over the destinies and institutions and hearts of men more real and spiritual than any that any age has seen yet. But I must not preach to you, and I do not know that I ever before wrote a letter eight pages long. I only wanted to assure you that I did not forget you at Christmas time, and to make sure that you should not quite forget me. I send my kindest and most cordial regards to your husband, and with all best wishes for God's truest blessings I am, my dear Elise, Your sincere friend, Phillips Brooks. In replying to a letter from Mrs. Ward (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps), who had thanked him for the "Lectures on Preach- ing," he says: — December 22, 1879. I am so strange still to authorship that I do not realize that I have actually written books, and any allusion to them always embarrasses me. To the Eev. George A. Strong he sends his thanks for a Christmas present of Clifford's writings : — December 23, 1879. Thank you, dear George. I have wanted to see ClifEord, heathen though he be, for he is about the best specimen apparently of these men who are telling us that we have no souls, and that there is no God. They must pass away some time if anything that we believe is true. But they will surely leave some mark upon the Faith which they so patiently and ingeniously try to murder, and which will outlive them all. There is something almost pic- turesquely like our .muddled time in ClifEord being made a Christ- mas present of. I accept the omen. And I accept your kind good wishes, as I have all the way along for these last twenty years, and thank you ever more and more. This year is especially bright in that it has brought us more near together, after these long years when I never saw you. 252 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 There are some letters written in a hurried, anxious tone from Phillips Brooks to his brothers Arthur and John, in the early weeks of 1880, speaking of the illness of their mother. On the 1st of February she died, at the age of seventy-two. To the letters of condolence which he received from his friends he replied, but not with the same freedom from re- serve as when he spoke of the loss of his father. His grief went deeper. A gentleness and softness of manner came over him, the tenderness which can find its best expression not in words, but in the features, reflecting unspeakable moods in the soul. He went heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother. To Dr. "Weir Mitchell he wrote : — My mother has been the centre of all the happiness of my life. Thank God she is not less my pride and treasure now. To Mr. Cooper : — I did not know I could ever be so much like a child again, but to-night the world seems very desolate and lonely. All my life I have feared and dreaded what has come this week. And now that she is with God, I seem to know for the j&rst time how pure and true and self-sacrificing all her earthly life has been. Surely with all these that have gone before it will not be hard to go to Him when our time comes. To another friend : — The happiest part of my happy life has been my mother, and with God's help she will be more to me than ever. The sense of God and his love has grown ever clearer in the midst of all this sadness and bereavement. To members of his family he wrote these letters : — 175 Maklbobough Street, Boston, February 15, 1880. Dear Aethub, — I am sure we have been thinking pretty much the same thoughts for these last two weeks. It does not seem possible that two weeks have passed almost since that Mon- day morning. Surely Mother's departure was the quietest and most placid of all deaths. And there have been a dozen things smce of which the first feeling was that I must write to her about them, and of which I wondered what she would have to say about them. Last night I had a letter from Aunt Susan, very pleasant, but very sad. They must miss her terribly up there in the old ^T. 44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 253 house. What strange events in our lives will always he those two visits, so much alike when we waited together there between Father's and Mother's deaths and their funerals. And so the new chapter of life has begun, and the Brooks Boys have got to stand together as long as they are left. Well, we have done it pretty well so far, and I guess we shall do it to the end. May we all get through with the faithfulness and simpli- city with which Father and Mother have finished their course. My love to L . Affectionately, P. 175 Maelbobodgh Street, Boston, February 15, 1880. Deab Aunt Susan, — I thank you with all my heart for your thoughtful and kind note. It was real good of you to write it. I knew that you had been thinking of us, and you have known I am sure that we have thought of you all constantly ever since we left you at the door in Andover. It does n't seem possible that two whole weeks have gone since that Monday morning when your message came, and when we started for the last time to go up and see dear Mother. How many times I have been over since then every moment of that day until the quiet peaceful drawing of her last breath in the evening. I never shall be thankful enough that both with her and father it was my privilege to be with them at the last and see how peacefully they both passed into the everlasting life. And ever since we laid her body in the little lot at Mount Auburn I have gone over and over all her life, and remembered all that I thought I had forgotten about the years when we were all together. Ton know, in some respects even better than we do, what she was to us from our birth. And it is impossible to think of her without thinking how much you were to her, and how she loved you and leaned on you, and how you helped her in everything that she did for us. Our gratitude to you and to her will always go together. Her life looks more and more beautiful every day as I think it over, and the new life that she has begun seems only the continuation and fulfilment of the life on earth which we knew and loved so well. Thank you for Uncle Gorham's letter which is very good and kind. Give my love to Aunt Sarah and Aunt Caroline, and may God keep us all. Your afEectionate nephew, Phillips. We must pause for a moment longer to dwell on the mother of Phillips Brooks. Her greatest endowment was in the power and intensity of her emotional nature. She had a 254 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 vast capacity for feeling, pouring it forth inexhaustibly, untiringly. She lavished upon her family an untold wealth of devotion. His father writes to Phillips Brooks at Virginia, in 1859: — I don't think one of her children has an idea of the extreme, incessant, and maternal anxiety she constantly feels for each one of you; just now for you and Fred. You can perhaps conceive somewhat what she feels for Fred from your recollections of your entrance into College life. Such anxiety and love ought to he repaid hack a thousand-fold, and then the debt would still remain. She showed the intensity of her affection in little ways that are pathetic. When she was expecting her son's return from Virginia for his vacation, she was accustomed to pin a paper on the wall of her room with a stroke for each week remain- ing, and draw a line across the marks as the weeks dimin- ished. Her letters to him abound in such expressions as this, "I am longing to see you, and I cannot wait much longer." The devotion of a mother's love was the power by which she trained and ruled her children. From the time the new household was set up, she concentrated her energies in one single purpose, — the care of her family, first its re- ligious, and then its secular welfare. As the family income at first was limited, she studied economy, serving with her own hands. She never accepted an invitation from home for any social function until her youngest child was grown up and no longer needed her care. Dr. Vinton said of Phillips Brooks that he was made by his mother. He also said of her that if she had chosen to go into society she would have been a power in the city of Boston. But the quiet house- hold over which she ruled was a veritable nursery secluded from the world. Everything was sacrificed to this end, — the welfare of the children. Phillips Brooks recalled the picture when he went abroad for the first time. From Germany he wrote in 1865 : — My dearest Mother, — You cannot think how strange it seems to be writing in this little German inn, and knowing that you will read it, in the old back parlor at home, where you have read my letters from Cambridge, Alexandria, and Philadelphia. ^T. 44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 255 Johnnie will bring it up from the post office some night, and Trip will break out into one of his horrible concerts two or three times while you are reading it. Then as soon as it is over, father will get out his big candle, and you will put up the stockings, and all go up the old stairway to the old chambers, and to bed. Well, good-night and pleasant dreams to you all, and don't forget that I am off here wandering up and down these old countries and thinking ever so much about you.* While solicitude for the religious life of her children was the mother's deepest anxiety, yet it did not interfere with, it may have intensified, her anxiety for their physical well- being. She was the mother careful and troubled about many things, but she had somehow reconciled the two types of womanhood; like Martha, but like Mary also, in the good part that could not be taken away from her. She was religious, and yet the simple human instincts of motherhood carried her away. It was her custom, when the boys were at a distance from home, to make up boxes, filled with everything to eat which she knew was liked. Into their preparation she put her heart and thought. Her husband writes to Phillips Brooks of one of these presents, "It was mother aU over." When she sent them it was with the in- junction that they would think of her while enjoying her gift. She understood the nature of boys. Her task must often have been a hard one to curb the natural merriment which threatened at any moment to break loose in riot, or the natural play of the physical powers which often became tumultuous. Even after the boys had grown into men she still felt called upon to exercise her sway in quieting the tendency to uproar. When Phillips and Frederick were on a home visit, the one rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, and the other rector of St. Paul's Church in Cleveland, she is recalled as putting her head into the doorway of the room from which the sound of merriment came, and saying, "Boys, remember it is Sunday." She was a woman very much alive in every pore of her nature, with a watchful eye for any incident that she might distract into a 1 Letters of Travel, p. 18. 256 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 spiritual channel. She studied her opportunities of approach to the soul. "That was a very beautiful prayer, father, that you read " was her remark to her husband after the morning devotions, but the remark was intended for the children. A visitor once came to her, a young and anxious mother, in the confidence that she could get aid from one of so much experience in the bringing up of boys. At first there was demurral, and then, according to the report of the con- versation, she admitted that she could say something in regard to the management of sons. This is the substance of what she said, though in passing through the mind of another it does not reflect her manner of speech, or give her exact language : — There is an age when it is not well to follow or question your boy too closely. Up to that time you may carefully instruct and direct him; you are his best friend; he is never happy unless the story of the day has been told ; you must hear about his friends, his school ; all that interests him must be your interest. Suddenly these confidences cease ; the affectionate son becomes reserved and silent, he seeks the intimate friendship of other lads, he goes out, he is averse to telling where he is going or how long he will be gone. He comes in and goes silently to his room. All this is a startling change to the mother, but it is also her opportunity to practice wisdom by loving, and praying for, and absolutely trust- ing her son. The faithful instruction and careful training during his early years the son can never forget; that is impossible. Therefore trust not only your heavenly Father, but your son. The period of which I speak appears to me to be one in which the boy dies and the man is born ; his individuality rises up before him, and he is dazed and almost overwhelmed by his first conscious- ness of himself. I have always believed that it was then that the Creator was speaking with my sons, and that it was good for their souls to be left alone with Him, while I, their mother, stood trembling, praying, and waiting, knowing that when the man was developed from the boy I should have my sons again, and there would be a deeper sympathy than ever between us. For the illustration of this in her own experience, the reader may recall the account which has been given of Phillips Brooks's reserve, in his youth, when his mother un- derstood him, keeping silence in the years of transition which ^T. 44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 257 shut Mm up to the issue between God and the soul; or of the conversation with George Brooks after his confir- mation, when, like Monica with Augustine, after years of waiting the full communion of spirits came at last. She was making an act of faith when to her son Phillips at Alex- andria she wrote that she would not doubt his love even if she did not hear from him for years. Phillips Brooks resembled in appearance his mother more than his father. The contour of the head, the large dark eyes, the form of the nose, something also in the poise and the carriage of the head, are those of his mother. But the large stature seems to be a remoter inheritance, coming into the Phillips family, together with the deep darkness of the eye, in Phoebe Poxcroft, his great-grandmother, the wife of that Samuel Phillips who founded the institutions at An- dover. The indebtedness of Phillips Brooks to his mother in the line of a rich heritage is perhaps the greater, yet what he owed to his father is of such importance that without it he would not have been the man he was. Thus his handwriting, which is a symbol of many other things, and from which to some extent the character may be read, at one time so closely resembled his father's that it appears at a casual glance to be the same. But as the years went on it changed, and became more distinctly his own, graceful and symmetrical and most legible, without affectation, — a sort of reflection of the man. Many of the higher intellectual qualities of Phillips Brooks are those of his father. His love of historical studies, his taste for architecture, his accuracy, his interest in minute details, his literary sense, and his sober judgments of men and things, — these are traits which his father possessed. He was like him in his habit of writing out on paper what went through his mind. Had his father devoted himself to literary work, he would have achieved distinction. He loved patient, laborious research. There are several large volumes of his journals running through many years in which he notes all that came under his gaze with admirable re- flections of his own, in a graceful style, and always most interesting to read. These journals stand for an immense VOL. n 258 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 amount of work. No monkish chronicler in his cell in the days of the Crusades was more alive than he to the necessity of recording minutely and accurately the events of the passing hour. In that respect his son resembled him, always fastening upon that which had a genuine human interest. His father was something of an onlooker upon life, stationed a little outside or above it, in order to note its movement, and here, too, there was a close resemblance. The father had the con- stant play of humor without which the highest results in character and achievement are impossible, and these also the son possessed in larger measure. Phillips Brooks's almost invariable mood outside of the pulpit was one in which his humor played with all the events, the changes, and chances of this mortal life. It is said that sons inherit from the father the moral qualities. If this be true, then the high unbending integrity, the uprightness of the perfect man, who could be trusted in all circumstances to do what was right and fitting, was an invaluable paternal legacy. For of the father the truest words that his sons could speak were these, "The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance." In this comparison with his father, there are some other points of resemblance. They had in common the love of relics. When the father was leaving Boston in 1877, he entrusted to his son, as if his work in life were over, the relics that he valued : — Boston, February 7, 1877. Deak Phillips, — I have put with this bundle the book with the autograph of George Phillips, our ancestor who came over in 1630. I have always valued it from its rarity, and entrust it to your keeping as a curiosity. I know of but one other. It has the bookmark also of the Kev. Samuel Phillips of South Andover, who graduated in 1708, and died in 1711. Also his portrait. Also a Latin Bible. All of which please accept from Father. The mother was content to remain at home, abiding In the consciousness of an interior wealth, where lay her hap- piness. The son was not without this same satisfaction, but like his father he loved to travel. Thus his father writes to him on one occasion, "I have been so long at home that I .ET. 44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 259 begin to feel uneasy." Phillips Brooks might have often made these words his own. This comparison may be summed up, then, in the state- ment that the invaluable gift of the observation of life came from the father to the son. It is this gift which underlies the imaginative power, and indeed may be said to constitute the imagination when it is united with the other gift of ex- pression, enabling one to reproduce what he sees. In Phillips Brooks the power of observation was enlarged in its range, and was fused with that vast and almost unlimited power of feeling which came from his mother. The gift of observation as seen in the father implies the recognition of a certain importance and significance in secular things, in life as it is and not solely as it ought to be, that kind of realism which is based on the conviction that the divine idea is actually and already working in the ways and institutions of common life. The mother had more of the spirit of the reformer, who is born to set the world right and cannot contemplate with serenity the world as it is. She hungered and thirsted for the righteousness whose coming is so slow. So strong was her will, so intense her nature, that she grew impatient with the obstacles in the way. One who knew the family well speaks of this difference between the father and the mother : — It always seemed to me that Phillips owed to his father the clear common sense and realization of the rights and, so to speak, the personality of others, which kept him from jarring, and made him able not to try for too much or too impulsively. I remem- ber his once speaking with amusement of that difference between Mother and Father. "Mother," he said, "always felt that every- thing must be set right at once. Anything wrong roused her to appeal, 'William, are n't you going to do something about it? Why don't you talk, then! ' And then Father with his quizzical smile would say, ' But it is none of my business. ' " Now, it seems to me that it was just that capacity to see what was his business, and how in the prosecution of it he yet must regard other men's views and peculiarities, and could help them only by sympathy and honest respect, — in that lay Phillips's great exceptional power. We have had many fanatics, whom we have honored for their single-mindedness, but few men of such breadth of mind that we could be sure they understood those who 26o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 differed from them. And one such does more for the unity of the Church universal than all the others. A friend of Phillips Brooks, who had seen him at home and knew his father and mother, writes of his impressions regarding them : — Mr. Brooks always gave me the notion of a typical Boston merchant, solid, upright, unimaginative, unemotional. Mrs. Brooks gave me the notion of a woman of an intense emotional nature, the very tones of her voice vibratory with feeling, deep spiritual life, the temperament of genius, the saintly character. I felt that Phillips Brooks owed his father very much, the business- like and orderly habit, the administrative faculty which worked so easily and was so overshadowed by greater powers that it never received full recognition; the clear logical understanding that framed so well the skeletons of those sermons which the intuitive reason, the active imagination, the literary sense, the spiritual fire so richly filled out, and clothed and inspired afterwards ; and the strong common sense that no fervor of feel- ing, no passionate outburst of soul, could ever sweep from its anchorage. But I never had a question that what made Phillips Brooks a prophet, a leader, a power among men was from the Phillips side of the family. The big heart, the changeful coim- tenance, the voice that so easily grew tremulous with feeling, the eager look and gesture, the magnetism, the genius, seemed to me, and I believe seemed to him, his mother's. The father saw things as they were; she saw things in vision, ideally as they should be. So Phillips Brooks knew the facts of life, seeing with his father's eyes, and all the hopes and possibilities of life through the eyes of his mother. It is unnecessary to carry this comparison further. The conjunction in one personality and in organic fashion, accord- ing to the marvellous mystery of life, of the qualities inher- ited from both parents constituted the foundation of the greatness of Phillips Brooks. Had he received by transmis- sion only the outlook of his father without the inspired hero- ism of his mother he would not have risen to greatness. But, on the other hand, had he inherited from his mother alone, he might have been known as an ardent reformer, not wholly unlike his distinguished kinsman, Wendell Phillips, — a type familiar in New England; but the wonderful fascination of ^T. 44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 261 his power for men of every class and degree, the universal appeal to a common humanity, would have been wanting. He himself recognized the divergence of these possibilities within him. Sometimes it seemed almost to amount to a contra- diction whose resolution into a harmony he was seeking to accomplish. There was a moment in his Philadelphia ministry when he really identified the pulpit with the cause of social reforms. He changed, but the process of the change is buried in silence. AU that we know is that when he came to Boston he must have reached the determination to confine himself to preaching. He saw that there was an evU side to this perpetual agitation, danger of life passing away while one was getting ready to live. Some said, "Kemove first the obstacles which stand in the way of human progress, and then men will be able to live." He said, "The world, humanity, has already been redeemed by Christ. The opportunities of the divine sonship are open to every man. Live! Live greatly now I " ^ The mother of Phillips Brooks, as she went about her house- hold duties, was brooding over a world to be won for Christ. The possibility filled her with strange unuttered enthusiasm. She was thinking much about foreign missions. Her heart would have been torn with natural anguish, but she would have bravely bidden farewell to all her sons had they been going forth into heathen lands to carry the gospel of Christ. "How Mother used to talk to us about Henry Martyn," wrote Phillips Brooks to one of his brothers, when two years later he was in India. A new zeal for foreign missions was born in him from that time. The concentration of his power- ful will in combination with the brooding love and tenderness for humanity, the vast almost superhuman yearning for the well-being of humanity and of individual men, the clear single purpose, from which he steadfastly refused to be turned aside, even by the fascination of intellectual culture or liter- ary creation, the growing devotion to Christ which mastered his whole being, — this we came to know as Phillips Brooks, and this in another form was the spirit of his mother. The 1 Cf. Sermons, toI. vi., for a sermon on the " Battle of Life." 262 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 words of Scripture upon which he fastened as representing his mother's life, to be engraven upon the stone that marks her burying place, were these: "O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt." Shortly after her death he preached upon this text in the pulpit of Trinity Church. The sermon contains no personal reference, but it is the son's memorial of his mother. ^ There are many of his sermons, where one familiar with his life may trace his experience in the home. It was his peculiarity to dwell on the simple facts of his own life till he saw them in their truer, because diviner meaning. There is one sermon entitled "The Mother's Wonder," on the text, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?" which may be called his apology for the inevitable divergence from the standards of the household in which he had grown up. Every man must take his life finally into his own keeping, responsible only to God for his methods and conclusions.* Both father and mother, and particularly the mother, held stringently by those religious opinions which in that day were accounted safe, fearful of the newer books and movements in religion, lest they should shake the foundations of Christian faith. Thus the mother warned her children against Bush- nell's writings as dangerous. The following letter was written by her while Phillips Brooks was in Philadelphia, after he had been for two years the rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity. It wiU be read in a spirit of profoundest reverence, for the intensity of its convictions, its entire devo- tion to truth, that sense of responsibility, as it were, for the world which made the mother great : — Boston, Sunday evening-, NoTember 27, 1864. Mt deae Phillt, — I have just been hearing "William read two sermons by Dr. Bushnell, just published, one upon the "Agony of Christ," and one upon the "Cross." And I am so shocked by them that I cannot refrain from warning you against them as being a preacher of the Cross of Christ. Philly, they are nothing better than Unitarianism that I suffered under all my ^ Cf. Sermons, Tol. iii., " The Greatness of Faith." 2 Cf. Ibid. Tol. iv. ^T. 44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 263 young life. They tear the view of Christ's vicarious suffering all to pieces. I know you admire some of his writings, therefore I warn you not to be beguiled by these ; for God knows, Philly, I would rather never have you preach Christ's blessed Gospel than wickedly pervert it as Bushnell does. I hope you do not own the book called "Christ and His Salva- tion. " But if you do I want you to burn it with Frederick pre- sent to witness and exult over it. I have no patience with the book or with the man. It is shameful to put forth such a book under the guise of an orthodox preacher, when it is nothing better than Unitarianism. I am afraid he will beguile many a one who is not on his guard, and so I cannot help warning you. No, my dear child; remember, you have promised to preach Christ and Him crucified in the true meaning of the words, and I charge you to stand firm. If you do read the book, I would love to see you come out with a scorching criticism of it. He is also going to bring out another volume, which I also warn you against, upon "Christ's Vicarious Sufferings." I shudder to think how he will deny all Christ's blessed dying /or MS. No, Philly, I 've sat under such preaching a long time, and I know how to warn you all against it. I know Dr. Vinton would not like those sermons ; he is so simply sound. I heard him con- demn Dr. Bushnell fifteen years ago. Philly, I wish you would let Frederick read what I have writ- ten. It may do him good too. And excuse the plainness of my writing, and impute it all to my love of the Truth and my earnest desire that you may continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto your life's end. Your faithful and affectionate, Friend and Mother. P. S. I hope you will answer this letter. Perhaps it would be better after you have read the sermons. But perhaps you had better not read them at all. The significance of this letter is its valuation of the truth of vicarious atonement, which, apart from all reasoning, is the expression of some deep human feeling, too persistent to be set aside as an accident in the history of the religious life. Dr. Bushnell, it is well known, changed his opinion on the subject, and after much serious consideration withdrew the book in which he had questioned the vicariousness of the great sacrifice. This letter from the mother of Phillips Brooks, it may be taken for granted, had its influence on 264 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 the son. He was too deep a student of the religious life and of the instinctive utterances of Christian feeling to deny the validity of a conviction which meant so much in his mother's experience. The subject will be referred to again when treating of his theology. But here it may be said that this letter stands to his theology somewhat as the letters of his father, in regard to carrying politics into the pulpit, stood to his general attitude as a preacher. He was a loyal son, even when forced to differ from the parental injunction. Another instance of the parental anxiety was displayed when the book "Ecce Homo" appeared, creating bewilder- ment through its unusual treatment of the person of Christ. Phillips Brooks sought to allay the anxiety which his en- thusiasm for it had created in the home circle by appealing to the authority of Dr. Stone, who was regarded as a safe guide, "I am happy to report to you that Dr. Stone is an enthusiastic admirer of 'Ecce Homo.'" But any concern which the mother may have felt because of the son's diver- gence from those opinions to which she rigidly adhered ceased to exist after he came to Boston. His preaching entirely satisfied her soul in its most exigent demands for the bread of life. This confirms what has already been said, that he had now taken up her mission and was fulfilling it after her heart's desire. Sometimes he himself or his friends would seek to tease her by speaking of his tenets as not in harmony with her doctrinal system, but she was no longer annoyed. She kept the counsels of her heart about in- tellectual difficulties and new developments in theology. It was enough that he was preaching the Christ whom she knew and loved with a power and insight she had never known before. Both father and mother felt the natural human pride in such a son. At the time when the services of Trinity Church were held in Huntington Hall, the father is remembered as going to the robing room, before the service began, and leav- ing there his hat and overcoat before entering the haU. The mother sat with a rapt countenance, leaning slightly forward as her son was preaching. She would often come up to him ^T.44] DEATH OF HIS MOTHER 265 in her shy, gentle way, saying, "Phillips, that was a beauti- ful sermon." She had fears, sometimes grave anxiety, lest his popularity and success would injure his character. " Do you think they are spoiling him?" she once asked in her pleasant but abrupt way of a young clergyman whom she casually met. She did not like the new style of Evangel- ical preaching which came in with the younger generation, with its finical play upon the letter of Scriptures, the find- ing of surprising meanings in the absence or presence of grammatical particles. She also refused to believe that there were any "Eomanizing germs " in the Prayer Book. Thus she wrote : — Boston, May 7, 1869. Mt deak Philly, — I hear that you are to preach the Con- vention Sermon next week. Do stand up with all your strength for our dear good Prayer Book. Plead that not one jot or tittle of it be altered. It never was the cause of that hateful ritualism, and our Faith and our Church will go when our Prayer Book is changed. Let us show we can defend our good old Mother when she is in danger. I trust in your power and will to do it, and may God help you to defend the right. Anxiously, your Mother, and earnestly. The mother is also remembered for that peculiar power of sympathy which was illustrated so amply in her son. A lady who had given up her religious home among the Unitarians to attend Trinity Church, and who felt still as a stranger in the new position, recalls how Mrs. Brooks introduced herself once after service, alluding to her own loneliness when she made the transition to the Episcopal Church. Another lady says of her, "I never saw her without feeling a desire to be better." When her sister went to Washington during the war to serve as a nurse in the hospitals, she writes that she wishes she could go herself. For many years she taught a class of boys in a mission Sunday-school on Purchase Street. But her main work was at home, caring for her household and her children. There she revealed her greatness. Of the devotion of Phillips Brooks to his mother much might be said, and especially in those last years of her life, when he seemed to live for her in constant acts of thoughtfulness for cl66 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 her comfort and happiness. She came to wonder at his good- ness. She grew deeper into the childlike spirit. Gratitude and humility were the graces of her character. Her favorite hymn was one of Bonar's, called the "Everlasting Memorial : " Up and away like the dew of the morning, Soaring from earth to its home in the sun, So let me steal away gently and lovingly, Only remembered by what I have done. The reputation of Phillips Brooks as a preacher had now extended into England and Scotland. To trace the process of his growing fame abroad would be only to repeat the story of his first appearance in the pulpit of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia or of his coming to Trinity Church in Boston. Abroad as at home he awakened the same interest in himself as a man, as well as overcame his hearers by his power in the pulpit. It had been through Dean Stanley that his first introduction to England had come. Then Dean Stanley's friends had become his own, speaking of him among themselves. This was the first be- ginning of his English fame. When his first volume of sermons appeared, it reached a wide circulation in England, because those who read it spoke of it to their friends as some- thing which had left a rare impression on their minds. Be- neath the thought they penetrated to the man, and felt the same desire to know him that had been felt at home. A pathetic interest attaches to this first volume because Dean Stanley read it by the bedside of his wife in her last days. A distinguished dignitary of the Church of England wrote to a friend who sent it to him : — January 21, 1879. . . . The volume you so kindly sent me to look at is a trea- sure, and it has already been brought under my notice by Canon Spence, of St. Pancras, who was introduced to it by Canon Farrar. I have ordered a copy for myself, for I had already dipped into the volume and seen what wealth it contains. Canon Spence said, "The man who wrote those sermons is a giant," little knowing that his words applied physically as well as intel- lectually ! I must say that Phillips Brooks is of all living divines ^T. 44] SERMON BEFORE THE QUEEN 267 the one with whom I feel I have most in common, — whose view of Christianity and the Christian life appears to me to be the wisest and the healthiest. I wish I had the chance of "sitting under " such a teacher. If we could import him into a stall at "Westminster what a gain it would be ! Our Dean says he con- siders the last sermon he preached at the Abbey the best he ever heard there.' The knowledge of the sermons came to the Queen, who read them with deep interest, and made them a gift to the Dean of Windsor. Her Majesty having expressed a desire to hear tim preach when he next visited England, the invitation was conveyed to him by the Dean of Windsor, and on Sunday, the 11th of July, he preached in the Chapel Eoyal at Windsor Castle. The text of the sermon was Eev. iii. 12: "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God . . . and . . . my new name." As it was the first instance in which an American clergyman had preached before the Queen, Dean Wellesley was naturally interested in the result. Writ- ing to Dean Stanley the next day he says : — Phillips Brooks was a complete success. The Queen and who were here admired him very much. His word-painting — if one may use the expression — was very fine, clothing matter most lucidly arranged and with much unction. I do not remember having heard a finer preacher ; and with it the man himself, most simple, unassuming, and agreeable. To Phillips Brooks Dean Wellesley wrote, July 19, 1880 : — I received with great pleasure your letter of the 18th, more especially as it gives me the opportunity of letting you know that the Queen is most anxious to have a copy of your sermon. She has twice asked for it. If it is not giving you too much trouble, you would have it copied in a fair round text, although she would certainly prefer it in your own hand. It would be very nice, if on your return to Boston you would include the ser- mon preached before the Queen of Great Britain in your next volume of printed sermons.^ ^ Cf. Sermons, vol. i., for the senuon referred to, under the title, " The Symbol and the Reality." ' The request was complied with, and the sermon is g^yen in Sermons, vol. ii. p. 60. 268 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 To Mrs. Messer, a daughter of the late Bishop Mcllvaine of Ohio, living in England, Mr. Brooks wrote the following letter describing his visit to Windsor : — Caledonia Hotel, Edisbuboh, July 18, 1880. Deab Mrs. Messeb, — You took such a kindly interest in my going to Windsor that I know you will allow me to tell you about my visit, and how pleasant an experience it was. I went down on Saturday evening and spent the night at the Castle. Everybody was most hospitably cordial, and curious and new as it all was I enjoyed the evening very much. Sunday was a delightfully pleasant day, and the service at noon was full of heartiness and spirit. The place was not, as I had feared, too small to preach in ; and the people, Her Majesty and all the rest, were good enough to listen, so that the twenty minutes of preaching was not disagreeable. After the service the Queen sent for me, and I had a short interview with her. She was kind and pleasant, and I liked her. In the afternoon I went to service in St. George's Chapel, and in the evening came back to London. It was all a very enjoyable experience. I shall always look back to it with much interest. We left London early the next morning, and have been in and about Edinburgh ever since. I have been trying hard to understand what the Scotchmen are saying and how their very queer and complicated Ecclesiastical System is working, and I make some little progress in both. It rains most of the time, otherwise everything is most pleasant. To-morrow morning we are off for the Highlands. I thank you for all your kindness, and with all good wishes, I am. Ever sincerely yours, Phillips Beooks. Besides preaching before the Queen and at Chester Cathe- dral, Mr. Brooks preached at Westminster Abbey, deliver- ing his famous sermon, "The Candle of the Lord." As the Sunday fell on the Fourth of July, many felt that the Dean had given a very difficult task to an American in ask- ing him to preach on that day in such a place. The Dean himself felt some anxiety about the result. Lady Francis BaiUie, a sister-in-law of Dean Stanley, has contributed an interesting incident in connection with the occasion. After the service she slipped out into the deanery by the private door, and reached the drawing-room before any of the guests ^T. 44] WESTMINSTER ABBEY iG^ who were to come in from the Abbey. She found the Dean with tears running down his face, a most extraordinary thing for him; and as soon as she appeared he burst out with expressions of the intensest admiration, saying that he had never been so moved by any sermon that he could remember, and dwelling on the wonderful taste and feeling displayed in the passage at the end. This is the passage referred to, appended to the sermon in order to commemorate the day: — Mt Fkeends, — May I ask you to linger while I say a few words more which shall not be unsuited to what I have been say- ing, and which shall, for just a moment, recall to you the sacred- ness which this day — the Fourth of July, the anniversary of American Independence — has in the hearts of us Americans. If I dare — generously permitted as I am to stand this evening in the venerable Abbey, so full of our history as well as yours — to claim that our festival shall have some sacredness for you as well as for us, my claim rests on the simple truth that to all true men the birthday of a nation must always be a sacred thing. For in our modern thought the nation is the making-place of men. Not by the traditions of its history, nor by the splendor of its corpo- rate achievements, nor by the abstract excellence of its constitu- tion, but by its fitness to make men, to beget and educate human character, to contribute to the complete humanity, the perfect man that is to be, — by this alone each nation must be judged to-day. The nations are the golden candlesticks which hold aloft the glory of the Lord. No candlestick can be so rich or vener- able that men shall honor it if it holds no candle. "Show us your man, " land cries to land. In such days any nation, out of the midst of which God has led another nation as He led ours out of the midst of yours, must surely watch with anxiety and prayer the peculiar development of our common humanity of which that new nation is made the home, the special biu-ning of the human candle in that new candlestick; and if she sees a hope and promise that God means to build in that land some strong and free and characteristic manhood, which shall help the world to its completeness, the mother-land will surely lose the thought and memory of whatever anguish accompa- nied the birth, for gratitude over the gain which humanity has made, "for joy that a man is bom into the world." It is not for me to glorify to-night the country which I love with all my heart and soul. I may not ask your praise for any- 270 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 thing admirable which the United States has been or done. But on my country's birthday I may do something far more solemn and more worthy of the hour. I may ask for your prayers in her behalf. That on the manifold and wondrous chance which God is giving her, — on her freedom (for she is free, since the old stain of slavery was washed out in blood) ; on her unconstrained reli- gious life ; on her passion for education and her eager search for truth ; on her zealous care for the poor man's rights and oppor- tunities; on her quiet homes where the future generations of men are growing; on her manufactories and her commerce; on her wide gates open to the east and to the west ; on her strange meet- ing of the races out of which a new race is slowly being bom ; on her vast enterprise and her illimitable hopefulness, — ;- on all these materials and machineries of manhood, on all that the life of my country must mean for humanity, I may ask you to pray that the blessing of God, the Father of man, and Christ, the Son of man, may rest forever. Because you are Englishmen and I am an American; also because here, under this high and hospitable roof of God, we are all more than Englishmen and more than Americans; because we are all men, children of God waiting for the full coming of our Father's kingdom, I ask you for that prayer.* These words of international amity, which if they could be realized would put an end to jealousy or suspicion or hostility between England and America, were rendered memorable by the sublime associations of the place and the day as well as by the preacher who uttered them. The occasion becomes representative, impressive to the historical imagination. It has in it the element of the picturesque, in which Dean Stanley delighted. The accessories of the moment have been described by an eyewitness : — A vast congregation filled the grand old Abbey, the most striking scene of Christian worship in the world. There was the presence, too, in spiritual communion of the great dead whom the Abbey commemorates, the men of renown in English history, — statesmen and warriors, poets and philosophers, men of letters, of science and of arts, who have made England great, and in whose greatness America claims a share. The noble anthem of Mendelssohn "I waited for the Lord, " resounded through the arches of the vener- > Sermons, vol. il. pp. 20, 21. Cf., also, Essays and Addresses, p. 364, for a reference to the occasion by Mr. Brooks. ^T. 44] CORRESPONDENCE 271 able fane. Dean Stanley, the most eminent ecclesiastic of the century, read for the first lesson the story of Absalom's death in pathetic, almost dramatic manner. While Keble's hymn, "Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear, " was being sung the American preacher in his black gown mounted the pulpit. There were many in the large congregation who had come attracted by his fame. The eyes of all fastened upon him as he spoke. He held their attention by the freshness and suggestiveness, the beauty and spiritual power, with which he invested his theme. He was cultured and classical in his style ; there was also noted the absence in the voice of any American peculiarity which grates upon English ears. But yet he reminded in some subtle way of the wide prairies, in the largeness and freedom of the atmosphere which enveloped him as a garment. There was one common verdict on the sermon, — it was worthy of the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. From that time the fame of Phillips Brooks was established in England. He had the royal approval in having preached before the Queen ; it was but a short step to the confidence and love of the English people. There was an event in ecclesiastical circles while Mr. Brooks was in England which was making no slight commotion, — the renunciation of the Church of England by the Eev. Stop- ford Brooke in order to join the Unitarians. In this event there came to a focus some of the conditions of religious thought which characterized the moment. Mr. Brooke left the Church because he no longer accepted the miracle, joining the Unitarians because among them he was free to preach a non-miraculous Christianity. The question was raised whether he was justified in leaving the Church on this ground. As the national establishment of religion, the Church of England, it was said, might reflect the passing phases of religious opinion in the nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, without detriment to her spiritual constitution or effectiveness. It must be remembered that at this time the scientific presumption against the miracle was so strong that it almost amounted to an intellectual proscription of its adherents. To scientific minds the miracle had become im- possible and unthinkable. To a friend in England who asked for his opinion on the questions at issue, Phillips Brooks wrote this letter: — 272 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 233 Clabbndon Street, NoTemter 4, 1880. Dear Mrs. Messer, — I must thank you in a single hurried word for your kindness in sending me the account of Stopford Brooke's Sermon. I difBer from him very deeply. To me the Incarnation and the miracles which Christ Jesus is said to have wrought seem to be sublimely reasonable, and contradicted by no knowledge of man or of the world which God has given us. I believe that they are true historically and most natural philo- sophically. But as between Mr. Brooke and those who blame him for leav- ing the Church of England, I cannot doubt which is right. Of course he is. He could not stay in justice to the Church or to himself. The "Spectator" had an article upon his action a few weeks ago with which I thoroughly agreed. Ever sincerely yours, Phillips Brooks. Mr. Brooks was accompanied on this visit by his youngest brother. Leaving London after a few delightful weeks, they went to Scotland. Scotland, July 25, 1880. Dear Arthur, — ... Here are John and I, way up in the Highlands, with everything redolent of heather and broom and gillies and pibrochs and burns and tarns and the "Princess of Thule " and that sort of thing. Your letter reached me at Oban a day or two ago, and it was pleasant to learn about Commencement up among those wretches who never heard of Harvard. The High- land journey has been very beautiful and everything has gone well, the weather being exceptionally well behaved. We had almost a week in and about Edinburgh with a little visit to St. Andrew's, where we saw Shairp and TuUoch and the little Divinity School over which the author of the "Rational Theology " pre- sides. One gets quite interested in theological quarrels here, and listens to the battle which is raging over Robinson Smith and his articles in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica " with a curious sort of sense that he is hearing the roar of an out-of-the-way skirmish of the same battlefield that he is so familiar with at home. The Kirk and the Free Church and the U. P's keep up a perennial turmoil, and divide the people of every little county town among them. . . . In London everything was very pleasant. Stanley was very devoted, and put us in the way of seeing lots of pleasant sights and people. I preached for him in the Abbey on the Fourth of July, and was quite shamed with the way in which Farrar in the ^T. 44] THE NEW RECTORY 273 afternoon outsaid everything that I possibly could have said about America. Then I went down to Windsor and preached. . . . Last Sunday we spent in Edinburgh and heard their great man there, a certain Dr. MacGregor. . . . John spent at Boston the Sunday which I spent at Windsor, and preached in old St. Botolph's there. Mr. Brooks returned to Boston with the prospect of taking possession of the new house, No. 233 Clarendon Street. It was intended, of course, as the rectory of Trinity Church, but was built primarily for him, the architect Richardson advising with him in regard to the plan, Mr. Brooks had at first protested against the purpose of building him a fine house, which should be a permanent home. So long had be been accustomed to transient residences in hotels or hired houses that it seemed to him inappropriate to live in any other way. But he acquiesced in the arrangement, and soon appreciated its advantages. The house on Clarendon Street became very dear to him as to all his friends. It was part of his recre- ation to adorn and beautify it with pictures and relics and souvenirs of travel, till it took on a personal character and seemed the expression of himself. Among the relics which he valued and gave an honored place were an old chair from the house in North Andover, and a cabinet richly carved, for which he had a peculiar reverence, as associated with the generations of the PhiUipses. He writes to his aunt Susan that it is a perpetual pleasure, asking for information about its history. Among the letters of this year there is one to his college friend, the Eev. James Reed, pastor of the New Church in Boston : — April 29, 1880. My dbae Jim Reed, — It has not been carelessness or ingrat- itude that has kept me from acknowledging your book before this. But I wanted to read it first, and I found no time until a few days ago, when I went to New York and took it with me. Then I read it all carefully, and I want to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I am not a New Churchman in the special meaning which the words have for you, but I hope still that I have some small part and lot, as I certainly have the deepest interest and delight, in VOL. n 274 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1880 the great New Church which one feels moving everywhere under the crust of sects and dogmas in these days: the New Church which comes down from heaven and not up out of the earth, and whose power of life and unity is love and loyalty to the personal Christ. I thank you with all my heart for your Book, for it has shown me how much there is that is dear to both of us alike, and haa helped me I know in faith and life. May God bless you always. Your old friend, Phillips Bbooks. In the fall of the year he participated in the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church in Boston, where his ancestor, John Cotton, had been a minister, and again at Watertown in the commemoration of the founding of the town and church in 1630, in which his ancestor, Rev. George Phillips, had been an important factor. "I am afraid," he writes to his aunt Susan, "that my ancestors would not ap- prove of the people who are celebrating them." To his brother in bereavement by the death of a child he writes this letter : — December 2, 1880. Dbak Johnnt, — I hope that you will feel like coming down on Monday. I am sure that it will do you good ; you know what a simple, quiet time it is. All the fellows will be glad to see you, and you know what a treat it will be to me. I have been thinking of you all the time, and hoping that you were happy, and that everything was going well with you and H . The Sundays must have been hard enough, and yet I know the work has helped you. I am sure it is a blessing to a minister that the work to which he has to go when he is in sorrow is not a foreign thing which vexes arid chafes him, but he is busied with the thoughts which he needs most, and which bring him into the presence of God where he most wants to be. I am so glad that I was with you those two days, and that I had part in choosing the pleasant spot where the body of your little child and my godchild was to be laid. I shall always be thank- ful for it. How beautiful it must be out there this bright winter morning ! To the Rev. W. N. McVickar he writes in reference to the consecration of the Church of the Holy Trinity : ^T. 44] CORRESPONDENCE 275 233 CiiAKENDON Street, Boston, December 4, 1880. Mx DEAR McViCKAB, — Your good letter came yesterday, and I am glad to be able to clap you on the back at this long distance, and rejoice with you in the Church of the Holy Trinity. Long may you live to flourish there, dear fellow, and may each year be happier and brighter than the year before it. Thank you for wanting me to come. I '11 tell you what I '11 do. If the consecration should be on the 11th of January, I '11 come and spend the 9th with you and preach all I know how on that day and stay over the Consecration day. But I won't preach the Consecration sermon. Dr. Vinton is expecting to do that, and I haven't a moment between now and then to preach a consecration sermon. Get him to come and give the occasion the proper solemnity and dignity which neither you nor I, old boy, are capable of giving. If you '11 do that I will be with you on the 9th and the 11th. I don't see how I could possibly be there on the 13th, for I must lecture here upon the evening of the 12th, and the 16th is our Foreign Missionary Sunday, when I must surely be at home. Now think of all this ; ponder and digest it well, and when your mind is clear write to me all about it, and I will make a big mark in my Almanac, and when the day comes so will I. My best remembrance to your sister and to you. Oh, William, what more can I say than that the longer I live I am more and more, Yours respectfully and affectionately (if you only wouldn't cross your letters), Phillips Brooks. CHAPTER X 1881 THE CALL TO HABVAED UNIVERSITY, AS PREACHER AND PROEESSOR OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. EXTRACTS FROM COR- RESPONDENCE One of the features of the ministry of Phillips Brooks was its adaptation to all classes of men. He spoke to all alike as though in some way he had bridged the gulf which divides the people. He touched the common humanity. But, for the most part, it was his mission in life to preach to people of intellectual culture; nowhere was he more eagerly welcomed than in colleges and universities where the standard was intellectual. Like Schleiermacher in his famous appeal to the educated people of Germany, he made thoughtful men and women realize the power of religion in an age when the current of tendencies ran strongly against religious faith. It is all true, so he seemed to be constantly saying, — this old religion; it has a deeper, larger, grander meaning, and a diviner beauty than you knew. It only needs to be seen as it really is and you would receive it again with enthusiasm. His temperament was intellectual, and therefore he met the human intellect in all stages of its development. Had he been free to follow his natural bent he would have pursued the lines of intellectual research and activity in which his age was interested. But the preparation for the ministry and the experience of the pulpit had forced upon him the conviction, that if the intellectual appeal was to be effective it must come from an intellect fused in organic relationship with the heart and will, — the whole man on the one side reaching forth to meet a simple humanity on the other. It was through his power to meet the needs of those who were seeking to connect intellect with life that he became the ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 277 favorite preacher to young men in that stage of their progress where the intellect is supreme. To an age of over-intellec- tual refinement and subtlety, where the reason was defeating its own end, he brought a mind which had been subjected to special training in the logic of life. Educational institutions recognized his mission and asked for his aid. While in Philadelphia he had been called to the presidency of Kenyon College, in Ohio. He felt an attraction for such a call, but declined on the ground that he would not be free to carry out his purpose in his own way. He had been invited to take the chair of Church History in the Philadelphia Divin- ity School, and, as we have seen, his impulse had been to accept it. In 1880 he was requested to consider the question of the provostship of the University of Pennsylvania. To Dr. Weir Mitchell he then wrote : — I must not think of the provostship ; though if I were free there is no place in the country that would attract me so. I think the work of a provost there, should it be thoroughly and in the best way successful, would be so fine, that nothing I could think of would compare with it. But I am a preacher to the end. But there came a call which shook his resolve to abide exclusively by the pulpit. In the early spring of 1881 he was invited to accept the position of preacher to Harvard University and professor of Christian Ethics. It was an opportunity that strangely realized the dreams of his youth, when it had been his ambition to become a great teacher, when his highest hopes would have been fulfilled if he had been offered a position in Harvard College. It was a character- istic of the man that what he had once loved he had loved forever, and to Harvard his whole heart had been given. The call came as the natural sequence of his devotion to it during his ministry in Boston. On coming to Boston he had been at once elected to its Board of Overseers, and when his first term of service had expired was reelected for a second term. In this capacity for twelve years he had now served the College. In his position as an Overseer [says President Eliot] he sup- ported all changes which enlarged the freedom of the students, 278 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 simplified regulations, and tended to develop in the young men the capacity for self-control. In his judgment of character and of conduct, he was generous without being weak. He was tolerant of all religious, philosophical, and political views and opinions, — so much so that I never heard him raise a question on any such matter when the appointment of a teacher was under discussion; but he had a strong dislike for the pessimistic or cynical temper, and in a few instances he expressed distrust of College teachers on the ground that they exhibited this quality, in his judgment so injurious to young men. His first connection with the College as a religious teacher was indirect, through the chapel of the Episcopal Theologi- cal School. The most noticeable feature of these Sunday evening services for the seven consecutive years he had preached there was the large number present of its officers and students. It was something unusual for students in such large numbers voluntarily to crowd a place of worship in order to listen to a sermon, and the spectacle awoke reflection as to the place of religion in the College. During those years the attendance of Harvard students never slackened. They knew that the service was intended for them, and the feeling grew that Phillips Brooks was devoting himself to their inter- est. "When this arrangement came to an end in 1877, a peti- tion was sent to him from the students, with a large number of signatures, asking that he continue to preach in the chapel. But for various reasons it was not possible to comply with the request, and there came the feeling of a void, which could be only partially filled by his occasional appearance at the college chapel. In 1881 came the opportunity to bring him into an official relationship, through the resignation of Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, who for many years had held the post of preacher to the University. To this vacant place Mr. Brooks was at once invited. The call of Phillips Brooks to Harvard produced a wide- spread and intense excitement. There was much speculation as to its import and possible consequences, — deep searchings of heart when one considered all the issues involved. In the minds of some the consideration was foremost that the Uni- versity was breaking with the traditions of its history in ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 279 handing over the responsibility for the religious training of its students to an Episcopal clergyman, a representative of the Church of England in America. And again for several generations the College had been identified with Unitarianism. To call a minister of another denomination must mean at least that the University was swinging away from its old position as a sectarian institution. But if this meant calamity to Unitarians it must mean jubilation to Episcopalians, as though there were a possibility of their ultimate possession and control. Or, still further, there was ground for the sin- ister suspicion that Mr. Brooks had changed his creed, and under some tacit understanding with the Corporation had been called to the high position. In the absence of definite infor- mation, and in the intense interest and excitement which prevailed, unnatural rumors were magnified into facts. Mr. Brooks himself was so stirred by these reports that he went to President Eliot, and asked if it were understood by those in authority that he was a Trinitarian in his belief. The answer was definite and satisfactory that he had been called with full knowledge of his theological position. Thus the religious history of more than two hundred years seemed to be condensed in this simple issue. Whether the President and the Corporation of Harvard had foreseen these things or not, they could not have realized how profound and widespread would be the interest which their action would awaken, how it would stir the city of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and become a question of importance to the country at large. But in the midst of the excitement and the confusion, one thing stood out with great clearness, from which there coidd be no dissent, — the Corporation of Harvard University in calling Phillips Brooks had performed an ideal act which was above all criticism ; they had asked for the one man in all the world whom they most wanted, who if he came would fill the vacant place, and bring increasing honor and confidence to the institution. They had called him not because he belonged to any one reli- gious body rather than another, but in spite of his denomina- tional affiliation. They had supreme confidence in the man 28o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 himself, that under all circumstances he could be trusted to do that which was right and honorable and beautiful in the eyes of all men. It was understood from the first that Phillips Brooks not only felt free to consider the offer, but that he was strongly inclined to accept it. He had freely said so when the offer came to him. It would seem as though this were a question which a man was entitled to decide for himself, and above all that such a man as Phillips Brooks would insist upon this simple prerogative of his manhood. If he had done so, all would have admitted that he had acted conscientiously and from the highest motives. But here we touch an extraordinary phase in this most important of the experiences of his life. He was not to be allowed to decide it for himself. The issues at stake were so vast and so momentous, he represented so much more than himself, that he was compelled, as it were, involuntarily to submit the question to be determined by the people while he waited for the verdict. Such is the impres- sion made when the full picture of the moment is gathered in. There came a month of waiting and suspense, filled up with personal interviews, when anxious letters flowed in upon him daily from all parts of the country, from aU classes of people, from the governor of the Commonwealth and the president of the University down to the humble serving woman who had found him her support and consolation in the struggle with the hard necessities of life. As one studies this mass of letters, where the question of his going to Har- vard is discussed frankly and in all its bearing by scholars and statesmen and thinkers, by lawyers and men of business, by the clergy of all denominations, by women in all ranks of life as well as by men, by those who were his closest friends and by those who had never seen or heard him, there is con- veyed to the mind a rare and intimate vision of how people are feeling at a certain moment in life, such as one never gets from books or history. To Phillips Brooks it must have proved a strange revela- tion. In his simplicity he had thought he could act in such a juncture as did other men. Now it was borne in upon him ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 281 that he did not belong to himself and was no longer living for himself. Others were claiming him for their possession, each for his own. It reminds one of that earlier experience when the spirit of the world also recognized him for its own, and blocked his way when he was seeking to direct it for himself. The spirit which then sent him into the ministry was now at work to prevent the defeat of its design. To this end it invoked methods that were almost weird in their effects. Those who wrote and spoke to him broke the cus- tomary reticence of life, and told him all they thought and felt. It was like listening to a long eulogy while he was yet alive. It must have had its effect. It humiliated him to the very dust. He could never again be quite the same that he had been. There was from this time a change in his face and bearing, as of one who had seen a vision of things un- speakable. It may be interesting to review, now that twenty years have gone by, the history of that critical moment in the life of Phillips Brooks. He was the object of a controversy, almost a battle, between contending parties, not unequally matched. In the first place the cause of the University may be presented. And from the first it had this advantage, that Mr. Brooks felt a strong inclination to accept the call. He liked young men and the associations of student life. Throughout the years of his ministry he had not discarded his early ambition to do some scholarly work. Amid the pressure of duties in a large parish he felt at a dis- advantage when issues were at stake which could be solved only by intellectual research. To this research he could bring a mind that had learned how to connect abstract ideas with life. He may even have felt that he had for this reason a special mission to young men at the age when the intellec- tual is too apt to be divorced from the moral and the spiritual. There was a possibility that he might help them to a more complete culture. He was at this time forty-five years of age, not too late to betake himself again to the distinctive work of a student, — the moment in a man's life when all his powers have reached their perfection. But it was manifest enough 282 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 that he had no time to lose. If anything were to be done in this direction it must be begun now, or he must abandon the dream forever. And still further, he was beginning to be wearied with the burden he had so long been carrying. For twenty years he had stood in the pulpit, Sunday after Sunday, preaching his matchless sermons. To exert the influence he did was to take the life out of him. With the constant drain on his vital powers it was a marvel that he had endured so long without the breaking down of his health. People had come to think of his work as calling for no effort or preparation, welcoming and rejoicing in his appearance as in the sun shin- ing in its strength. In the rich endowment of his nature, he seemed to work with such absolute spontaneity that no one thought of a possible exhaustion, or if they did, postponed it to years in the remote future. Yet there were signs already that he had overtaxed his strength. He said nothing of them, perhaps did not consciously recognize them as warn- ings. Yet he knew that he needed some great change, and the opportunity was here presented to him. These personal considerations were reinforced by the most earnest appeals from the University, its officers and its stu- dents, and by others throughout the length and breadth of the land, wherever the interests of Harvard were cherished. The late Professor J. P. Cooke wrote to him : — Of the great opportunities for influence which the College ofEers, you need no one's testimony; but I doubt if you appre- ciate how very great they are. I have had an intimate knowledge of the facts for some thirty years, and I speak of what I do know when I say that your power here at this time would exert a greater influence over the educated minds of the country than in any other position however prominent. As is the case with all planting, we are obliged to wait long for the fruit of our labor, but it is a noble harvest when it comes. This is a place where conviction at once leads to action, and you know this is not the case where men are engrossed in the cares of the world. The one place in the country to fight and overpower the agnosticism which IS weakening the religious faith and sapping the manhood of the community is just here. You have a wonderful power, and I do hope you can view this field of labor as I do. ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD ^83 The College is offering you [wrote a prominent educator] the very finest chance for working " Christo et Ecclesia " that has ever before been offered to any man in this country. The greatest religious opportunity in this country [wrote another distinguished teacher] will be lost if you say No. And who knoweth [were the words of Scripture quoted to him] whether thou art come to the Kingdom for such a time as this? You can touch [says a Unitarian clergyman] the young men at Harvard. I will not say "you know to do it," for I doubt if you do know how you do it. But God helping you, you do it. Allow me to express my very earnest desire and hope [wrote the late Dr. Ezra Abbot] that you will accept the call to Har- vard, where I am sure your influence would be a power for good hardly to be measured. No other man [wrote one of the younger professors in the College] has such a hold on the young men as you. No matter what the explanation is, you do, as a fact, hold their ear and their whole confidence. ... I believe you can do with these thousand young men practically anything. . . . People of every church would welcome you, without distinction of creed and with open arms. Among the clergy, as among the students, the sense of re- ligious divisions was subordinated when they thought of Phillips Brooks at Harvard. Yet in some of the letters there is the consciousness that religious changes are impending, not without significance. Most of the clerical opinion was in favor of his remaining in Trinity Church. But there were some exceptions. The late Eev. J. F. Garrison, a learned and thoughtful Episcopal divine, not so widely known as he deserved to be, writes : — My acquaintance with you is too slight to give me any right to express an opinion to you upon so weighty a matter, but my sense of its vast importance is so profound that I shall let it override conventionalities. I feel that no congregation in this Union can give you such a mighty field of work for God, just where it is most needed, as there. To be the privileged teacher of thousands of men, themselves well-nigh all to be in their future life in 284 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 some high sense teachers, and of such an institution, will enable you to do a work for the cause of Christ such as is seldom offered to a man. And in this age, when there are such intense mental awakenings and so much silly orthodoxy quailing under them, to have a man who knows how to be true to the essentials and yet not bound in the grave clothes of dead formulas, seems to me one of those providences of God you ought not to regard in any other light or on personal grounds. Among other letters which came to him was one from the late Eev. John Henry Hopkins of Williamsport, Pa., the son of the Bishop of Vermont with the same name, an eccle- siastical controversialist all his life, devoted to High Church principles, but also capable of seeing the larger bearings of religious problems. He writes : — Your election to succeed Dr. Peabody at Harvard is the most stunning fact in regard to religious changes that our country has seen since the Cutler and Johnson tempest in the " good old colony times." It means more than dozens of Rectorates or even Epis- copates. Accept by all means. There ought not to be one moment's hesitation, unless merely to enhance the effect of your acceptance. Your acceptance will do more to leaven the intellect of the land than can well be conceived of. Rejoicing with all my heart in the wonderful field thus opening before you for wide- spread good, I am, etc. This following letter was from the late Dr. George E. Ellis, who was watching the career of Phillips Brooks with an interest deep and undisguised : — 110 Maklborough Street, Boston, April 5, 1881. Deab Mb. Brooks, — With inexpressible satisfaction do I read in the papers that the Corporation of the College have invited you to the office of the College Pastor. Allow me to say frankly that I can think of no other minister of any denomination whom I would so gladly see in that office, and whose accession to and occupancy of it would be so grateful to our whole community, and so hopeful of good to the College. And I shall find this satisfaction in the call to you whether your judgment and conscience decide on its acceptance or other- wise, for I know that your decision will be made upon most thoughtful religious deliberation on the way of duty. Hard in- deed it must be for you to weigh the alternatives presented to you. ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 285 In talking confidentially to one of the Corporation recently, I said I did not believe they could find an able, earnest, and self- respecting man who would be willing to accede to the o£Bce held by Dr. Peabody on the conditions under which he had exercised it. I think you yourself would exert a mastery over those con- ditions. One might perhaps suppose that I should feel something of a shock at the thought of the old Puritan College being minis- tered to by an Episcopal clergyman. But I feel nothing of the sort. Circumstances and relations, coming with the changes of time, modifications of opinion and the expansion of the College, I will not say reconcile me to the result, but dispose me to wel- come it. Nothing will ever lower my sense of the profound indebtedness of the obligations of this especial community to that class of persons, clerical and lay, of the last generation, who were known as Liberal Christians, devout, serious, earnest Bible Chris- tians. Their works and services have left an enduring benefac- tion to this good city and to the College. But with existing so- called Unitarianism I have for many years had no concern. It has left no authoritative basis for religious instruction and insti- tution common to preachers and people. The preacher has for his stock and capital his own individualism of opinion and belief, and his utterances are like notes, dependent on his own credit and integrity and resources, instead of current coin of Divine or human realm. Of course, I am wholly ignorant of any conditions ofEered or required of you or by you in reference to the acceptance of the discharge of the official duties proposed to you. I have written these lines solely from the promptings of my own loving respect for you, and in view of the gleam of a bright way of relief for the College from what I feared would be an almost hopeless difficulty. Excuse me if I have in any way tres- passed upon delicacy or propriety. Most sincerely yours, Gboege E. Ellis. There were many other things said in connection with the call by those who favored it, but the burden of the argument has been given. It was well summed up in the Christian Eegister (Unitarian), " Phillips Brooks would not be lost to Boston, but would be gained by the whole country." Nor could anything nobler in spirit be found than the attitude of the Unitarians, who while they felt that the College was to be no longer identified with the religious body which they repre- 286 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 sented, could yet rejoice in the call to Phillips Brooks, and yield their support to the comprehensive and far-sighted policy of the President of the University, as he sought to give reli- gion the foremost place among the agencies and influences in the college world. Among the incidents of the campaign, as it may be called, was a mass meeting of Harvard students, where speeches were made and a petition signed, expressing not only the hope that he would come, but the conviction that he could not refuse. Accompanying the petition was a letter from the late Mr. Frank BoUes, afterwards secretary of the College, whose untimely death is stiU lamented : — You will receive to-day the signed copy of the resolution passed at the great meeting of last evening. It was probably the largest spontaneous meeting of students ever held here. The Chapel was packed (it holds over three hundred), and more were turned away than could find seats or standing room. The speeches, all made by students, were so earnest, so full of confidence in your coming that I wished you could have heard them and seen for yourself what Harvard thinks of your coming. Of the speak- ers, certainly seven to one were not churchmen, and throughout the whole meeting not one word was said which did not show, not only the deepest regard for you and admiration for your work, but the fullest confidence that you would decide to come, and that it was wise for you to come. I mail you a copy of the "call " for the meeting, which was posted at eleven o'clock yesterday afternoon. And now, my dear Mr. Brooks, I can only say a word or two more of the much that I think about this matter. I beg of you to remember in all this clamor, that we all knew that you were doing a great work in Boston, that we all knew how Boston valued you ; and yet when you were asked to come here, we believed we were asking you to a more useful field, and to a congregation of hearts whose devotion to your teaching would bring forth even better fruit than that of Trinity parish. Your coming here will be the opening of the new reformation in thought and faith of American manhood. It will give the needed example to all our great universities, and show them that in calling to their chairs the great preachers of the day, they will be laying the foundation of a revived faith among mew, a faith, which equipped with all that modem learning can afford, will have a strength and vigor unknown in any earlier age of the Church. ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 287 From the situation in Cambridge we turn to Boston and to Trinity Chureli. The letters that came to Dr. Brooks urging him to remain at his post were no less positive and exigent in the expression of convictions than those advising his acceptance of the call, but in niunber they exceeded them in the proportion of ten to one. What he had been to Boston in the twelve years of his ministry at Trinity Church it is impossible to describe ; it must be left to the imagination to conceive. He had become one of its foremost citizens, so identified with the city that he had given it a new lustre and reputation. Visitors to Boston from all parts of the country and from abroad thought of it as the home of Phillips Brooks. To see him or to hear him was one of the induce- ments which led strangers to remain over Sunday, or brought pilgrims as to some sacred shrine. Trinity Church during these years had been like an open cathedral, the common property of the people; or, to change the figure, it had be- come a vast confessional for human souls, whose spiritual directorship was bringing strength and consolation, faith and hope, to the thousands whom no man can number. At first there had been symptoms of coldness, suspicion, or uncer- tainty in the reception given to PhiUips Brooks, but all that was long gone by. Boston had taken him to its heart as well as to its head. He had no superior, no rival in its affections. It had been impossible, even had he wished it, to confine his influence to the limits of his parish. He spoke to all, and his heart went forth alike to all, without regard to distinctions of class or religious sects. He had the freedom of the city and its many suburban towns, and he had the freedom of all reli- gious denominations. The devotion to Phillips Brooks, it need not be said, rested upon solid foundations at a very peculiar juncture in the history of religious faith. He had risen up as a deliverer from the causes that were shaking religious opinion and un- dermining or destroying religious belief. There was no illu- sion about it; it was most real. The people are not mistaken about these things. And yet there was danger of its becom- ing a fashion to worship him. A distinguished clergyman, 288 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 who knew Boston well, remarked that so long as Phillips Brooks remained there, it was impossible that any other clergyman should be estimated at his true merits. The remark was not meant to be disparaging, but only to state the simple fact. It had reached such a point that the veriest commonplaces of religious thought or sentiment when uttered by him were received on his authority as true, or as if they had never been spoken before. Those who listened to him wrote down his remarks to send them away to their friends as what Phillips Brooks had said. They treasured up his sayings as the first principles of religion. He was the stan- dard of comparison by which others were judged. The clergy of Boston knew better than most the deeper significance of Phillips Brooks's position. Nor was there a better test of their manhood, or of their Christian character and power of intellectual and spiritual appreciation, than when they asked him to remain in Boston. There were some who thought it would have been a gain to every one of them had he left. They did not take this view. They knew, and they said to him, that every church was the stronger for his presence in the city, that they themselves were stronger to do their work, that every agency for good was more effective under the stimulus of his inspiration. It had been one of the arguments for inducing him to go to Harvard that he would influence the future teachers of others as they passed through the College on their way into the world. He was now reminded that he was doing this work at Trinity. Teachers in the public and private schools of Boston and the vicinity were drawn there in large numbers by his magnetic influence, living by his strength, for some- how he spoke to teachers of every grade, from the highest to the lowest, as if teaching were his profession. And then again, he was reminded that he need not go to Harvard to meet young men, for there was a university in his own parish, drawn in part from the College and from all the higher insti- tutions of learning and professional schools in and around Boston. Theological students came from their seminaries in every direction to listen to the sermons on Sunday after- .ET. 4S] CALL TO HARVARD 289 noons, — from Boston University, from Newton, and from Cambridge. And they came also with the knowledge and approval, even the recommendation of their teachers. It would not, therefore, do to assume, as some had done, that it would be no loss to Boston if he went to Harvard. In this discussion the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts took part. He, if any one, could speak for the city and the State, and the value of his testimony is enhanced in that he was not a member of the same religious communion : -^ April 13, 1881. My dear Mb. Brooks, — May I add my sincere word in be- half of your remaining in Boston ? It seems to me in the interest of the Commonwealth, with its population accumulating and its young men gathering in its capital, that your close relation to them should not be lost. The Harvard boys do not need you so much. They have everything already. If they develop some wild oats, yet the general surroundings of their college life lead them to higher opportunities and standards sooner or later. But yoiir reach in Cambridge will be nothing compared with what it is in Boston, extending to homes, families, the shop, the count- ing-house, and every fibre of the city. I cannot help feeling that to change would limit and not enlarge your work. I know your own judgment is best, but I think you will pardon my suggestion which is certainly sincere. Very truly yours, John D. Long. The call had been given to Mr. Brooks in the latter part of March, and by the middle of April the excitement had grown to an unprecedented extent. The daily newspapers in Boston teemed with communications, representing every point of view. Throughout the country the conflict was watched in its varying phases and commented on as having some strange import for all the higher interests of life. It may be said for Phillips Brooks that he was now waiting to give his answer, not of his own volition, but because he was earnestly besought to wait until the question should have been discussed in all its bearings. Only in the multitude of counsellors was there safety. Both parties in the conflict felt secure, if only time could be taken for the fullest consideration. VOL. n 29° PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 One effect of the discussion was to make men realize as they had not done before the unique greatness of the man in whom the interest concentrated. In the history of pulpit oratory, it was asked, who was there to compare with him? He was to be ranked among those most eminent, whose fame had come down through the ages, the few who came first to the mind. Great names were recalled, St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Chrysostom, in the ancient church; St. Bernard, St. Francis, Tauler, and Savonarola, in the Middle Ages; Jeremy Taylor and Bossuet, in the seventeenth century, — that age of great preachers; Chalmers, or Tillotson, or Beecher, in the modern world. What one among them all was greater than he, especially when one took into considera- tion the vast growth of the modern day, and recalled that he was now moving by his voice or by his writings the English- speaking world, with its colonies in every part of the globe? There were those who took these things into consideration and were impressed and awed as they revolved in their minds the issue. This gift of inspired speech, so divine and so rare, had he any right to endanger its possession for the world by any experiment? All the conditions of his place at Trinity Church had favored its expanding power. What would be the result if he were to withdraw himself into the seclusion of the University town ? He was reminded that his power as a preacher must in some real though subtle way be dependent on conditions which would be lost if he were to abandon the pulpit of Trinity Church. Mr. Eobert Treat Paine wrote to him with these thoughts in his mind. April 14, 1881. Mt deak Brooks, — Let me too pour out my heart to you, about what is filling all our hearts. I know how you are over- whelmed with counsels from all sides. Take it in patience, and let it at least convince you of the Love and Respect of the whole city for you, — your hold on the heart of the whole Community — their terrible earnestness that you should remain doing your grand work among them — and their pain at the thought that you may think it a duty to go. What a sight this is ! A great city stirred at the fear of losing you, and many sects, forgetting all sectarian ties, men as well as ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 291 women, youths as well as strong men, uniting to speak out to you, not only their affection, but their strong sense of how you have brought to them and the whole city the Blessings of God. Boston is just the city to-day for ideal work — large enough for a. vast work to be done — bad enough to be almost hopeless — good enough to fill us with hope passing into certainty. Boston has a certain great privilege among the great cities of this coun- try. She holds an influence second to none. Work done here has a potency and value multiplied all over the land. College life is full of fun and froth and frolic and frivolity and scurrility. It is acutely critical. It turns into sport everything, saered and profane. Life is free there first — full of joy and spar- kle, full of study and sports, absorbed and preoccupied. Entire absence of variety in experience ; death, marriage, children, busi- ness, failure, sickness, suffering, danger, all that makes adult life so full, — none of all this enters the life of the student. Gather them together into a single audience, and it is the hardest in the world to hold in constant interest to religion. Scatter them into their own churches and it is far easier. Compel them to attend at Appleton Chapel and some will be studying for the Lampoon, and their spirit is contagious on all around. Surely this is the least impressible part of life. It is not responsive, it has no magnetism in it. The power of the Preacher rises to the need. Great need is great inspiration. Life in a great city with all the sufferings and joys and anxieties of the infinitely varied lives of a multitude of men and women and chil- dren crowding upon a minister's sympathies keep him full of fire, and make him surpass himself. The secluded life of a college minister, with boys critical and cold and free, and so simple in their relations to life, lacks almost every inspiration except Duty, stem Daughter of the Voice of God. Others might go there and do as well as they could else- where, but surely you feel the magnetic influence of responsive numbers too powerfully not to know the danger of settling down as the permanent, regular college preacher and professor. Not that I make light of such important work, but the question is where you can find the Great Field for those transcendent powers which God has poured out upon you in such full measure. You, the great Missionary to the Masses of the People! You, who have let us build a splendid Temple, full of beauty and art and lavish outlay, — because all unto God and a joy to offer — this splendid Temple not only, nay not so much, for ourselves, as for the masses of the people, now and hereafter, setting a grand example of rich and poor, of favored and unfavored, meeting to 292 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 worship God! Can you, the people's leader, go apart to the favored few, the sons of wealth, present or prospective, — the sons of culture, and leave the Great World behind ? Among others who did much to clear up the issue and bring all its aspects before Mr. Brooks was his friend Colonel Charles R. Codman, who studied the situation with the keen and practised eye of a man of affairs. He pointed to a few actual facts which afforded the basis of a conclusive deduction. Trinity Church was so near the University that its students could attend there freely if they wished. In case he went to Cambridge he would have only a fraction of its students for an audience, for a large proportion of them spent Sundays at their homes, and went to their various places of worship. A large part of the University, indeed, the Medical School, was in Boston. And more important still, it had been in and from his place in Boston that he had already exerted such an influence upon Harvard as to lead to his call, and it was not necessary to go there to reside in order to retain or increase his influence. It was also pointed out what many felt, that the sectarian feeling really consti- tuted an element in the problem. There would be jealousy of him as an Episcopalian. Already in the communications to the press this cry had been raised. The Episcopalians, it was said, were "working like beavers " to secure the trans- formation of Harvard College into an American Oxford and to make it as far as possible an Episcopalian institution. If he went to Cambridge he would have to suppress his own con- victions and would not be as free as at Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity, the liturgical worship of the Prayer Book, the method of the Christian year, he could not keep these colors flying for fear of some sectarian protest. The truth was simply this, that the University had outgrown the possibility of any longer being ministered to in its spiritual life by any one clergyman, no matter to what denomination he might belong. The Episcopal clergy for the most part were agreed that the Church would suffer a greater loss by his removal than the College would gain. Those more especially who looked ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 293 to Phillips Brooks as a leader, leavening the Episcopal Church with the elements of a more comprehensive theology, and ■weakening the ecclesiastical stringency which separated it from other Protestant communions, were unanimous in the expression of their conviction that it would be nothing short of a calamity if he abandoned the parish ministry. He would gradually lose his identification with the Episcopal Church altogether. There were still other considerations which had their weight. "The aptitude of the student mind," wrote the Kev. C, C. Tiffany, "to sheer off from the direction of oflBcial teachers, especially preachers, gives me the conviction, that in your present position you affect these students more positively than you could from the University pulpit." The Kev. William R. Huntington fastened upon a point which no one else had urged. The post to which Mr. Brooks had been called carried with it not only the preaching in the University pulpit, but the work of a teacher in the chair of Christian Ethics. "A sophomore," wrote Dr. Huntington, "is not likely to be the more interested in your preaching on account of your having given him, the week previous, a poor mark in his examination paper." There were letters from representative business men in Boston pleading in behalf of those who were neither scholars nor teachers, but that large class of yovmg men who would influence the business interests of Boston in the future. One of them, from an old schoolmate and dear friend, will be read with interest : — Boston, April 12, 1881. Deab old Chap, — Forty years is it since we began learning Latin and mischief together — you the Latin and I the mischief ? Since which we have never had a cross word, and so I will run the chance of one by impertinence. Folks say that the College is asking for you; and it is true, I know. Since you took your course for life, you have gone on steadily and enthusiastically until you've won a great place. Just think of the empty old church and of the present full church ! Just think of the men and women of the intelligent and educated classes whom you 've drawn into your fold ! Think what these 294 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 men will do for the less fortunate people of our city, and still more think hoW your women work ! We have not seen the like for a great, great while. It has fallen to you to do this thing, and I will not pass on your deserts, but merely on your luck to have done something in this life worth doing. Is not that what we all are after, and what goes far to save us from remorse or despair ? How can a chap be content for a day, unless he is aim- ing at something of a serious kind? It is the only theory on which one can explain this life, is n't it ? And how many of our comrades have made a success of their lives ? or how often does it occur in our experience to see it? You have, — no matter how or why ; and still more the future for you is greater in promise than the past has been in perform- ance. Don't dream of leaving your own field. Your personal contact with all these folks is a necessity, if you will go on. How can you then think of Cambridge and the dear old Univer- sity? You can't work on those boys in the same way, simply because they are at the questioning, critical, restless age. The worst of them are not bad, but frivolous or idle-minded. The best of them are seeking for the truth everywhere, and had better seek by themselves. Let them ferment. Of course you can help many a restless spirit, when he wishes to be helped — but you can do it as well here as at Cambridge. You certainly can talk to or preach to or teach them at Cambridge occasionally — as in Boston. But, for Heaven's sake, don't leave your stronghold for this new field. It would be the mistake of your life — and you will rue it deeply and forever. Now how do I know? I do not know, and yet I feel absolutely sure of it. I 've talked to some of the middle-aged and some of the younger folk of it, and listened with much interest — to but one reply. You know that personally I get nothing from your being in town. We both are too busy to meet often unless at church; and there I do not go. So I am free from bias. But I can't but feel much interested m your work, and glad of your great influ- ence. Don t risk losme it dmi't n-n o„„ /-i TV.- 1 *<- IT r ^ , ^° ^^*y "^ntil your sun sets. This letter calls for no reply. If it annoys you, burn it and forgive me for the sake of old times. I know that it is presum- ing, impertment, arrogant even. It has not one word of praL or admiration for you. Such a word is not called for or neSf but no one can value work and entbiiK,-,or„ „ ., oi neeaea, know full well how I feel about your H^ '^"" ^^ ^*'" God bless you, old fellow. Henry L. Higkjinsoit. JET. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 295 As the time went on the forces that multiplied against the call were stronger than those in favor of it. If the students of Harvard had a mass meeting to urge his coming, so also a mass meeting was held in Boston in Huntington Hall, at which hundreds of young men raised their voices in protest against his leaving. The entire membership of the Young Men's Christian Association signed their names to a request that he should remain in Boston. There came the same request in a petition from the large business establishment of C. r. Hovey & Co., signed by more than fifty names. Other petitions there were, with the names of prominent busi- ness firms appended. It was no slight consideration with Phillips Brooks that the members of his own family were opposed to his going. The wise counsel of the Rev. Arthur Brooks, in whose judgment he placed great confidence, con- demned on the whole what seemed a doubtful experiment. The bishop of the diocese asked him to remain. Trinity Church spoke in its organic capacity through the wardens and vestry : — Boston, April 11, 1881. To THE Eeveeend Phillips Beooks, D. D., — We, the "War- dens and Vestrymen of Trinity Church, feel it our duty to address you on the invitation that you have received to become the preacher to the University at Cambridge. As individuals, we have expressed our personal wishes that your relations to the Parish may continue for many years, but we have not hitherto felt called upon to take official action. We were confident that you thoroughly imderstood our feelings, and we have desired not to embarrass you by any act of ours. But we cannot forget that we are the chosen representatives of the Proprietors of Trinity Church, and we feel that we should not be acting justly to them, nor to the large number of worship- pers who are connected with the Parish, if we did not in their behalf afEectionately, but most urgently and earnestly, beg you to consider well, not only what may be your duty to them, but to the larger community to whom you have ministered. We speak not only for ourselves, but for the highest spiritual interests of those whom we immediately represent, and chiefly for the city in which we live, to great numbers of whose inhabitants our Parish, altogether from your connection with it, has been and is a blessing. We beg you to remember — and this with no desire to pain you 296 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 by saying anything that may seem extravagant, but solely from our regard for what we believe to be the simple truth — that the pulpit of Trinity Church has given you the opportunity, which you have improved with results altogether imparalleled, to exercise an influence for good upon the people of this city, including all classes and both sexes, — the young and the old, the poor and the rich. Parents are thanking you for the blessing to their chil- dren of growing up inspired by you, and they cannot see the pos- sibility of your going from them without speaking out to you their sense of loss. The mothers, wives, and daughters of our great congregation have seen under your ministry new visions of life and love and work and devotion to Christ. Business men, full of the sense of life and power, are moved mightily by your words to consecrate their lives to the service of God. The young men of the city, of our schools, our colleges, our stores and homes, know the way to Trinity Church, and go there at the critical moments of their lives, when perhaps for years before they have been unimpressible, and go away inspired and consecrated, and carrying your power widely through the land. Those of our community who are not the favored ones of the earth in education or worldly circumstances have received from your words comfort and courage, and many of these would sadly feel the loss of your presence from their homes and families, in their hour of sorrow or distress. The work that you are doing is one of transcendent importance. It is steadily growing and cannot be left to suffer or halt. We solemnly believe that if you will appreciate this work and its infi- nite needs, you must come to our conclusion, that no other place can give you so much power for good. Trinity Church, with its open doors, its generous welcome, its great congregations, its varied audiences gathered from every sect and section of the city, attracting the men and women of thought and influence from all parts of the country as they pass through Boston, — Trinity Church as a means of carrying your power and inspiration into the hearts and lives of the whole people, far surpasses in our judgment any other possible field of usefulness. Your parishioners have not believed it possible that you could take a different view; and if they have seemed silent, we who know their strong and unanimous feeling can assure you that it has been from a conviction that a separation was impossible, and because they have shrank from believing that such a thing could be seriously contemplated. The grief which all your people feel at the suggestion of your I Wardens. ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 297 withdrawal from the Eectorship cannot adequately be expressed by any words of ours. They do not dare to contemplate the ef- fect of your departure upon all the activities and missionary work of the parish already vigorous and rapidly developing ; still less, its effect upon the Parish itself. We beg you to allow them ample time and opportunity to ex- press their feelings and wishes before you come to a final decision. We ask you to determine nothing until you have heard the repre- sentations that will be made by many persons of whose deep and personal concern in your decision you are possibly not now aware ; and when you have heard all that can be said by those for whom we speak, we trust and believe that it will be given you to see that it is your present duty not to abandon the field in which God has made it manifest that your power and influence can do a great work for the souls of all conditions of men. Chables Henkt Paeker Charles R. Codman Thomas C. Amory, John C. Ropes, Stephen G. Deblois, C. J. Morrill, B. F. Nourse, Robert Treat Paine, Jr., William Amory, Jr., Edward D. Peters, Samuel Eliot, Robert M, Gushing, Vestry. Phillips Brooks had sometimes doubted whether his work at Trinity were successful, judged by the higher standard of success. He had longed for some response, which he did not get, which indeed it was almost impossible to give, to those impassioned, exalted appeals which he poured forth, Sunday after Sunday, year after year. But from this time he could have had no doubt as to his place in the hearts of his con- gregation. Into the sacred confidences of personal letters, where he was told what he had been to the hundreds of fami- lies in his congregation, we must not enter. They have one common feature, — a determination that he should know at last, not merely in a general way but by the unveiling of individual experiences, that his work at Trinity had been the agency under God of iUmnination and consolation, of moral reformation and of spiritual life. There is still one point to be mentioned, as the vision gradually faded from his mind, of the possibilities involved in the call to Harvard. In one of the letters which came to him there is this remark : — There is one other thing that I hardly dare to say. I cannot 298 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 believe, as some people do, that you care only for your work with men. It would be too ignoble a thought. But I do believe that you think women by nature more religious, less needy than they are. You do not feel always that triumph and joy in helping them that you do in helping men. But when you give up a mixed congregation, do you realize what a tremendous indirect influence upon men you lose, men who never care for church or preacher but who have homes ? You spoke not long ago of the queenly power in the household as the most subtle though the least manifest. Only to-day some one said to me, "Our home is utterly different since we went to Trinity Church ; we are different people. " And this is only one. A gentleman in Ms congregation wrote to him with refer- ence to the same point : — I think more Harvard students hear you preach every Sunday in Trinity Church, brought there mostly through the influence of women in one way or another, than would hear you on Sundays in Cambridge ; for most students that live in Boston and vicinity spend their Sundays at home. I believe women are the minister's strongest support in religion and all other good works, and the great secret of the power of the Boman Catholic Church is its in- fluence over and through them. Most men, in my belief, that join the Church do so directly or indirectly through their influence, and the best way to reach young men is through them. It seems to me that in losing the direct aid and support of women, you would be losing more power than you have any conception of. No words except those of the writers of these letters can adequately portray the "terrible earnestness," the "intense anxiety," the "severity of the shock," the "fearful strain," the "sorrow and the gloom," of that long, agonizing day at Trinity Church when this question was pending. But it was also a day not wholly dark, for the trial cemented more strongly the already strong bond of unity in the parish. People and minister alike were impressed anew with the reality of the religious life. If the people realized what the ministry of Phillips Brooks had been to them, he too was made to know, as he had not known before, what was the work which it had been given him to do. He did not forget the lesson. There was to follow still another epoch in his life, when its fruit would become manifest. It might seem 233 C?LAI^ENDON^\EET. Ad&iA/^^ ^ Coo (Za^ /^^y^^eZ^^ <^>C2y — dlc^ t^w^T^eo /t^cuc^ y^^i^je^L.^^^ ^^^"^^^ A^cay aA6 Aej Aj> jf^ <^ dirAci^'6- JET. 4S] CALL TO HARVARD 299 as if he had now exhausted the line of ministerial experiences, or as if he had reaped the highest earthly reward for which a man can hope in this world. He appeared to be standing on the highest pinnacle of fame. But yet he was to be called to take another step in the way of self-renunciation, before the sacrifice should be complete. The letters of Phillips Brooks relating to this incident in his life tell us but little of what he thought or felt. Yet in this very circumstance a light is thrown on his character. He was bewildered and hardly knew what to think. His mind was rent with contradictory impulses. There was something in him of the feminine mood which led him to go where he was wanted. He would like to have gone to Cam- bridge, but he also wanted to remain at Trinity. To go, or to remain, meant some inward suffering. These are a few of his letters : — 233 CiiAEBNDOK Street, Boston, March 31, 1881. Dear Artetdb, — I have been Elected by the Corporation of Harvard College to be Preacher to the University. ... I wish you would tell me when you have a leisure moment what you think of my resigning Trinity and going there. I am much puzzled. Many things about it attract me very much indeed. Tell me perfectly frankly what you think. But don't mention the matter till you hear it in some other way, for it is not "out " yet. I count much on hearing your judgment about it. Boston, April 4, 1881. Deae Abthue, — I want to thank you right ofB for your kind letter. It stated both sides very satisfactorily and I think on the whole inclined towards "Go to Cambridge." I incline very much that way myself, more because I don't see exactly how it is possible to decline the call than because I particularly want to go. But I think it will come to going, unless you write me speedily to tell me some overwhelmingly convincing reason why I should decide otherwise. . . . To the Rev. Dr. George E. Ellis he writes: — 283 Clabbndon Street, April 5, 1881. My dear De. Ellis, —I must thank you at once and with all my heart for your letter. I thank you for its friendliness and for its wisdom. Both will help me. While I feel, of course, that the difficult question which is given to me must be answered 300 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 by myself, it is very good indeed to know how those whom I esteem and honor feel about it, and how my acceptance of the place, if I should venture to accept it, will be regarded by them. I am in no danger of underestimating the interest and impor- tance of the work in Cambridge. I am much more likely to err by being afraid of it than by being indifferent to it. It would offer the most delightful and satisfactory life that any mortal minister could live. I shall always thank you, my dear Dr. Ellis, for your letter and for the kindness which made you write it. Most faithfully yours, Phillips Bkooks. To the Rev. Percy Browne he writes : — Fast Day Morning, April 7. I can't thank you as I wish I could, dear Percy, for your let- ter. It makes me feel frightfully ashamed of myself when I hear that you really care so much about what I decide to do. I feel like a horrible fraud. I know it is not a great matter for the Church or the world whether I go or stay, but I do want to make what life I have still to live tell as much as I can, all the more because I honestly feel every year more and more how poor it is. I think now that this feeling will carry me to Cambridge, bat it is far from settled, and you and my other friends must have patience with my hesitation. Only, my dear Percy, don't talk as if the going to Cambridge would break or even strain the friendship and intercourse which has been growingly one of the greatest treasures of my life here. If you are going to give me up, why that settles it, I won't go. No, we will have Monday morning somewhere in Cambridgeport, or if you won't come there I '11 come to Millmont Street. I thank you more than I can say. To the Rev. John C. Brooks he writes : — April 13, 1881. Dear Johnnie, — A thousand thanks (in a great hurry) for your kind letter and your good sympathy. I am getting to feel just as you do about it all, and I don't 'believe that I shall go. The work at Trinity looks more and more. The chance (though not the need) at Cambridge less and less. It is n't settled and probably won't be for a week. . . . One of the earliest and most important of these letters is addressed to Dr. Vinton, at Pomfret, whose counsel and blessing on all the changes in his life he had invoked hitherto, without which no event was complete : .ET. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 301 Deab Doctor, — You won't forget that you are to come and spend Passion Week here and go to church all the time and preach as much as you can, will you? Let me know just when I may meet you at the station and you shall have the cordialest of welcomes. I want to see you very much. I want to talk with yon ahout Cambridge, whither I have been called and whither it seems now as if I might go. Don't fail to come. It will be the last chance perhaps to get you under this roof. Affectionately yours, P. B. Dr. Vinton came up from his retirement at Pomf ret, — it was to be for the last time. For several days lie remained the guest of Mr. Brooks at the Clarendon Street rectory. Then, as we know, the question was turned over in all its aspects, with calmness and dignity and the sense of repose after the excitement. To Dr. Vinton he sent this letter, announcing that he had declined the call to Harvard : — April 18, 1881. Deab Doctob, — I write to you at once to say that the thing is settled and I am to stay at Trinity. President Eliot was very courteous, said that he was sorry and didn't know where to look; and then I came away. It was the quietest death of the pretty little project that you can conceive of, and the pretty little pro- ject never looked so pretty as it does now in death. Just at this moment I feel as if I would rather be Preacher at Cambridge than Hector of fifty Trinities. But I think it 's all right, and I cannot thank you enough for the kind patience with which you listened hour after hour to the endless talk about it all. You must have been badly bored, but it was very good of you and I do thank you. ... Well, on Thursday we meet in Philadelphia and Sunday we are in New York. Till then adieu. Gratefully yours, P. B. To another friend on the same day he wrote, "I hope it 's all right, but I 'm awfully blue about it." His call on Pre- sident Eliot had been a severe ordeal; his face was pallid during the short interview, as of a man who saw egress denied him at a critical moment and his life shut up, for his future years, to a work from whose limitatiops and its fearful strain on all his vital powers he had dreamed for a moment of 302 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 escaping. It was the old story with which we are familiar already in his history. There was not the time in his parish ministry to read, or study, or think. Under these conditions the task of preaching began to loom up more formidably before his eyes. From this time he began to forecast the future with misgivings and an occasional touch of despond- ency. What, then, shall be said upon " the merits of the question " ? In view of his own profound silence, one's words must be brief and cautious for fear of error. We may believe that if he had accepted the call to Harvard, he would have made no failure. He was wise; he would have committed no mis- take by attempting too much ; he was under the restraints of sobriety of judgment ; he knew what was in men and how to address them. President Eliot saw that, amid the conflict- ing variety of opinion, this was the point to be kept in the foreground. He went to the friends of Phillips Brooks who were doing their utmost to keep him in Boston, and in answer to the question whether Mr. Brooks could exert an ideal influence at Cambridge, he received from them all the tes- timony that he could desire. "As they testify with reluc- tance," he wrote to Mr. Brooks, "their testimony is the more trustworthy." We may also believe that had he given his remaining years to study, he would have surely left a stu- dent's mark upon the thought of the world. And again, he did not like the exceptional position which he held. In going to Harvard he would have passed from the glare of publicity into the simple quiet life which he coveted. He could do there his work as a teacher with at least the same success as any man. He alludes to this feel- ing as possibly a touch of the boyish morbidness which had led him to feel that in going into the ministry he was crawl- ing into obscurity. There was a certain contradiction in his being, as though two lives were struggling within him for the ascendency. He would have liked to lead the life of his father, doing an honorable man's work without ostentation. He might have married, he was a man who could have given himself to and lived for one woman. He was torn by an ^T. 45] CALL TO HARVARD 303 inward contradiction. For when lie was living so publicly, for all the world, confiding to the sermon his most intimate feeling and thought, he could not belong to any one in the same interior way. It may then have seemed to him like a last chance to reconstruct his life. He acquiesced in the verdict, knowing that an opportunity had been lost which would not return. Yet was he convinced that he had done the right thing. The voice of God and the people assured him. There seems to be here something of supernatural direction. A call had come to him again with renewed force to give himself in more complete seK-surrender to the larger number who wanted him. There came another series of letters after the decision had been announced, for the most part of a congratulatory char- acter. Among them is one from the president of Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, who had been watching the situation with deep interest : — April 25, 1881. Deab Mb. Beooks, — I am not siirprised by your decision, which the newspapers announce this morning, nor can I blame it, for it is a serious thing to leave a post of great usefulness, how- ever strong the inducements to enter another. But will you not, even more than before, be an unofficial pastor and teacher for those Harvard boys, and help them to find the substantial reality amidst the fogs and darkness of our times? You would certainly be welcome at any time in the College pulpit ; and, regarding it as a simply Christian and undenominational position, can you not occasionally address the students from it ? Can it not be under- stood, too, that there will always be a seat at Trinity for any Harvard boy? But wherever you speak, I beg you to feel that you are priv- ileged to command the attention of men at a very critical period in the history of Christianity. Religion and morality itself are menaced by wild and one-sided speculations ; but you will continue to teach that there is an eternal, unchangeable moral law, a God in whom we can trust, a Saviour to whom we can cling. I had pleased myself with a day-dream of you at Cambridge as a better Newman, leading the intellectual hope of the country, not, like the Oxford preacher, into the lions' den, but to the promised land. It may be, however, that you will be almost as influential in the University from Boston as from any "Appleton Chapel," 304 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881 however enlarged, at the same time that your influence over the whole country will be wider from your present post. Let me tell you that I have often read your printed sermons here, on Sunday afternoons, with great satisfaction both to them and myself. Ever very truly yours, Thomas Chase. There is a sense, then, in which Harvard University gained in the struggle. The whole subject of religion came up for discussion, and the old arrangement was abandoned by which one man ministered to the miscellaneous body of students. A body of chaplains was constituted, of which Mr. Brooks was one, who, coming in from outside, with a wider range in the observation and experience of life, could bring their spiritual force to bear upon the college life. This plan which Harvard was the first to adopt was gradually introduced into other colleges. During the next ten years of his life, Phillips Brooks seemed to have at his command the open door to stu- dents' life, throughout the leading colleges in the country. It was an additional burden, but he thought of it as a glorious privilege. It was Harvard University that was sending him forth with this mission. She had placed her seal upon him as the great University preacher. CHAPTEE XI 1881-1882 MEMORIAL SERMON ON DR. VINTON. DEATH OF DEAN STANLEY. SPEECHES AT CHURCH CONGRESS. SECOND VOLUME OF SERMONS. THE STANLEY MEMORIAL. DEATH OF DR. STONE. REQUEST FOR LEAVE OF ABSENCE FOR A YEAR On April 26, 1881, Dr. Vinton died at the age of seventy- four. The eulogy which Phillips Brooks pronounced upon him in a memorial sermon preached at Emmanuel Church, Boston, and again in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila- delphia, was published by request in pamphlet form, but de- serves a permanent place among his writings, for it is the description of an ideal which had been before him from his boyhood. For nearly forty years these two lives had been intertwined. A few extracts from this sermon will show what the relationship had been, how profound had been the influence of the older man upon the younger, but incidentally they show us what manner of man was Phillips Brooks. Thus he describes Dr. Vinton as the great presbyter, to whom the episcopate would have been no gain. He is interpreting the working of the organization of the church by his own ex- perience when he says : — And 80 he was in his true place in that degree of the ministry where preaching is the constant duty. Once or twice they talked of making him a bishop. But it was well in his heart, I think he knew that it was well, that they who formed such plans for him did not succeed. So far as it would have separated him from the pulpit where he belonged, it would have been a loss and not a gain. The great work of the church lies with the presby- ters. The deacon saves the presbyter from some details of work VOL. II. 3o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 that he may be the freer for his tasks. The bishop watches the ramparts of the church and secures for the presbyter the condi- tions of peaceful and efEective labor. But the great work of the church is in the presbyters. And this was our great presbyter. That is his name and honor. A bishopric could never have in- creased his dignity, while it must have weakened his power and fretted his life out with minute details. He was our great pres- byter, the elder, the brother, with a special experience and educa- tion, but still the elder brother, telling his brethren in brotherly simplicity and earnestness the truth of God. Here follows a description of the pastoral office as em- bodied in Dr. Vinton, always before the mind of Phillips Brooks as his own ideal : — I stop a moment and think of that great pastorship, of all it meant to countless souls ; and to have lived in it and carried it on as he did seems to me to be an indescribable, an inestimable privilege. A great pastorship is the noblest picture of human influence and of the relationship of man to man which the world has to show. It is the canonization of friendship. It is friend- ship lifted above the regions of mere instinct and sentiment and fondness, above all thought of policy or convenience, and exalted into the mutual helpfulness of the children of God. The pastor is father and brother both to those whose deepest lives he helps in deepest ways. His belonging to his people is like the broad spreading of the sky over the lives of men and women and little children, of good and bad, of weak and strong, on all of whom alike it sheds its rain and dew. Who that has ever known such a pastorate can believe that death, which sets free all the best and purest things into a larger spiritual being, ends the relation- ship of soul to soul which a true pastorship involves ? It is with profound respect that he goes on to speak of Dr. Vinton's theology, from which he had diverged. Many and earnest had been the discussions between them on this sub- ject, as they maintained their differing views, but always with mutual deference and toleration : — He won in the community where he lived a profound respect for the theology which he preached ; not necessarily an acceptance of it, but a respect for it. No people listening to him could think that the theology of the Incarnation and the Atonement was irrational or absurd. There never was a pulpit which more ^T. 45^46] SERMON ON DR. VINTON 307 clearly uttered a definite truth than his, and yet there never was a pulpit more respected. . . . Many of us who listened to Dr. Vinton thirty years ago have seen truth differently now from the way in which he showed it to us then, but we have seen it still with eyes that he helped to open ; and many a vision which he never bade us see, but which is now our joy and feast and inspi- ration, we owe still to his ministry, and may thank him for it, next to Grod. The change in the religious outlook which comes to every new generation is a trying experience to the older men, who would fain have the world abide by the conclusions they themselves have reached. Dr. Vinton bore himself well under this ordeal — a model to young men who in their turn must encounter the same difficulty. Those years from 1858 to 1861 were interesting years to any minister of our church, because of the new drifts and tendencies of Christian thought which were beginning to become pronounced. Kitualism and rationalism were claiming their places in the church. Especially in the latter of these two directions the move- ment became vigorous and prominent about that time. The famous "Essays and Kevlews " were published in 1860, and the whole liberal or broad church tendency attracted the interest of thinking men. It would not be right to try to sketch the life of Dr. Vinton, and not to tell how he regarded that movement in which he was, through all the last years of his life, so deeply inter- ested. He mistrusted It and feared it. He disagreed with many of its processes and most of its conclusions. At the same time he never withheld his friendship and his love from those who were most earnestly in sympathy with it, nor ever gave them anything but help and godspeed in their work. He never recoiled from it with horror. And his own spirit, which, above the spirit of any other man I ever knew, was devout without the slightest taint of superstition, had much to contribute, both In the way of check and in the way of stimulus, to the new thought of the younger men in whose society so much of the years which still remained to him was passed. . . . For my part, I thank Dr. Vinton for many and many a word even of protest against what I thought was true, which, while it made me more anxious and careful to be sure that what I thought was truth was really true, made me also more earnest in holding it a? I became convinced that I was not mistaken. And I am sure that his great soul would not grudge me that gratitude. And I think that It is one which 3o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 many others share with me. . . . He has been the Socrates to many a poor boy's unborn power of thinking. He was never shocked at honest heresy, however earnestly he argued to disprove it and dislodge it. He has set many a glad soul free from the constraint of what it thought it ought to believe and sent it out to the delight of a real faith. There came a letter in response to this sketch of Dr. Vin- ton from a distinguished Congregational clergyman, which forms part of the record, showing that Dr. Vinton's power continued to be felt through the influence of Phillips Brooks's portrayal : — Boston, September 13, 1881. My deab Bkotheb, — I can address you by no other name since reading, as I have just done, your Memorial Sermon on Dr. Vinton. Never by anything you have before written have I been so profoundly stirred as by parts of this noble discourse. I am not ashamed to tell you that tears have fallen on the pages where you describe a great pastorship as "the noblest picture of human influence," and where you tell of Dr. Vinton's work in the national judgment day of this generation. Rebuked and humbled have I been by the vision you have given me of a great life, the humbling I trust to be followed by new inspirations to a higher service of Christ. Indeed, I now believe that no such moral quickening has come to me for years as I have had on this blessed morning. Within a few weeks I am to go from my work here to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In the one happy year of my ministry in Boston, I have felt the inspira- tion, not only of your words, but of your nearness, and I cannot go away without telling you of it. There creeps into the correspondence of Phillips Brooks at this time the evidence of some physical weariness. He found, so he writes, the sermon on Dr. Vinton one of the hardest things that he had ever undertaken ; and he men. tions that while he was writing it the weather was atrocious. He declines an invitation to take a journey, which would call for physical activity or endurance, on the ground that he is no longer good for such things. On hearing that one of his clerical friends proposed to take a long rest of more than a ^T. 45-46] SERMON ON DR. VINTON 309 year, he says: "It is getting to be kind of tame and vulgar to plod right on. But it is pleasant nevertheless." It was a novel event at Harvard, creating a deep interest, when the "CEdipus Tyrannus " was given in Sanders Theatre. No one was more interested in following it than Phillips Brooks, for the Greek tragedies had formed an essential part in his education. He speaks of it as a "most tremendous success." Among the important books which appeared in 1881 was Dr. Mulford's "Republic of God." It was important be- cause it broke the long silence of the younger men, speaking for them on the religious issues of the day. Mr. Brooks was asked to review it for "The Atlantic Monthly," but declined. He read it, however, despite its philosophic terminology, against which he rebelled. To a lady who wrote to him a few years later, after Dr. Mulford's lamented death, asking his opinion of the book, he wrote : — Dr. Mulford was a most interesting man, and his book is one of the most inspiring and exasperating things that anybody ever wrote. It is as bright and deep and vague as the sky. It will never be much read, but a few men will get out of it what they will interpret to the world. He was not a man for the ecclesias- ticism of the Church to make much out of, but he was felt, and his loss nobody can make good. Mr. Brooks took no vacation from preaching during the summer of 1881. Every Sunday found him in his place in the pulpit of Trinity Church. But he gained some relief from the burden of pastoral cares in visiting his parishion- ers in their summer homes. It was a summer long to be re- membered because of the assassination of President Garfield, when for weeks the country was in suspense waiting for the fatal issue. To the Eev. James P. Franks he writes : — Boston, 233 Clarendon Street, July 3, 1881. Deak James, — ... This week has been Commencement and •I". B. K., and we have been revelling in Wendell Phillips and George William Curtis. It was very beautiful, and made eloquence seem as easy as breathing. Arthur and John were both here, and we had a very beautiful time and sentimentalized about the lapse of 3IO PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 time in a very maudling sort of way. Then, when that was over, I went yesterday and spent a day with Charles Parker, the Senior Warden of Trinity, who has just returned from Europe, and when I came home from there this morning, we were met with the President's assassination. How it brings back that awful Friday sixteen years ago, only this is more wretched because it is not connected with any great issue and has no more dignity than must always belong to death — if it is to be death. The assassin seems to have been the most miserable moonstruck vagabond — and his object nothing more than disappointed spite. I met on the street just after we had heard of it this morning, and he told me of an article he had been writing upon the folly of allowing the President of the United States to go about without a bodyguard ! Every goose will sting his own sermon into the dreadful tragedy. I saw , and he had several delightful and subtle theories about it. But the one thing to do now is to hope that Garfield will get well and that we shall be spared the infliction of Arthur as President. We shall pray for the President to-night at the "usual meeting previous to the Communion." Well, all this is to tell you why I have n't come to Beverly to thank you for asking me to come. And now, though I am to be in Beverly twice next week, I am afraid I shall not tread your hospitable piazza before our Mountain tour. The truth is that the Summer looks as if it were going to use itself up in a sort of parish visiting on a big scale. ... It is the old struggle of duty and desire, and, of course, with you and me duty conquers. But it 's only a week from next Monday when we start under William's care for the Mountains — that will be the Cor Cordium of the Summer. Till then we '11 think of one another, and you will give my Love to S and the chickens. Ever afEectionately, P. B. The summer brought another sorrow, in the death of Dean Stanley, which took place July 18. On first hearing the sad intelligence he wrote to Eev. Arthur Brooks : — JvJy 22, 1881. The suddenness of the Dean's death is most startling and seems to flash all that was lovable and beautiful about him upon one with a terrible sense of loss. We shall not see another such in- teresting man in our day, and I have a sort of feeling as if the Abbey and the Deanery could not possibly be standing there in the old way we used to know them, now that he is gone. Well, it is a good thing that he has lived and a delightful recollection to have known him. ^T. 45-46] DEATH OF STANLEY 311 To Lady Frances Baillie, a sister-in-law of Dean Stanley, he wrote: — 233 Clarendon Stebet, July 23, 1881. Mt dear Ladt Fbakces, — I hope that I shall not seem to you strangely intrusive if I try to tell you something of my deep sympathy with you and of the deep thankfulness with which I think of our dear friend's beautiful life. It seems to me as per- fect a picture of human living as the world has ever seen, — and what it suggests and promises for his great future, for the other life (as we blindly call it) which he has begfun, is past all expres- sion. My first thought is all of him, of the, rich and sacred delight which has come to that insatiable appetite for truth and that deep love for God. But when I let myself think of all his kindness to me, of how he has welcomed me with that beautiful welcome of his which was like no other man's, of how England has been bright and tempt- ing to me, most of all because he was there, the world seems sadly altered now that I shall never see him again. I remember so perfectly the first time I saw him. Lady Augusta was with him in the Library of the dear old Deanery, and before we had loosened hands, it was as if she and he had given me the right to count them friends forever. That was in 1874, and from that day on, with all his cares and interests, he was so full of thoughtful kindness, that he did not even let me think how little right I had to any word or thought of his. But I did give him, and I will give him always, that love and grati- tude which is all that such as I am can give to such as he is. Surely we cannot lose him. We have not lost him. We are with him in the love of God in which he rests at peace. I wish that I could tell you what he was when he was here in America; what friends he made, what a memory of him remains, and what a multitude of hearts are mourning for him, as if he was their friend. But more than this is the blessed work that he has done for Christ and for the Church. That cannot die. It will be part of the great future for which he kept such an unfaltering hope, and which we may believe he now discerns with perfect clearness. And it is sweet for us all because he believed in it so. WiU you forgive me if I ought not to have written, for his sake. I send my kindest remembrance to your daughter, and I am, with truest sympathy, Sincerely yours, Phillips Brooks. 312 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 Phillips Brooks now for the first time broke the rule to which he had hitherto invariably adhered, and in response to a call from the editor of "The Atlantic Monthly" wrote his article on "Dean Stanley." ^ For two months he gave himself up to the task, collecting material enough in the pre- paration for it to have made a considerable volume. Only a fraction of what he desired to say could find room within the required limits. The article glows with devotion to Stanley, to whom he felt deep personal indebtedness. "The life of Stanley when it appears, if it is worthily written, wiU be one of the richest records of the best life of our cen- tury and one of the most attractive pictures of a human life in any time." He reviewed Stanley's career so far as it was known to the world. He delineates his characteristics with loving appreciation, for, as in the case of Dr. Vinton, he is describing the ideals of his own youth and manhood. He speaks of Stanley's love of right, his desire to look facts in the face and to know the exact and certain truth. He remarks on his method of approaching all truth through his- tory; of his dislike and inability for metaphysics and for abstract thought. Stanley loved men for the sake of man; special arts and occupations in which he had no personal interest were to him full of the great human drama, full of divine meanings. The world was full of poetry to him. There is need of other methods for the entire mastery of truth, but there is great value and beauty in the historic method which Stanley followed : — In the turmoil of a priori reasoning, in the hurly-burly of men's speculations about what ought to be, let us welcome the enthusi- astic student of what is and of what has been. The gospel in the ages must always be part of the same revelation with the gospel in the Bible and the gospel in the heart. We cannot afford to lose the softening and richening of opinions by the historic sense. The ecclesiastical historian and the systematic theologian must go hand in hand. "The word of the Lord which was given in the Council of Nicsea," says Athanasius, "abideth forever," but the personal History of the Council, which Dean Stanley has so won- * Cf. Essays and Addresses, pp. 340 S. ^T. 45-46] DEATH OF STANLEY 313 derfully told, is part of the word of God which comes from that memorable assemblage to all the generations. Stanley's last volume on "Christian Institutions," Phillips Brooks especially admired for "its wonderful clearness and power," and as "making Christian faith and worship stand forth in calm and majestic simplicity." In an age of perplex- ity and disbelief Stanley stood high among the faithful souls who refuse to despair of the Church of Christ. As we read his "Christian Institutions" — it is as if we heard the quiet word spoken which breaks the spell of ecclesiasticism:, and the imprisoned truth or principle wakes and stands upon its feet and looks us in the eye. The flush of life comes back into the hard face of dead ceremonies, and their soul reveals itself. Bubbles of venerable superstition seem to burst before our eyes ; and we feel sure anew, with fresh delight and hope, that not fantastical complexity, but the simplicity of naturalness, is the real temple in which we are to look for truth. He dwelt upon the work of Stanley in making the Bible live to a great multitude of readers. He had not only in- vested it with a fascinating interest, but he made it the Book of Life. Thus his work was constructive. As an American Mr. Brooks did not sympathize with the idea of an estab- lished church ; but he refused to believe that there was any low Erastianism in Stanley's interpretation of the church- and-state theory. "It combined the view of Dr. Arnold with Maurice's inspired and glorified doctrine of the kingdom of heaven. His volume of ' Essays on Church and State ' is a book which every religious student should read." He recalled Stanley's personal charm, the charm also of his preaching, — a point on which he could speak with authority : — Apart from the beautiful simplicity of his style and the rich- ness of illustrative allusion, the charm of his sermons was very apt to lie in a certain way which he had of treating the events of the day as parts of the history of the world, and makmg his hearers feel that they and what they were doing belonged as truly to the history of their race, and shared as truly in the care and government of God, as David and his wars, or Socrates and his 314 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 teachings. As his lectures made all times live with the familiar- ity of our own day, so his sermons made our own day, with its petty interests, grow sacred and inspired by its identification with the great principles of all the ages. Of Dean Stanley's visit to America, and his first sermon in the New World, at Trinity Church, he says : — He had been but a few days in America. It was the first time that he had looked an American congregation in the face. The church was crowded with men and women, of whom he only knew that to him they represented the New World. He was for the moment the representative of English Christianity. And as he spoke the solemn words, it was not a clergyman dismissing a congregation: it was the Old World blessing the New; it was England blessing America. The article brought to Mr. Brooks gratifying letters from relatives and friends of Stanley. Dean Plumptre writes: "It is, I think, the truest and fullest presentation of his char- acter that has yet appeared." Lady Frances Baillie thanks him for giving "such a living picture to the people of your country and to us all. . . . How she would have thanked you!" After Stanley's death, the English friendships grew dearer and more intimate, — with Lady Frances Baillie, Sir George Grove, who had accompanied Stanley to this country, and with Archdeacon Farrar, through whom he kept his connec- tion with the sacred Abbey unbroken, always preaching within its precincts at St. Margaret's whenever he visited Eng- land. Another friendship in England was formed at this time with Dr. Thorold, Lord Bishop of Kochester, after- ward translated to the See of Winchester. On failing to find Mr. Brooks at home when he called upon him in this country, Bishop Thorold had written : — You are so well known to me by your sermons and have so blessed me by them, I wanted to thank you face to face. They are my constant companions. Some of them, — the "Consola- tions of God" and the "Soul's Eefuge in God," I almost know by heart. This morning I read the one on "Humility." As life ^T. 45-46] CHURCH CONGRESS 315 goes on I am always trying to grow new blood in the shape of new friends, and I had dreamed such a dream of a cup of tea with you to-night, to which I had meant to invite myself; and we should have soon found out that we had much in common. . . . But I write chiefly to say, when you next come to England you must be my guest. I am very near London, Selsdon Park, Croy- don ; and I shall rely on your proposing yourself. Part of the summer was spent in New Hampshire, where lie recalled old associations connected with the familiar tour of the White Mountains. He speaks of the visit as "plea- sant and pathetic. We have been watching the telegraph just as we used to do in the old war times, and the last thing we do before going to bed is to go down to the village and see what the President's pulse and temperature are. After a short stay at Mount Desert he returned to Boston. The effect of the call to Harvard was to bring Mr. Brooks into closer relationship with the University. A temporary arrangement had been made by which he was appointed one of several chaplains, who were to take their turn in preach- ing at Appleton Chapel and in conducting morning prayers. Had he accepted the call to be the sole chaplain, he could not have felt more keenly the responsibility for the spiritual wel- fare of the students. In his devotion to the students he did not begrudge the claims upon his time. But the tax was none the less severe. "I am chaplain this week at Cam- bridge," he writes to Rev. Arthur Brooks (November 6, 1881), "and go there every morning for prayers. It is very pleasant, but it takes lots of time. I have to leave here at eight o'clock and do not get back till ten." At the seventh Church Congress, which was held at Provi- dence, in October, Mr. Brooks was one of the appointed speakers on the subject of "Liturgical Growth." It was a subject full of interest at the time, for it had been brought before the General Convention in 1880 by Dr. William E. Huntington, then rector of All Saints' Church in Worcester, and a committee had been appointed to consider the question of the enrichment of the Prayer Book. For long and weary 3i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 years the leaders of the Evangelical school had been asking for changes in the way of omissions, and also for greater flexi- bility in the use of the various services. These demands bad been refused. There had grown up in the minds of many the feeling that the Prayer Book was too sacred to admit of alteration or change. Dr. Huntington's motion, however, had passed the convention and the subject was before the Church. It was distinctly understood that the purpose in view was not to alter the Prayer Book in the interest of any school of opinion, nor to make changes for the sake of change, or in order to adapt the Church to any changed con- dition of the time; but to enrich the worship by additions from the great treasury of devotions. There were some things which all alike would have been glad to see incorpo- rated in the Book of Common Prayer. Whether this could be done without also making doctrinal changes, or without invading the Communion Office, was the question which agi- tated many. To the Church Congress at Providence Mr. Brooks went with a determination to speak his mind on the subject of chan- ging the Prayer Book. Others were suggesting what changes were desirable, and he, too, had changes to recommend. What he chiefly wanted was the formal recognition in the Prayer Book of the liberty of extemporaneous prayer. In his paper on "Liturgical Growth "^ he pleaded for this permission on the ground that in a comprehensive church such as the Epis- copal Church claimed to be, this element of power and flexi- bility should be included. It was not enough that a clergy- man was already at liberty to make the extemporaneous prayer at the close of his sermon, — a liberty of which he freely availed himself. So long as the rubrics did not author- ize it, he felt bound to refrain from indulging his prefer- ence, for he was scrupulous in adherence to the prescribed form and order. Yet it may be told here — for there are many who will remember it — how in saying the beauti- ful prayer which was a great favorite with him, — " O God, Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the Faithful," he always included 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 96. ^T. 45-46] LITURGICAL GROWTH 317 himself with the congregation, and changed "them " to "us : " "Visit us, we pray Thee, with Thy love and favor." He also changed the abstract expression "the truth" to "Thy truth : " " Graft in our hearts the love of Thy truth." Slight changes, but bearing witness to his passion for the personal relation of truth and his avoidance of the abstraction. Whether he were conscious of these innovations may be doubted. In some nervous impressible moment, on infor- mal occasions, when he was quite at liberty to make such changes, they may have been stamped upon his memory, and grown unconsciously into a habit. The paper on "Liturgical Growth" shows that he keenly felt the restriction which made it impossible to pray with an open heart at critical moments, when the freedom of the soul should be granted. Thus he was indignant, and also amused, that when the city of Chicago was in flames the General Convention, then in session, showed its sympathy and asked for the Divine aid by reciting the Litany, while the name of the city and the awful occasion were passed over in silence. Even the Eoman Church possessed flexi- bility in striking contrast with this hard conservatism and immobility. To this defect in the Church he called atten- tion in vigorous speech, denouncing the conservative habit as showing lack of faith in the principles of liturgical worship. Upon one other topic he volunteered to speak at this same Church Congress, — a thing unusual with him, for when peo- ple were met to talk it was his custom to be silent. The Ke- vised Version of the New Testament was one of the subjects for discussion. He listened to the objections to it by the various speakers, — its sacrifice of rhythm in style and of familiar expressions which had become dear. He listened till he could bear it no longer, and rose in his majestic pre- sence to make his way to the platform. The thing that is really upon trial, he said, is not the Revised Version but the Church. If a man is going to translate a book for me, the one thing I demand is scrupulousness, — the most absolute fidelity to details, the absolute binding of themselves to the simple question how they could most completely represent the 3i8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 Greek in English, letting the question of literary merit take care of itself. That is the one great evidence of faithfulness to their charge which we had a right to ask of those men who undertook this responsible work, which work so far Christendom has stamped with its approval as to its accuracy. If a man came to me to- morrow, and wanted to know what Christianity was, to understand the words of Christ, I should be absolutely bound to give him the New Version and not the old one. The great body of new Christians are reading the new book. God grant that our Church may not condemn us to read the old and faulty book in our churches, to the exclusion of the new and corrected one, and so lag behind, as we have done again and again, and only with a tardy run by and by come up abreast of the great dominant sentiment and the prevailing convictions of our fellow Christians. This instance of his volunteering to speak without special preparation is not a characteristic one. Mr. Brooks was a man that usually weighed his thoughts and his words in long meditation beforehand. He was accustomed to qualify his utterance by considering the other side. He was quite alive to the truth which the late Master of Balliol had ex- pressed in such perfect form, — that there might be more inspiration in the received version than in the original Greek. Nor was Mr. Brooks aware of the importance which others attached to his words, how he spoke now to the coun- try at large, and not merely to his own religious fold. The consequence of these speeches at the Church Congress, espe- cially of his remarks on the subject of Liturgical Growth, was an editorial criticism in "The Churchman " which sharply resented his strictures upon the ecclesiastical conservatism, not mentioning him by name, but referring to him as "a bril- liant and popular preacher " who had recently been making some rash remarks. The use of the Litany, when Chicago was burning, was defended as the most appropriate thing to have done. How Mr. Brooks regarded the criticism is shown in a letter to his brother : — 233 Clabendon Steeet, Boston, December 6, 1881. Dear Arthue, — I thank you very much indeed for your kind sympathy. The brutal attacks of " The Churchman " have kept ^T. 45-46] SERMONS 319 me awake o' nights and I have thought several times of either writing a reply or else committing suicide — but I haven't yet done either. The only consolation I have is that " The Church- man " seems to enjoy it, and that I have no doubt congrat- ulates himself that the Church is still sound. One serious injury that the articles do me is that I don't feel quite as much at lib- erty to abuse " The Churchman, " which has been one of my chief amusements. I am afraid now that people wUl think I am spite- ful. In the fall of 1881 Dr. Brooks published his second volume of sermons, under the title "The Candle of the Lord, and other Sermons." It met with the same reception accorded to the first volume, reaching a sale of over twenty-one thou- sand. The titles of the sermons are felicitously chosen, and linger in the memory. Most of them had been written in the seventies in the ordinary course of his preaching at Trinity Church. Out of the twenty-one sermons which the volume contains, the texts of nine are from the Old Testa- ment, which is a large proportion. If this circumstance has any significance, it lies in showing his gift of the poetic imagination applied to the interpretation of life, the con- tinuation of the spirit of his Philadelphia preaching. Phil- lips Brooks indignantly repelled the insinuation, that the Christian pulpit lingers too long among Jewish antiquities. He found in the Old Testament perpetual inspiration, the disclosure of the process by which God reveals his life to the world. These texts of sermons in his second volume recalls some of the most abiding impressions of his preaching: "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord;" "The good will of him that dwelt in the bush;" "And he said, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee; " "I wiU lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help;" "Curse ye Meroz, saith the Lord; curse ye bit- terly tbe inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty;" "Who coverest thyself with light as with a gar- ment; " "Behold he smote the rock that the water gushed out and the streams overflowed. But can he give bread also? Can he provide flesh for his people? " 320 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 As we read these words of Scripture the preacher stands forth again in his strength with his insight into the deeper meanings of life. The bush which burned and was not con- sumed stands for the continuity of one's years; the joy of self-sacrifice is typified in ancient ritual, as when the "song of the Lord began with trumpets " at the moment of the burnt offering; to lift up one's eyes to the hills is to see all lower sources of comfort and consolation as having their origin in the highest, which is God; the curse which was upon Meroz is the curse upon human inactivity in any age whenever the crises of life are upon men; the accumulation of faith makes it possible to believe that God is as powerful in the present as in the past, — "He could overcome the world- liness of the eighteenth century. He can overcome the mate- rialism and fatalism of the nineteenth century; as in ancient times He not only smote the rock that the waters gushed out, but He also provided bread for his people. " It is hard to speak of some of these sermons without speaking of all. But a few must be specially mentioned. There is the sermon on the "Manliness of Christ," which strangely touched the conscience of every one who heard it. The keenness of psychological analysis is here, going beneath the surface to the depth of the consciousness, as he probes it for the reason why men have failed to see the strength of Christ, who in his human personality was the manliest and the mightiest of men. The defect, and the cause of the de- fect, felt in the traditional portraits of Christ, is here made apparent. The sermon on the "Law of Liberty," delivered many times, has in it a reminder of Chalmers and Bushnell, but does not suffer by comparison. No one who heard it can forget the closing passage, where he describes the judgment day as simply taking off the restraints of education and of social order, at last leaving each man free to seek his own place. The sermon on the "Mystery of Light" gives a contrast between the two kinds of mystery, that of light and that of darkness. It is no more possible to measure the depths of .ET. 45-46] SERMONS 321 one than of the other. The object is to show that current popular objections to the doctrines of the Trinity are mis- taken in considering it as a mystery of darkness, when in reality it is the dazzling, bewildering mystery of light. This second volume of sermons, like the first, bears witness to that moment in the history of religious experience when, according to the familiar comparison, trite indeed but always most expressive, there was a storm on the ocean of life and much wreckage of faith. Then Phillips Brooks had stood forth as a commander to the people, pointing to the haven and the way by which it was to be gained. Thus on Thanks- giving Day, when his church overflowed with hearers who anticipated the value of the message to be delivered, he took for his text the words of the prophet Ezekiel : " Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee." His subject was the need of self-respect as a condition for hearing the voice of God in revelation. There are many passages in the Bible which describe the ser- vants of God as their Lord's messages came to them, falling upon their faces to the earth, and in that attitude listening to what God had. to say. . . . There is a great truth set forth in all these pictures. It is that only to human humility can God speak intelligently. . . . But in the passage which I have taken for my text this morning, there is another picture with another truth. "Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee." Not on his face but on his feet ; not in the attitude of humiliation but in the attitude of self-respect ; not stripped of all strength, and lying like a dead man waiting for life to be given to him, but strong in the intelligent consciousness of privilege and standing alive, ready to cooperate with the living God who spoke to him ; so the man is now to receive the word of God. . . . The best understanding of God could come to man only when man was up- right and self-reverent in his privilege as the child of God. If this be a truth, is it not a great truth and one that needs continually to be preached ? The other truth is often urged upon us that if we do not listen humbly we shall listen in vain. But this truth is not so often preached, nor, I think, so generally felt, — unless you honor your life, you cannot get God's best and full- est wisdom ; imless you stand upon your feet, you will not hear God speak to you. VOL. n. 322 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 With this introduction the preacher turned to pessimism, whose prophets were vehemently declaring that "human life is a woe and a curse, that the will to live is the fiend which persecutes humanity." Because unphilosophical men, who have no theory of life, are practically accepting this teaching, he proposes to show what the "will to live" must mean. I am sure you know whereof I speak. In large circles of life, and they are just those circles in which a great many of us live, there is an habitual disparagement of human life, its joys and its prospects. Man is on his face. It seems to me that he must hear God's voice calling him to another attitude, or he is hopeless. "Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee." The year 1881 as it came to a close brought the usual commemoration days with their inevitable reflections. The friends of Mr. Brooks continued to insist that his birthday should be observed, though in the swift passage of time the years were coming which made it no more a pleasure. He was confused a little with the transition of life. A birthday should be a day of rejoicing. But as he entered the forties he began to sigh for the youth that was passing, and to realize that something had been lost. He was now forty -five. When he was reminded of the increasing wealth that came with maturity, the larger vision, the mature ripeness of the powers, he declared there was in them no compensation for that which was gone. There was a conflict going on in his soul as he measured the significance of the changes in the life of man, and out of this conflict were to be born some of the most valuable truths which it was given him to reveal to the world. Let the reader turn to his sermon on the "Manli- ness of Christ" and he will find him brooding upon this issue : — It would seem, then, as if this truth were very general, that in every development there is a sense of loss as well as a sense of gain. The flower opening into its full luxuriance has no longer the folded beauty of the bud. The summer with its splendor has lost the fascinating mystery of the springtime. The family of grown-up men remembers almost with regret the crude dreams which filled the old house with romance when the men were boys. ^T. 45-46] SERMONS 2^2 The reasonable faith to which the thinker has attained cannot forget the glow of vague emotion with which faith began. . . . Who is not aware of that strange sense of loss which haunts the ripening man? With all that he has come to, there is something that he has left behind. In some moods the loss seems to out- , weigh the gain. He knows it is not really so, but yet the mis- giving that freshness has been sacrificed to maturity, intenseness to completeness, enthusiasm to wisdom, makes the pathos of the life of every sensitive and growing man.* This is but one of the passages scattered through his ser- mons where Phillips Brooks is telling the congregation be- fore him what he would not speak of in the intimate inter- course of friendship. It was when these moods were on him tliat he took them to the pulpit, as to some Horeb or mount of vision, to test them there. What he could not tell to his people out of his own experience which would prove a source of strength and elevation and joyous triumph could not be true. Let the reader then turn to his sermon on the "Symmetry of Life," preached on Advent Sunday, where he gives the cor- rective of all depressing moods. His text was from the Book of Kevelation, in whose mystic imagery his soul delighted, "The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal." 233 Cl4kendon Stbket, Boston, Christmas Eve, 1881. Deae Johnny, — How many Christmas Eves we have spent together ! Do you remember how we used to go up to St. Mark's and then come back and wander through the toy shops and look up children's presents, and then how you would go home and find father nailing up Christmas wreaths? Well, that 's all over, and here I am all alone with the Christmas festival safely over and the Christmas sermon done, and cheering myself up by looking at the mighty pretty little vase you have sent me, and by thinking how very kind you were to send it. I do thank you, and I do think it just as pretty as possible. It came quite safe and has taken its place among my treasures, and every club the fellows will see that the study looks a great deal brighter than it used to look, and will wonder what it was that did it. I do indeed thank you for all your kind thoughts of me. Give H my very best love, and for you, dear Johnny, you know how truly I am your affectionate old brother, Phillips. 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. u. pp. 258, 259. 324 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 Watch Night had been kept as usual at Trinity Church, and on returning to his house in the first hour o£ the New Year he found a gift awaiting him from the members of the Clericus Club, — a bronze statue of John Baptist in the atti- tude of preaching. In this letter he describes one of the familiar meetings of the Club and speaks of the gift he had received : — 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, January 5, 1882. Deab Johnkt, — A Happy New Year to yon and Hatty and Josephine and the Baby! I have been meaning to write you a beautiful letter, but somehow the sermons have got all my time and all my lovely thoughts. What a lot of them (the sermons) there have been ! Thank you for sending me your Advent sermon, which I enjoyed exceedingly. It was a delightful sermon, and I envy the people who hear such sermons always. Pray send me everything of yours that goes into the papers. The Club went off first-rate. There were sixteen men here and Bradley's paper was capital. Parks and Percy got a foul of one another in the dis- cussion. "Willie Newton turned up when we were halfway through. Charles Eichards stayed here all night, and altogether we had a first-rate time, barring your absence which was very bad. Did you know that the Club made me a splendid New Year's present of a bronze John the Baptist, who stands upon my centre table now ? It came in just after the watch meeting on Saturday night. We have called Kidner to succeed Killikelly and he has accepted. Jim was up yesterday and Parks is going to preach in Appleton Chapel next Sunday morning. You will come down and spend a night or two soon, won't you? But send me word beforehand or I 'm awfully likely to be away. Good-by, Johnny. Affectionately, P. In this month of January Mr. Brooks undertook with enthusiasm the task of soliciting subscriptions for a memorial of Dean Stanley to be placed in the Chapter House of West- minster Abbey. The subject had been first suggested at a meeting held in the Chapter House on December 13, 1881, to commemorate Stanley's birthday. At that meeting the American minister, Mr. James Russell Lowell, had been pre- sent, making one of those felicitous speeches which pleased the hearts of Englishmen. It had then been suggested that ^T. 45-46] STANLEY MEMORIAL 325 the opportunity be given to friends of Stanley in America to contribute _^to the memorial already determined upon in England, — the completion of the Chapter House, — by supplying one of the great windows, for which Stanley had already furnished the designs. With reference to this point Dr. Bradley, the successor of Stanley, wrote early in January to Mr. Brooks and a few others, asking that the amount required, JEIOOO, should not come from three or four rich persons, but from a large number. So quickly did the re- sponse come in to Mr. Brooks's appeal that by the month of March some three hundred persons from all parts of the country had sent in subscriptions whose total amount exceeded what was called for by several hundred dollars. In a letter to Dean Bradley, in which was enclosed a bill of exchange for £1064 9s. lOd., Mr. Brooks requested in the name of those subscribers whom he had been able to consult, that the sur- plus, if there were any, should be given to the Westminster Hospital and Training School in which the Dean and Lady Augusta were so deeply interested. To Lady Frances Baillie he wrote : — 283 Clabenbon Street, Boston, March 15, 1882. Dear Laky Feances, — I want you to see one of the small tokens of the way in which our dear friend was honored in Amer- ica. So I send you the list of names of the people who, without urgency, have contributed most gladly and often most eagerly to the window in the Chapter House. It has been most delightful to see the feeling with which people have sent their small or large sums. The subscriptions have ranged from one dollar to one hun- dred, many of the givers not being able to afBord more than the single dollar. You will know many of the names: Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Adams among our oldest public men; Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier among the poets; Parkman and Bancroft among the historians ; Emerson, the philosopher, who was most glad to make his contribution; the Bishops of Massachusetts, New Tork, Michigan, Bhode Island, Connecticut, and Nebraska; clergymen of all sorts, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Baptists, Cong^regational- ists ; men of business, college students, and professors, and then a great many who have simply read the Dean's books and have per- sonal gratitude for him. You will no doubt recognize more than 326 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 one who have enjoyed the delightful hospitality of the Deanery, which nobody ever forgets. I hope that you are well, and I know that the months must bring you more and more of peace and thankfulness. I wish that I could hope to meet you this summer, but, though I probably shall go abroad, I do not think that I shall be in England. Will you remember me most kindly to your children and to my kind friends at Megginch Castle, and believe me, dear Lady Fran- ces, Always sincerely yours, Phillips Beooks. On January 13 Dr. John S. Stone died at the age of eighty-six, almost the last of the great leaders of the Evan- gelical school. To his death Phillips Brooks refers in the following letter : — 233 Clabbndon Stbeet, Boston, January 28, 1882. Deak Cooper, — You know, I suppose, that dear Dr. Stone has gone. Last Friday afternoon he took his dinner as usual and very shortly after had a stroke of paralysis from which he almost immediately became unconscious. He lingered through the night, and the next forenoon at about eleven o'clock without any return of consciousness he passed away. He has been pretty feeble lately but very bright and happy. I saw him about two weeks ago, and he was lying on the sofa in his study, as cheery and full of fun as ever. He spent his days there, without pain, till the stroke came, and I believe he died in the study where you and I saw him a couple of years ago. It was a beautiful old age and death. On Monday the funeral service was held in the Chapel and his body was taken to Green- wood. What good old days those were which it brings back, when he used to come down to Race Street and when he used to come and sit in the chancel of Holy Trinity. Well ! Well ! He was very fond of you and alw'ays talked of you when I saw him. I wonder what he will be like when we see him again. Ash "Wednesday fell on the 22d of February. It had been the custom of Mr. Brooks in the earlier years of his min- istry to confine the Lent services to Wednesday and Friday of each week. That was then the prevailing usage. But a change had taken place; there was multiplication of ser- ^T. 45-46] LEAVE OF ABSENCE 327 vices till they were held every day of the week, and in Pas- sion week each day was observed by two and even three ser- vices. Mr. Brooks accommodated himself to the change, but with some misgivings. He humorously remarks in a letter tha,t he is wearing out the bricks between his residence and "the meeting-house." He writes to Mr. Cooper accepting an invitation to preach at the consecration of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Philadelphia, and expressing his doubts about Lent : — 233 Clakendon Stbeet, Boston, March 2, 1882. Deab Coopeb, — Of course I '11 preach at the Holy Apostles on the evening of the Second Sunday after Easter. That 's half the fun of coming to Philadelphia. I am depending immensely on my visit. When the services get a little thicker than usual I say to myself, in six weeks I shall be in Cooper's study. . . . That cheers me up and I go on with the services again. I do believe you are right about Lent. We have got the thing a great deal too full and complicated. No one service amounts to much in the way of exciting thought or feeling, and the whole long stretch of services grows tame if not tiresome. Besides this there has got to be a sort of rivalry between Parishes, as if the one which had the most services were the most Godly flock and shepherd. Men get each other's "Lent Cards " and compare them, to see who is doing the most "work." There'll be a great collapse some day. Meanwhile we are keeping on with two or three services a day and counting on the Second Sunday after Easter. When that comes we '11 talk things over and set the whole world right. . . . After Eiaster Mr. Brooks showed signs of physical weari- ness. He continued to say of himself that he was as well as ever, but he knew and admitted that he needed a complete change, and a long one. The subject was mentioned to the wardens and vestry of Trinity Church. He had not yet made up his mind definitely how long he should wish to be absent from home, but intimated that he might possibly conclude to ask for an entire year. The answer of the Pro- prietors of Trinity Church was prompt and generous. These were the resolutions they adopted, drawn up by the late Mr. Robert C. Winthrop, and presented by Colonel C. R. Codman : — 328 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1881-82 Resolved, That the Proprietors of Trinity Church, deeply grateful for the invaluable services which have been rendered us by Mr. Brooks, during the more than twelve years of his rector- "ship, and fearing that he may be in need of a longer and more continuous rest from his devoted labors than he has even yet been willing to allow himself, desire to express their sincere wish that, in going abroad this Summer, he may not feel bound to limit his vacation too narrowly, but may be at perfect liberty to linger in other climates for the Autumn, Winter, and following Summer, if he shall deem such a stay more likely to bring him back to us with invigorated health and strength for the work which we count upon so earnestly in future years. Kesolved, That the Wardens and Vestry be instructed to com- municate the foregoing Resolution to Mr. Brooks, with full powers to make any arrangements which may be agreeable to him, and to assure him that much as we should regret even a temporary loss of his services, we should still more regret to deprive him of the rest and recreation which he needs, and which he has so richly earned. Boston, April 10, 1882. Easter Monday. Just before sailing for Europe Mr. Brooks wrote this letter to Mr. Cooper : — June 20, 1882. Deab Cooper, — While I am waiting for the carriage which is to take me to Europe my last letter shall be to you. I got your good kind letter yesterday, and it was like the Benediction I had been waiting for, the last blessing, which I had half hoped to get on board the Servia at New York, but your dear old hand- writing is the next thing to it. What lots of good times we have had together! Race Street and the mountains and the lakes and the Tyrol and Switzerland and Paris and Boston and Spruce Street for twenty-two years. And now it seems as if you ought to be going with me. The journey doesn't look lovely or attractive this morning, but of course it will all brighten up by and by and there will be lots to enjoy) tut the best of it all will be getting home again. So keep well and young and strong so that we may have still a lot of talks together. Thank you, dear Cooper, for your long friendship and unfailing kindness. May God be good to you as you have been to me. Well, well, a year from next September. Good-bye, Good-bye. P. B. CHAPTER XII 1882 PLANS FOB THE TEAR ABEOAD. GERMANY. CORRESPOND- ENCE. RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS. EXTRACTS FROM NOTE- BOOK AND FROM JOURNAL OF TRAVEL It seemed to Mr. Brooks a simple and natural thing to do when he asked for a year's leave of absence from his parish. It was the rule at Harvard to grant its professors this priv- ilege once in seven years. And among the clergy it was not uncommon, especially in large city parishes where the strain of labor was severe, to seek this mode of relief. But when it was known that Phillips Brooks was to be absent for a year, that his voice was to be silenced during all that time, people wondered, and were amazed, and even alarmed. They were asking of him and of one another why he should go away. It seemed inexplicable that he should stop preach- ing when the world was waiting to listen. How great the work was which he had been doing he did not realize, nor was there any one then who could tell him. In reality he had been leading people in all the land through one of the dark- est, strangest crises in religious history. The popular grati- tude and devotion to him seemed overwhelming in its length and breadth and depth, but it must have been only in pro- portion to some service of immeasurable value he had ren- dered. That at such a moment he should withdraw himself seemed unreasonable. There were fears that something was wrong. Vague rumors were in the air. An interruption like this of his unprecedented work seemed to portend dis- aster. In the forecast of the future, it was feared he might not return. When he was asked, as he often was, why he was going, he answered to some that he wanted a change; 330 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 or to others that he had been giving out for a long time and he would like to stop for a moment in order to take in. But his answers seemed unsatisfactory. No one felt that it was necessary for him of all men to be in such need. He had made them realize the meaning of the words that it was more blessed to give than to receive. But there was another side of the truth, that one must first have received in order to give; and one must continue to receive if one would have the reward of giving. A few words of comment upon the situation are required. They must take the nature of surmise, for he was silent while all were talking, as he had also kept rigid silence during the public discussion of his call to Harvard, and at every other turning point in his life. It must then be said that his health was in danger from the severe and prolonged strain of his twelve years' ministry in Boston. There were no impending signs of physical collapse, but the danger was real. He had no misgivings about his health, and when the subject was alluded to would simply remark that he wanted a change. But he had been undergoing a strain during these years, to which flesh and blood were not equal, no matter how perfect their organization in the human body. People marvelled sometimes at his powers of endurance, but for the most part were content to accept the fact and to rejoice in it, as in the regularity of natural phenomena. When we stop to think of what he had gone through, we recall the unbroken line of wonderful sermons, each one bet- ter, so it seemed, than the last. It was no slight task for him to be always equal to himself. Those who thought that it was as easy and natural for him to preach great sermons as it was for the sun to shine are now seen to have been mistaken. Others could not have done it at all, but neither could he accomplish it without the life going out of him. To this must be added that he usually preached three times every Sunday, that he preached once a week beside in the Wednes- day evening lecture, and in addition to this very often on other days in the week as th6 call came to him. There were also the occasional addresses of which it is useless to attempt ^T. 46] PLANS FOR YEAR ABROAD 331 the record. But they were numerous, for he was wanted in every direction, and where he was wanted he went. He was accustomed to go abroad for his vacation ; he had gone six times in these twelve years, while the other six summers he stood in his place in Boston, preaching to the strangers that were passing through the city, or to the toilers who stayed at home because they were unable to leave. He carried the responsibility of a large parish, involving innumerable calls on his time and strength. This was the inevitable strain under any or ordinary circumstances. But it must be re- membered that those years of the seventies were also no ordi- nary years. He was watching the trend of thought and dis- covery, as it necessitated changes in his own attitude to meet the spiritual need of the hour. Those who lived through the seventies realize, now that they have passed away, the trial and strain to faith and to Ufe which they brought. Mate- rialism, fatalism, pessimism, agnosticism, were words which describe the moment. To lift the world above them into the light of faith was the task which had been assigned him. To this end he must cultivate the larger faith in himself. He lived through the strain, but the virtue which went out of him was a drain upon the vital powers. For multitudes of people he had been living vicariously; they were content so long as he believed. Then again, he had suffered, and it cost him to suffer, from the loss in such rapid succession of his father and his mother, and at last of Dr. Vinton. The world was changing to him. There was inward agony as he adjusted himself to the new stage of his life when he was to be henceforth without a home. The situation was the harder because he was not married, and would be forced to realize what loneliness meant. Had he been married he would not have felt as keenly as he did the changes of this mortal life. They would indeed have gone over him, but with compensations which he never knew. His large heart, with its vast capacity for affection, was hun- gering for human love. He should have married, and yet perhaps he knew that if he had now attempted to give himself to one, the spirit of the world which held him for its own 22^ PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 would Lave resented the attempt and made it impossible. He realized that he was losing the richness and the con- solation and the gift which God so freely bestows on others, but did not vouchsafe to him. But he pondered the more deeply on what it was to lose these gifts divine, which con- stitute the joy of life, and out of his musing came comfort and hope for others. It is evident that the health of Phillips Brooks was now in danger from the lack of exercise or some method of re- laxation from the incessant strain of life. He felt the need of it the more as the opportunities for it diminished. He clung to the Clericus Club as offering freedom to an over- burdened man; where there was no danger that he should be misunderstood as he unbent himself in the amusement which some of its members, himself among them, were wont to furnish. He was a member of the Saturday Club. He took an active part in the formation of the St. Botolph Club in 1880, whose object was social, artistic, and musical. For a few years after its establishment he went occasionally to its weekly gatherings. But there was no diminution apparent in the seemingly boundless vitality of Phillips Brooks. He will be recalled at this time as carrying that manner of boisterous mirth which has heretofore been mentioned to an almost abnormal extreme. If he suffered at all, or were lonely, or ever knew what de- pression meant, the world would not have guessed it. He seemed to be the very soul of joy. His coming was always and everywhere the signal for an outburst of wild hilarity. His very presence on the street seemed to have power to carry happiness and content to hearts that were heavy. "It was a dull rainy day, when things looked dark and lowering, but Phillips Brooks came down through Newspaper Eow and all was bright." This was one of the items in a Boston daily paper. His presence in a house was so exciting that it seemed to penetrate every part of it, and the effect was long in subsid- ing after he had left. When he took his journeys, the tumult began from the moment he landed at the station. He walked ^T. 46] PLANS FOR YEAR ABROAD 332 Tip the street, the observed of all observers, though he did not know it; people turned to look at him and stood and watched while he stopped at the windows of shops and made humorous comments on their display, or paused at posts or signboards to read notices and to detect or fabricate some absurdity or incongruity which provoked his laughter. When he reached the house he threw family discipline to the winds. He would call in a loud voice for the children, regardless of considerations of convenience, and when they came their elders passed into the background and the scene of revelry began. He would incite, or seem to do so, the children to revolt and disobedience, as though law and order in the household were a sham ; but he deceived no one, least of all the children. To them it was some fairy scene, some picture from "Alice in Wonderland," where all things were reversed or lost their normal relations. To considerations of personal dignity of bearing he would become oblivious, as when he would romp on the floor or stand as Goliath for some small David of a boy to use his sling. This was his amusement and recrea- tion, so far as he had any. But at times there seemed to be something almost desperate about it all, as though he were striving hard to escape from his influence for a moment or to throw o£E the burden he was carrying. But the worst of the situation was that he had little time for quiet reading or thinking. Only by the strictest economy of his opportunities could he have managed to read as much as he did. This diligent improvement of the casual hours, coupled with his power of taking in so quickly the purport of a book, still enabled him to do what to others seemed a large amount of solid as well as of discursive reading. Thus he placed books before him and read while he was shaving. Twice, as we have now seen, he had endeavored to obtain for himself a mode of life in which there would be leisure for thought and study, — in Philadelphia, where he wished to accept the offered chair in the Divinity School, and again in Boston, when he was called to Harvard. " The years," he would say, "are not so many as they were." Time was fly- ing and there was much that he wished to know. He admit- 334 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 ted there were great questions which he wished to think out for himself. He may have fondly recalled that second year in the Virginia Seminary, when the intellectual world in all its splendor first opened to his view. We may surmise all this and other things to fill in the picture. He seemed to tell nothing when he answered those who asked him why he was going, but in reality he told all there was to tell. Some deep instinct impressed him with the necessity for a change which should be as prolonged and as thorough as opportuni- ties in this world would allow, and he would fain secure one long year for study and reflection. The plan for spending the year abroad included a sojourn in Germany, India, and England, giving some three months to each country ; and it also provided for a short tour in Spain, to glance at its monuments and churches. It was a plan for study, but he proposed to study from life as well as from books. He wanted to know for himself, by personal inquiry and observation, how the world was thinking and living at a moment so significant in its history. He found it hard at first to realize that he had a long year before him. And so the year of wandering has begun. It is not easy yet to realize that it is more than a mere summer's journey, but every now and then it comes over me that the gap is to be so great that the future, if there is any, will certainly be something difBerent in some way from the past. I don't regret that, for pleasant as all these past years have been, they don't look very satisfactory as one reviews them ; and although 1 am inclined to put a higher value on their results than anybody else would be likely to do, they 'have not certainly accomplished much. I should like to think that the years that remain, when I get home, would be more useful. There is surely coming, and it has partly come, a better Christian Day than any that we or our fathers for many generations have seen. One would like to feel before he dies that he had made some little bit of contribution to it. He went attended by his friends Kev. W. N. McVickar and Rev. James P. Franks ; Mr. Richardson, the architect, and Mr. John C. Ropes were also fellow passengers. The appearance of three such men together as Brooks, McVickar, and Richardson, all of them far above the average in their ^T. 46] PLANS FOR YEAR ABROAD 335 stature and physical proportions, was the occasion of humor- ous anecdotes, in which the humor ran beyond the actual fact. Their stay in England was brief, and Mr. Brooks preached but once, at St. Botolph's Church in old Boston. He was invited to speak at the English Church Congress and his name was advertised, but owing to some delay in the mails, there was misunderstanding which prevented his keeping the en- gagement. In London he went to Stanley's grave and had much talk about him with Lady Frances Baillie. He called upon Burne-Jones, the artist, and William Morris, the poet. The arrangement was here made with Mr. Eichardson to visit southern France and Spain. Architecture under these cir- cumstances must be the main interest, but "art, life, and scenery," he writes, "shall not be forgotten." The journey was a delightful one, including Provence, with its wealth of old Eoman remains, Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence, Bo- logna, Eavenna, and then Venice. "I think that I enjoyed," he writes, "the re-seeing of old places almost, if not quite, as much as the discovery of new ones. The deepening and filling out of old impressions is very delightful." At Venice the delightful party began to break up, Eichardson and his friend Mr. Jaques, then a student of architecture, of whom aU became very fond, taking their way toward Spain. With McVickar and Franks he went to Paris, and after a few days together, he was left alone to follow out his plan of study. On August 28, 1882, he writes : — After three pleasant days together In Paris, they have gone this morning, and I am all alone. It has been a delightful sum- mer, and now I feel as if my work began. A week from to-day I hope to reach Berlin, where I shall stay for some time. I am very anxious to study, and the prospect of unlimited time for reading opens most attractively. I do not feel as if it were a waste of time, or mere self-indulgence, for all my thought about the work which I have done for the last twenty years, while it is very pleasant to remember, makes it seem very superficial and incomplete. I do not know that I can make what remains any better, but I am very glad indeed of the opportunity to try. How he felt on being left alone is evident from this letter to McVickar : — 336 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 August 29, 1882. I tell you it was a lonely fellow that walked back in the rain all the way from the Gare du Nord to the HStel de 1' Empire last Monday morning. It seemed all wrong that I hadn't got in with you. I had a sort of feeling of having missed the train. I felt like a fool, and I have no douht I acted like a fool, and so I called myself a fool. It is better now, and I am looking forward to a very pleasant winter. But didn't we have a good time ? I like to sit and think about it all, and one by one the queer, delightful scenes come up, and I find myself laughing all alone at the Brionde kitchen or the St. Nectaire Church, or the night on board the Indian, and then to think that it 's all over and poor little Jimmie is already crawling sideways down the channel in the Malta. I never shall cease to thank you for com- ing. Before leaving Paris he wrote this letter to Mr. Eobert Treat Paine : — Pakis, August 29, 1882. My deab Bob, — I have come to a sort of a way station on this long journey and it seems as if it were time for me to report myself. Besides I want to have a talk with you, and if you were in Mt. Vernon Place and I in Clarendon Street, I should come up and spend the evening with you. This is a very poor substitute for that, but it is all I can get. To talk about myself, then: the summer journey is over, and you have no idea how good it has been. We went down almost to the gates of Rome, and saw the beauty of northern Italy at its most beautiful. My eyes swim with light and color now. We went also into southern France and saw a great deal of soberer beauty, — quiet old towns, and queer, quaint churches, and kind, dirty people. Richardson was with us till we reached Milan, and then went ofE into Spain, where he is now. You should have seen the man in Venice ! The wonder is that any gondola could hold such enthusiasm and energy, or that he ever, having once got there, came away. Fortunately he has been very remarkably well all summer, and has been most capital company. McVickar and Franks are both old friends, of whom I am very fond, and they made the summer even more delightful, and Mr. Richardson's small friend Jaques was always pleasant and kept the money accounts. We sent you a counterfeit presentment of the party. . T f * '^- ^""^ "^"^ ^""^ Richardson glowing with splendid S?ierr7h"*^- ^ f°"* ^'"•'='^' ^ ^'''P*- ^ouse, ImZ great Piers to be covered from top to bottom with mosaics. You ^T. 46] GERMANY 337 will listen with interest, and dream as I do of how more and more beautiful the dear old Church may be made from generation to generation. Now I am going to Germany, and for a good while to come I mean to be very quiet in or about Berlin, certainly somewhere in Germany. I still mean to start as near the 1st of December as possible for India. . . . "Well, my dear fellow, I think of you all constantly. What a good time we have had together for the last thirteen years. For myself, I am almost scared when I think how happy my life has been. And now, when it seems as if a new period of it were beginning, I have no wish except to go forward and trust the same good God. Your life, too, has been very bright, I know, and in the heart of your deepest sorrows there must lie some of your brightest hopes. My best love to your wife and children. Your and their friend, P. B. To the Rev. Percy Browne he commended the interests of the Clericus Club while he is away : — You won't let the Club flag this winter, will you? It seems to me that we all owe so much to it ; and while we have grown used to it and don't think so much about it as we used to, it has never been better than in these last years. . . . You don't know how pleasant the old life looks from this distance, when one un- derstands that he is to get nothing of it for a year. What good times we have had ! and how few the dull and disagreeable spots have been ! May the winter be as bright as possible, and yet I hope you may find room to miss me a bit. One otter pleasant incident remained, however, tefore the real work should begin. At Cologne he met his brother Arthur travelling with his wife ; and of this he writes : — Hahoveb, September 4, 1882. The great event of the last week was the meeting of the waters. Two Brooks boys, Arthur and I, came together in the ancient city of Cologne. It was Thursday evening when it happened; Arthur had started that morning from Mayence and come down the Rhine, — the way you know, — and I had started from Paris, at an awful hour, and come all the way through by rail, and we met in the hall of the Hotel d'Hollande at about eight o'clock P. m. We had a long talk that evening, and the next morning we went VOL. II 338 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 through the sights of Cologne once more. Then we took rail to Aix la Chapelle, and I saw that again in this new company. I had been there once before this year with James and McVickar. Then we went to Maestricht, where we spent the night, and saw a queer cave. Then we came to Brussels, with various expe- riences on the way, and once more I found myself in that very familiar town. There we spent a very quiet, pleasant Sunday, went to church, and talked to each other a great deal. Late last night we bade each other a long, long farewell. This morning I was called at half past four, and have come to-day (passing through Cologne again) as far as here. ... I have started my journey three or four times already. Now to-day it really has begun. I have said good-by to my last rela- tive, and there is nobody else whom I have any engagement to meet until I land in New York a year hence. I am quite alone. To-morrow I am going to Hildesheim and Magdeburg, and the next day to Berlin. While Mr. Brooks was in Germany and India he wrote a large number of letters, many of them long letters, in which he spoke much of himself, giving expression to his thought and feeling in a most unwonted degree. He seems to have felt at last, in his separation from home and friends, the absolute necessity of letter-writing for his own satisfaction. Not since he was at the seminary in Alexandria do we get such a complete picture of the man. In the twelve years of his life in Boston, his letters had been comparatively few, short, and conventional, so that only through what was said of him by others, or by what personal allusion might be read in his sermons and other published writings, do we get any strong light upon his character. Some of these letters, which he now writes, but mostly those of a lighter character, have been included in his "Letters of Travel." Even these, however, are always characteristic in their quality. Dr. Oli- ver Wendell Holmes said of these published letters that only after reading them did he feel that he knew the man. In them we see the great child-heart and the exquisite humor, as he writes to little children, — his nieces Agnes, Gertrude, and Susan, who were to him as his own children,, or the other little nieces in the home at Springfield. While he was away he carried all the interests of his life at home close to his ^T. 46] CORRESPONDENCE 339 heart, — the Clericus Club, Trinity Church, the households of his friends, and the varying phases of ecclesiastical life. Many of his friends at home charged themselves with the duty of writing to him often, so that he could easily follow the familiar stream of the things he loved. So voluminous is the correspondence and other material during this year abroad that it would require a considerable volume to contain it. Only a small part, therefore, can be given here. To the Kev. Reuben Kidner, one of the assistant ministers at Trinity, in charge of St. Andrew's Church, he writes : — Berlin, September 9, 1882. I am sorry to know that the ecclesiastical world of Boston is being stirred up again by troubles at the . It seems some- times as if the world outside the Church must get to think of it solely as a field for the scramble of small ideas, and small men for prominence and precedence. We know how small a part that plays in church affairs. The people have worked conscien- tiously and faithfully. Their ideas seem to me to he vastly fan- tastic, and their whole conception of Christianity is one that I cannot enter into at all. But I think it is a great pity when anything happens which would make these people seem what they are not, — partisans ready to quarrel with each other for personal preeminence. But I am talking about all this at a distance and quite in the dark. Very likely I do not understand the case at all. At any rate there is nobody here in Berlin whom I can ask about it. The people in the streets look as if they had never heard of the , many of them as if they had never heard of Boston. They are discussing whether the Jews have any right to live here, and whether there ought to be such a thing as property, and whether there is a God. There is plenty to interest one here, and having settled myself quietly after a summer of hurried travelling, I shall probably be here for some time. Early in September Mr. Brooks had reached Berlin, taking up his residence there for some two months, but in the mean time visiting other imiversity towns, Giessen, Leipsic, and Heidelberg. For Heidelberg, where he spent two weeks, he felt a strong fascination, as combining beauty of scenery with history and with thought. It was unfortunate that the 340 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i88a universities did not open till the middle of October, so that he missed in consequence conversations with many distin- guished men to whom he carried letters. Thus he writes from Berlin, September 17 : — I am going out to dine at Wansee (which seems to be a sort of Berlin Brookline) with Baron von der Heydt, who is going to have some of the Court preachers to meet me. A good many- other people have called on me, and talked about German things and people ; so that I see all I want to see of folks, and the days are only too short. Unfortunately, the university is closed, and the professors are all off on vacations, so that I miss many men whom I should like to see. Here are some hints of how he passed his days, of the effect upon him of being for a moment associated with men whose whole time was occupied with speculative thought and learned investigation. I get up in the morning and breakfast at eight o'clock; then I go to my room, which is very bright and pleasant, where I have a lot of books and a good table, at which I am writing now. Here I stay until eleven or twelve, reading and studying, mostly German; then I go out, see a sight or two, and make calls until it is two o'clock. Then I go to Dr. Seidel, my teacher, and take a lesson, reading German with him for two hours. Then it is dinner time, for everybody in Berlin dines very early. They have North Andover fashions here. Four o'clock is the table d'hote time at our hotel, and that is rather late. After dinner I get about two hours more of reading in my room, and when it is dark I go out and call on somebody, or find some inter- esting public place until bedtime. Is not that a quiet, regular life? This week I have been like a college student, going to hear what the great men have to say about theology and other things. I have German enough now to follow a lecture quite satisfactorily, and you do not know how I enjoy it. Of course I have not taken up any systematic course of attendance. My time is too short for that. I only roam round and pick up what I can and fill it out with reading from the books of the same men, a good many of which I have. There are four thousand other students here in Berlin, so that one can go and come in the great university quite as he pleases, and be entirely unnoticed. . . , ^T. 46] CORRESPONDENCE 341 It is very pleasant to see how quietly and simply these scholars live, and what cordial, earnest folks they are. I have also seen something of the ministers, hut I do not think I like them so much as the scholars. German religion seems to he eaten up with controversy, and is hampered everywhere by its connection with the state. There is much work being done here, and the thorough- ness of their real scholars makes me feel awfully superficial and ashamed. To Eev. Arthur Brooks he writes more fully of what he is doing : — October 12, 1882. Dear Aethxtb, — I have been as German as I could, and while I have no revelations to make about the tendencies of German theology, I have been quite successful in seeing what I wanted most to see, and if we could sit down and talk about it all to- gether I think I could be very interesting, but I shall not try to put it in a letter. I will only say that every one who seems to know best gives strong assurance that there is indeed a strong awakening of religious thought in Germany, and while very much calls itself Christian here which would puzzle the House of Bishops and makes even the broadest of us open his eyes, yet still a candid and respectful interest in Christianity and a decided disposition towards a theistie explanation of the world and man have largely gained, and are still gaining, among men who think about religious things at all. In Berlin everybody says that Lotze is the truest representative of the prevalent tendency in Metaphysics, and his death so soon after he came there to teach is almost pathetically lamented. That he had been greatly impressed by reading Lotze is evident from the following important letter : — Beslin, October 29, 1882. Dbab Akthuk, — I got a real good letter from you yester- day, which told me all the things that I liked most to hear and made me feel as if we were very near indeed together. And I wanted to write ofE at once and tell you so and report myself to you, but I am only at it now after your letter has been almost two days with me. For this morning I went to preach at the Ameri- can Chapel, and after service I met your friend Evart Wendell, who is a very nice boy, and he came home to lunch with me; and then he wanted me to go home with him and see the photographs that he had bought, and so the whole afternoon got used up, and 342 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 here it is Sunday Evening. Understand that Wendell sent his best love to you, which I hereby give. I am now back something over a week here in Berlin, and my time here draws to a close. Just think of its being two months since we parted in Brussels ! Of that time about half has been spent in Berlin and the rest in other parts of Germany. On the whole I have been as successful in carrying out my rather vague plans as I could anyway have hoped. I have been only unlucky in being rather too early for the universities, which did not begin their lectures till last Mon- day; so that I have not had much of that sort of life, and the vacation time also prevented a good many men whom I should have liked to see from being at home. On the other hand I have found people everywhere most accessible, and although very few of the theologians speak English they mostly understand it, and the study I have had here makes their German quite intelligible. Both in such lectures as I have heard here in the last week and in the conversations which I have had with men in various places, I have found no real difficulty. In Halle and Heidelberg and Leipsic I have found interesting people and got pretty good ideas of what theologians were at. A thoroughness of Exegesis which is beautiful, and an inquiry into the Old Testament History which makes it very living, and a rearrangement of dogmatic statements in philosophical systems : — these are their great works. The books which I have read with considerable struggle are the new "Life of Jesus " by Weiss, of Berlin; the "Life of Luther " by Kostlin, whom I saw at Halle, which is the last great work on the Reformation ; the " Christian Belief and Morals " of Pfleiderer of Berlin; and, above all, the lectures of Hermann Lotze on the "Philosophy of Religion" and on the "Foundations of Practical Philosophy." Then I have dipped into Schleiermacher, of whom I knew nothing before. But Lotze is the most interesting of men. I wish you would get somebody to translate his "Grundziige der Religionsphilosophie, " — somebody who knows German well. It is a little book, the mere notes of one of his students from his lectures, which has been published this year in Leipsic. If I knew enough German to be quite sure that I was n't making him say just what he did n't mean to I would translate some of it myself, for it is full of as rich sound meat as any book I ever read, and with my poor German knowledge I know I have got at the gist of it. The way that people speak of him here is very impressive. I have heard one or two lectures from his successor Zeller, who is also an interesting man. It is the joUiest thing, this Univer- sity. There it stands wide open and anybody can go in to any lecture that he chooses. I have heard Dillman and Weiss and ^T. 46] CORRESPONDENCE 343 Pfleiderer, who are the best of the theological people here except Dorner, who is the Nestor of their faculty, but is now very ill and off at Baden-Baden. The city preachers, of whom I have seen several, seem to be very earnest but not very inspiring men. On the whole I feel as if there were not in Germany just the type of man whom we have in England and America, — the really spiritual rationalist or broad Churchman, the Maurice or the Washburn. Their positive men are dogmatists and their rationalists are nega- tive. Such men there must be somewhere, — successors of Schleiermacher on his best side, — but nobody seems to be able to point them out, and except in vague and casual approaches I have failed to find them. Outside of theology I have made some very pleasant acquaintances. I have seen a good deal of Baron von Bunsen and his family. He is the son of the Bunsen of many books, the Chevalier, and is a very charming man, and his house is always full of pleasant people. Lately I have seen something of Hermann Grimm, the translator of Emerson, and the author of Goethe's Life and of Michael Angelo's. Then there is a most hospitable doctor (Abbot) who has been here for many years, and whom I knew when I was here seventeen years ago, whom I have found a kind friend and at whose house I have seen lots of nice people. All this about my Berlin life, but I hoped you would care to know what had come of my venture. Now I leave here on "Wednesday for Dresden, and then Prague and Vienna and so to Venice, whence I am booked for the Foonah, which sails for Bombay on the 1st of December. Is your new church coming on to your satisfaction? How I should like to be where I could hear all about its details and know what all the knotty points are which you will have to settle. Do get in a bit of La Farge glass somewhere. It is too splendid a chance to be neglected now when you have such a wonderful genius living at your doors who may die any day. The more I see of what work in glass is being done abroad, the more remark- able his work appears. Just think of Trinity Church, Boston, being on fire the other day ! Do you know young Feters, the son of your friend the Reverend Doctor in New York, who came to see me the other day in Leipsic ? He seemed to be a fine fellow, an enthusiastic scholar and a wise broad Churchman. Surely, there ought to be some place for such a man in some one of our semi- naries. To Professor A. V. G. Allen he writes, with reference to an article on the " Renaissance of Theology in the Nineteenth Century:" — 344 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i88a VmirtrA, November 13, 1882. My DEAR Allen, — I have been reading this evening your article in the "Princeton Review," and before I go to bed I want to tell yoa how deeply I am delighted with it. Its great idea, the distinction between the eostra-mnudajxe and the intra-mvaidane conceptions of God's revelation, has happily grown familiar to multitudes of us in their own thinking under the half-recognized influence of the disposition of our time. Little by little we have awaked to the knowledge that we had attained to such a richer and worthier idea of our relationship to Grod. Not least among the delights which it has brought has been the sense of how with it belonged all the best, the most characteristic work of the human mind in our time, from Emerson's essay on the Oversoul to Darwin's teaching of the constant presence of live, creative force in nature. Of course this truth, as opposed to the Napo- leonic conception of Deity, verges toward Pantheism. All the Orthodox ministers of Germany say that Schleiermacher was a Pantheist, as some Englishmen say of Coleridge. But it has been a great joy to find how in such a more intimate knowledge of God a nobler and realler sense of His Personality has ever come. All this has been familiar to many of us. But to trace the history of the Christian thought upon the subject, and to show that in the knowledge of God that is true which the Alt-Katho- liks have claimed so barrenly to be true of Christian institutions, that the youngest is the oldest, and the last the first, — this you have done beautifully in your essay. Henceforth I am an old Greek. I wish that you would develop that part of your Essay, the presence of this better theology before Augustine, into a book. It would be a flood of light to many souls. But I only wanted to thank you, and to say how glad I am with all my heart, away off here, that you are teaching our youngsters in Cambridge. God bless your work. I hope that you are all well and happy. You ought to be. In two weeks now I am off for India, but I shall think of you from the Ends of the Earth. With best remembrances to your wife and boys. Ever your friend, Phillips Bkooks. It is interesting and important to note that PhiUips Brooks was impressed by Lotze's philosophy. "We have seen that in his youth it v^as the philosophy of Lord Bacon which influ- ^T. 46] RELIGIOUS CX)NVICTIONS 345 enced him. For the abstractions of speculative thought he felt no attraction. There is no evidence that he ever made any effort to understand the purpose of Hegel, though one sometimes encounters in his sermons thoughts which are akin to those of the Hegelian philosophy. But they may have an independent origin. There are also traces in his sermons of the influence of Plato, as in the sermon on the text, "See that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount " (Hebrews viii. 5). ^ On this sermon, which was preached in England, at old Boston and at the Chapel Koyal, Savoy, an English clergyman remarked to him that it was not what was wanted in England. The influence of Lotze was to raise the question whether the intellectual formula at any moment was adequate for the full and final expression of the content of human soul, of human faith and belief. That one did not come to the truth solely by the in- tellectual process had always been one of the ruling ideas of Phillips Brooks. But in the first stages of his development, he has assigned the lead to the reason. In his lectures at Yale College on the "Teaching of Eeligion" he had assumed that truth came first to the reason, then from the reason to the feelings, and finally from the feelings to the will. In some degree that had been the law of his own growth. His temperament was predominantly intellectual, and in the early years of his ministry this tendency was prominent in his preaching. But as he passed through the struggle of the seventies, he found more and more that men must believe through the cognitive power of the feeling, — those deeper instincts of the human constitution which do not originate so much in the mind as in the heart, or in the experience of life. With this growing tendency in himself, he found Lotze in harmony, as also in another direction which he was fore- casting, that the reason had been given a predominance in modern philosophy which obscured or subordinated the mighty function of the human will. While PhiUips Brooks was in Germany he seems to have been profoundly moved by the intellectual environment. It ^ Cf. Sermons, vol. iii. 346 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 was a time with him of most intense activity, affecting the whole man, as he was engaged in translating into terms of life the thoughts with which his mind was teeming. He appears as reviewing his experience, religious and intellec- tual, in the light of a more satisfactory philosophy. He en- ters in his journal a series of connected statements regard- ing his religious beliefs, prefacing it with the words: "I want to try to draw out in order and connection those per- sonal convictions about religious truth which have slowly and separately taken shape in my mind." The paper was not exhaustive, and as these words quoted indicate, it was the working of his individual experience which he was seeking to trace. Upon this point something remains to be said in another chapter. It is interesting also to note how his mind assumes a devotional tone in dealing with theological pro- blems. To this beautiful and impressive paper, the reader will now turn : — 1. GOD. Man does not seem to reach the idea of God by any conscious process. All conscious processes appear to be either the subse- quent analysis of what has gone on already unconsciously, or else the support which study and thought bring to a conviction which already exists on other grounds ; very much as the filial impulse or instinct finds itself supported by many considerations of human nature and society, but was not Tnade by any of them.^ If we look into this first idea of God, which seems self-born, a direct impulse of the heart of man, its origin, I think, will be found to lie in a transference by man to the universe of that one sole primal cause of which he has any knowledge, which is will. This is a very simple transference and is made almost uncon- sciously. Man finds only one stopping place in tracing back the claim of cause and effect in his own activity. That stopping place is in what seems to him to be truly an uncaused cause. When, then, he pictures to himself the stopping place of the chain of cause and effect in the greater world of active life, then, too, he thinks that at the beginning must lie will. This seems to be to man a supposition to be verified by experi- 1 AUe Beweise sind bios Rechtfertigungsgriinde fiir unseren Glauben und fiir die bestimmte Art, in welcher wir dies hoehste Princip meinen fassen zu miissen. Lotze, Grundzuge der Heligionsphilosophie, § 5. ^T. 46] RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS 347 ence. God is first to the world, and to some extent to every man a "Working Hypothesis. It is in the way in which this working hypothesis seems to meet, and abundantly cover, all the events of life and conditions of the world, that man finds himself justified in accepting it as true. Of course for every individual this process is not merely in large part unconscious, but it is also complicated with tradition. Each man receives the result of the process as it has gone on in the minds of men before him, and often it is by the greater or less tendency to traditionalism (that is, to the acceptance of the testimony of previous men) which is in different men's disposi- tions that they are led to adhere to or react from the witness which this process bears to the existence of God in their own minds.* We must not understand will too narrowly. It includes the whole creative force in which there is an element of afEection and desire, and so this testimony is not distinct from, but includes, the impulse which man feels to believe in a God, because he craves to be loved and to have some interested purpose outside of himself governing his creation and his life. 2. RETELATION. How does such an Idea of man arriving at the Idea of God by the examination of himself affect the doctrine of a Revelation? In the first place, it is a Doctrine of Revelation. When man has thus reached the Idea of God he adds almost of necessity the notion that God meant that he should reach it. God's first revela- tion of Himself must be in human nature itself. All other kinds of revelation would be useless unless this lay behind them all. There is here the first appearance of the truth that man is the Child of God. Both the wish and the possibility of God to show Himself to man in man's own nature are involved in the Idea of Childship. To no being but a child could such a revelation from the Father come. The traditional element, of which I spoke, makes the access to the knowledge of God seem all the more a revelation. God seems to the man to have been using not merely this man's own self, but the selves of other men and the great self of humanity, to make Himself known to this one of his children. But with this first revelation (which is often not called a Reve- ^ Im Oegentheil bat das religiose Gefiihl immer die expansive Leibe, die znr Mittheilnng ihrer Seligkelt an andre Weaen drangt, als das Motiv dei Schiip- f ang angesehen. Lotze, § 52. 348 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 lation, but is spoken of, by way of contrast, as a part of natural religion, — an unreal distinction) then the expectation of other revelations immediately follows. Man caimot think of God ex- isting and creating him without thinking also of God making some effort to communicate with His creature. The result is a searching curiosity to find God's communication, which, whatever fantastic form it takes, is still valuable as testi- fying to the fundamental conviction of man that there is a God and that He will speak. It takes form in the belief in Visions, Oracles, divinely written Bibles, and more vaguely in an undefined idea that at the origin of human life God must have said, in some way, things to man of which man has preserved the tradition. The degree of truth in each one of these is a separable question from the fact of a truth being resident in them as a whole. In this, most religious men, however they may hesitate about each particular Vision or Bible, are always tending to believe. Still in close association with what I said about man's finding God's first witness in himself (i. e., in man), there is always a half-consciousness that it must be in human life that the truest and fullest and deepest revelation of God is given. No other paper is fit to hold that awful writing. Hence all great religions, however they may rely upon their sacred books, have also their sacred man, their Prophet or Saint, in whom God is supremely shown. This comes to its completeness in Christianity. 3. CHRIST. The Principle of Christianity is that God was in Christ. Not a revelation by a Book, but by a Being. This the point to which all disturbances of literal faith in the Book are tending, and so in this there is no tendency to deny or to depreciate the true human- ity of Jesus, but rather a necessity of exalting and emphasizing it. The Fossibility of such supreme manifestation of God in Jesus must lie in the essential nearness of humanity to Divinity. Such revelation in a person could not take place in any person which did not thus naturally belong with God. Hence it is not strange that there should be much in the lives of the best men which seems to be identical with the life of Je- sus. In them, too, there is the capacity to manifest God. In them, too, God is endeavoring to manifest Himself. Here is the true key to the inspiration of Thinkers, Poets, and Saints. And this has been always and everywhere, so that Religion has been in all times and places. What we call the heathen religions ^T. 46] RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS 349 are thus real utterances of God. After man has passed beyond mere fear and the adoration of Power in the forms which seemed to him to represent it (as, for instance, the heavenly bodies), wher- ever he has tried to come into the genuine companionship and communion of a Great Father, there has been a vision of the same truth which became completely manifested in the Incarna- tion. Therefore we ought to welcome and not disparage every resemblance between heathen religions and our own, and find in them the point of approach to heathen minds. Christ certainly is to be thought of, not primarily as a revelation of God's will or intended way, but as a revelation of God's character. This does not do away with the separateness of Jesus, but only shows the way in which His separate life becomes a possibility. His seemingly contradictory name, the "only begotten Son of the Father," seems to contain this double idea of the uniqueness of His life and at the same time its being the consummation of the life of man. The testimony to its uniqueness is in His own words as historically recorded (of which I will speak later when I come to treat of the Bible) and in the solitary strength of His influence. His miracles are to us not so much the proofs of the separate- ness and superiority of His life (whatever they may have been to his contemporaries), as they are the natural and altogether to-be- expected utterances of it in its reaction upon the material world. Supposing such a special presence of God in any human life, it would seem altogether likely that that life would have a peculiar relation to nature, perhaps a peculiar mode of entrance on the mortal career and a peculiar mode of departure from it, as well as peculiar power over it during the intervening years. Thus the question of Christ's miracles becomes purely an open question of historical evidence. In this view the higher power over nature which belongs to man as God's utterance in the world, compared with the lower power over nature which the brutes possess, is also of the nature of miracle. The recognition on our part of the means and pro- cesses of the exercise of that power seems not to change the nature of the case, and the miracles ascribed to other men than Jesus (using the word "miracle " in its ordinary sense) become the natural expression of God's superior life in them and are also pure questions of history. There is no antecedent presumption against their truth. TTie supernatural is only the manifestation of a higher nature and so is natural. Hence, also, no man who believes in them can reasonably deny the possibility of present miracles. I cannot but think also that the whole present tendency of 3 so PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 physical science, which, with its theories of evolution, dwells upon the presence in the world of nature of a continually active forma- tive force, is in the line of Christianity. Christ not merely taught that the divine Power was always at work in the world. He was Himself that present active divine power, and so, in some sense, not merely made miracles seem occasionally possible, but made all events seem miraculous, which is not the abolition of the idea of the miraculous any more than the flooding of the world with sun- shine is an extinction of the sun. 4. PRATEK. The revelation in Christ of the intrinsic relationship of man to God furnishes the true ground for the Idea of prayer, the presence of prayer outside of Christian influence being, as in the other points mentioned before, an indication that the essential truth of Christianity is everywhere present in the world. Prayer, as Christ, not merely by His practice and precept, but by His nature, makes it known to us is the entire expression of loving and depend- ent sonship, — the complete resting of the life of man upon the life of God, of the child upon the Father. While Petition will be certainly included in the utterance of this, it will not be limited to petition. Confidence, love, sympathy, thankfulness, all will be part of Prayer. And when Petition comes it never will be absolute, but always conditioned on the higher knowledge and complete love of the Father to whom the Prayer is offered. See the Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done," and the Prayer in G«thsemane, which is the pattern of all petitions. In this view the so-called "difficulties of prayer " by no means disappear, but are seen to be identical with the difficulties of moral life in general. They are not involved in any relation of a subordinate to a superior will, one working within the other. They do not make prayer impossible or unmeaning any more than the difficulties of free-willed life make choice and action impos- sibilities or fictions. The evidence of the reality of Prayer and of its efficacy must lie not in our recognition of its specific answer, but in our assur- ance of the nature of the Being to whom it is offered. 5. ATONEMENT. Of such a revelation of God in a human life what should we say beforehand would be the results? First, Suffering to the Humanity in which the Revelation is made; and second, Recon- ^T. 46] RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS 351 ciliation or assertion and establishment of the essential oneness between God and man. The first of these is accidental, belonging to the special circumstance of human sin in the midst of which the Bevelation must be made. In a pure, though imperfect hu- manity the Revelation by Incarnation might be painless. The second result is essential, and must come under whatever circum- stances God thus showed Himself to man. In other words Atonement by suffering is the Result of the Incarnation ; Atonement being the necessary and Suffering the incidental element of that result. But Sacrifice is an essential element, for Sacrifice truly signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life. Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as His consecration and ful- filment of it makes morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfilment of it which He achieved, therefore His Atonement and His sacrifice, and incidentally His suffering, become vicarious. It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make pos- sible and successful in us the same processes which were perfect in Him. The Vicarionsness of Jesus is of the same sort with and has its distant repetitions and illustrations in the Sacrifices by which the men in whom God is most revealed open for other men the way to God and the divine life. 6. THE BIBLE. If the true revelation of God is in Christ, the Bible is not pro- perly a Revelation, but the History of a Revelation. This is not only a Fact but a necessity, for a Person cannot be revealed in a Book, but must find revelation, if at all, in a Person. The centre and core of the Bible must therefore be the Gospels as the Story of Jesus. There is no necessity of supposing them to be other than the natural records of the events of the life of Jesus which they appear upon their face to be. The critical dis- cussion of them has in the larger part confirmed their genuineness and authenticity. The Fourth Gospel has sufficient claims to be accepted as the work of John ; but even if that were doubtful there would be abundant authority in it as issuing very early from the Church's consciousness and tradition and holding the Church's loyalty of faith. The course of our thought with reference to the Gospels is this : 352 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 (1) They set before us the character of Jesus in such way as demands our supreme honor for His knowledge and His truthful- ness. (2) Then upon His own word we accept His higher claims ; there being, as I have already said in speaking of Him, no ante- cedent impossibility or even contrary presumption. The Epistles have their natural value as the commentary of those most likely to know the mind of Christ, or what He was and did and said. The Old Testament gets its value from the New. It is^ the story of the gradual shaping of the world for Christ. For' the purpose of giving this story there is brought together the whole literature of the very peculiar nation in whose midst He came. That literature consists of History, Poetry, Biography, Essay, and Discourse. It was formed under the same laws under which all literature is formed, only made peculiar by the facts that (1) the Jews were under special divine training for a peculiar pur- pose, and that knowing this fact themselves they were (2) very careful of their national Records, and (3) very anxious tO' find signs of the divine interposition in their affairs. There is in these facts nothing to prevent the occurrence- in the Bible of mistakes or misconceptions; on the contrary, there is strong reason to believe that certain great tendencies (e. g., love of the miraculous) will distort special facts, while the great spirit- ual current of the story will be preserved more faithfully than that of any other ancient history. Inspiration is primarily in the events with which the Bible deals; secondarily in the nature of the Bible writers; only through these in their literal words. It was a noble story told by noble men. So comes the nobleness of the narrative. The Bible claims nothing else for itself. "We must not give it quali- ties which simply seem to us necessary. It is the word of God, speaking not through passive trumpets, but through living History and acting characters. 7. MOEAi LIFE. Taking the Bible thus, not as a series of oracles but as the utterance to the world of the Revelation of God in Christ, its treatment of man's moral condition and hope is clear. Its great characteristic is that it is positive and not negative. The Idea of Jesus is of a true personal moral life for every man, which belongs to every man as the son of God, to which by his deepest nature every man tends, from which sin hinders him, into which he is to be set free. It is the need that every man should ^T. 46] RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS 353 thus fulfil his own true life which makes the obligation, and must ultimately make for every man the attractiveness, of duty. While this is the distinctive New Testament Idea of Duty, the other Ideas of Duty have their true place. Always "mere moral- ity," as it used to be called, is included and involved, not set aside by the Gospel. Such motives as the fear of the conse- quences of sin, the honorable gratitude to God, the regard for the well-being of humanity, the instinctive sense of the beauty of con- forming to the moral law, are freely used to surround and sustain the central motive which comes of the soul's revealed possibilities. Indeed some of these motives may be considered only as other forms of this motive. The entrance into this deeper consciousness and into the motive power which it exercises is Kegeneration, the new Birth, not merely with reference to time, but with reference also to pro- foimdness. Because man has something sinful to cast away in order to enter this higher life, therefore Regeneration must begin with Repentance. But that is an incident. It is not essential to the idea. A man simply imperfect and not sinful would still have to be born again. The presentation of sin as guilt, of release as forgiveness, of consequence as punishment, have their true meaning as the most personal expressions of man's moral condition as always measured by, and man's moral changes as always dependent upon, God. 8. PERSONALITY. Christ's whole conception of life is Personal. Every man is a true and distinct will and nature. There is no shadow of Pan- theism or Fate in His teaching. It is the union of this clear sense of personality with the full declaration of God's all-pervad- ing life which makes the greatest wonder and power of His life and doctrine. It is put forth in His teaching of the Father and the Son. Here is the strong irreconcilable issue of Christianity and Buddhism. This personality of Christianity is involved in the fact of its being a moral religion, and not a system of ideas or a condition of feeling. It is in moral life, in responsibility and duty, in per- sonal attainment of character and personal suffering for sin, that personality becomes clear. We want to be very clear, in speaking of Christianity, about the real meaning of Salvation. Only when it means the release from sin and the attainment to holy personal character does it keep the essential peculiarity of Christ's teaching, which is personality. VOL. II 354 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 9. THE CHURCH. The struggle of man for personal character directly and con- sciously pursued must to some extent defeat itself. It must be- come self-conscious and selfish. Men's social relations giving birth to constant duties are provided for the training of character in self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness. Man forgets even to question about his own growth in goodness while he serves the souls con- nected with him and the great whole of humanity. Although society gets its value from the individuals of which . it is composed and has no existence apart from them, yet as made up of them it is capable of being conceived of as a Being, with duties, with rights, with character, able to be developed indefi- nitely in wisdom and goodness. It is this ideal society which Christ contemplates when he established the Christian Church. In other words the Church is simply the Ideal world. A perfect church would be a perfect world. The church is imperfect so long as it is not coterminous with the world. The church therefore possesses no real existence or character except those of the men and women who compose it. The sacraments in their largest view are human rites, that is, they indicate the universal facts of humanity. Baptism is the declaration of the universal Fact of the Sonship of man to God. The Lord's Supper is the declaration of the universal fact of man's dependence upon God for supply of life. It is associated with the death of Jesus because in that, as I said, the truth of God giving himself to man found its completest manifestation. 10. DEATH. The soul which has lived in society passes through death alone. Death is the point where it is reminded of its individuality and where the points of its life in society are gathered up. This is the real criticalness of Death, the way in which it becomes proper to speak of it as a Judgment Time and of the period which pre- cedes it as Probation. The continuance of Life through death is the natural assump- tion of humanity, conscious in itself of something which the appar- ently wholly physical phenomenon of Death seems not to touch. Man believes in continued existence because the burden of proof seems to him to be upon the other side and no one has proved that death ends all. ^T. 46] RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS 355 According to the strength and clearness of the sense of person- ality will be the strength and clearness of men's belief in Immor- tality. The ordinary argument for immortality, like that drawn from the need of moral adjustments, of the need of rewards and punish- ments, never could create the Faith. They are only its occasional helpers in its weaker moments. The Resurrection of Jesus has power in assuring our resurrec- tion, in the fact that it confirms and illustrates that expectation which the consciousness of our own personality had produced. Here, as in other cases, the sense of our own personality in some weak times will resort to and rest upon the sense of individ- ual personal life which is strong in other men, and which, as I said, was supremely asserted first in Christ's own self-conscious- ness, and then in the way in which He treated the lives of other men. This is one of the deepest ways in which He " brought Life and Immortality to light." 11. ETERNITT. The more natural Death seems the more truly the world beyond Death will seem to be one with the life on this side of it. Christ, therefore, in redeeming Death (which we must remember was a true redemption or bringing it back to its ideal self) redeemed also Eternity. At the same time, death, while not the end of Life, must cer- tainly be a very significant event in Life, and therefore there may well be a criticalness in it which will make it a true time of Judgment. There is no possibility of logically denying the eternal continu- ance of sin and suffering. It is bound up with the continuance forever of free will. On the other hand, there is no possibility of asserting it, for that, too, assumes a determination of men's free wills which has not yet been made and which nobody can know. This life is probationary, but only as every period of existence is probationary with reference to the times which follow it. It is not ended in a fixed decree, but in a more strongly assured character. Heaven is the soul finding its own perfect personality in God. The activity of the Eternal Life must be intense. Stated phi- losophically, it will be the soul working without resistance or re- luctance in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Stated reli- giously, it will be the child reconciled in perfect love to the 356 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 Father and serving Him in the delight of love forever. "Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast!" The strong undercurrent of Phillips Brooks's life during the year abroad was religious. Natural scenery, art, architec- ture, historical monuments and inscriptions, everything relat- ing to famous men, the customs and manners of people, the course of ordinary life — in these he v?as deeply interested. But beneath them all he was seeking for the spiritual mean- ing of human existence in this world. He took the opportu- nity which his leisure gave him to study the life of Luther, visiting every spot connected with his career. He made himself the possessor of many of the original editions of the great reformer's writings, surprised to find that they could be bought so cheaply. K(3stlin's "Martin Luther," which had just appeared, was eagerly read. Next to Luther in his admiration stood Goethe. He studied the Second Part of Faust, and witnessed an attempt to reproduce it in the theatre, which he pronounces a failure. He devoted much of his time to Lessing. He had long been familiar with Les- sing's ideas regarding the education of the human race, but he now gave himself up to a thorough study of that most suggestive work, "Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts," writing out in his note-book an abstract of each, one of its paragraphs. Much of his time was given to writing in his note-book the thoughts with which his soul was glowing or the impressions he was receiving. Not for many years had he done such systematic work in recording what passed through his mind. The lateral and terminal moraine, — that refuse of miscon- ception, superstition, etc., which an old institution or faith throws off on its sides as it moves while it is still living, and that which it leaves as refuse at the end after it has exhausted itself and perished. The heaven of Truth lies deep and broad and' still. And while I gaze into it, lo, I see Some human thought, instinct with human will. Gather from out its deep serenity. ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOK 357 Awhile it hovers, changes, glows, and fades. Then rolls away; and where it used to be Naught but the heaven of Truth from which it rose Looks down upon me deep and broad and free. So have I seen, shaped in the noontide blue, A floating cloud attain to gradual birth, And then, absorbed in that from which it grew. Leave only the great Sky which domes the earth. What are men's systems, thoughts, and high debates But clouds which Truth creates and uncreates ? Standing in the cloud and seeing the dew upon the mountain tops in front of us. The sad story of the earnest minister who went to give himself to study so that he might be more useful. And as he learned more and more his faith more and more decayed, until at last he was a learned skeptic, and knew himself that he had destroyed the vessel in filling it with its true wine. The awful dilemmas which his life must have presented to his mind. The truth and value of George Eliot's remark in "Eomola, " apropos of Savonarola, that it is not always the strongest spirits of a time who are most free from its superstitions. The illus- trations in one's own time. "Show thy servants thy work and their children thy glory" Psalm xc. 16 (Prayer Book version). One generation doing a piece of the work of God, and the next generation seeing how splendid it is. The day returns, and street and lane Throb with the human life again; As if one poured the rich, red wine Li the dull glass and made it shine. The mosaic work, whose pieces being long they can cut the mass across at various points and find the same figure or face less a quarter in size, but keeping the same expression. So perhaps of various ages in history. "Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head." The answer of Christ. The cry of dissatisfied men who only need more impulse and "go " for a complete change of thoughts and 35^ PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 principles; when what they want is only to put to use more conscientiously and vigorously what they have. In Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," when Gessler's cap is on the pole the priest comes with the host and stands beside the pole, and the people bow themselves down to that and so avoid the appear- ance of disobedience. As the one test of a well-tied knot is that it shall be so tied that the more the strain is put upon it the stronger it holds. As when you fling your window open on the crowded street it seems as if the noises then began. The way you sit in a great square in some foreign town (Erfurt) and see the monument of some dead local hero, but do not care to go and examine it, sure that you would know nothing about him ; but yet you get a clear and deep and pleasant feeling of past life and history from it all. The blessed little towns which have no sights, where you may just wander about the streets and take it in. Herder's Wahlspruch, — "Licht, Liebe, Lehre." It is on his tombstone in Weimar and on the scroll which he holds in his hand in his statue in Herder Platz. Text: "Living or dying, we are the Lord's." Text: "And my people love to have it so." The final criti- cal decision of what the preaching is to be is in the people. Text: "And what shall be done in the end thereof?" The culmination of processes. The "entering wedge." The danger and duty of anticipation. One of the old Heidelberg professors in the Jesuit days used to say, "wenn die Fragen der Schtller ihn in die Enge brachten, 'Unus asinus plus protest negare quam decem docti probare.' " "No fine view to-day," says the guide who shows the castle; "there is too much cloud." And so the glory of the cloud view goes for nothing. His one idea is that the greatness of a view is measured by the distance you can see. Sometimes you can almost see Strassburg minster eighty miles away. So talk often the ^T.46] EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOK 359 guides into the regions of truth. But constantly it is the very clouds that make the landscape most worth studying. In the old church which fronts the square, By the third altar in the southern aisle There hapgs a picture radiant and fair, The Virgin Mother with the heavenly smile. Then describe the same picture standing there still, even in the dark with no one to see, but the same beauty in it all the while. The blessing of knowing it is there. So of God's unseen grace. Comparison of the people to a fountain ("Warzb'urg Schloss Garden, Sunday afternoon, October 15, 1882). The constancy of it, though its particles are constantly changing. The constant effort to go higher and yet the ever undiscouraged failure. The power proceeding from a mysterious and hidden source — the power telling on each separate particle, yet seeming to move the whole as one mass, etc. The figure of the " Stream " of time (or life) is true not only in other respects but also in this, that it expresses the constant change along with constant identity which life possesses. Text: "He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." This text in the light of the idea that original utterance of God's true prophecy had ceased since Ezra's time, and that since that, "Halacha, Midrash. and Hagada had become the forms of all literary effort." (See Robertson Smith, Old Testa- ment in Jewish Church, p. 141.) "A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye shall see me." Text for sermon on the passage through darkened periods of Life and Faith. Lessing's "Der Jimge Gelehrte " must be more than an amazing farce. In it we certainly can see two things, one temporary and local, the other universal and eternal. The universal teaching is that mere pedantry is not true learning, and that life, no less than books, has lessons for the learning man. The local application must be to a state of Germany in his time, when the studying people, filled with the new enthusiasm of study, were often using it foolishly, as if it were a valuable and noble thing for its own sake, — the crude condition of the ordinary German student in those days, of which we see many signs. 36o PHILLIPS BROOKS [i88a In all this travelling one is overcome and oppressed with the multiplicity of life. The single point vrhere we stand is so small, yet it is the best and dearest of all. I would not for the world be anything but this, if I must cease being this in order to be that other thing. But I would fain also be these other things, — these College Students, these soldiers in their barracks, these children playing round the old foimtain, these actors on their dotage, these merchants in their shops, these peasant women at their toil, these fine ladies with their beauty ; I want somehow, somewhere, to be them all! and the simplicity, the singleness of my own life, with its appointed place and limits, comes over me oppressively. Where is the outlook and the outlet? Must it not be in the possibility, which is not denied to any of us, of get- ting some conception of life which is large enough to include and comprehend all these and every other form in which men live, or have lived, Or will live forever ? And is not such a conception to be found in Christ's large truth of God the Father? Oh, to preach or hear some day a worthy sermon on " In Him we live and move and have our Being " ! This morning as I looked up at the castle [Heidelberg], the sun streaming through a vacant windowpane just caught a branch of autumn vine and made it burn so that it seemed as if the room within was glowing with the light of fire. All the rest was dull and brown and sombre. Only this one window shone like a lighted palace window on a winter night. It was as if Frederick and Elizabeth had come back to the English Bau again. Text: "Till the time of the restitution of all things." Acts iii. 21. Pointing to a great return, but not to a previously realized condition of things, which would be terribly disheartening — rather to that ideal conception of things which is the true "be- fore," the antecedent of all intelligible being. Apply to Genesis. You complain of the details of life and duty, but after all they are to the great principles what the countless objects of the Earth's scenery are to the sunlight, the points of manifestation. What a world empty of everything but sunlight it would be! That would be a life with noble principles, but no details of duty or lines of small events. Oxenstein's speech to his son, "See, my boy, with how little wisdom the world can be governed." ^T.46] EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOK 361 The present condition of our churches is something like an orchestra tuning up. Each instrument trying itself altogether by itself. Some time they must all strike in together and the great Symphony begin. The high unselfishness of the instruments in an orchestral piece. The way in which each speaker in a play must make the situa- tion ready for the player who is to follow him, prepare for his speech or action. Text: "The Son of Man cometh like a thief in the night; watch therefore." The whole subject of suddenness; nothing is sudden and yet everything is sudden. Examples in history, Christ, Luther, Darwin, — the illustrations which you '11 find in your own life. The value of the knowledge of this in bringing about the true poise of temperament. Expectation without terror, a sense of naturalness and wonder together. Sermon on the verse about the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Text: "Sacrifice and meat offering Thou wouldst not, but my ears hast Thou opened." Ps. xl. 8. Sermon on God's love for intelligent worship and for a desire after the truth upon His people's part. Text: "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even your faith. " The absolute creed that only by belief in something higher should man master the lower. Oh, the necessity of loving purity and great thoughts about great things, not merely being driven to them. This the child's salvation from brutal vice and infidel cynicism. Point alse to the men who are overcome by the world for want of Faith. In connection with the above think of the great danger of abolishing that for which we give no substitute. Sometimes it must be done, and the development or discovery of the substitute must be left to wisdom and power greater than ours, but there is always terrible danger. We in America have no complete substitute for the military training which we rejoice to be free from. The mercantile rivalry is not a substitute. It lacks the possible self-devotion and noble- 362 PHILLIPS BROOKS [i88a The "Rundschau" for October, 1882, contains a most interest- ing address delivered by Professor Haeckel, of Jena, in Septem- ber, 1882, at the meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Eisenach. It is called "Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, Goethe, und Lamarck." It is really a eulogy on Darwin. It opens with an allusion to the place of meeting and a claim that the New Era which Darwinism opens is a fit successor to that with which Eisenach and the Wartburg must always be associated in connec- tion with Luther. It is interesting to think what degree of trath and what amount of fallacy there is in this. Luther's protest in behalf of freedom was indeed the opening of a new world, but its real value was measured by the worth of the positive authority to which he appealed. Darwin's protest against the crudeness of popular Creationism must be his real claim to remembrance in spite of the very striking letter from Darwin to one of Haeckel' s pupils, which the Professor quotes, in which Darwin says that "Science has nothing to do with Christ." It may perhaps turn out after all that Science has wiser teachers than the Great Scien- tist knew, that Christ's truth of the Father Life of God has the most intimate connection with Darwin's doctrine of Development, which is simple, the continual indwelling and action of Creative Power. I do believe that it is a real test of men's character to ask yourself whether you can think of them in connection with their mothers and fully realize the association. The greatest, the wisest, the oldest, if only they have kept simplicity and freshness, if they have genuine reality and truth, will easily enough allow such thoughts. But the sophisticated, the unreal, the vicious and untrue, repel them. You cannot bring the mother thought home to them. It does not seem as if they ever had mothers. Try it with the thorough-going man of the world and you will see. Some people seem to have almost exactly the influence of Music. It is an inarticulate influence. It does not communicate ideas, but it creates moods. It is incapable of analysis. Men ask you to give an account of these people's power over you, and you can- not. You tell your story and the listener asks, "Is that all? " and wonders at your delusion. All that you can do is to say, "Come and see," as after vainly trying to describe the power of a piece of music you take your friend to hear it. All influence of man over man, however rich it may be in the imparting of ideas and the awakening of the moral sense, seems to be incomplete unless there is in it something of this musical power of creating moods. ° ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOK 363 Stein had great contempt for what he called metapoliticians, who are, as Seeley in his " Life of Stein " defines it, " those who stand in the same relation to politicians as metaphysicians to the students of nature. " The same feeling which crudely and coarsely breaks out in our time against the "scholar in politics," those "damned literary fellows." There are reason and unreason in it both. Text: "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep." Spoken in perfect honesty. A naive expression of the worldly man's sense of the difficulty of life and of the inadequate equipment of merely spiritual natures to cope with it. "I really do not see what the world would come to if all men were Chris- tians." Let us see. Text: 2 Cor. v. 11. "We are made manifest to God and I trust also to your consciences." The two great objects of the true man's appeal. Text: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." A sermon on the need of essential purity, unselfishness, and lofti- ness of purpose as a condition for all special entrance into the Eeality of Things, which is God. The beasts in a zoological garden always trying to get out; their pathetic, brutal inability to be convinced that it is hopeless. You come back after years, and there is that same bear walking up and down just as you left him, trying the same bars, and never giving up the hope that somewhere he may find a gap. It is the dim memory of savage free life — nay, see how even the beasts bom in captivity, who have never known by experience the freedom of the desert, they too are at the same endless undiscour- aged effort to escape. Apply to man's everlasting working away at the problems of existence. (Berlin Zoological Garden, October 27, 1882.) Like the bear in his disgraceful humiliation begging for nuts. The remembrance which we leave behind us when we die only like the blue smoke which floats off from the candle for a moment or two after you blow it out. Launce, in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona, " says, "Thou shalt never get such a secret from me but by a parable." So some people give out their new ideas about religion. 364 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 What was the dream which long ago Filled this sweet face with pensive pain ? What pity at some tale of woe Or longing for some hopeless gain ? Gone are the dreamer and the dream, Yet still among the things of earth The pensive pain, like sunset's gleam, Outlives the sun which gave it birth. (Picture by Bronzino, in the Dresden Gallery.) In the palace of the Countess Nostitz, at Prague, is a most curious picture by Van Eyck which singularly illustrates the way in which mysticism opens on the one side into coarse materialism, as we see so constantly in the history of the church. Christ stands literally in a winepress. On His bent back the great board is crowded down by the great screw, and out of the gash in His side the pressure drives a torrent of blood which flows into the vat in which He stands. Out of mouths in the sides of this vat the blood comes flowing in smaller streams, and angels catch it in cups and hand it to the faithful all about, who are drinking it before one's eyes. Yet there is nothing in all this horrible realism which is not easily enough matched in the writings of Calvinistic and Romish theologians. The Franz and Carl of Schiller's "Die Rauber " is another illustration of that disposition to disparage respectability as against vagrant generosity which is always appearing. It is the same thing whose real key we have in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The nature of the cause in which heroism is shown does not affect our honor for the heroism itself. We do not like confes- sion, but" the constancy of this St. John Nepomuk, who would not reveal to Emperor Wenzel (1383) what the Empress had told him in the confessional, wins our honor nevertheless. In the old castle at Prague the Bottle-Shaped Dungeon, where they put victims for starvation, has in its floor a hold leading to a lower cavern still. When any prisoner was put into the horrid place the dead body of the last occupant was thrust into this hole and there decayed, the new wretch dying in the horrid stench of hia predecessor's corpse. So sometimes with doomed Ideas and Institutions. ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOK 365 The English minister at Prague compelled every week to send his text to the police authorities; sometimes compelled to send his whole sermon too. Like a bell buoy got adrift and ringing wildly all over the The conversation of Jesus with the woman of Samaria comes out very strongly as the type of the narrowness of orthodox con- servatism (in this case combined with a life of sin) set over against the breadth which had its root in first principles. "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship; " "How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, a woman of Samaria ? " How often I have heard this sort of talk from the true sectarian. And then the richness and depth of Jesus, "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." As when the music of the organ suddenly stops and leaves only the solid, stolid tramp of outgoing feet. We are not called upon to set in opposition the two great con- ceptions of the results of conduct, one of which thinks of them as inevitable consequences naturally produced, and the other as the rewards and punishments meted out by the superior insight and justice of a ruling Lord. Each conception has. its value, which we cannot afford to lose in seeking for the total truth. The first gives reasonableness and reliability to the whole idea. The second preserves the vividness of personality. The time was when the second conception monopolized men's thought. In the present strong reaction from the second to the first conception it would be a great loss if we let the second be denied or fade into forget- fulness. When St. Francis Xavier had been buried at Goa, "le corps du saint fut officiellement d^clard vice-roi des Lides et lieutenant g6ji6val; et c'est de lui que le veritable gouverneur ^tait cens^ tenir ses pouvoirs; encore au commencement du dix-neuvifeme si^cle, il allait les demander en grande pompe a Bon Jesus avant de prendre possession de son gouvernement." (Keclus, India, iii. 447.) A picturesque illustration of the way the living are rul- ing by the work the dead have done. The great dead still really rule. 266 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 The Ten Commandments based on the idea of liberty. "Thus spake Jehovah who brought you out of the house of bondage," and issuing in the injunctions of duty and righteousness "Thou shalt and thou shalt not ; " so Liberty and Duty lie together here. (See Robertson Smith's Prophets of Israel, pp. 40, 41.) It seems to be almost an indication of the incompleteness of each thing by itself, and of how each needs aU the rest to make a whole, that we find the full illustration of the qualities of each in other things than itself, — often in those things which are its opposites. Thus we say of the frank man that he is "simple as a child," and then we bid the boy "behave like a man." The hero is "bold as a lion," and the strong voice rings "like a trum- pet." It is Lq the individual and the host coming to their several completenesses together that the final completeness of the whole must be attained. I read in a religions paper, "Nothing short of this can differ- ence the gospel from any other ethical system in kind." Do we, then, want to difference the gospel from the ethical systems of the human soul? Is the impulse which makes us want to do so the highest impulse of the soul ? Is there not yet a higher and a truer impulse whereby we may rejoice to see the gospel sweep into itself all of man's moral effort, and prove itself the highest utterance of Him who in the million cravings of man for righteousness has always been, is always, making Himself known? There are who hold life like a precious stone. Hither and thither turning it to see The rich light play in its mysterious depths ; And other men to whom life seems a bridge By which they pass to things which lie beyond ; And others still who count life but as wine, In which they drink their pledges to their friends. But then there are to whom life's dearness lies In that it is the pressure of Grod's hand, With which He holds our feeble hand in love, And makes us know ourselves in knowing Him. There is a stronger and stronger reluctance to have religion treated purely as a regulative force for conduct. That it will surely be, but that it will be most surely if it be primarily con- sidered as the power of a higher consciousness, the power by which the soul knows itself divine, and enters into conscious com- munion with God. So, if I could do what I would, I would ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 367 reveal the power of religion to a soul, and thus it should arrive at lofty contempt for sin, which should be its perpetual safety and strength. And is not this the real thought which was in all the ancient talk about works and Faith ? As when a mother proudly holds the hand Of children, walking one on either side, Who fight their fights across her, and yet still Are one in being hers, howe'er they fight; So walk we 'mid our struggling fears and hopes. The way in which the fact that Nelson was mortally wounded was kept from the knowledge of the men as they fought on to victory at Trafalgar. (See Rossetti's Sonnets, p. 271.) Some people seem to think they can do so with a dying doctrine. The Banyan Tree, dropping its supplementary branches, which take root ; then the main trunk decaying, and the tree supported by these secondary supports. So- of institutions and doctrines, and their history and first evidences. "Is there not a lie in my right hand? " The tragedy and misery of having falsehood at the very seat of power, not merely an accident of the life, but in possession of its very citadel. In addition to his letters and the note-book from which these extracts are taken, Mr. Brooks kept a journal where he records his impressions of travel. By its aid we may fol- low the lonely man in his wanderings from place to place. It is too voluminous to be given in full, but a few extracts from it, which are as characteristic as they are beautiful, bring us near to the man himself, nearer than his friends could come as he moved in and out among them. Bkblin, Thursday, September 7, 1882. The first day in Berlin certainly does not impress one with anything like brightness or gayety. Everything is dull and lum- bering. The people, for the most part, very homely, the shops tiresomely ugly, and the whole having the look of a piece of coarse material which has not well taken polish, perhaps which has not yet found the right way of being polished, but has tried other people's ways and so has failed. At the same time there is an evident strengfth, the constant suggestion of not being yet 368 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 finished, but having a future, and the general homeliness in which the simplest affections show out not unpleasingly. He comments on the picture of George Gisze, the mer- chant, by the younger Holbein in the Museum : — Bkkun, Friday, September 8, 1882. It is a picture perfect in its kind, of the best sort of northern life and mercantile character. No southerner, no dealer with the abstract as the business of his life, ever looked like that. He knew affairs. The lovely green wall, before which he sits, is covered with the apparatus of concrete concerns. He writes and receives letters, which are what fasten men to common, pre- sent things. And yet he thinks. Those eyes look beyond his ledgers. And he has suffered. Not idly is his motto written on the wall, "Nulla sine merito voluptas." Where shall such a merchant meet such a painter now ? It is a sober strength which comes from such a picture, a genuine in- spiration to good and faithful work. Sunday, September 10, 1882. Took tea with Baron George von Bunsen and his family, who were most interesting people, old friends of Stanley's, son of the famous Bunsen, now member of German Parliament, a broad churchman and liberal in politics. Is under prosecution for libel by Bismarck, who, it seems, makes three hundred such prosecutions every year. Baron Bunsen gives but poor accounts of religious conditions. Liberal church empty; dogmatists and unbelievers have things their own way. But it is good to hear of the power of what he calls the second class, — professors, judges, etc., — who are the real power, the higher society having no power to oppose them. Tuesday, September 12, 1882. Spent some time in the Kunst Gewerbe Ausstellung, where they have a sort of show and salesroom of the present artistic manufactures of the town. One thing pervades it all, a certain heaviness and lack of inspiration and careless ease, which is the delight of all such work. "Go to, now, and let us make our furniture beautiful," they have said, and the result is what we might have expected. The old German work is delightful because it is unconscious and quaint, very little of intrinsic or eternal beauty in it. Take the unconsciousness away and let the race try to be beautiful, and they fail just where the Greeks, whom they seem to worship with a sort of despairing adoration, so wonderfully succeeded. JET. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 269 Beblw, September 15, 1882. I paid a long visit to Dr. Carl Abel, and found a very intelli- gent and leaxned man. He told me of the strong tendency which he believes exists at present among the better German classes towards religion; not distinctively towards Christianity, but in general towards theism, although some of it still keeps a pan- theistic aspect, towards reverent thoughts of the mystery of the causal powers of life and death. Lotze, who seems to have been highly honored here, represents the real tendency of German thought. Of course there is also the growing irreligiousness of a great busy community, and there is the narrow materialism of absorbed scientists, but these are special phenomena with their own explanations. . . . Monday, September 18, 1882. In the morning to the Royal Library, — a free public library, where whoever will may come and read, and with simplest pre- cautions books may be taken out, — every way apparently as free as our own Public Library. It is the love and care for learning that mitigates the hardness of this northern city. Without that, and with its all-pervading military habits, it would be barba- rian. In the library are many interesting manuscripts, but per- haps the most interesting is the Bible and Prayer Book which, on the morning of his execution, Charles I. of England gave to Archbishop Jaxon. How comes it here ? Dined at Baron von der Heydt's. A lovely view over a quiet lake not far from Potsdam, royal estates all around. Dr. and Mrs. Henry Potter dined there; also Dr. Strauss, the court preacher at Potsdam. . . . Bebltn, Wednesday, September 20, 1882. The beautiful picture of the dead Christ in the Museum, which was formerly ascribed to Mantegna, is now called by the name of John Bellini. It is rather hard to give up the old association, and though no doubt the evidence is sufficient, one cannot help feeling that the old name suited best the picture's character. It is a greater picture than Bellini, with all his wonderful sweetness and beauty, ever made. The greatness of the Christ, and the tenderness of the sorrowing angels who support him, are both wonderful. A pleasant dinner at Dr. Abbott's with Herr von Bunsen, Dr. Abel, Mr. Sargent, our new minister, and Dr. Frommel, Hof Prediger, the last a very interesting man, full of eloquence and imagination, a bit too declamatory for private life, but very earnest. He differs altogether from Stacker about the Jew ques- VOL. n 370 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 tion ; thinks Christianity is suffering the reward of its misdoings but sees the outcome in the return of the Jews. Beblin, Friday, September 22, 1882. A long morning with Herr von Bunsen at the Falk Real Schule in the Charlottenberg district. The bright little boys and their oral arithmetic, the tendency to guess, the frequent mistakes, but the general quickness and correctness. The gymnasiimi full of boys of about fifteen at their physical exercise, the absence of manly games among German boys, the consumptive look, the pale faces and thin frames. Then the melancholy religious teaching, boys being taught to analyze and explain the Epistle to the Gala- tians, evidently very tiresome to them; a strong confirmation of the belief that the Bible is not suited to such ways of being taught. . . . Berlin, Saturday, September 23, 1882. I leave Berlin to-day after a little over two weeks' visit. The people impress me not wholly pleasantly. The enormous power of the army overshadows everything. Great commercial activity is everywhere. Social life is generous and free, and in its best specimens unsurpassed doubtless in all the world, but in its ordinary aspects it is crude and rude. A coarse personality is everywhere, and through the whole commvinity there runs a certain restlessness and fear, a disappointment that the nation has not won, out of the wonderful success of 1870, the advan- tages which were so confidently looked for ; a sense of constant pressure from without, the two great neighbors, France and Russia, never being forgotten for a moment, and a sense of watchful surveillance within, which makes liberty a partial and always precarious possession. Wittenberg, Sunday, September 24, 1882. A delightful Luther Sunday. In the morning at eight to his old parish church, where a dull sermon wearied a quite numerous congregation. The singing was good, and all the time there was the association of his having preached there, and of this having been the place where first, in 1522, the communion, in both kinds, was given to the laity. How formal an event it sounds, and how essential it really is. The standing of the people while the text is read is very good. The Augustinian Convent, with the great Reformer's rooms, is a perfect monimaent. And that strange wife of his, who is said to have been so pretty, and looks so ugly in all the pictures, gives a homely reality to it all. His little fourteen-year-old girl's picture, hanging in the chamber where he died, is very pretty. . . . ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 371 HaiiLE, Monday, September 25, 1882. Halle has grown greatly since I saw it seventeen years ago. Now it has 80,000 people, and all the new .fine streets which every growing town, it seems, must have. But still the University is here, and Francke's Institute. The latter is enormous, and seems as if it must be very difficult to guard from false develop- ments, and perhaps also from corruption. But its look of sim- plicity is very charming, and the German teacher, with his class of girls, was the very picture of unsophisticated earnestness. One is ready very seriously and literally to ask who has left a more enviable name in the world than Francke. The University has the same simplicity. Its class rooms are as plain as rooms can be made, and even its Fest Hall has not succeeded in being fine. But its library building is superbly arranged. Professor Conrad went through the buildings with me, — a youngish man. Professor of Political Economy. I took tea afterwards at his house : a strong man, talking as they all talk about the poverty of Germany and the crushing effects of the war. I saw with him the very curious and interesting cast from Luther's face after death, which is made into a sitting statue, and, with his own Bible before him, sits at the window and looks into the market. EisLEBBN, Tuesday, September 26, 1882. Professor Conrad rode with me in the train almost to Eisleben, getting out at the station before, where he has a little country place. He talked of the Church and its lack of hold upon the people^ their slight religiousness. He ascribed it to the dead life of the clergy, who study theology but not life, cultivate the head and not the heart, and have not sympathy with the people. It is the old story, with probably about the usual amount of truth in it. At least he earnestly regretted that there was not more religion. He talked also of the superabundance of students, more than Germany can provide for in learned occupations. Divinity students are increasing. . . . Weimab, Wednesday, September 27, 1882. The poetic character of this town, with its long worship of Goethe and Schiller, has something artificial, an eighteenth cen- tury look about it, but very pretty, and the town suits it per- fectly. It is like a very well-kept room of an unforgotten but dead friend. One can see Goethe going in and out of Herder's door, and the park all about the town is a beautiful setting for it. And Luther preached here in the Stadt Kirche, they say, on his way to Worms. . . . 372 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 Wbimab and Gotha, September 28, 1882. Of all the pretty Thuringian towns there seem to be none so pretty as these two. Weimar is a monumental town. It is a sort of German Concord, with most characteristic differences. . . . The new Museum, quite at the other end of the town, has the Odyssey frescoes of Preller, which are models of their kind of decorative art. The pale and quiet colors keep the dreamlike vagueness and distance of the whole story. No one can help heing interested, but no one can become anxious or excited over the doings or the fate of these far-away people. It is as if the transparent veil of twenty-five centuries were between them and us. Then, in the Bibliotek, you come to the startling reality of Luther's coarse and ragged cloak which he wore when he was an Augustinian monk at Erfurt. Fbankfobt, Sunday, October 1, 1882. There must have been something in the early Reformation times which tended to bring out the best German character. Luther is constantly interesting. It must have been partly the fresh sense of discovery and the feeling of an opening future, which is always suited to the German mind, and inspires it to its best. It may also have been the presence of conflict, which the German also loves. But, whatever it was, it has strangely disap- peared. Modern German Protestantism is the driest thing. It seems to have had no power to develop any poetry or richness. At present it seems to be ground between the upper millstone of a military state and the lower millstone of the learned universi- ties. It was almost a relief to be again in the Catholic worship in the Cathedral here this morning. Heidelbekg, Tuesday, October 10, 1882. ... In the early evening on the great terrace, where after all is the finest point of view. I watched the lights gradually kindling in the darkening town, and thought of the Reformation breaking out at point after point in Europe. . . . Heidelbebg, Wednesday, October 11, 1882. Goethe chose a most beautiful spot in the Elizabeth Garden for his point of outlook over the town, which looks very grim and gray and sets off richly the broad sweeps of color which are on either side of it. A still finer point is further on towards the brink of the castle hill, where the garden seems to sweep out for the very purpose with a sudden jut into the air. Here the leaves were falling thick as I sat taking my last view of it all to-day. Last Sunday the English minister preached a very dreary and ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 373 dull sermon about "we all do fade as a leaf." Here was the, real sermon. It was inspiring, but terrible to see each leaf fall, carrying with it its whole history since it was a bright little green thing last spring, falling with such perfect quietness, but having done its duty all summer. . . . WuBZBUBG, Sunday, October 15, 1882. It is something of a notable Sunday in Wtlrzburg to-day, for it is the anniversary of St. Burkard, one of the many planters of Christianity in this region, — for it seems to have been planted and destroyed and replanted again and again. This morning the Mass in the Neumilnster Kirche, under which St. Kilian, the martyr, another of the early apostles of Wtlrzburg lies buried, was fine and crowded. The singing of the people was splendid. There was a strange spontaneousness about it. It burst out almost as if it were a common thought of the moment. So dif- ferent from our "giving out " hymns. . . . Leipsio, Thursday, October 19, 1882. The religious question in Germany has sufBered from that fate, which always is disastrous to it, of being made a political ques- tion. But leaving aside those whose whole interest in the ques- tion is to be explained on political grounds, there remain certain clearly recognizable classes: First, the Virchows and Haeckels, the simply naturalistic people, whose hatred to church and reli- gion is something quite unknown among us. Second, the oppo- site extreme, the dogmatic churchmen, whose whole theological position is retroactive and obstructive. Third, the liberal church party, who esteem the church purely for its social and police value, and take little or no interest in its missionary aspects. Such are some of the rationalistic preachers. Fourth, there , is not clearly shaped nor very prominent a school of thoughtful, earnest, and enlightened men, to whom the real future of Christianity in Germany belongs, the men of reasonable faith like Lotze. Leipsio, Friday, October 20, 1882. The life of young students here is very curious, supposing them to be real students, and genuinely in earnest with regard to what they are about. They are all specialists, none of them are seek- ing a complete or rounded education. Each of them is dealing with a people not imitable by him, however admirable they may be in themselves, out of whose learning he is to pluck the special knowledge he desires. And they are mostly at an age when a special hero-worship or enthusiasm seems to satisfy the life and when the habits of the life are being very deeply founded. There 374 PHILLIPS BROOKS [188- ceptaiiily could be no circumstances in which the value of loftiness of purpose and purity of life could come out more stxongly, — and with many it does seem to have these inspirations, I mean among the young Americans. BKRLDf, SatardsT, October 21, 1SS2. As one gets back again to Berlin, after a month's absence, there is a new sense of how modem the town's life is, and of how plain and prosaic the people are. German art so lacks spontaneity, is so scholastically overridden, and Grerman taste is so enterprising and so bad. One is very much struck with the lack of humor which is the rectifying sense. There is immense heartiness and good feeling, enthusiasm for coimtry, pride in their heroes, and devotion to ideas ; but of easy and graceful ex- pression of it there is very little. The public monuments are generally most unpleasing. The officers of the army are the only well-built and well-dressed men. The streets lack lightness and liveliness. . . . Bkrus, Monday, October 23, tSS2. Tlie minute divisions of the Established Protestant Church of Prussia within itself are very complicated and numerous. They suggest, of course, the one thing to be said in favor of a State Church, that it keeps the different schools of thought in associa- tion with each other. On the other hand, it certainly develops animosities and jealousies which are exasper.ated by the forced union of antagonistic minds. It is the old question which we have settled for ourselves by the free libertj- of sects. In all their preaching there is too much eloquence and too little tliought. BERtm, Frid.<»y, October 27, 1SS2. A visit to Dr. Hermann Grimm, the author of the "Life of Michael Angelo, " "Life of Goethe," etc., translator of some small parts of Emerson, lecturer on art in the university. The picture which, fi'om his point of view, he gives of religion in Germany, and the way in which it has afEeeted his whole feeling about religion, is most interesting. He speaks of all that goes on in the churches as something that does not appeal to him in any way, and so he never goes to church. He claims that there are no men who are what Schleiermacher seems to have been, distinct both from the dogmatists on one side, and from the equally acid rationalists upon the other. And certainly I myself have failed to find any such either in personal intercourse or in reading contemporary books. Professor Grimm then curiously talked of a certain power which distinctly belonged, he said, to the Roman Catholic ceremonial, and made many educated men JET. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 375 feel it as they felt nothing in Protestantism. It was historical and it was self-possessed. The priest at the altar, with a certain disregard of the people, busied himself directly with God. He did not attempt to teach what is unteachable, but he stood be- tween the soul and God, and in some vague way made the divine present. Strange enough, surely, to find a man like Professor Grimm feeling all this, and at the same time feeling the power of the preaching of Chaiming and of Parker, of both of whom he spoke. He speaks hopelessly of religion in Germany, but surely there can be no room for despair until first the trial of a volun- tary religion shall be made, and some attempt at a higher priest- hood thiui either the Komanist's or Chaiming's shall be seen. Bekmn, Saturday, October 28, 1882. It is strange how, in a great gallery like this of Berlin, one finds his special mood met by one class of pictures and special rooms attracting him on special days. . . . One day you go there and Holbein's portraits fascinate you completely, and sat- isfy your cravings, while, if you wander into the other room, the faults and crudities of Botticelli are all that you can see. But to-day his St. John in the Madonna picture seemed full of myste- rious beauty, and even the Eve, with yellow hair on the black ground, appeared to appeal to something very real in one's power of enjoyment. . . . Berlin, Monday, Oototer 80, 1882. Pi'ofessor Zeller's lecture room at eleven o'clock was crowded with students- who had come to hear him discourse on the History of Philosophy. He was talking especially of the Greek philoso- phies as they influenced mediaeval times. The lecture was inter- esting, but still more interesting the audience. One wondered what had brought them there, and what they proposed to do with the knowledge they were getting. They had not the look of pure students for the pure sake of knowledge, nor did they seem intellectually ready for great thought. On the other hand, the profitable purposes to which such knowledge could be turned it was impossible to see. Professor Herman Grimm, who lectured from one till two on the Earliest History of Christian Art, gave a very g^od sketch of the changes of early German art in the way of representing the persons of the Trinity. A well-put, intelligent account, with nothing particularly suggestive or pro- found. In the afternoon I walked a long, long way, and came at last down Sclileiermacher Strasse to the Dreifaltigkeit Kirch- enhof, where I saw Schleiermacher's tomb, and in the evening, on my way home from hearing Pastor Prommel talk to the coach- 376 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 men and postilions, I passed the Dreifaltigkeit Church, where Schleiermacher used to preach. Beklin, Tuesday, October 31, 1882. It is yery interesting indeed, in the Dorotheen Burial Ground, to see the two quiet simple monuments of Fichte and Hegel facing each other across the narrow path, which was all wet this afternoon with rain, and covered with dead autumn leaves trod- den into the ground. Fichte's monument bears on one of its three sides his name, with dates of birth and death; and on an- other that of his wife, with the assurance that she was the worthy wife of such a man; and on the third, the Old Testament text which tells how those who turn many to righteousness shall shine like the stars. One feels how late all German greatness is. In the Reichstag Chamber the things that interest you are the seats of Bismarck and Von Moltke, and the tablets of great Germans in the corridors go back no farther than a century. . . . Deesden, Saturday, November 4, 1882. One comes back to the sight of anything which he has seen in his mind's eye, so long as he has seen the Dresden Madonna, with a sort of fear whether, in all these years, the memory has not been deceived by the imagination; whether, dreaming of the world's most perfect picture, his dream has not passed into a region where no actual power of human art can follow it, and so the point from which it started will fail to satisfy one who comes back to it. This is the sort of question which is in one's mind as he passes through the curtained doorway which leads into the shrine of the great picture. And he finds it greater than his dream! A deeper wonder than his memory has been able to carry is in the Mother's eyes. The Child looks into a distance farther than his thoughts have run. The faint, rich heaven of angel faces behind the scene is sweet and holy beyond any con- ception which his senses have been fine enough to keep. Before the picture begins to open to him again its special treasures of detail, it blesses him with this renewed knowledge of the wonder- ful power of the highest art. Dbesdbn, Sunday, November 5, 1882. Among the religious manifestations of Germany one finds it hard to discover any trace of that which in England and America seems to many of us at the present day to be most full of attrac- tiveness and hope, — the devout and spiritual rationalism of Maurice and Erskine and Washburn, all the more spiritual for the freedom of its thought, free in its thought just because of the profoundness of its faith in God. This may exist, but it is cer- .ET. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 377 tainly not a prominent or powerful element in the religion of the land. There is Pietism ; there is scholarly Dogmatism ; there is hard, critical Liberalism; but unless it be in some trace of Schleiermacher's influence, or possibly in some power of Tholuck and such men as he, making their followers broader than they were themselves, it is hard to find the religious life of which I speak. The Orthodox all call Schleiermacher pantheistic, as if every attempt to depict the essential closeness of God's life to His world must not incur that charge. Dbbsden, Tuesday, November 7, 1882. After seventeen years I come back to the Sistine Madonna, and find it greater than I thought. One of the things that most im- presses me about the picture is the wonderful life that is in it. There is such a stillness in it that it hushes the room in which it hangs, but yet it is all alive. The Virgin is moving on the clouds. Her garments float both with the blowing of the wind and also with her motion. Strangely different it is in this re- spect from the many pictures in which the Divine Group simply stands and meditates, or gazes from the canvas. The nobleness of the arrangement, too, is most impressive. Every rule of high- est art is there, but swallowed up by the sublime intention of the work. The pyramid of figures has built itself. What, one won- ders, were Kaphael's feelings as he sent his work off to Piacenza? Did he know what a marvel he had done ? For among the wonder- ful things about this picture is the immeasurable degree in which it surpasses everything else of Raphael's. Dbesden, Wednesday, November 8, 1882. A perception of the wonderfulness of the art of painting comes nowhere more strongly than in some of the great portraits. Here are the Kembrandts, which get, more than any others, the total conception of the man they portray. No detail detains you. Just as it lay in the artist's mind, a distinct human thing, not a mere composition of ieatures and beard. The person looks out at you from the canvas. There are the Vandykes, so full of lofty refinement, gentlemen and ladies always, appealing to the part of us which always feels the power of good taste, even in Charles I. and Henrietta Maria. Titian, with the sumptuousness of Venice, and yet able to portray something as sensitive and delicate and shy as the timidity of the girl in white, who holds the fan, full of the quality as distinct from the quantity of color. Battoni's St. John Baptist, which one sees through the door if he turns his head from looking at the Madonna, is a beautiful, sunny, living picture. 378 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 Peaqub, Friday, November 10, 1882. Two figures occupy the eye at Prague. One is John Huss, who once was university professor here, and who has left behind him a power that passed through the great defeat as a spirit passes through a solid wall and leaves the wall puzzled and de- feated behind it. Huss's power is in the liberal thought and in- telligence of the university to-day. There is nothing left of him by way of relic except a very doubtful house, which perhaps stands where he used to live, and may have in its walls some of the old material of his. The other figure is Count Wallenstein, the very type of earnest, fiery mediaevalism, strong, able, true to conviction, narrow, cruel, dark, and spreading darkness. . . . Vienna, Monday, November 13, 1882. The first sight of Austria to one who comes from Germany is full of suggested contrasts. The people in Vienna are brighter and handsomer than in Berlin. The whole movement of life is gayer. But at once is felt, what I believe all later observation will confirm, that the people to whom we have come are not the really interesting and respectable people we have left. Germany teems with ideas, conceives of itself as having a mission in the world, and expects a future. Neither of these things is true of Austria. Vienna, Wednesday, November 16, 1882. In the Belvedere there is a picture of St. Catherine of Sienna, which, if the story of that very unpleasing person, that canoniza- tion of hysterical young womanhood, is ever to be put in paint at all, paints it aright. It is hard and white, but there is a real ecstasy about it, the ecstasy of intense, distracting pain. It is no comfortable damsel, pluming herself on the romance of a celestial lover, and enjoying the ^clat which her adventure brought her among her earthly friends who were less fortunate. It is the eager, straining, yearning after a mysterious love which is, indeed, more than life to her, for which she would rejoice to die, nay, for which she is dying as we look at her. She does not make the subject pleasing or profitable, but at least it gives the only ideality of which it is capable. Vienna, Thursday, November 16, 1882. A figure carved on a gem such as are the most beautiful in the great collection here seems to have reached a sort of apotheosis. It floats in light. When it receives the sunlight through it, it seems to bathe itself in the luminous color, and yet to keep its own brilliant identity and shape, to be a brighter and distincter form of light within the light that bathes it. Somewhat as we ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 379 conceive of how in the great -world of spirit one spirit, while it is part of all around it, has its own special personal glory inten- sified and made more personal. There is also something in the sense of fineness and eternity combined with the brightness and glory of a gem that makes it beautiful and impressive to the imagination. Size is nothing except to connoisseurs. There is a very small green stone down in the corner of the case hung in front of the window which is glorious. Vienna, Friday, November 17, 1882. In the great Treasury there is what seems as if it must be the most glorious opal in the world. It is as large as a small pear, and as it hangs there with the light upon it, it quivers through and through with fire. The flame which you see seems not to come from any surface lustre, but out of its very heart. The mystery of it and the life of it, every one must feel. Indeed, standing before the whole wonderful collection one feels very strongly the preciousness of precious stones. It is no fanciful or conventional value, but something which springs as truly from a real relation to human nature, though on another side, as the value of a beautiful face or of a noble thought. It does not de- pend on rarity. If sapphires like that which tops the Imperial crown were as plentiful as are gray pebbles, the healthy eye would see their beauty all the more, not less. Vienna, Saturday, November 18, 1882. In the Belvedere the greatest wealth is in the paintings of the Venetian school. Titian is there in quite bewildering profusion, but, as seems always true, it is not in his great compositions such as the Ecce Homo, which is here, that he is most admirable, but in the single portrait where an individual life glows with the rich- ness which it seems to have gathered from generations of ances- tors who have basked in the sunlight of the south. On the other hand, Tintoretto, who is represented here only by some noble portraits, is equally great in splendid compositions, as Venice bears abundant witness. There is at least one glorious picture of Giorgione's, where the vine-crowned youth is caught by the mysterious person who holds him by the collar and gazes into his astonished face. Only those two heads, but wonderful union of color and expression. Vienna, Wednesday, November 22, 1882. One building at least our cities at home cannot share, and that is the barracks of an army. One sound is not heard on our streets, with which, in the streets of Europe, one's ears become 38o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882 awfully familiar. It is the bugle which summons the soldiers to their drill. They may say all that they can about the value of the military discipline in Germany and Austria as a school for raw youths, and we ourselves may sometimes fear lest, in the absence of anything corresponding to it among ourselves, a certain tameness may settle down upon our young men's life, and hero- ism and obedience to authority may fail ; but, after all, when we come to speak seriously about it, words cannot express the privi- lege we enjoy. Of course its danger and responsibilities come with it. Its dangers are those to which I just alluded. Its responsibilities are summed up in the duty which must rest upon us of iinding new and higher cultures for the virtue which the army does no doubt rudely train, and of developing a purer and loftier social life out of a soil which is not cursed and exhausted by the rank weed of military life. Venice, Thursday, November 23, 1882. The Pont Ebba route from Vienna to Venice is the very poetry of railroad travel. It is very long. We left Vienna at seven in the morning and did not arrive much before midnight. As we left, Vienna looked its dreariest, dark, cold, and rainy, with the comfortless, need-driven people crawling to their early work. But soon after we got out of its gloomy shadow, came the ap- proach to the hills, and they were streaked and flecked with snow. Sometimes a sloping side would be completely covered, then the fields of thin snow would try to make their way up to the heights, for all the world like great waves breaking on a rocky shore. . . . The afternoon, rich with sunset, lights up the valleys, which seemed to lead to heaven; the moonlight superb and full on mountains made of silver, and afterwards on cold plains and marshes which stand guard round Venice. Venice, Friday, November 24, 1882. Strange how there is nothing like St. Mark's in Venice, no- thing of the same kind as the great church. It would have seemed as if, standing here for so many centuries, and always profoundly loved and honored, it would almost of necessity have influenced the minds of the generations of architects, and shown its power in their works. But there seems to be no sign of any such influence. It stands alone. Either because it seems a work beyond all chance of being copied, or else, as is more probable, because the whole disposition to be consistent in architectural work, to preserve characteristic styles in certain places, is a modern and artificial idea; or perhaps because the Eastern influ- ence, which made St. Mark's, died away, and "Western influences, ^T. 46] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 381 such as made the Frari and Salute, came in instead. Whatever be the reason, there it stands alone, and there is nothing like it in the rest of Venice. Vbniob, Monday, November 27, 1882. Venice has two aspects, one sensuous and self-indulgent, the other lofty, spiritual, and even severe. Both aspects appear in its history, and both are also in its art. Titian often represents the former. The loftier, nobler Tintoretto gives us the second. There is something in his greatest pictures, as, for instance, in the Crucifixion, at St. Rocco, which no other artist approaches. The lordly composition gives us an impression of intellectual grasp and vigor. The foreground group of prostrate women is full of a tenderness. The rich pearly light, which floods the centre, glows with a solemn picturesqueness, and the great Christ, who hangs like a benediction over the whole, is vocal with a piety which no other picture in the world displays. And the Presentation of the Virgin, in Santa Maria del Orto, is the con- summate presentation of that beautiful subject, its beauty not lost in its majesty. Venice, Thnrsday, November 30, 1882. The sun arose to-day at a quarter past seven superbly over the Lido, and promised Venice at its best and richest. But directly after sunrise came the clouds, so that the last day here is cold and dreary. But in the Academia there is the sunshine of three hundred years ago. Paris Bordone's glowing picture of the Fisherman who brings the Ring of St. Mark to the Doge, burned like a ray of sunlight on the wall. Carpaccio's delightful story of St. Ursula brought the old false standards of other days back to one's mind, but brought them back lustrous with the splendor of summers that seemed forever passed, but are perpetually here. Tintoretto's Adam and Eve was, as it always is, the most de-, lightful picture Ln the Gallery, and Pordenone's great St. Augus- tine seemed a very presence in the vast illuminated room. Venice, Friday, December 1, 1882. As one who parts from Life's familiar shore, Looks his last look in long-beloved eyes, And sees in their dear depths new meanings rise And strange light shine he never knew before ; As then he fain would snatch from Death his hand And linger still, if haply he may see A little more of this Soul's mystery Which year by year he seemed to understand ; 382 PHILLIPS BROOKS [li So, Venice, when thy wondrous heauty grew Dim in the clouds which clothed the wintry sea I saw thou wert more beauteous than I knew, And longed to turn and be again with thee. But what I could not then I trust to see In that next life which we call memory. CHAPTER XIII DECEMBER, 1882-MAKCH, 1883 INDIA. LETTEES AND EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL The journey to India was strewn with letters all along the way. In his leisure on shipboard he recalled his friends, and seemed to he taking a review of his life. His imagina- tion was excited by the fascinating interest of the land to which he was going, — the first home of the human race, where religion was in strange and rich exuberance, as was outward nature. He was to realize the brilliant pictures of Oriental life and history, with which he had long been famil- iar through books. With his power of vision in reading life and detecting its hidden meaning, the opportunity meant to him a vast increase in knowledge and in wisdom. But with this prospect before him, his memory carried the past and made him feel the changes in his life. To his aunt, Miss Susan Phillips, living in the old house at North Andover, he had written while he was in Vienna : — It is eighteen years since I was in Vienna, on my first Euro- pean journey. Then I was on my way to Palestine. One dif- ference between that year abroad and this I feel all the time. Then the old home in Chaimcy Street was still there, and father and mother were both waiting to hear what one was doing, and one of my pleasures was to write to them and to think how I would tell them all about it when I got back. I miss all that part of the interest of travel very much now. Sometimes it is hard to realize that they are not still there, and that I am not to write to them. At this distance all that has come since I was here before seems like a dream. He wrote to the Rev. Frederick B. Allen, the assistant minister of Trinity Church, who had kept him supplied with 384 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 information in advance, as to the preachets on successive Sundays : — Berlin, November 1, 1882. My dear Allen, — I can't tell you how constantly and ear- nestly I thank you, first for the devotion with which you are looking after that blessed Parish on the Back Bay, and then for the fulness with which you have told me all about it. I put one of your kind letters next my heart and go out on some delightful excursion, with the comfortable sense that everything is right at home, and that the Church would just as lief have me here as there. When I get back I hope you '11 have a host of things saved up that I can do for you in small token of my gratitude. My advices thus far have covered the visits of Bishops Beckwith and Williams. The former I hardly know, but I have pleasant impressions of him. We smoked together in Stephen Tyng's study at the last General Convention in New York. I am glad you liked him. And all the people who have written to me about his preaching are quite enthusiastic. Bishop Williams is a jewel of a man, — the Prince of all our Bishops. I hope that is safely over, and will not come again. Did he really ask to be invited? The insolence of the wretch! I shivered all over when I opened a paper one day and saw the paragraph headed "Trinity Church on Fire." Fortunately I did not pack my trunk for home until I had read on and seen that the fire was out and that the bill was only fifty dollars. Then I gave thanks for the escape, and concluded to stay. But I am awfully sorry to hear how much trouble the bad roof is causing. I hope that Mr. Richardson, since his return, has given his mind to it, and made some helpful suggestions. By the way, when the time comes, why can't you see that the vines are properly covered for the winter? I have always seen to that, and I doubt if anybody would look after it if you did n't. How I would like to see you all, and shut the study door and have a good long talk with you and Parks and Percy. But the Unter den Linden is rattling with carriages under my window, and across the street the hosts of unknown German youth are thronging into the University, and just above us there is a crowd of people waiting to see the Kaiser start out for his drive, and Boston is thousands of miles away. Be sure that I think of the dear old place more confi- dently and happily because you are there running Trinity Church. My best love to your children. I hope the new house is all you wanted it to be. Ever affectionately yours, P. B. ^T. 46-47] INDIA 385 On December 1, he sailed from Venice for India, on the steamship Poonah, by the way of the Suez Canal, then a new experience to travellers. To Rev. Arthur Brooks he writes: — Steamship Poonah, getting pretty near Alexandria December 6, 1882. So far the voyage thither has gone very well, but has not been particularly interesting. The first days out of Venice were very rough, and many of the passengers were sick and most of them uncomfortable and cross. We took most of our passengers at Brindisi, and since then the weather has been better and the sea more calm, so that the souls of the Englishmen begin to revive and they are growing a little bit more sociable. They are mostly the sort of Englishman who is full of information and intelligence, totally destitute of imagination or of humor, and absolutely de- termined to bring all the world to his own standard. He makes you mad and amuses you and wins your respect all at once, all the time. . . . I have got lots of books about the country, and by the time we get to Bombay I expect to have learned a good deal about it and to be somewhat prepared for what I have to see. It all looks more and more attractive the more I learn about it. Your young friend, Evart Wendell, opened correspondence with me soon after I left Berlin, and proposed to go to India if his father would consent; and the result was that he joined me at Venice the day before the steamer sailed and is with me now. I find him a very bright, pleasant, good-natured boy, and he will make excellent company, I think. What has become of Bishop Littlejohn since he tried to sit down on the two young giants of the Boston Club and found it such uncomfortable sitting? And have you read Allen's paper in the Princeton? Is it not a genuine contribution to a rational philosophy of that whole movement of which we are a part, and whose meaning in the midst of the ages has been often such a wonder to those who were in the very midst of it ? ... I want to see what Chunder Sen thinks about it all when I see him next month. . . . It is hard to believe that almost six months of my year is gone. It has been all that I hoped ; and while I am in no hurry for the rest to go, I shall be glad to get back into the stream of work again. Your letter makes me feel very much outside of it. To the Eev. George A. Strong, rector of Grace Church, VOL. n 386 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 New Bedford, lie writes after the manner of an old and famil- iar friendship : — December 5, 1882. I am glad the consecration ceremony is safely over, though I can't help feeling as if we consecrated it long ago. But now the Bishop has been there, and he feels better about it if you don't. A large part of our relation to our bishops seems to consist in efforts on our part and theirs to make them feel good. How well I can see the whole scene: Bishop Paddock's arrival with his bag; his breaking up the service into little bits among the clergy like the five loaves and the two fishes, to be set before the people, and his voice beginning the sentences as he went up the aisle, and the sermon and the collation and the Episcopal de- parture. But, dear me, how far away all that is, and how ab- surd for me to get mad about it at this distance ! It is a lovely forenoon, halfway across from the heel of Italy to the mouth of the Nile. The stewards are setting the table for lunch, and through the open skylight I can hear the brogue of the English- men on the deck, who are my fellow passengers for Bombay. The Lascar sailors, who are all Mohammedans and never heard of Bishop Paddock, are going back and forth in their red turbans, and the wind that comes in through the portholes is like June. Truly the Diocese of Massachusetts need not trouble one here. And not only a few thousand miles, but almost six good months of pleasant wanderings, are between me and it. Many a time in these months I have found myself on ground where you and I have been years ago together. London and Paris and Geneva and Chamouni and Maggiore and Dome d'Ossola, and a lot of other places, all brought back recollections of that first journey when we were young. Dear me, a week from to-morrow I am forty-seven ! Tell M I have not forgotten about the French novels, but so far my reading has not run that way. All summer I read nothing, and this autumn up in Germany I confined my reading to their crooked text and queer constructions, trying, as much as my time would allow, to get the hang of what they were thinking about, and what books they were writing. It was all very delightful, and I shall always look back on it, especially upon my life in Berlin, with the greatest pleasure. When you get this I shall be in Bombay, and now my only reading is in Indian books, which will prepare me somewhat for that absurd land. In March I shall come back to Europe. April I expect to spend in Spain, May and June in England, and, through it all, I shall wish ever so many times that I could take a train for ^T. 46-47] INDIA 387 New Bedford and have a good long talk by your fireside. Cooper and I have arranged that you are certainly to go to the General Convention in Philadelphia next autumn as a sort of Delegate at Large. Don't fail! My love to M , and my best regards to the Hathaways and other New Bedford friends. Good-by, deax feUow. Lunch is ready! Ever affectionately yours, P. B. He kept his birthday on December 13, when he was forty- seven, by a letter to Mr. Kobert Treat Paine : — Steamship Poonah, December 13, 1882. Dear Bob, — Halfway down the Red Sea and a glorious morning! What can I do better than to have a little bit of a talk with you and answer the letter which I know you have writ- ten to me, and which I shall get at Bombay. I am the more moved to it because I have a birthday to-day and am forty-seven years old. It is a sort of comfort to talk with an old fellow who was forty-seven long ago, and who makes one feel young by con- trast. Well, I don't believe that many fellows have had a hap- pier forty-seven years than I have had. It seems quite absurd, sometimes, when I think how everything has gone about as I should have wished. How good everybody has been to me, and how the world has kept its troubles out of the sea! Why, here is this Red Sea. Everybody has been talking about how uncom- fortable it always is, how you can't breathe for the heat, nor sleep for the closeness of the nights; but here we are, and it is like an exquisite June day at home, and the punkas are swinging from mere habit; and this morning came two splendid showers such as the Captain says he never saw at this season on the Sea before. They are a queer set, the people who are on board, — almost all Anglo-Indians, full of intelligence and as hard as rocks. They hardly talk anything but India, which, of course, is very good for us who want to learn all we can about the coun- try we are sailing to, but very monotonous, I should think, for them. We have been on board now two weeks, and have ten days more of it before we reach Bombay. Everybody has set- tled down to the life. This morning, as I passed the captain's cabin, he was quietly painting a picture, and the boys and girls are getting up concerts and farces as if they meant to live upon the Poonah all the rest of their lives. The Church seems to flourish splendidly without its minister or its two front roofs. I hope that Trinity House got all the money that it wanted, and I hear good news from the Chapel. 388 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 Every Sunday I think of things that I would like to say, and preach myself little sermons. But I am afraid that 1 shall Kill you all with much preaching when I get home. Good-by, my dear fellow, and my best love to you all. Ever your friend, To Dr. Weir Mitchell he writes, dating his letter from the Eed Sea : — December 15, 1882. Dear Weir, — I hope that you are well, and your wife, the little lady, and Jack, — all of you well and happy. How I wish that you were here, and that, instead of this poor letter-writing, we could go up on deck and get into the breeze which comes over from the Mocha Hills, and light our cheroots and talk out the last six months. That is quite long enough, I think, for old friends to be out of hail of one another, and so I want to send you at least this Christmas and New Year's greeting, and let you know that I keep thinking of you and of the pleasant old days, one of the pleasantest things about which was that I saw you all the time. I have had, since June, a summer in France and Italy, and an autumn in Germany, where I studied their ways and what they call their language, and went to lectures in the University, and made some pleasant friends, and, what is most of all, stopped preaching. On the 1st of December I sailed from Venice for Bombay, and ever since that we have been lounging along in a slow old craft, crossing the Mediterranean, running through the Suez Canal, and now, all this week, sailing down the Red Sea. To-night we came to Aden, and to-morrow we shall be out in the Indian Ocean. My fellow passengers are Englishmen, hard, narrow, and intelligent, like all their race. They are of all sorts and classes. Some of them have titles; all of them have brogues. Here is the General who led the cavalry charge at Tel el Kebir, and Lord Charles Beresford, who ran his little boat in under the forts at Alexandria, and the ritualistic head of the Missionary Brotherhood at Delhi, and the Judge of the Hindu court at Hyderabad. Among them all one finds plenty of inter- esting information about India, — enough to make him very glad that he is going to have a two months' visit there, and thankful, from the bottom of his heart, that he has not got to live there, but can come away when the two months are over. It must be an awful thing to be a conquered race with the Englishman for your master. Good-by, my dear fellow. May God bless you always. Your old friend, P. B. ^T. 46-47] INDIA 389 On the 23d of December he reached Bombay, and was in India at last. His first act was to telegraph home his safe arrival, and then the vision of the gorgeous pageantry began. Of his first impressions on the day of his arrival he writes : — We drove about the town and began our sight of Indian won- ders : Hindoo temples, with their squatting ugly idols ; Moham- medan mosques; bazaars thronged with every Eastern race; splendid English buildings where the country is ruled ; a noble university; Parsee merchants in their shops; great tanks with the devotees bathing in them; oflScers' bungalows, with the hand- some English fellows lounging about ; wedding processions, with the bride of six years old riding on the richly decorated horse behind the bridegroom of ten, surrounded by their friends, and with a tumult of horrible music; markets overrunning with strange and delicious fruits; wretched-looking saints chattering gibberish and begging alms, — there is no end to the interest and curiosity of it all! And this is dead winter in the tropics. I have out all my thinnest clothes, and go about with an umbrella to keep ofE the sun. This morning we started at half past six for a walk through the sacred part of the native town, and now at ten it is too hot to walk any more till sundown. But there are carriages enough, and by and by we go to church. I was invited to preach at the cathedral but declined. Although his anticipations were great, he writes that he finds the country far more interesting than he expected. He remained in Bombay for a week, where every facility for seeing what was most important to be seen was afforded him under the best guidance and advice. He lunched, by the invitation of the Governor, Sir James Fergusson, at the Government House, where he met very pleasant people. He made excursions to old Buddhist temples in the vicinity, and to the EUora Caves. But the heat was so excessive that he suffered, and was glad to escape to a cooler climate. From Bombay he went to Ahmadabad, taking letters from Sir James Fergusson to Mr. Phillpotts. Here he struck Mohammedan influences, and visited the great mosques. From thence he came to Jeypore, with letters to the Presi- dent, Dr. Stratton. The Eajah sent him in a carriage to the entrance to Amber, from whence he made the ascent on elephants to the deserted town, with its splendid palaces and 39<^ PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 temples. At Jeypore he preached in the English church. On January 8 he reached Delhi. Here his young travelling companion, Mr. Evart Wendell, was taken ill with the small- pox, so that two weeks were spent there waiting for his re- covery. He felt deeply the kindness shown to him under these circumstances by the English residents, Mr. Robert Maconachie, of the English Civil Service, and his wife, who surrendered their house to the invalid. He himself put up at the Cambridge Mission, with Kev. G. A. Lefroy, whose acquaintance he had made on the steamship Poonah, and his companions, Mr. Carlyon and Mr. Allnutt, of whom he writes : — Three young fellows, graduates of Cambridge, scholars and gentlemen, live here together, and give themselves to missionary work. They have some first-rate schools, and are just starting a high-class college. They preach in the bazaars, and have their mission stations out in the country, where they constantly go. I have grown to respect them thoroughly. Serious, devoted, self- sacrificing fellows they are, rather high churchmen, but thought- ful and scholarly, and with all the best broad church books upon their shelves. They are jolly, pleasant companions as possible, and yesterday I saw a cricket match between their school and the Government school here, in which one of these parsons played a first-rate bat. Under their guidance I have seen very thoroughly this wonderful old city, the great seat of the Mogul Empire, excessively rich in the best Mohammedan architecture. To Mr. Robert Treat Paine : — Lahore, January 15, 1883. I wish that I could give you some idea of the enjoyment I have had in the last three weeks. Ever since I landed in Bom- bay it has been one ever-changing and always delightful picture, but a picture which not only delighted the eye with color, but kept the mind busy with all sorts of interesting thoughts. I cannot begin to tell you about it. That will come in the long evenings when we sit together over your fire or mine, and I tire your patience out and you make believe that you are not bored. But do you know I have seen the Brahmin and Buddhist Rock Temples at Elephanta and Karli and EUora,. in many respects the most remarkable monuments which religion ever wrought? And I have seen the exquisite art of Allmadabad and Jeypore, ^T. 46-47] INDIA 391 and I have been at the great seat of the old Mogul power at Delhi, and I have studied the most perfect mosque that ever was made, with a tower like a dream, at Kittub, and now I am in the land of the Sikhs, and to-morrow I shall see the Golden Temple at Umritsar, and before next Sunday I shall have looked at the Taj at Agra, the gem of all the gems of India. And all the while the most interesting problems of the past, the present, and the future, have been crowding on the mind. The efforts of these conscientious, blundering Englishmen to do their duty by the Hindu, whom they don't like, and who don't like them, are constantly pathetic. I have just been spending some days with a household of five young English clergymen at Delhi, who are doing the best kind of missionary and education work. They are splendid fellows, whom you would immensely like. The hospi- tality of everybody here in India, and the way they put them- selves out to make you comfortable and to let you see every- thing, is a continual wonder and embarrassment. Well, when I try to talk about it all, it is so immense that I talk like an incoherent fool, but I have got it all safely put away in my mind, and I hope the poor old mind is the better for it. In the midst of it all you may be sure that I think of you all very often, and would like to see you step out from some old Mufti's tomb some day more than I can tell. I am on my way to Calcutta, which I shall reach early in February, then to the mountains, then to Madras and Ceylon, whence I sail again for Aden some time in March. My best love to you all, and may God keep you all safe and happy. Your old friend, P. B. Through the kindness of his parishioner, the late Dr. Samuel Eliot, he carried letters of introduction from Sir Richard Temple to the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Charles Atchison, by whom he was invited to a "swell dinner in a gorgeous tent, with about thirty persons, and no end of picturesque servants to wait on us." "While he lingered in Delhi he preached in the English church. One who heard him for the first time, with no previous knowledge of him, recalls how he listened in wonder and a sense of awe. As the congregation were leaving the church he heard the comments on every side: "It was a wonderful sermon!" "Who is he?" "He must be some man of high distinction in the world." 39^ PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 From Dellii he made a trip to Amritsir, in the Sikh coun- try, — a people with a religion of their own. At Amritsir is their great place of worship, the Golden Tem- ple, a superb structure, with the lower half of most beautiful mosaic and the upper half of golden plates, standing in the mid- dle of an enormous artificial lake, called the Lake of Immor- tality. There is a beautiful white marble bridge connecting the island with the shore. I saw their picturesque worship one morn- ing, just after sunrise. He was so much associated with the English at Delhi, that he felt as if an American must be a strange sort of creature. The English Civil Service he admired as something which ought to be a pattern to all the world. He found Delhi so "wonderfully interesting," as the old centre of Mohammedan power in India, that he did not regret his enforced detention there. From Delhi he went to Agra, visiting the Taj Mahal, the most beautiful building in India; then to Cawnpore, where he was interested in the mission work, and saw the Divinity School; from there to Lucknow, where he again met with English missionaries; then to Allahabad, at the meeting of the Jamna and the Ganges. He was now in the region where Buddhism originated, and made a pilgrimage to Asoka's Pillar. And so he came to Benares, the most sacred city in India, with its five thousand temples, one of the most ancient cities of the globe. Here he paused for a moment, and letters were written to Herr von Bunsen and to his sister- in-law, Mrs. Arthur Brooks : — Benakbs, January 28, 1883. Mt dear Herb von Btjnsen, — Do you really care to know that this last week I have seen the Taj Mahal? It is one of the few buildings which, like a few people whom one sees in his life, make an epoch. In the midst especially of this Indian architec- ture which, rich and interesting as it is, is almost always fantas- tic and profane, what a wonder it is to find, as the culmination of it all, as the perfect flower which has grown out of all this gross and heavy soil, a building whose one absorbing impression is its purity. One almost feels that here that essence of pure reli- gion which is lurking somewhere under all the degradation and superstition of this land has broken forth in an exquisiteness which ^T. 46-47] INDIA 393 surpasses anything that even Christian architecture has attained. Some day you must come and see it, and get a new memory and dream for all your life. India has interested me intensely. Its past and present and future are all full of suggestion. I long to see Christianity come here, not merely for what it will do for India, but for what India will do for it. Here it must find again the lost oriental side of its brain and heart, and be no longer the occidental European religion which it has so strangely become. It must be again the religion of Man, and so the religion for all men. At present the missionary efforts are burdened with Englishism and American- ism, and the country does not feel them much ; but they are get- ting broader, and the larger religious life which I am sure has begun to come at home, must be felt here. Thank you truly for your kind letter to Mr. Grant Duff, whom I shall be very glad to see if he is in Madras when I am there. From what I see in the papers I fear that he will be away, for which I shall be very sorry. And very many thanks for your kindness in sending me your paper on the Liberal Party in Germany. I have read it with the greatest interest, and it has taught me much. I wish I could ask you some of the questions it suggests. May God bless you and yours always. Most faithfully yours, Phillips Bkooks. January 30, 1883. Dbak Lizzie, — Since I wrote to you last we have come over from Benares, and to-day have been making a delightful excur- sion to Buddh-Gaya, where, as Edwin Arnold tells us so prettily, Gautama sat six years under the Bo tree and thought and thought and thought until, at last, "was the Dukha-satya opened him," and Buddhism began. In these days, when a large part of Boston prefers to consider itself Buddhist rather than Christian, I con- sidered this pilgrimage to be the duty of a minister who preaches to Bostonians, and so this morning, before sunrise, we started for Gay a and the red Barabar hills. We had slept in the rail- way station, which is not an uncommon proceeding in the out-of- the-way parts of India, where there is no pretence of a hotel, and where you don't know anybody to whose bungalow you can drive up as you can to that of almost any man you ever bowed to in the street. They are a most hospitable folk. Only when you go to stay with them you are expected to bring your own bedding and your own servant, which saves them lots of trouble. 394 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883-84 Think of my appearing at your door some afternoon with a mat- tress and Katie. We had to drive ten miles, and as we went the sun rose just as it did on Buddha in the same landscape in the fifth book of the "Light of Asia," which, as you see, I have been reading with the greatest interest. We had to walk the last two miles, because the ponies, who must have been Moham- medans, would n't go any farther. But it was a glorious morn- ing, and by and by we suddenly turned into an indescribable ravine. One tumbled mass of shrines and topes and monuments hundreds on hundreds of them set up by pilgrims for the last two thousand years, and in the midst, two hundred feet high, a queer fantastic temple which has been rebuilt again and again, but which has in it the original Buddha figure of Asoka's time, a superb great altar statue, calm as eternity, and on the outside, covered with gold leaf, the seat on which the Master sat those six long years. The Bo tree has departed long ago, and the temples were not there when he was squatting and meditating, but the landscape was the' same ; and though this is one of the places where thou- sands of pilgrims come from both the Buddhist and the Brahmin worlds, the monuments which they had set up were not as inter- esting as the red hills on one side, and the open plain on the other, which Sakya must have seen when he forgot for a moment to gaze at the soles of his own feet, and looked upon the outer world. It is a delightful country, this India, and now the cli- mate is delightful. The Indian winter is like the best of our Indian summer, and such mornings and midnights you never saw. At Calcutta he remained for nearly two weeks. Here as at every other point his highest interest culminated in the missionary work. He was studying the situation with an open mind, ready to see things as they actually were, un- biassed by the conventionalities of missionary enthusiasm. He was deeply interested in Chunder Sen, and immediately on his arrival at Calcutta made the long anticipated call on the Hindu reformer. In a very important letter to Rev. Arthur Brooks he gives the impressions he has formed : — February 2, 1883. Dear Arthur, — Calcutta itself has not many sights, and so it is the people whom one wants most to see. This morning I spent two hours with Keshub Baboo Chunder Sen. And I '11 tell ^T. 46-47] INDIA 295 you about him. I told old Mr. Dall, the venerable Unitarian missionary here, that I wanted to see the head of the New Dis- pensation, and the minister of the Brahma Somaj (which is an- other name for the same thing) sent back word that he would be at home at nine o'clock to-day. On the Circular Boad, one of the chief streets of the city, there is a big house all surrounded on three stories with verandas, standing inside a garden, around which is a high pink-washed wall. On the gate-post is inscribed the name of Lily Cottage, which, I believe, was the title which a previous occupant gave to the place. Driving in under a great parte cochhre, we were shown up to a very large, high parlor in the second story, where we waited for the prophet. It was furnished comfortably but not tastefully in European style, with rather cheap pictures on the walls. I noticed especially an engraving of the Queen, which had been presented to Keshub by her Ma- jesty ; also a very poor little painting of the man himself, sitting on the Himalayas with a woman by his side, he holding a long guitar-like instrument in his hand, and clad in the skin of a tiger. At one end of the room hung a familiar chromo-litho- graph of Christ, after Carlo Dolci, holding the sacramental cup, and with the right hand raised in blessing, — a large, cheap Christian picture. While we were looking about, Chunder Sen came in, a rather tall and sturdy man of forty-five, with a bright, kindly, open face, a round head, and black mustache and some- what short-cut black hair. He wore the Eastern white mantle thrown over his shoulders, and apparently covering a more or less European dress. He gave me a most kindly greeting, and at once began to talk. I asked him questions, and he answered freely and at length. It made me feel very like an interviewer, but it was the best way to get at what I wanted. He said that the central position of Brahma Somaj was pure theism. It stood fairly between Indian Pantheism on one side and Indian idola- try on the other, insisting fully on the Unity and Personality of God, and freely calling Him "Father," believing in this God's perpetual and universal presence. It found his prophets everywhere, and aimed to hold all the good and true of all sys- tems and all teachers "in Christ." He mentioned, especially, Socrates, Mohammed, and Buddha. When you tried to find just what he meant by holding the truth of them " in Christ, " he eluded you. He constantly asserted that he held Christ to be in unique sense the " Son of God, " but said he could not any further explain his meaning of that phrase. He rejected all idea of Incarnation. Nor would he own that Christ, in his his- toric teaching, was in any way the test by which other teachers 296 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 should be judged. He talked much of "Communion with Christ," but defined it as such profound contemplation of his character as produced entire sympathy with him, not allowing anything like personal intercourse with a Christ now living and communicating with us. Still he clung strongly to that phrase "in Christ." He described very interestingly the "Pilgrim- ages " of the Brahma Somaj to Socrates or Buddha or Moham- med or Carlyle, which consist of gathering in front of the church and singing hymns and reading some of the great teacher's say- ings, and then going inside and sitting still and entering into communion with his character. Besides these, and as something more sacred, they have occasionally the Lord's Supper, which is celebrated with Indian sweetmeats and water, and centres in mystic contemplation of the character of Jesus. They have also a baptism, which is quite optional, and strangely keeps associa- tion with the Hindu ablutions on the one hand and with Chris- tian baptism on the other. He was very interesting in his ac- count of how he freely uses the terms of the old Hindu mythology, talking of Siva and Vishnu and Parvati as different sides of Deity, and hoping so to win the people to spiritual views of what they have long held materially, and to construct in their minds a unity out of the fragments of Divine Ideal, of which their books are full. Thus he hopes some day to appeal to the com- mon superstitious Hindu mind, though thus far the movement has been mostly confined to the higher classes, who have been reached by English education. He said some fine things about the orien- talism of Christ and Christianity, and about the impossibility of India ever becoming Christian after the European sort. At the same time he said unreservedly that the future religion of India would be a Christ religion. The asceticism to which he clings is of a very healthy human sort, rejecting entirely the old ideas of the Fakirs. He pointed to the picture on the wall and said that there he had had himself painted as a Vedic Rishi, but had especially taken care to have his wife painted by his side to show- that the true asceticism kept still the family life. As to the peculiar worship of their society, he told of the new "Dance" which has been lately introduced, and which has been much abused. It is, according to him, neither more or less than the Methodist camp-meeting principle of the physical expression of spiritual emotion putting itself into oriental shape. For himself he eats no meat and drinks no wine, but these restrictions are not enforced nor universal, though they are very commonly observed as a protest against the self-indulgence into which modern India is largely running as it departs from its old faiths. -<5ET. 46-47] INDIA 397 All this and much more was told with a quiet glow and ear- nestness which was very impressive. The basis and inspiration of it all was intuition. There was no reference to any authority. Indeed he almost boasts that he never reads. Even his Christ seemed to be One of whom he knew not so much by the New Testament as by personal contemplation. He shrinks from dogma and definition, and eludes you at every turn. He is the mystic altogether. As we got up and went out we passed a room where his household and some other disciples were at morning worship. Eight or ten men sat cross-legged on the floor with closed eyes, while one fine-looking fellow in the midst murmured a half-audi- ble prayer. In one corner of the room was a rustic booth devoted to supreme contemplation, in which sat one worshipper, who seemed more absorbed even than the others. At the feet of the men lay drums and other musical instruments, to which they would by and by sing a hymn. We had heard them singing as we sat talking with Keshub Baboo. Behind a thin curtain you could just see the women's fans. Chunder Sen stood and looked in with us at the door and told us all about it, and then bade us a cordial farewell and promised some of his books and a photo- graph of himself which he has since sent. This is enough, perhaps, of Chunder Sen! but I thought you might care to hear of what has interested me immensely. It is Indian mysticism fastening on Christ and trying to become the practical saviour of the country by him. They hold in full the idea of special national religions all embraced and included within the great religion of the Divine life made known in Jesus. Surely nothing could be more interesting than this. It is not Christianity, but it is the effort of India to realize Christ in her own way, — so far as I know, the only such attempt now being made in any heathen land. Already the natural divergences have shown themselves. There is the Adi Somaj, or old society, which desires to return purely to Vedic religion and will not hear of Christ because he is not in the Vedas; and there is the Sad- harar Somaj, or advanced school of Free Religionists. There is also the Ajya Somaj, which still calls itself Brahminic, and hopes to reform Hinduism from within. The first three together have some one hundred and sixty congregations in India, of which some forty are of the Brahma Somaj. I have been much inter- ested in what the people here who care about religion say about Keshub and his new dispensation. Some of the missionaries and other Christian people call him impostor out and out, and do not believe in his sincerity. I have been unable to get from them any grounds of their disbelief in him except that they think him 398 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 conceited, and that he went back on some of his precepts about infant marriages in order to marry his daughter of thirteen to the Rajah of Kushpahar. An inteUigent Brahmin, with whom I talked, spoke of him with contempt and said his movement was fast dying out, and told of a strange new life in Hinduism, very- much as the Orthodox churchman talks of Unitarians. Strangely enough, it is from high English churchmen that I have heard the most thoughtful and interested coroments on the work. The Bishop of Bombay, a ritualist of very narrow sort, declared it to be most interesting, and the Bishop of Calcutta told me to-day that while he had no sympathy with mysticism and thought that Brahma Somaj would come to nothing because it had no doctrinal basis, yet he counted Chunder Sen his friend, and praised his spirituality and earnestness. Our friends of the Cambridge Mis- sion at Delhi were full of watchful interest in the new movement. Joseph Cook, when he was here, almost offended some of the missionaries by his interest in and praise of Chunder Sen. And some of the missionaries of the German mission believe in his personal character, and watch his movement with much hope. Old Mr. Dall has never given in adherence to anything but the pure theism of the New Dispensation, but is constantly with them, and naturally enough is claimed by them as more theirs than he will himself allow. I am almost ashamed of having written so much about him, but it does seem to me to be the very kind of thing for which we are all looking. Brahma Somaj is not the end. It is only tho first sign of the real working of the native soul and mind on Christ and his truth, which must sometime find far fuller light than it has found yet. I send you a copy of its paper of January 14, which has (beginning on the first page) an article on Chris- tian Mission Work in India, which I think must stir the heart of every missionary. The whole movement and its leader believe intensely in the Holy Spirit. And I believe that such embodi- ments of Christianity as India will sometime furnish, and such as this New Dispensation faintly and blunderingly suggests, will not merely be different from European Christianity, but will add something to it, and make the world of Christianity a completer thing, with its eastern and western halves both there, than it has ever been before. These are my views. Sometime soon I will write to you about something else. Now good-night. On Sun- day I shall go to the cathedral in the morning and to Brahma Somaj in the afternoon. While he was at Calcutta he took a long journey for the ^T. 46-47] INDIA 399 purpose of seeing the Himalayas. He writes to Mr. Wil- liam G. Brooks describing his impressions : — Calcutta, February 11, 1883. Dear William, — This week I have seen the Himalayas. Last Monday we left Calcutta at three o'clock by rail; at seven we crossed the Ganges on a steamboat, just as if it had been the Susquehanna. All night we slept in the train, and the next day were climbing up and up on a sort of steam tramway, which runs to Darjeeling, a summer station at the foot of the highest hills, but itself a thousand feet higher than the top of Mt. Washington. There the swells go in the hot months, but now it is almost deserted. We reached there on Tuesday evening in the midst of rain, found that the great mountains had not been seen for eight days, and everybody laughed at our hope of seeing them. We slept, and early the next morning looked out on nothing but clouds. But about eight o'clock the curtain began to fall, and before nine there was a most splendid view of the whole range. In the midst was the lordly Kinchinjinga, the second highest mountain in the world, over 28,000 feet high. Think of that! Certainly, they made the impression of height, such as no moun- tains ever gave me before. By and by we rode about six miles to another hill called Senchul, where the tip of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world, 29,002 feet, is visible. That was interesting, but the real glory of the day was Kinchinjinga. We gazed at him till the jealous clouds came again in the afternoon and covered him ; then we roamed over the little town and went to a Bud- dhist village a couple of miles away. The people here are Thi- betans by origin, and they keep associations with the tribes upon the other side of the great hills. A company of Thibetans, priests and Lamas, had come over to celebrate the New Year, which with them begins on the 9th of February. They had the strangest music and dances, and queer outdoor plays, and we were welcomed as distinguished strangers, and set in the place of honor, feasted with oranges, and begged for backsheesh. The next morning there were the giant hills again, and we looked at Kinchinjinga (I want you to learn his name) till eleven o'clock, when we took the train again for Calcutta, and arrived there on Friday afternoon about five. It was a splendid journey, and one to be always remembered. On my return to Calcutta I found two invitations waiting: one was to dine at the Govern- ment House with the Viceroy on Thursday evening. Of course, I was too late for that, and was very sorry, for now I shall not 400 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 see the great man and the viceregal court at all. The other was to an evening party on Friday, given by the Rajah Rajendra Narayan del Bahadur, "in honor of the late British victory in Egypt." Of course I went to this, and it was the biggest thing seen in India for years. It is said to have cost the old Rajah a lac of rupees, or $100,000. At any rate, it was very splendid and very queer, — acres of palace and palace grounds blazing with lights, a thousand guests, the natives in the most beautiful costumes of silk and gold ; a Nautch dance going on all the time in one hall, a full circus, — horses, acrobats, clowns, and all, only after native fashion, — in a great covered courtyard, supper perpetual, and the great drawing-room blazing with family jew- els. I stayed till one o'clock, and then came home as if from the Arabian Nights, and went to bed.^ Leaving Calcutta, he came to Madras. While there he made a trip to the Seven Pagodas, which only needed the company of his friends to have been complete to his imagina- tion. Of this trip he wrote several weeks later to Kev. W. N. McVickar : — Deab William, — How often I wished that you and Charles Cooper were with me ofB in India. There was one time espe- cially when I imagined what it would be if you two fellows were burning tobacco on the same scow's deck. It was on the trip to the Seven Pagodas, as they call themselves. We drove five miles from Madras and came to a canal where there were three boats lying, queerest boats that ever were made. One was for us, me and my small companion, one for our servants and their cooking, and one for a Brahmin gentleman who had offered to go with us and was very wise in Indian Archaeology. He might not go in our boat because we had no caste, and he must book his own vict- uals and eat by himself. But save at eating time he came and sat with us. And all night long we crept along, drawn not by horses nor by mules after your Pennsylvania fashion, but by a score of naked savages, who shone in the moonlight and every now and then broke out into wild songs as they trotted along the shore. The nights were glorious, with such an atmosphere as we never see even in Boston, and the Brahmin (whose name was Pundit Natesasastri) talked eloquently and looked picturesque and told all about his strange life and wonderful belief. And I smoked and wished you fellows were there. And the next day we saw the most wonderful rock temples and hid ourselves from 1 Published in Letters of Travel, p. 260. ^T. 46-47] INDIA 401 the midday sun at the feet of Siva and Parvati, and then came baek to Madras by a second night journey like the first. And all the while Cooper and you were writing sermons when you might just as well have been with me as not. This letter to the Eev. Charles D. Cooper, gives us a specimen of his humor : — Chedambaram, Fetruary 22, 1883. Deab Coopbk, — In case you do not know where Chedam- baram is, I will tell you that it is just ten miles from Vaithis- Tarankoil, and it is hotter than Philadelphia in fly time. I have been celebrating the birthday of Mr. "Washington by firing off bottles of soda water all the morning ever since we came in from our early visit to the wonderful pagoda which is the marvel of this beautiful but benighted heathen town. The only way to see things here in Southern India is to start at daybreak, when the country is cool and lovelier than anything you can imagine. The palm-trees are waving in the early breeze. The elephants go crushing along with painted trunks and gilded tusks. The pretty Hindu girls are drawing water at the wells under the banana groves. The naked children are frolicking in the dust of the bazaars. The old men and women are drinking their early cocoanut, and you jolt along on the straw, in your creaking bul- lock cart, as jolly as a rajah. So we went this morning to do homage to the false gods. Vishnu had gone off on a pilgrimage, and his shrine was empty, but Siva was at home, and the howl- ing devotees were in the middle of the morning service. They must have been about at the second lesson when we arrived, but, owing to the peculiar character of their language, it was not easy to make out just what stage of the morning exercises they had reached. But it didn't much matter, for immediately on our arrival the worship stopped where it was and the officiating clergyman came forward and ridiculously presented us with a lime each, and then tried to put a garland of flowers about our Chris- tian necks. This last attention I refused with indignation, at his making a heathen so summarily out of a respectable presbyter of the P. E. Church from Bishop Paddock's diocese. He grace- fully intimated that he didn't mind my being mad but would pocket the insult (or do whatever a fellow does who has no pocket, or indeed anything else except a dirty rag about his loins), provided I gave him the rupee which he expected all the same. While I was doing this there was a noise like seven pandemo- niums outside, and soon in through the gate came a wild crowd VOL. n 402 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 of savages yelling like fiends and carrying on their shoulders a great platform on which was a hig brass idol all daubed with grease and hung with flowers. This was Vishnu, just returned from his sea bath, and in front of him came the craziest band of music made up of lunatics banging on tom-toms and screeching away on brazen trumpets three feet long. We saw the ugly Divinity safe in his shrine, and left the pagans yelling in their joy at getting their ugly image safely home. By this time the sun was blazing, as I said, and we came home to the bungalow, which does duty for a tavern, and set a small Hindu to pulling away at a punkah rope at the cost of three cents a day. Then we cut up our sacred limes and poured soda water on the juice of them and made a drink which I advise you to try if ever you have to spend a hot day in Chedambaram. Then we breakfasted on rice and curry and fried bananas, and then I thought I would write to you and send you my blessing out of the depths of this Hindu darkness. I can't tell you what a delightful thing this Indian trip has been. From the snows of the Himalayas down to these burning and luxuriant tropics, from the wonderful beauty of the exquisite Taj of the Mohammedan Emperor at Agra down to the grotesque splendor of this great Brahmin sanctuary which we have seen to-day, everything has been fascinating. Oh, if you and Mc- Vickar and George Strong had been with me all the way! I have had a pleasant young companion, who has behaved beauti- fully except when he got the smallpox in Delhi, and kept us there two weeks. But Delhi is, after all, the most interesting place in India, and if he was going to do it he could not have chosen a better place. We were guests there of some fine young Eng- lish missionaries, who behaved splendidly under the affliction which we brought down upon them, and I went about with them and saw the ins and outs of missionary life which, when the right men are at it, is a splendid thing. The hot season has set in within the last few days and we must be away, but I shall leave these gentle Hindus and their lovely land with great regret. Now we are on our way to Cey- lon, and two weeks from to-day we sail from Colombo back to Suez, and then comes Spain. Are you right well, old fellow, and does the dear old study look just the way it used to do, and are you counting as much as I am the time when we shall meet again there at General Convention, and talk it all over and abuse the s in the dear old way ? Ever and ever yours, P. B. ^T. 46-47] INDIA 403 To the Kev. Percy Browne : — P. & 0. Steamship Rohilla, On the Ganges, February 13- 1883. My dear Peecy, — For almost five months I Ve carried in my visiting case the letter which you wrote to me away back last September, and I have greeted you in heart a hundred times as I have looked at it. Now, how are things going with you, really ? One or two glimpses I have had of you in other letters, — once preaching at the reading desk of Trinity (for which I thank you heartily ! ), once getting sat down on by a Brooklyn bishop for some first-rate sentiments on missions, once or twice at the Club, and all the rest my imagination has supplied. But now it is time that I should tell you how heartily I wished you all Christmas and New Year's good things. The New Year came in on me in the midst of an all-night ride on the way back from the wonderful Buddhist Caves at Elbera, — a night ride undertaken to escape the blazing January sun. It was all very different from the last old year's night, with its watch-meeting and the walk home in the snow, and Allen coming in just after with John the Baptist in his arms, and the long, peaceful smoke together with which we welcomed 1882. I could only address the heathen Hindu who was driving me, and wish him, in a tongue he could not under- stand, a Happy New Year, to which he responded with a friendly grin and grunt ; but for the moment his grotesque figure, in his dirty turban, represented the human creatures whom I cared for most, and you may be sure that I did not forget you and all that I hope to enjoy with you before the year is out, as we rattled on in the moonlight. The year is more than half over. Germany was very delightful, but it has sunk back now into the distance behind this wonderful India, whose pictures of strange life and suggestions of strange thoughts have been before me for the last six weeks, — a perpetual surprise ! Every morning to come out and find the Brahmins and the idols and the palm-trees and the temples and the color and the sunshine still there, and that it was not a mere spectacle of last evening's theatre or a dream of last night's sleep. And all the while Boston is there, and you and the other fellows are getting thick in Lent. What are you lectur- ing on this year ? Last year, I think it was the great Christian heroes, wasn't it? When Lent is over you will go to work on your convention sermon, and I know that those who sit and listen every year will hear this year some healthy, human, and divine truth, by which I pray thus early that they all may get the edifi- cation and blessing which they ought. And then, as if after the diocesan convention all the world must rest, summer will come, 404 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 and the pretty Marion house will take you all in again. Before another winter comes my wanderjahr will, be over, and I shall be there again to see how much you all have outgrown me while I have been playing by the Spree and the Ganges. I wonder what changes I shall find. One thing I know I shall find, — and it makes me almost homesick when I think of it, — that you have not forgotten your old friendship, but will come in to my fireside and let me come out to yours, and we will console one another's old age and trot down the further side of the hill of clerical life together hand in hand. God bless and keep you always, — you and the wife and bairns, to all of whom I send love, and am more and more affectionately yours, P. B. To the Rev. "George A. Strong : — Tanjobe, February 23, 1883. DbAk Geokge, — It is the loveliest Indian night, and I am sitting on the veranda of a travellers' bimgalow, and it is cool, which is more than could have been said of any house to-day since breakfast time. What can I do better over my after-dinner cigar than have a little talk with you ? Oh, that you were here, and that it could be real talk and not this miserable pen-and-ink business. But that must wait for six months yet. Then we will do it to our hearts' content. A travellers' bungalow is a sort of government institution which exists in every considerable town in India which has no hotel, and in some that have. It takes you in, — gives you a bedstead. You must bring your own bedding, your own servant, your own victuals, and here you live as independent as a prince, or pack up and are off when you have seen the sights or done your business. The sight of Tanjore is a glorious pagoda, — a vast pyramidal Hindu temple, two hundred feet high, rich with all sorts of grotesque sculpture from top to bottom, and glowing with all sorts of colors, — red and brown and yellow and green and black, — all mellowed and harmonized with ages. Inside there is a hideous shrine with a hideous idol, but the outside is a marvel, and it stands in a great area dotted with palms and guavas, and with a lot of little temples sprouting as if from the roots of the big thing. This is our latest wonder ; but every day for the last two months has had its spectacle, and such a sky has been over all all the time as even New Bedford never sees. . . . It has been a great success. Everybody has been very hospit- able, and the only wonder has been to find each morning that it was not all a dream and has not vanished in the night. But it is almost over now. Next week we shall be in Ceylon, and ^T. 46-47] INDIA 405 on the 7th of March we sail from Colombo to Suez, and shall be in commonplace Europe again before we know it. And how has the winter gone with you ? While we are dodging the sun and lying low all the midday, you are burning your cheerful fire and trudging through the snow to comfort sick New Bedf orders. And just now it is Lent, I think ; I am not sure. A day which I believe was Ash "Wednesday I spent up at Darjheeling gazing at the Himalayas. I have no daily service and no Confirmation Class. All of these things seem like dim memories, but I am glad that some of you are more faithful than I am, and are doing the Gospel work while I am loafing here among these naked heathen. It is wonderful how little clothes an utter absence of the Christian faith can get along with ! I have almost wished I was a heathen for this one privilege of heathenism at any rate. I wonder how the new Church goes, and whether Mr. Hathaway and Colonel Fessenden still drop in of evenings (remember me kindly to them if they do) ; and whether you still write sermons on old scraps of paper and then copy them (I wish that I could hear one of them day after to-morrow). I do not wonder whether, for I know that you and M sometimes find time for a thought of your old friend. P. B. Tbticovin, India, March 1, 1883. Deae Mes. Painb, — This place with the strange name is the last place in India. We came here yesterday fully expecting to sail away this morning, but the steamer which is to take us to Colombo has not yet arrived, and so we shall have to spend the whole day waiting. It is terribly hot, but the picture that one sees from the veranda of the little Inn is pretty enough. The shore is lined with native boats, which are loading and unloading, and perpetual lines of black figures are wading back and forth with bales on their heads, bringing cocoanuts on shore and carry- ing Chilis and other Tuticovin produce out to the vessels. They seem to be enjoying both the water and the sun, and the chatter which they keep up is deafening. The children play in the sand in the foreground, and the women take the bales at the margin of the water and tug them up the beach. In the distance through the trees I can just see a bit of a native temple and of a Roman Catholic church. And this is the last of India. I look back on two months of as delightful travel as I have ever enjoyed. To be sure, there is about a week of Ceylon yet to come, but that is not really India and will be an experience by itself, a sort of hymn after the ser- mon before we turn our faces homewards. India itself is over, 4o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 and the whole already begins to blend into the sort of dream which one has of a country where he has hurriedly travelled for a little while. But its interest has been very great indeed. To speak of only one thing, the constant suggestions about our own Christian faith which have come from the daily sight of heathen worship and missionary effort have given me much which I shall never lose. Christianity grows very simple when one sees the need of it here. God forbid that it should come to these poor people, burdened with the elaborations and distinctions which it has accumulated among us. I hope that I shall be able to preach with a clearer sense of what the heart and soul of the whole mat- ter really is, because of what I have seen in India. I have met with the kindest hospitality everywhere, and have made some friends whom I shall always value ; but, dear me ! the new friends cannot be like the old ones, and many a time I have dreamed of the day when I should come back to you all at home, or, what I hope will take place first, meet you all somewhere in Europe in the summer. I hope there are letters over there in Colombo to tell me of your plans. What you are doing now I can pretty accurately picture. You are happily settled in the new house, I am sure, and every now and then I think I hear a bit of a speech on charity organization wafted on these soft spicy breezes. My best love always to all from the oldest to the youngest. God keep you all safe and well. Always your friend, Phillips Brooks. From Madras he went to Ceylon, where he spent a week, visiting the Buddhist shrines, talking with Buddhist priests, and especially interested in the Buddhist schools and in the contrast between Buddhism and Hindu religion. As he could quickly extract from a hook its essence, so from con- versation and observation he was quick to see the significance of the actual situation. The whole man was alive to the greatness of the opportunity presented to him. In his spare moments he was reading important books on India, — the writings of Hunter and Wilkins. On the religion of India he supplemented what he saw by the works of students such as Max Miiller, Barth, and Ehys Davids. Trevelyan's "Cawnpore," the writings of Meadows Taylor, Macaulay's essays on "Clive" and "Warren Hastings," furnished him with information which he coordinated with his own experi- ence. He mentions " Mr. Isaacs," a novel by Marion Craw- ^T. 46-47] INDIA 407 ford, wLich has caught the real life of the people as he him- self had seen it, "The atmospheric contrast between the Englishman's sharp, clear concreteness and the Indian's sub- tlety and mystery very well brought out." He found a new interest in reading again Arnold's "Light of Asia." Over Bishop Heber's "Journey " he brooded, admiring its spirit, and gaining great reverence for the man. Into his note-book there went some of his deeper reflections. First impressions of a country have their value as compared ■with those which a long sojourn induces. In this case the personality of the observer, his comprehensive outlook, his psychological penetration, his knowledge of man, and his genius for religion, all combine to give interest and worth to the thoughts that follow : — IMPKESSIONS OF INDIAN RELIGION. Hinduism, the great stock faith. Its wonderful pliability, philosophical and idolatrous both; subtle and gross at once. In neither aspect morally elevating. From time to time moral reforms, which afterwards degenerate into either, first, theological differences, like Buddhism, and Jain- ism, its successor; or second, political and military movements, like Sikhism. These reform movements always taking place, but always being reabsorbed by the superior strength of the great Hindu system. The new theism is a stronger movement, because it has a£Blia- tions with the two great forces which are moving in the outer world. The strongest point of present Hinduism is probably transmi- gration. Its effect on habits, no meat eating. Caste is its great social light and safeguard, keeping its central core solid and com- pact. The true Brahman cannot travel, must prepare his own food, etc. Then comes Mohammedanism, sharp, precise, simple, and in- tolerant, — without philosophy, cutting right through the whole life of the nation, like a wedge. Existing principally in the north. Sikhism was originally a sort of attempt to reconcile Hinduism and Mohammedanism, but this character has long since gone out of it. 1 The Brahmanical doctrine of Identity, the assurance that sin and misery alike consisted and resulted in the separation of the 4o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 personal soul from the Atman, the universal self, the absolute existence, and that the struggle of man must be towards, as the reward of man will be in, his reentrance into the Eternal Identity by the death of his own individual will or desire. The idea also that all the finite world is a delusive dream, a Maya, with which the Eternal Being amuses itself, as it were, and which must disappear as the mist disappears above the river which runs on still. All this which we reject entirely as a philosophy, or answer to the problems of existence, has yet in it a wonderful power of appeal to some moods of almost all our natures, which is quite sufficient to make us understand how it could have been, and is still, held by multitudes of souls. First the worship of Nature and her great objects and forces ; then the sense of a creative and governing power behind all; the analysis of this power into a mythology, — this seems to have been the course of Hinduism. The simplicity of the Vedic deities, Indra, Agni, and Surya; the Puranic deities opening from the three, • — - Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva (probably some- thing to do with aboriginal gods which the Aryans found), through the incarnations of the second and the progeny and the harem of the third into a countless pantheon. Along with this ran the deification process, always manufacturing new deities, and the priestly impulse making more; for superstition, being childish, is always desiring more, and discontented with what it has; and priesthood hardly ever restrains but always stimulates and tries to satisfy this longing. These three together are the causes which produce a mythology : — (1) The naturalistic, analyzing the natural process. (2) The historic, enlarging real personalities. (3) The priestly, making gods at popular demand. The three kinds of deities represented in Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva: the mysterious, the familiar, and the awful, found in all religious systems as the conception of God formed by different nations. With all the tremendous exaggerations of space, time, and size, in these Hindu stories, you can get nothing more than the universal and perpetual human passions. Heroes and gods thirty feet high, living ten thousand years, can, after all, only love and hate and wish and dread. Buddha called a Vishnu incarnation by the Hindus, and his unorthodox teaching considered to be for the sake of deluding God's enemies, — a most ingenious and theological device. The Krishnu stories, showing how men will play with their religion. ^T. 46-47] INDIA 409 Siva is pure spirit, although to render himself perceptible and conceivable, he deigns to assume a body composed "not of matter, but of force." The modern sound of this last notion. The subordinate value of the Trinity idea (Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva), in Hinduism portrayed in Barth, p. 186 and preced- ing pages. The Vedic religion develops but feebly and hesitatingly the notion of divine personality. Kdma (desire) stirring in the self- existent mass is vaguely but profoundly declared to be its origin. Then the personal god Ka (who?) is evolved into the absolute Tat (that). (See Barth's "Religions of India," p. 30.) This is very sublime, surely, but the definiteness with which it seems to point out a central will soon disappears in the multitude of powers, each of whom has a name which, while it seems personal, really characterizes only an abstract force. The old Brahman said, "God is everything, and the earth and all things sensible are illusion (Maya)." The modern scientist says, "The sensible things alone are real, and God is all a dream." Somewhere these two, getting entirely around the circle, must meet. Hunter, p. 212, describes the present relation of the people to the Hindu triad. Brahma, only a handful of worshippers; Vishnu supplies a worship for the middle classes ; Siva, a philo- sophy for the learned, and a superstition, cruel and pale, for the lowest classes. Is there not something like this in the Chris- tian's relation to different conceptions of God and Christ? Strange lack of creative power in modem Hinduism, their ar- chitectxire is all old. The endless hope of Brahmanlsm, which is transmigration, be- comes by and by the dread and despair of Buddhism, which only comes to escape from it in Nirvana. The relapse again into the hopelessness in later Hinduism. Talk with Brahman gentleman on road from Amber back to Jeypore. His disbelief in Chunder Sen; unwillingness to be himself a priest and make profit out of his religion. Declaration that he would be cast out by his family if he did so. Assertions that Brahmanism was better than Christianity because it taught mercy not only to human creatures but to beasts. Dislike of Christian missionaries because, as he said, they do not live good lives, which seemed to be a judgment not from moral standards, but from a purely sectarian one, with regard to religious observ- ances, etc. Comparison with Boman Catholic missionaries to the advantage of the latter. The way the Roman Catholics adapt 4IO PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 themselves to the people, take their dress and ways of life. He alleged a want of sympathy of Protestant missionaries with the people ; says that baptism is a great hindrance, expects vaguely a day when all the religions — Mussulman, Hindu, and Chris- tian — will coalesce. Believes in a present awakening among Brahmans, makes much of Fakirs and the theurgic power of a pure life, which point, however, is largely technical. Believes in cure of diseases and inspired sight of truth. Fully adopts the esoteric view of the gods. Idolatry only for lower classes. Talks much of Mohammedan oppression, but believes that when the Mussulman conquered the Hindu that Hinduism was degen- erate, and needed the discipline. Thinks the same of British dominion, which he does not regret. The way in which the great temples at Madura and elsewhere, with their courts of public resort, and their places for the sale of goods more or less connected with the worship, remind one of and throw light upon what one reads of the Temple at Jerusalem. In the temple at Madura, above a miserable tank, is the carved image of a Brahman murdering his father; said to signify that even that crime this tank can wash away. The great pagoda at Chedambaram is the most terrible speci- men of pure idolatry. All refinements and subtleties and spir- itualizations fade away in the presence of such brutality and dark- ness. All comparisons with the darker sides of Christian history become mere fallacies. The awful state of morals at Delhi; unnatural crimes of the most awful sort. Traceable, perhaps, to the practices of early marriages and early exhaustion, and of the isolation of women and consequent constitution of society solely by men. The coun- try regions better than the city. The absolute failure of Hindu religion to restrain passion. Certainly occidental morals must come in ; and if in the "West those morals rest on Christian faith, it must be that the Christian faith shall be brought here as their basis. As Mr. Brooks passed from India to Ceylon, he had re- ceived more favorable impressions of Buddhism than of Indian religion. A few of his remarks on Buddhism will serve to show that he did not fail to do justice to its truth, while discerning its weakness. But for Buddha himself he had a feeling of reverence. As one sees the Buddhists in Ceylon, there is certainly a look of intelligence such as one does not easily find in the ordinary ^T. 46-47] INDIA 411 Hindu. There was nothing which we saw (at least in India) like the Buddhist temple at Colombo, or like the instruction scene at Kandy. The three Buddhist notions of (1) SJcandha, or the composi- tion of each man out of elemental conditions, which disunite at his death, and even if they unite again to make another being, who is his true successor, they do not make him. (2) Karma (act), or the perpetuation of the results of a life in the succeed- ing being, something quite distinct from transmigration. (3) Nirvana, the final falling back of this special phenomena of life into the mass of universal existence; an anticipation of this in present life, indifference and rest. In all of these a constant extinction of personality both human and divine. It is clear enough that the Buddhist did and does draw a dis- tinction, perhaps too subtle for our minds to follow, but still real to him, between Nirvana and personal annihilation. Buddha's Bo tree, occupying almost the same place in Bud- dhism that the cross does in Christianity. It marks the differ- ence. The first religion saves by contemplation, the other by active sacrifice. No such power given to Christ's temptation. The pathetic connection of Buddha's doctrine of the misery of life and the hope of ceasing to be, with the miserable circum- stances of the special life which he saw about him; with the German pessimist it is all different ; a fancy theory. The great remonstrance against caste is the noblest part of Buddha's teaching. The lapse into the worship of Buddha (a false personal religion) shows where the weakness of his system lay. Original Buddhism a religion of character. The analogy of the Vedic religions, of Brahmanism, of Hindu- ism, and of Buddhism, on the one hand, with primitive Chris- tianity and the early dogmatism and medisevalism and the Refor- mation on another, and with the patriarchal system and Mosaism and Pharisaism and Christianity on yet another, is illustrative of the whole constantly repeated movement of human nature. The step from Vedism to Brahmanism being associated with the rising authority of the priesthood, and with the loss of the free know- ledge of the language of the Vedic hymns, corresponds exactly to the change which took place as the simple substance of the apos- tolic Christianity passed over into the highly organized ecclesias- tical and dogmatic systems of the Latin Church. There is much both in Brahmanism and Buddhism that throws light upon the varying understandings of the "New " or "Second birth, " which have played so large a part in the contentions and 412 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 speculations of Christendom. Each of these systems, according to its intrinsic nature, has its own understanding of the idea and phrase which both contain. Brahmanism (see Barth, Religions of India, p. 51) applies it to the boy's formal entrance on a cer- tain period of life, his established manhood. Buddhism, on the other hand, makes it mean the perception of profounder truth which comes with the awakening of the spiritual nature by con- templation. Both of these unite in Christianity with the idea of moral determination (transformation where the nature has been going wrong) to make that complete notion of fulfilled life which is what the phrase is always struggling for, what it means in the supreme use of it by Jesus. Mr. Brooks could not fail to observe the society into which he was thrown in India.; and upon this, as upon Hindu and Buddhist types of religion, he comments in his note-book. The Anglo-Indian, the English officials, and the Civil Ser- vice, the missionaries whose acquaintance he cultivated, are alluded to in these extracts : — England came into India with a conquest of violence and fraud ; and, having established herself, she proceeds to govern the coun- try without sympathy but with careful justice, establishing the most perfect Civil Service in the world. That service is some- thing at which we never cease to wonder. Highly paid, well selected, free from political subservience, so that a very large part of them to-day are enemies of the present government, they are the most conscientious, faithful, incorruptible body of ser- vants, I believe, that are administering the government of any country anywhere in the world. The thoroughly high character of the English lieutenant-gov- ernors. Sir Charles Atchison, at Lahore, Sir Alfred Lyall, at Allahabad, Sir Rivers Thompson, at Calcutta, Mr. Grant Duff, at Madras, Sir James Ferg^sson, at Bombay, and Lord Ripon, as viceroy : all (especially the first four) men long and intimately acquainted with India. English colonel's statement (at Jeypore), that the more an Englishman sees of other people the more he dislikes them. If this were true, what a great incapacity it would show for the work on inferior races, which in these days seems to be more and more intrusted to the Englishman. There is no love lost between the two races in India. The naturalness of the great Mutiny here ; in some views it is just what Englishmen would most praise if it were not against ^T. 46-47] INDIA 413 themselves. Of course, it was savage; but they vrere savages, and the English had done very little to make them anything else. The Anglo-Indian has a soit of mental and moral thin blooded- ness which somehow or other the English seem able to bear less than most races. The first-rate Englishman is the best thing in the world. The very great assumption of the old Anglo-Indian that he knew more about the worth of missions than the missionary ; the liking which he often has for R. C. missions, and even for native idolatries. The society of India is either gross heathenism, with its almost total absence of higher things, or English civil life, full of the littleness of officialism, disliking the country, anxious to be away, and with more or less of spite or mutual jealousy. Among these, apart from its direct religious power, how valuably comes in the sweet, unselfish life of such works as the Cambridge Mission. His final impressions give the missionaries in India and the English Civil Service an equal place with the great Hindu Temple Taj and the great mountain Kinchinjinga. He had felt some doubts and misgivings about the actual results, as about the methods of missions when he went to India. These had disappeared, and in their place rose en- thusiasm and gratitude and hopefulness. Thus, in most of his letters he speaks of missions, and repeats his statement so often, that some repetition here will be excusable. To Kev. C. A. L. Kichards he writes : — These missionaries are really splendid fellows, many, most of them. One hears from them far more intelligent talk about reli- gion and the relation of Christianity to other faiths than he would hear from the same number of parsons at home (outside the Club). They and the civil servants of the English govern- ment are doing much for India. Oh, for a Civil Service such as this at home ! I think, next to the Taj and Kinchinjinga, that is the most impressive sight that I have seen in this strange land. The missionaries are as noble a set of men and women as the world has to show. Tell your friends who " do not believe in Foreign Missions " (and I am sure there are a good many such) that they do not know what they are talking about, and that three weeks' sight of mission work in India would convert them wholly. 414 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 He stood in Henry Martyn's pulpit, and tlie words in- scribed upon it, "He was a burning and a sbining ligbt," became luminous with a new meaning. Some of his reflec- tions on missions, which ever afterwards remained prominent in his mind, should here be given : — Bishop Heber's clear belief in the possibilities of Indian char- acter, along with his clear conception of their present degrada- tion. See his "Journey." The way his character stands out ideally in the history of Indian missions. The Bishop of Calcutta, (February 3) talking about the fool- ishness and uselessness of trying to take the Hindu's view, — "Give them the Englishman's and let them find out their own." Poor talk. Curious article in "Home and Foreign Church Work," assert- ing the need of asceticism in India. I do not believe it. Missions in India; their naturalness when one is on the ground. Impossible to think of English people not having them, and so of all Christian people with reference to the whole heathen world. Some 300, 000 to 400, 000 Protestant Christians now in India. The question how missions look to one in a heathen land ; — intensely practical and absolutely necessary. And, also, as it must be in the case of the missionary himself, it brings itself to a personal question. Can this man be lightened with the Light? The great 250,000,000 are a paralysis. This man is an inspira- tion, and his conversion or the struggle for it keeps hope alive. The really unanimous testimony to the Indian's untruthfulness. The awful business of haggling in the bazaars. The Indian's own account of it, — - that it is the result of endless conquests and successions of tyrannical dynasties. The first sense of tameness in the converts, — loss of their first rude and fierce picturesqueness. This to be watched over, but still it must come to some extent. The maniac among the tombs turned into the well-dressed man going home to his friends. How much there possibly may be in the Anglo-Indian's state- ment that the Christian convert is less trustworthy than the Hindu. Possibly something. His associations are broken, and he lacks whatever good influence there possibly may be in loyalty to caste. He has a strong restraint in fellow-men's judgment. His neighbors despise him. Fear for such, — the case in all transition times. Think of old Corinth, and what its magistrate must have said of Paul's converts, "Have any of the Pharisees believed in Him ? " I do not know of any country where religious statistics would ^T. 46-47] . INDIA 415 mean so little, or, at least, would have to be taken with so much careful reserve as in India. Whole districts have been nominally converted for the sake of food in famine times; and there is something disheartening in the way in which Europeans of all kinds distrust the converted Hindu more than his heathen brother. Still I believe beyond all doubt that the missionaries are doing a great work, and that the time is not far off when it will show ; but it must be by some more intimate reading of the thought and genius of the people than has yet been made ; not merely pluck- ing brands from the burning, but by putting out the fire. The Indians have the primary affections very strong, — pa- rental and filial affections, love of kindred, kindness for crea- tures, craving for immortality, sense of wonder. These are what Christianity starts with, and what it is to build into completeness. After all, the Hindu mind, haunted by the conception of escape and holiness, has something pathetic and sublime about it. No comfortable settling down to life. Somehow the touch needed, which shall move all this power into the region of moral life ; — there is where it seems powerless now. The old paradox of much religion and no morality, which we settle far too easily and off- handedly when we decide that the religion is hypocrisy. The only advantage in the multitudinousness of denominations in India is the chance that it may leave the question open for the promotion of the national Christianity. Perhaps there was no other possible way for this to come about but by the variety of approach, making the establishment of any one type impossible, — the way this possibly might impress a Hindu. Certainly the change to the newer forms of appeals for missions involves the confidence in a higher condition, in the working of better and nobler motives in those to whom we appeal. It may be a question whether men are ready for it, but here, as always, I believe very much in the possibility of making them to he by assuming' that they are. Certainly we see the reverse of this constantly. Men are made unfit for high appeals by the assump- tion that they can only respond to the lower. One high appeal for missions ought to be the need of Chris- tianity for a broader and completer life, — what these other peo- ple will do for our Christianity if they become Christians. I think we often understand missions best if we think of the con- verting power, and that which it tries to convert, as individuals rather than vague masses. Surely one man may say to another, "I want you to believe my truth, partly in order that by the way in which it influences you and by the form in which your mind apprehends it I may be able to see new sides of it and understand 4i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1882-83 its richness more." The moon would know more of what light is, if it could study the earth on which the sun's reflected light shines from itself. The reconstruction and simplification of Christian theology is imperatively demanded by missions. Indeed the missionaries are quietly doing it, almost unconsciously doing it, themselves. Christianity as a book religion, resting on the infallible accuracy of a written word, or as a propitiatory religion, providing a mere escape for hopeless culprits, or as a doctrinal religion, depending on the originality of some statements of truth, all of these aspects of it fade; and Christianity as a personal faith revealing in Christ, not simply by Him, the present living fatherhood of God, becomes the powerful and precious substance of our faith. CHAPTER XIV MAT-JULY, 1883 THE JOURNEY FROM INDIA. THE VISIT TO SPAIN. RECEP- TION IN ENGLAND. VISIT TO TENNYSON. LETTERS. EX- TRACTS FROM JOURNAL The return from India began on the 7th of March, when he went on board the P. & O. steamer Verona, bound for Gibraltar. During the three weeks on shipboard his mind was occupied in musing over what he had seen. As a cor- rective for the wild extravagances of Indian religion, he was reading William Eobertson Smith on the "Place of the Old Testament in Jewish History," and his "Hebrew Prophets." In his note-book he entered his reflections on leaving India, summing up the total impression of his visit : — The voyage from India to Spain carries one from the extreme east to the extreme west of the triumphs of Islam. The Mo- guls of Delhi and the Caliphs of Cordova! what a range of en- ergy, what a history of struggle and suffering, of pride and ruin, is included! As one withdraws from India it is very much indeed as it used to be when one walked farther and farther away from the old Sivite temples, in the southern districts, Madura or Tanjore. Gradually the grotesque details were lost. The dancing and dis- torted gods became obscure. The crude, hard colors mingled into harmony, the harsh sounds melted into a confused and pleasing murmur, and a quiet mystery, not unmixed with religious serious- ness, enfolded and dignified the whole. So it Is with that mass of legend, allegory, and corrupt tradi- tion, which, taken all together, makes the religion and philosophy of India. It has large masses of color and not ignoble outlines, as one looks back on it fading and mingling into memory. VOL. n 41 8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 Steamship Vebona, between Colombo and Aden, March 13, 1883. Dear Arthur, — I am on the way back from India, and you have no idea what soft and hrilliant days these are upon the south- ern seas. And it is a good time to think the whole thing over, and to get ready for the next scene in the play. The last thing before we sailed was Ceylon, with its Buddhism. Ceylon was beautiful beyond all description. Such tropical luxuriance as one had dreamed of all his life was in its splendor, and made pictures which one never can forget. And Ceylon Buddhism had a look of intelligence and decency after the horrible squalor and coarse- ness of Hinduism, which was very pleasing. A very different thing it is from the fetish worship of Thibetan Buddhism, of which we got a sight among the Himalayas. But as for making of it a great spiritual religion, with any chance in it for the salvation of the world, it is too hopelessly absurd. Primitive Buddhism was a philosophy with controlling ethical purpose. Modern Buddhism has changed it into elaborate ceremonialism, and invented for it a mythology. But there is no theism in either, and in spite of the charm of " Natural Religion, " ' there is no powerful faith without theistic basis. What a delightful book that is ! I cannot help thinking that there is a good deal of word- juggling in it, and that what it needs is a clearer definition. But to bring out as it does the noble and consecrated side of "modern thought," and to show how it gravitates at its best to- wards spirituality is a great boon. One grows very impatient at the way the selfish trader with a wooden faith is counted a more spiritual being than the self-forgetful student of truth or wor- shipper of humanity. It is good to have such a strong statement of the other side. As the Verona was slowly crawling tlirougli the Suez Canal, subject to long vexatious detentions, Mr. Brooks spent much of his time in answering letters received from home before leaving India. He had been kept informed of the incidents at Trinity Church, the names of the preachers sent to him in advance enabled him to reproduce every Sunday "the scene in the blessed old church; " he read with special interest the list of those confirmed in his absence. About one item of news he was worried, the sale of the little piece of land in front of the church, and the current rumor that a great building was to go up there. He continued to follow 1 Natural Beligion, by the Author of JScce Homo, 1882. iET. 47 j ENGLAND 419 in imagination every meeting of the Clericus Club, the place where it met, the essayist, the subject of the essay. While he had been away new members had been elected.^ You seem to be enlarging the Club with youngsters, so that one will hardly know it after a year's absence. Every now and then I feel a touch of intimation that I am growing old, in a bit of wonder whether these young fellows are good for much ; but generally I am ready to acknowledge their value, and I am glad that the Church and the Club should get them in. Only in the Club we never have got much out of the youngest men. They have generally seemed to be there more for their own sake than for the Club's. But perhaps your new acquisitions will do better. Among the items of religious interest was the publication of a volume of sermons by Eev. K. Heber Newton of New York, entitled "Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible." The book had been sent to him, and after reading the sermons he speaks of them as "cahn, serious, and conscientious," as say- ing, " what, in the great mass of it, I have no doubt is true, and once accepted by the Christian world must make the basis of a better Christianity. They are positive as well as nega- tive ; and no criticism of small points of style, or discussion of the accuracy of a few details of criticism, can obscure the broad view of inspiration and the relation of the Book both to God and man, which the sermons declare." I have heard of both the January and the February Clubs, both of which seem to have revolved about the Bible question. I sup- pose that Heber Newton and his agitation is, after all, only a symptom. The whole theological world seems to be wakening to the need of a new discussion and settlement about its sacred Book. ' The members of the Club at this time, in addition to those already men- tioned (of. ante, p. 58) were : David H. Greer, Frank L. Norton, Francis Whar- ton, James Hanghton, Theodosius S. Tyng, Reginald H. Howe, Charles H. Ward, Charles H. Babcock, William Lawrence, Darius H. Brewer, George Z. Gray, Samuel R. Fuller, George J. Prescott, Alexander Maekay-Smith, John C. Brooks, Leighton Parks, Leverett Bradley, George A. Strong, F. B. Allen, T. A. Snively, L. C. Stewardaon, Frederick Burgess, Augustine H. Amory, George S. Converse, Elisha Mnlford, Reuben Xidner, Frederick Courtney, Samuel Snelling, Charles P. Parker, H. S. Nash, C. M. Addison. To these are to be added after 1883, A. H. Vinton, Endicott Peabody, H. Evan Cotton, Roland C. Smith, John S. Lindsay, Frederic Palmer, Arthur C. A. Hall, W. M. Grosvenor, E. Winchester Donald. 420 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 I cannot feel anything but confident hope regarding the result, and as to Heber, however it may seem as if his way of going to work were perhaps not the best, that is a very small matter. His face is toward the light. And certainly no mischief he can do can begin to equal the mischief which must come from the obstinate dishonesty of men who refuse to recognize any of the new light which has been thrown upon the Bible, and go on re- peating assertions about it which, if there is such a thing as proof, have been thoroughly and repeatedly disproved. These are the men on whom the church in future must look back upon with reproach, and almost with contempt. So the thing looks to me from the Suez Canal. "When he learned that the work was creating a stir in ecclesiastical circles and a heresy trial invoked by those who resented its teachings, he wrote : — If the man who thinks as soberly and earnestly as he thinks has no place in our church, then alas for the church! I see my old friend is first and keenest on the scent. So I was wrong about him, and Mrs. and your sister were right about him when they used to.insist that he was narrow and sentimental and despotic. I send them my apologies and own my mistake. But what an infinite pity it all is. This wrath of men who ought to be largest and wisest is the kind of which it seems hardest to see how the Lord will make it to praise Him, but no doubt He will. As he neared Gibraltar he took up the books he found on the ship which would prepare him, to some extent, for enter- ing Spain, — Irving's "Alhambra" and "Conquest of Gra- nada," Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella," and Lamar- tine's "Christophe Colomb." While he was on the Verona he had formed a friendship with Major Wing, who was re- turning from India on sick leave, through whose kindness in giving him a letter to the colonel in command of the forti- fications was of great service. "The colonel was immensely civil, took me all over the fortifications, introduced me at the Club, and made me almost live at his house, where were a very pleasant wife and children ; so I saw Gibraltar at its best, and have the brightest recollections of it." When he reached Madrid, on his journey through Spain, he learned of the death of two of his aunts, his mother's ^T. 47] ENGLAND 421 sisters, who resided in the old house at North Andover. For his aunt, Miss Susan Phillips, he felt the affection of a son. She had been a member of the family during all his earlier years; and after his mother's death his heart had gone out to her as if she stood in his mother's place. He wrote to her frequently, doing all in his power to make her life in the old homestead a happy one. Madrid, April 15, 1883. Dear William, — Ever since I received your letter yesterday I have been trying to realize that it is true that aunt Susan and aunt Caroline are really gone. It seems almost impossible to picture the old house as it must be to-day. ... I wish so much that I had been at home, and I hope I shall hear from you some time about the last of those two long, faithful lives. . . . It seems as if this great change swept away from the world the last remnants of the background of our earliest life. Even after father and mother went, as long as aunt Susan lived, there was somebody who had to do with us when we were babies. Now that generation has all passed away. How many old scenes it brings up. This is Sunday morning, right after breakfast, and it seems as if I could see a Sunday morning of the old times in Eowe Street, with the general bustle of mother and aunt Susan getting o£E to Sunday School, and father settling down to read to the bigger boys in the front parlor; and there are faint memories of much earlier days when the aunts must have been blooming young ladies, though they seemed to us then almost as old as they ever did in later times. I hope the last years of their lives have been happy, in spite of the suffering. They have been spared what was most to be dreaded, long, hopeless illness and helpless- ness. But I am so sorry to hear that aunt Susan had to suffer. ... If there were ever lives totally unselfish, and finding all their pleasure in making other people happy, these were they. We know aunt Susan best, of course, but dear little aunt Caro- line, with her quiet ways, had something very touching and beau- tiful about her. She seems to have slipped out of life as unob- trusively and with as little trouble as she lived. When I left them, of course I knew it was very likely that I should not see them again. But all I had heard since made me feel as if they would be there when I came home. I had a nice let- ter from aunt Susan in the autumn, which must have been a good deal of an effort for her to write, and I wrote to her, from India, a letter which must have reached Andover after it was all over. 422 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 It cannot be long — one cannot ask that it should be long — before aunt S follows her sisters. Give her my love and sympathy. As it may be that she will go before I come home, the old house be left empty, and something have to be done about the property, I want to say that I should like to buy it, and 1 authorize you to buy it for me, if the chance offers. Or, if you and Arthur and John would not like that, I will join with any or all of you to buy and hold it. I do not know whether you liked it well enough last summer to think of making it a summer home, but I should like to hold it as a place where, for the whole or part of any summer, we could gather and have a delightful, easy time, among the most sacred associations which remain for us on earth. A few very simple improvements would make it a most charming place, so do not by any chance let it slip, and hold, by purchase or otherwise, to as much of the furniture as you can. One of these days, when I am a little older and fee- bler, I should like to retire to it and succeed [Rev.] Augustine Amory at the little church. Is not our window done there yet? Salamanca, April 27, 1883. Dear William, — And so aunt S too is gone, and the old house is empty! I only received your letter last evening, and all the night, as I rode here in the train, I was thinking how strange it was. These three who began their lives so near to- gether, long ago, and who have kept so close to one another all the while, now going almost hand in hand into the other world. . . . How pathetic it used to be to see aunt S sitting there, full of pain, trying to do some little bit of good in her curious ways, with her queer little tracts, and her vague desire to exhort everybody to be good. I always thought she must have been one of the handsomest of the sisters when they were young. Surely, no end that we could have dreamed of for them could have been more perfect. But how we shall miss them! To the Kev. James P. Franks: — Madrid, April 28, 1883. If you were only here we would begin at once with the Velas- quez pictures, which I shall see to-day for the last time and which are famous. They stand away up alongside of Tinto- retto's in Venice for every great quality except that high reli- gious exaltation which is in the Crucifixion at St. Rocco and one or two other things which we saw last summer in those golden days. As to the rest of Spain it is delightful, but one would rather go to all the other great countries of Europe first. The ^T. 47] ENGLAND 423 Moorish work, the Alhambra and all that, is wonderful ; but as for Gothic and the great cathedrals, you who have seen Chartres and Strassburg and Cologne, need not worry yourself at all about Seville and Granada and Saragossa and Toledo. . . . We were right last summer, and the dear streets of Pisa and Eavenna and Bologna were better than anything we should have seen in sultry Spain. . . . In the midst of all the brightness of it there has come the sad news from home. I am sure S will know that I sympathize with her. The breaking up of families is dreadful. If we could only all go together. If only brothers and sisters who have been together in this life could start together for the next. But this seeing one another off, even although we know that we shall fol- low in a day or two and find them there, is very sad. That is what makes us feel that there is some sort of beauty in the way aunt Susan and aunt Caroline went together. After all these years in the old house at Andover they have started on the new experience in the same week. But we shall miss them bitterly. I want very much to get the old house and make it a summer bungalow, where all of us, whatever else we may be doing with our summer, may come and go at will. A few more words must suffice for Spain. He was there for nearly a month, travelling for part of the time with the Brimmers, from Boston, and the Wistars, from Philadelphia. Architecture, Moorish and Christian, and the pictures of Velasquez, which he saw in their fulness for the first time, were the principal objects of interest. In Burgos he found in one of the towers of the Cathedral what he thought must have furnished the suggestion to Eichardson for the tower of Trinity Church, Boston. He speaks of Burgos as a wilder- ness of architectural delight. And altogether he counted himself fortunate in having returned by way of Spain, — the transition from what he had seen of Mohammedanism in India to the works of the Moors, and thence to' Christian civilization. On June 8 Mr. Brooks arrived in England to receive what proved to be a long ovation. He had already many personal friends in England; his books had been widely read there, and through his books he had the power of speaking directly 424 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 to the heart, and of making himself known, honored, and loved. Whenever he had preached in England on the occa- sion of previous visits he had produced the same impression as at home, creating the widespread desire to see and know him personally. What it had been in Boston it was now to be in London, His coming had been awaited with eager expectation. Many were the invitations which he had re- ceived in advance, asking him to preach in London, and especially in the Cathedral churches. They were desirous that he should have the fullest opportunity to be heard by the English people, and they placed the great sanctuaries of England at his service. The Bishop of London sent him a courteous permission to preach in his diocese, expressing, at the same time, the desire that he would accept as many invi- tations as possible. He was also personally invited by the Bishop of London to preach in St. Paul's Cathedral on Hos- pital Sunday. His appointments were widely advertised in the London papers. Among the other churches at which he preached in London were St. Mark's, St. John'swood, Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, St. Mark's, Kennington; St. Mi- chael's, Chester Square; and the Temple Church; outside of London, Lincoln Cathedral, Wells Cathedral, and St. Pe- ter's at Arches in Lincoln. Interesting incidents occurred in connection with his preaching. This is an extract from a letter written by a person unknown to him, but it has a very familiar sound : — May 20, 1883. Dbak Sir, — Having had the great privilege of hearing you preach at Westminster Abbey three years ago, and having, since then, much enjoyed reading a volume of your sermons, I deter- mined to seize the opportunity of once more hearing you. Ac- cordingly a friend and I went twelve miles yesterday to the Savoy Chapel, where you were advertised to preach, but were bitterly disappointed at being unable to get even standing room, although we were at the church door half an hour before the service began. I hope you will pardon my boldness if I ask whether you would be so kind as to let me know by post-card if you are going to preach anywhere during this week ; for, if so, we should so much like to make another attempt to hear you. ^T. 47] ENGLAND 425 An English barrister writes to him a request that he would speak with more deliberation, when he preaches in Temple Church : — Having had the pleasure of hearing you at St. Paul's, I ven- ture to ask you to be so good as to adopt for the Temple Church a rather slower delivery, in order that all may hear. Knowing, as I do, that our church is a very difficult one in which to hear, I have ventured to make this request. I should not have done so had it not been that no one would willingly lose any portion of a sentence of your sermon. Dr. Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster, also made the suggestion that he should be more deliberate in speaking, but was told that it was not possible. To the English people his rapidity was more trying than to his compatriots. Yet Dean Stanley saw in it one source of his power, comparing him to "an express train going to its appointed terminus with majestic speed, and sweeping every obstacle, one after another, out of his course." In England, as in America, he was the despair of reporters, owing not only to the ra- pidity of his utterance, but to the bewildering rush of the thought as well. There came to him a request from the Select Preachers' Syndicate of the University of Cambridge to preach in Great St. Mary's Church upon Ascension Day, and the Sundays immediately before and after, in the next year, 1884. He was obliged to decline it, as it was not probable he should then be in England. But it was a source of regret to him that he could not see something of the English universities during his stay, and he was assured that the invitation would be renewed on some subsequent occasion, when he would be able to accept it. Apart from the public honors shown to him, Mr. Brooks was the recipient of the most generous hospitality, combined with a thoughtful kindness and constant acts of courtesy, which were wholly unanticipated, and made every day of his two months in England a refreshment and delight. How wide this hospitality was, enabling him to meet people whom he had long desired to know, will best be shown by a list 426 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 which he made of his engagements, and including the names of persons whom he met. Saturday, May 12, Canon Duckworth's, — Mr. and Mrs. Messer; Friday, May 18, J. E. Lowell's, — Mr. Huxley and Mr. Smalley; Tuesday, May 22, Baroness Burdett-Coutts's, — Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Benson, Dean of Westminster and Mrs. Bradley, Lord Shaftesbury, Sir F. Leighton, Sir Thomas Brassey and Lady Brassey, Marquis of Salisbury, etc. ; Thursday, May 24, at the Law Courts in London with Sir Farrar Hersehell; Saturday, May 26, Archdeacon Farrar's, — Bishop Lightfoot, Canon Barry, Canon Henning, Mr. Pulester, etc. ; Monday, May 28, Lady Frances Baillie's, — Sir George Grove, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Eandall Davidson and wife, etc. ; Thursday, May 31, Mr. Forbes's, Ashley Place; Saturday, June 2, Mr. Christian's, — Mr. Kittridge, Dr. Garden, etc.; Tues- day, June 5, Mr. Humphrey's (St. Martin's in the Field), — Mr. Galton, etc. ; Thursday, June 7, Dr. Vaughan's, — Dean and Mrs. Bradley, Sir Fowell Buxton, etc. ; Friday, June 8, Mr. De Bunsen's, — Augustus Hare, Mrs. Buxton (Lord Law- rence's daughter), Dr. Brandis, etc. ; Saturday, June 9, Sir G. Grove's, — Miss Stevenson (from Edinburgh), Rev. Mr. Yeaton and Lady Barbara, his wife ; Monday, June 11, breakfast with Eev. S. Bickersteth, — his father (author of Yesterday, To-day, and Forever), and his brother; Tuesday, June 12, at Bishop of Eochester's, — Mr. Grundy, etc.; Wednesday, June 13, at Lord Mayor's, — Mr. Holland, Bishop of Winchester, etc.; Thurs- day, June 14, Lady F. Baillie's, — Bishop of Carlisle, Miss Grant, Mr. Mills. Luncheon at the Duke of Argyll's; Friday, June 15, luncheon at Mrs. Charles's (author of Schonberg Cotta Family), — Mr. and Mrs. Holiday, Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, Mr. Maurice ; Sunday, June 17, at Wells, — Professor Free- man, Colonel Maurice, Canon Church; Tuesday, June 19, Mr. S. Morley's, — Mr. and Mrs. H. Childers, Dean and Mrs. Bradley, etc. ; Wednesday, June 20, p. m. Baroness Burdett- Coutts's, at Holly Lodge, — Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, Sir James Fergusson, Eev. Mr. and Mrs. Browne; Wednesday, June 20, Sir Lyon Playfair's, — Sir Thomas and Lady Brassey, Mrs. Shaw Lefevre, etc. ; Evening, Mr. Hugh Childers 's, — Duchess of Teck, Mr. and Mrs. Foster, Lady Holland, Dean and Mrs. Bradley, etc. ; Thursday, June 21, Alfred Tennyson's, Isle of Wight, — Miss Boyle, Mrs. Lushington, etc. ; Saturday, June 23, Lincoln, Precentor Venables's — Bishop Wordsworth, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Melville, etc.; Monday, June 25, Mr. JET. 47] ENGLAND 427 Paget's, — Mr. and Mrs. Trevellyan, etc. ; "Wednesday, June 27, Mr. Shaw Lefevre's party to the Tower, — Playfairs, Glad- stone, Bright, Foster, Morley, Lowell, Hare, Lady Harcourt, Heywood, etc. ; Thursday, June 28, at Dulwich, — Bishop of Rochester, Boyd, Browning, Jean Ingelow, etc. Dinner with Bishop of Carlisle, Bonamy Price, Sir James Paget, Macmillan, Murray, etc. ; Friday, June 29, lunch with Colonel Maurice, Llewelyn Davies. Evening at Lady Stanley's, of Alderley, — Stopford Brooke, Browning, Lady Harcourt, etc. ; Saturday, June 30, p. m., at Newman Hall's, — Dr. Allon, Dr. Farrar, etc.; Sunday, July 1, lunch at Dr. Vaughan's; P. M., at Mr. Holiday's; Monday, July 2, at Mrs. Leaf's, — Dr. Farrar, Mr. Arnold, and Miss Arnold; Tuesday, July 3, at Mr. Mills's, — Sir Bartle Frere, etc. Evening at Mrs. Gladstone's, — Dr. Acland, Mr. Bryce, Mrs. Childers, the Endicotts, Miss Glad- stone; Wednesday, July 4, P. M., Mr. Lowell's reception, — Smalley, Collier, Mrs. Putnam, Miss HoUey, etc. ; Thursday, July 5, A. M. at Harrow, Dr. Butler's luncheon, — Earl of Dufferin, Bishop of Manchester, Bishop of Derry, Sir F. Buxton, Dr. Boyd Carpenter, Canon Flemming, Sir Lyon Playfair, Beresford Hope, etc. ; Thursday, July 5, Lady Frances Baillie's dinner, — Lord and Lady Selbourne (Lord Chancellor), Sir G. Grove, Browning, Bishop of Litchfield, Mrs. Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) ; Friday, July 6, Mr. Flood Jones, Precentor, Westminster Abbey. Lady Russell, at Richmond; Saturday, July 7, Mrs. John Henry Green. Bishop of London, garden party, — Canon Duckworth, Dr. Boyd Carpenter, the Messers, etc. ; Mr. Macmillan's, — Mr. and Mrs. Shorthouse, Llewelyn Davies, etc. ; Tuesday, July 10, dined with Major Wing, — Mrs. and Miss Everest. Even- ing at Mr. Gladstone's, — Gladstone, Lowe, Lord DuCerin, Lord Spencer, Sir C. Dilke, Duke of Argyll, etc. ; Wednesday, July 11, lunch with Llewelyn Davies, — Mrs. Russell Garvey. Din- ner with Judge Endicott, — Mr. Saltonstall ; Thursday, July 12, breakfast at Mr. Shaw Lefevre's, — Mr. Smalley, Mr. Broderick (warden of Merton College), Mr. Wallace (from Constantinople), etc. Thursday, July 12, lunch with Dr. Allon, of North Brit- ish Review, — Rev. Mr. Rogers. Dinner at Miss Martin's, — Mr. Wallace, Professor Bayard; Friday, July 13, lunch at Lady Frances Baillie's, — Miss Selbourne; Friday, July 13, dinner with Sunday Evening Choir in Jerusalem Chamber, — Dean, Archdeacon, Canon, Precentors, etc. ; Saturday, July 14, lunch with Major and Mrs. Wing; p. m. at Miss Grant's, — Bust of Stanley, Lady Frances Baillie, Miss Selbourne, etc. ; Sunday, July 15, lunch at the Rev. Llewelyn Davies's, — Bishop of Man- 428 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 Chester, Eev. Dr. E. A. Abbott; Monday, July 16, breakfast with Ernest de Bunsen, — George de Bunsen, of Berlin. Din- ner at Mr. Francis Biixton's, M. P., No. 42 Grosvenor Gar- dens, — Lady Lawrence (Mrs. Buxton's mother), Rev. Henry White, etc. ; Tuesday, July 17, dined with Colonel Maurice at the Army and Navy Club, and with him to F. D. M. Club, — Ludlow, Llewelyn Davies, Blount, etc. Into many charming English homes he entered as a privi- leged guest. American friends, who were living in England, came closer to him. The English people were anxious he should see and know all that they cherished, as the peculiar pride, the beauty and glory of England. He had an invita- tion to visit one of the most beautiful of English rectories, in Surrey, where he might see English clerical life from its highest ideal side, which would illustrate the best aspect of the union of Church and State, wherein also lay the secret of strength in the development of the Church of England. From Lord Aberdeen there came an invitation, giving him a special opportunity to meet Mr. Gladstone, who had been reading his sermons with great interest. He went down to the Tower with a party of government people, — Gladstone and Foster and Bright. Once at luncheon he was seated between Browning and Jean Ingelow. It was an event to meet Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose poetry he had first read many years before, and with whose singular and unique insight into the conditions of modern religious sentiment he had been greatly impressed. Browning he had met before, and it need not be said that for one to whom Browning's poetry had meant so much, any opportunity to see him was eagerly welcomed. But the one man of all others whom Phillips Brooks was most anxious to see was Tennyson. He had met his son, Mr. Hallam Tennyson (now Lord Tennyson), in London, who gave him the invitation to visit his father at Farring- ford. Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight. He was able to give only one day to the visit, but in that time be had the poet much to himself; and when the daylight was over, "hav- ing come to know me pretty well, he wanted to know if I ^T. 47] ENGLAND 429 smoked, and we went up to the study, — a big, bright, crowded room, where he writes his Idyls, and there we stayed till dinner time. Of Mrs. Tennyson he says, "as sweet and pathetic as a picture." Then once more, — After dinner Tennyson and I went up to the study, and I had him to myself for two or three hours. We smoked, and he talked of metaphysics and poetry and religion, his own life, and Hallam, and all the poems. It was very delightful and reverent and tender and hopeful. Then we went down to the drawing- room, where the rest were, and he read his poetry to us till the clock said twelve, — "Locksley Hall," "Sir Galahad," pieces of "Maud," and some of his dialect poems. Tennyson, as is well known, was sensitive to being talked about in the papers, and the next morning, after breakfast, as he and Mr. Brooks were taking a walk together, he sol- emnly charged his companion with secrecy as to their conver- sation the previous evening. He had talked very freely of people, Mr. Brooks writes to a friend, and expressed himself with absolute freedom, we may infer, on every topic which had been broached. But if he had known Phillips Brooks as his friends at home knew him, he need have had no anxious fears that he would talk too freely. Mr. Brooks thought that Tennyson had reason for his almost nervous sensitiveness on the subject: — "Think of sitting talking to your wife upon the lawn, and suddenly discovering that there was a man up in the tree listening to what was being said. At another time a woman was found hidden in the shrubbery." PhiUips Brooks religiously kept his promise to repeat nothing of the conversation. But this first interview with Tennyson cannot be dismissed without a moment's reflection on all it meant. As they sat together in the study after din- ner for two or three hours, we may imagine Phillips Brooks face to face with the one man to whom he owed and must have acknowledged a great obligation. It had been Tennyson, more than any other, who had been the means of first opening to him the meaning of poetry, and more than that, of leading him out from the confusion of his early years. All that Tennyson had been to the nineteenth century, he 430 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 had been in a more special and empHatic way to Phillips Brooks. If ever there was an occasion in his life when he could sit at the feet of a man, as a pupil revering the master, it was when he was talking with Tennyson, who filled his ideal of what a great man should be. If ever he could have unburdened himself to a mortal man, saying what he could say to no other, it was to the man before him. We may think that there was then some unveiling of souls, and the impartation of sacred confidences, for two great souls were holding communion with each other. To the world at large Mr. Brooks dismissed the incident in words which tell us little, as though it had been only one among the many in- teresting occasions of his life. Tennyson had asked Mr. Brooks to pay him another visit at his home, Aldworth, Has- tlemere, Surrey. When he returned there from a voyage to Copenhagen, it was to learn that Mr. Brooks had gone back to America. He then wrote to him, saying that he was grieved to know that he had recrossed the Atlantic, and that he should not see him again, closing his letter with a sentence which shows that he liked Phillips Brooks : — " The few hours that I spent at Freshwater in your company will always be present with me." Bishop Brooks seldom spoke [writes the Eev. Percy Browne] of the distinguished people whom he met abroad, but I have heard him, more than once, describe his impressions of Tennyson and Browning. He was impressed with the way in which Brown- ing, whom he met at a dinner in London, threw himself, with gayety and cheerfulness, into the light conversation of the mo- ment, interested in amusing anecdotes current in London society, sharing heartily the pleasure of the hour, but never alluding to any intellectual problems : " One would think from his conversa- tion, " Brooks used to say, "that they did not exist for him." On the other hand, be found Tennyson always opening up a large philosophic view of life and its problems, sometimes in tones of sadness, occasionally in a cheerful optimistic spirit, but always philosophizing. Brooks seemed to have been impressed by this contrast of the two great poets in the social hour. Browning, who, in his poetry, dramatized the profoundest problems of life, ignored them completely in conversation, apparently interested in only the superficial topics of the moment; while Tennyson, whose ^T. 47] ENGLAND 431 lucid poetry never taxed the reader's intellect, showed himself in conversation as a philosophic thinker. In this respect he re- garded Browning as a more characteristic Englishman than Ten- nyson. In speaking of one of his visits to Tennyson, he told how the poet, when reading aloud his own poems, would sometimes praise or criticise them as though they were the work of another. On one occasion he asked : " What shall I read ? " " Read ' Locks- ley Hall, ' " Brooks replied, — " The poem that stirred us all when we were young. " When Tennyson reached the lines : — " Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands ; Erery moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands," he called attention to it as being the most perfect poetic image in his poems. But when Brooks claimed that the imagery was equally good in the lines : — " Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might ; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight," Tennyson insisted that it was inferior to the other, — lacking, as he said, "its Greek simplicity and pictured clearness." "The figure of the Harp of Life, " he said, " is too subjective and com- plicated in its implications; — no, the other is the best." It was characteristic of Brooks that he should have felt more sympathy with the spiritually suggestive figure of the Harp of Life, than with the "Greek simplicity" of the Glass of Time. Tennyson owned, adds the Kev. Arthur Brooks, recalling a conversation with his brother, to a natural dislike of the unmusicalness of Browning's poetry, while acknowledging his rich intellect. The experiences, he said, described in the "In Memoriam, " as, for instance, in the stanzas beginning, "I had a dream," were fictitious, but the "Two Voices," as is said in the notes, were "all true." Phillips Brooks often mentioned his surprise at Tennyson's confusion and perplexity in speaking of the mystery of the Trinity as compared with the clearness of his "religious theism, " and his faith in immortality. He quoted Tennyson as saying that "matter is more mysterious than mind. His mind one knows well enough, but cannot get hold of the thought of body. " Tennyson also remarked to him that it was in his mind to write a sequel to "Locksley Hall." 432 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 The London season was over by the middle of July. The year of wandering was drawing to its close, but a month still remained to be disposed of before he sailed for America. He had been joined in London by his friend, Mr. Kobert Treat Paine, and together they departed for the Continent. They stopped at Chartres and Bordeaux, and at Pau, near the Pyrenees. He writes, "The curtain has fallen and risen again; the whole scene has changed." After a "splendid Pyrenean week," including a trip to Lourdes, which re- minded him of the Ganges at Benares, he came to Geneva, where he seems to have been chiefly interested in getting the impression of Voltaire. One night was spent at the Grand Chartreuse : — There are about forty fathers there, Carthusians, in their pic- turesque white cloaks and cowls. Solitude and silence is their rule. They spend the bulk of the time in their cells, where they are supposed to be meditating. I suspect that the old gentlemen go to sleep. There was a strange, ghostly service, which began at a quarter before eleven o'clock at night and lasted until two in the morning. The chapel was dim and misty, the white fig- ures came gliding in and sat in a long row, and held dark lan- terns up before their psalters and chanted away at their psalms like a long row of singing mummies. It made you want to run out in the yard and have a game of ball to break the spell. In- stead of that, after watching it for half an hour, we crept back along a vast corridor to the cells which had been allotted us, each with its priedieu and its crucifix, and went to bed in the hardest, shortest, and lumpiest of beds. In the morning a good deal of the romance and awfulness was gone, but it was very fine and interesting, and the drive down into the valley on the other side at Chamb&y was as pretty as a whole gallery of pictures. In his "Letters of Travel" will be found an account of how the journey proceeded ; from Geneva to Miirren, thence to Interlaken and Lucerne, and through the St. Gotthard tunnel to Italy. From Italy he came back through the Tyrol, in which his soul delighted, calling up his old associations with the Dolomites. He stopped at Trent and meditated on the famous council. At Brixlegg, a little village near Innsbriick, he was present at the performance of the Passion ^T. 47] ENGLAND 433 Play, which he had once failed to see in its more elaborate form at Ober-Ammergau. Then he felt that he was setting his face homeward, as he travelled rapidly from Munich to Paris, and from Paris to London, whence he sailed for America, on September 12. Out of the many letters written while in London and on the Continent, a few are given that call for no comment. To the Eev. F. B. Allen he writes : — London, May 23, 1883. I saw the new archbishop the other day; his whole way is excessively ecclesiastical. The new Dean of Westminster is a dear little fellow, as gentle and modest and refined as possible, just such a successor as Stanley would have loved. Farrar keeps on preaching, drawing tremendous crowds, working tremendously at his books and in his parish; and Stopford Brooke is declar- ing in a hearty way that Broad Church is dead and that free thought in the establishment is an impossibility, is talking of giving up preaching and taking to writing a history of English literature, which he would do finely. Meanwhile all the choir boys in England have chanted the Athanasian creed for the last two Sundays, and hundreds of clerical consciences have been torn to pieces. I have engaged passage for home in the Cephalonia, which leaves Liverpool on the 12th of September. Will you be ready for the 23d ; but give it to me if I get in in time ? Thanks for the story of the Club, at Gray's. It must have been good. June 8, 1883. And Harvard has refused its LL. D. to Butler! That, too, is very good. I understand all the reasons which made some of the best men on the Board of Overseers vote the other way, but I am quite convinced that this action is, on the whole, best for the dignity of the University and for the moral standard of the community. London is very pleasant. I have been trying my hand at preaching again a little, and rather like it. Last Sunday, which was Hospital Sunday, I preached at St. Paul's, which is a hor- rible great place to preach in. To-morrow I am going down to Wells, the loveliest of cathedral towns, to spend the Sunday with Plumptre, and to preach for him in the cathedral there. The next Sunday, the 24th, I preach in the Lincoln Cathedral, and the first Sunday of July, at the Temple Church in London. VOL. n 434 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 The Clericus Club had proposed to give him a dinner to welcome him when he returned, and the Kev. F. B. Allen had conveyed to him their wish to honor him. To this pro- posal he replied : — London, July 3, 1883. My dbae AiiLEN, — I am touched and delighted by the wish of the Club to greet me on my return. There could be no wel- come that I should value more. The evening of September 24 shall be sacred to them. I would quite as lief meet the fellows in your study for a talk and smoke as to sit with them at the gorgeous banquetting board at Young's. If they will let me do the former, I should like it quite as well as the latter; but, how- ever I meet them, it will be one of the gladdest and proudest moments of my life. If they are willing, do let it be after the simpler fashion. Paine is with me now, and you may be sure we have no end of talk about home. It was a great delight to see him. He is over head and ears in charities, and I look on and listen. On Saturday I went with him to a two hour.s' com- mittee meeting of the Marylebone Branch, and it was curious to see how like the " cases " were to those which we know so well at home. He is off now to some disreputable place, and will have a cheerful tale of misery and vice to tell when he gets back. We shall stay here until about the 20th, and then be off for some- where on the Continent. I have been spending an hour in Con- vocation, where that very troublesome creature, the Deceased Wife's Sister, was vexing the souls of deans and archdeacons. The debates in the House of Lords about her have been very curious. For the present she is rejected, and we must not marry her. But, in the end, she will get her rights. I thank you for your full accounts about the Club. Here I have been chosen an honorary member of the "F. D. M. Club," which is made up of the old friends and new disciples of Maurice, and on the 17 th I shall attend their meeting. It will seem a little like a first Monday evening of the month. . . . London, Jnne 13, 1883. Dear Cooper, — Think of my having two letters from you to answer ! Something is going to happen. As to the first letter about Heber and his heresies, I do not think we need to worry. It will come out all right. If he is wrong, no doubt the world will find it out ; and if he is right, as in large part I think he is, there cannot be any harm in his saying it out loud. Now don't be mad with your old friend, and say that I am just as bad as Heber is, and swear that the lips that say such things shall not ^T. 47] ENGLAND 435 smoke your evangelical pipes next October, That would make me very wretched, for, in the midst of all the pleasant things which I am doing here, I am always counting on those days in Philadelphia, and it is your study more than the halls of the convention that my anxious soul is dwelling on. So, if I cannot come without cursing Heber, I will put my convictions in my pocket and curse him at a venture. He speaks of the difference between the English and the American clergy in a letter to Kev. James P. Franks : — London, July 15, 1883. Deak James, — It has been interesting to compare the Eng- lish clergymen with the same class of humanity at home. On the whole, I think that they have finer specimens at the top of their profession than we generally have to show; but the rank and file are better with us. . . . This morning I preached for Llewelyn Davies in the ugliest great barn of a church in London, and after church I went home to his house to luncheon, and met the Bishop of Man- chester and the Philochristus man, Dr. E. A. Abbott, and it was very bright and interesting. Next Tuesday I am going to a meeting of the F. D. M. Club, of which I am an honorary member. It is a Maurice Club, as you see by the initials, and has all his old disciples in it, along with a lot of young men who have got his spirit. It is more like the Club (Clericus) than anything else which I have seen in Lon- don. But, on the whole, one does not hear very good things about the present prospects of liberal theology in England. It has not strong young men ; no Parks or Percy or A. V. G. Allen, — a sort of timid, hard ecclesiasticism, making much of services. To the Rev. Arthur Brooks he writes this letter, giving his impressions of the Church of England : — Bagnbbes de Luchon, July 29, 1883. Deak Aethxtr, — What a delightful, good fellow you have been to write me three such capital letters, full of the very things I wanted most to hear. The last one was about Commencements. I am much interested in what you say about the Philadelphia School. Now is certainly the time to regenerate it. If one could only think of the right men for professors, and had the power to put them there. Certainly, such a man as Peters ought not to be left out on any account, and with all his scholarliness 436 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 he seemed to me to be almost oversound. Surely there need be no misgiving about his orthodoxy. I cannot think of the right man for Dr. Butler's successor. But you must find him some- where among the younger men. There must be no old man put into the place. I should like it, of course, as you suggest, but I am too old. He must not be over forty. I am glad you are a Trustee. I wonder if I am, too. I used to be. If I am, we will put our heads together and get up a conspiracy, — why not ? Cambridge is pretty well off. At least it is on the right tack. And it has Allen. I am so glad that he is to be the next Bohlen Lecturer. I wonder how ever made up his mind to that. In London the other day, at Llewelyn Davies's, be showed me Allen's essay on The Renaissance of Theology, and said how fine he thought it, and asked me all about the man who wrote it. I was surprised to hear how dolefully he and other men talked about the prospects of liberal theology in the Church of England. Davies and Abbott (E. A.) and the Bishop of Manchester, who were there that day, declared the whole Mauri- tian and broad church movement a failure ; Earrar said the same thing in his cheery, doleful way; Plumptre, also, and , of whom, perhaps, it might have been expected, and who is the same absurd, inconsequential creature that he was. The older men of it seemed to be clinging to a remote history back in the days of Frederick Maurice, and the younger men to belong to that school of secularized clergy, which I know you dread as much as I do, and to be clutching at anything, — art, music, ecclesiasticism, sociology, anything to get a power over people which they earnestly wanted, but seemed to see no power in reli- gion to attain. I went to a meeting of the F. D. M. Club, of which I was made an honorary member. It was presided over by Mr. Ludlow, and we had Hughes and Davies and Maurice's son for fellow members, but the whole effect was not inspiring. The debate was about how Maurice would have regarded the modern socialism of Henry George and others, and how they, as Mauritians, ought to stand towards it. Maurice seemed to be a name to conjure with more than an influence upon their thought. Of course, there were many good things said, especially by Davies, whom I thought one of the best and most interesting men that I saw in England. There are three things, I think, that hamper the mental activ- ity and free thought of the working English clergy. One is the Establishment. No doubt, with the best men, as in Stanley's case, the Establishment seems to be the safeguard of liberality and an inspiration for tolerance, but with ordinary men, I am ^T. 47] ENGLAND 437 convinced that it is simply a weight of responsibility, and makes them fear anything except most loyal adhesion to what they call Church of England views. The second thing is the immense overwork of the clergy in externalities, especially in the care of schools, which is an enormous tax on time and absorption of thought. And the third thing is the Athanasian Creed. That Creed, explain it as they will, has in it the very spirit of a set- tled, unprogressive, and exclusive theology. It was made in the interest of that spirit, and the need of considering it a "bulwark of orthodoxy " crowds hard on men all the while. Of course there are men, such as those in university or cathedral positions, who are more or less free from the influence of one or more of these causes, and so will always think or write freely; but the character of a church will always be determined by that of its working clergy, and so it is not very strange that a settled trust in ecclesiastical machinery, and sacraments, and sacred duties on the one hand, and a splendidly devoted but unthinking and superficial spirit of "work" upon the other, are becoming more and more the temper of the English Church. At least, this is what the broadest men say is the case, and what one's own little personal observation seems to confirm. Tou will get more live talk about first principles in either our Boston or your New York club in an hour than from any gathering of London clergy in a year. You could hardly get them to talk about anything but the Deceased Wife's Sister, who was convulsing England during most of my visit. Just think of its being the boast of the Church that all the bishops in the House voted together about her, and that, in Convocation, only two men (Vaughan and Farrar) took any other ground, about their artificial arguments. Could anything show more clearly that there is such a thing as an Episcopal and clerical conscience and judgment, professional and special? and could anything be worse for a nation and a church than that? Of course, you will see that I think our "P. E. Church" has all the good things and none of the bad ones which belong to the Church of England, and so I hope the best and brightest things for the future of liberal theology in Her! But instead of writing you a letter, I have written you an essay, and I have n't told you anything about the pleasant places that I went to and the pleasant people that I saw in England, nor about how Bob Paine joined me, and we came over into the Pyrenees, nor about how beautiful these valleys are, and how curious and suggestive our visit to Lourdes and its grotto was. Nor about how I slipped in getting out of a car and hit my shin, and it 's all swelled up, and I am lying on a sofa with a cataplasm 438 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 on, which will account for the awkward chirography. But I '11 tell you about all these things when I come home, as I think I shall do this autumn, now that Ben Butler is not a Harvard Doctor of Laws, and Heber Newton is not to be tried. Give Dr. Tiffany my cordialest congratulations. P. While he was at Geneva he was invited to preach at the American Church. "I should have done so," he writes, "if it had not been that the surplice was so short that the par- son and I both feared that the amusement of the congrega- tion would interfere with their edification." From Trent he writes to Dr. Weir Mitchell one of the letters of friendship, which delighted the hearts of those who received them : — September 19, 1883. Dba» Weib, — What a good fellow you are ! and, dear me, how many years ago it is since you began to be a good fellow, or rather since I began to know what a good fellow you were, when you were a young doctor, and I a young parson, and the world so much less aged than it is to-day ! Something well over twenty years ago, certainly it is, since you did me your first kindness ; but you never did a kinder thing than when you offered me your house and home, bed, board, and cook, for a three weeks' con- vention time. Not that I can accept it. I am bound already to Cooper and McVickar, each of whom has claimed me for half of the time that I am to be in Philadelphia. But I thank you just as truly as if I had been able to come and break all your choicest furniture, and drink all your rarest wines. You do not know what you escape by my being unable to do the tempting thing which you propose. Think of what your house would have had to undergo after we left it ! You would have found frag- ments of broken dogmas under the chair cushions, and skeletons of sermons in all your best-worn closets. No, my dear Weir, I must not put your friendship to this test, and, besides. Cooper and McVickar are expecting me. But I do thank you and your wife with all my heart. And I am so sorry that I shall not see you on my visit. I want to get you by the hand, and it must not be long after my return before you give me the chance. Ever affectionately yours, P. B. A few extracts from Mr. Brooks's note-book will close the story of his eventful stay in England. They were written on shipboard as he was returning to America. THINITY CHURCH, EAST ^T. 47] ENGLAND 439 The change to the later side of life marked, like the change from the northern to the southern hemisphere by the sight of new constellations, motives, hopes, dreams, and fears. Sermon on some such text as "I will praise my God while I have my being." The subject of the true temper of the religious life. Nature of temper in general, — 'distinct from principle, belief, or actions. The clear recognizableness of it in people's thoughts. The atmosphere or aroma of a life; the frequent idea of irresponsibility for temper; value of heredity. People talk as if it were just discovered. Moses, "from fathers to chil- dren." The beauty of such connection with all its frequent tragicalness. The religious temperament is a mingled one, yet a true unity : anxiety, yet carelessness ; self -care, yet self-f orgetfulness, — all resulting in a sort of serious joyousness which is unmistakable. Seen in Jesus, Paul, Luther. This filling and not destroying natural dispositions. It is strange to think how prominent the national thought of religion has been in other times, and how foreign it is to most of us now. The Jews, and all the tribes around them; Greeks, Romans, and, indeed, all the peoples oi the Old World ; and, in Christian times, almost every mediaeval nation identified its reli- gion with its patriotism. The same appears constantly now, and never in nobler form than in the Church of Englandism of such men as Dr. Arnold. It is a true element in a complete faith, no doubt, but I doubt not also that Christianity, as it is now most commonly conceived, as a primarily personal faith, is an advance upon it. Not the nation, but the race; not England, but humanity, is the consecrated circle of the Christian's sympathy. The race, the humanity, can be comprehended only from the starting point of the individual. The nation is antagonistic, the individual is sympathetic. I think it possible that even Rome, in her arrogance and clumsy selfishness, did yet some good in saving the very idea of catho- licity and in keeping Christendom from lapsing into a multitude of churches as far from one another as the East and West. Behind the clouds of dubious strife One truth is always bright ; The glorious mystery of life Which floods the world with light. 440 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 Killing many kinds of heresy in the persecution way is like cutting worms in two. Each part retains vitality and you have two instead of one. Canon Duckworth's story ahout the verger in Westminster Abbey, who, indignant at some Catholics praying at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, bade them up and begone: "If this goes on we shall have people praying all over the Abbey." General despondency of English towns; absorption in parish work and consequent separation of clergy from theological thought, — most honorable but dangerous. At Mr. Bunsen's breakfast (July 16), a gentleman who re- marked that some lawyers said they did not like the broad church, — it was a compromise; if they were anything they would be thorough high church. Yet they were nothing, never went to church at all. Same sort of talk in Berlin by Grimm and others about being Catholics. The consciousness and superficialness of it! You do not know a language when you know its words, or even its inflections and constructions. Merely to take the French or German words, and substitute them for your English words, that is not to talk French or German, however you may make Ger- mans or Frenchmen understand you. The genius of the people, and that whole character which is as truly in the speech as in the thought, that is the thing that you must master before you can be truly said to speak the people's language. And so it is with the reflection and reproduction of some great man's life. You may repeat his actions perfectly, and yet he is not here. The subtle shades and changes of his character, the way in which he not merely thinks and acts and speaks, but is, this you must have before you can indeed make him anew to be a reality and a power. All this, applied to men renewing the power of Christ in the world, confirming His testimony. Schleiermacher tells in his letters how, when Eleanore G had cast him off, he stood two hours that night, with his hands resting on the table, — lost ; and also, as he approached the end of the argument of his Critical Inquiry in Ethics, he absolutely forgot the conclusion. CHAPTEK XV SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER, 1883 THE RETURN TO BOSTON. EXTRACTS FROM SERMONS. ADDRESS ON LUTHER. CORRESPONDENCE. EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL Mr. Brooks arrived in Boston on Saturday, the 22d of September; on the following Sunday he stood in his place in Trinity Church. A large number of men and women [said the Boston Adver- tiser] met him at the Cunard Wharf in East Boston as the Cepha- lonia arrived. Some of them had chartered a tug and boarded the steamer off Boston Light. She reached the pier about half past four in the afternoon ; Mr. Brooks held an impromptu recep- tion on board, and landed about five. He preached yesterday forenoon to a congregation which filled Trinity Church to over- flowing. He stands vigorous, hale and portly as ever, but his head has become plentifully sprinkled with gray, so that the change strikes one the instant of beholding him. The text of his sermon was 1 Cor. i. 6 : "Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you." The text had been in his mind while in India. On the long voyage homeward, as he passed through the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, he was writing notes of what he would say. It would be in keeping when telling the story of a great poet to insert some unpublished poem, if it were of equal merit with what he had given to the world. In the case of a great preacher, at an epoch in his life when a new and greater phase of his career was opening, wiU it be inap- propriate if for once we give the larger part of his sermon, spoken out of the fulness of his heart, as he stood in the pulpit of Trinity Church, after more than a year of silence? 442 * PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 My dear friends, my dear people, I cannot tell you with what happy thankfulness to God for all His mercies I stand again in this familiar place. After a year of various delightful experiences, — I hope not without much that in the coming years may be in some way for your benefit as well as mine, — I see again these dear and well-known walls ; I look into the welcome of your dear and well-known faces; I greet you in our Master's name, I greet you in the memory of all the past, which comes rising up like a great flood about me, the memory of all the years of happy work together, of difficulties met and solved, of the common study of God's word, of the common experience of God's love, of sorrows and of joys, in the midst of which the affection of minister and people for each other has ripened and grown strong. I greet you also in the name of the future, which I hope looks as bright and full of hope to you this morning as it looks to me. To-day let all misgivings rest, and let the golden prospect of years and years of life together, and of ever richening work for God and fellow man, stretch out before us and lavish its tempta- tion on our eager hearts. Let our whole worship of this morning seem but an utterance of one common thankfulness and common consecration; and solemnly, gladly, with hand once more joined in hand, let us go forward in the thoughts of God. And now, in this first sermon to which I have so long looked forward, what shall I say? Where shall I try to lead your hearts in this first of the many half hours which we are to spend together as preacher and hearers ? I do not know where I can better turn than to the Epistle for this eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, which will always hereafter be remarkable to us as the day which brought us together again after our long separation. The whole passage from which these words are taken rings with St. Paul's delight in his disciples, and thankfulness for all that God has done for them. "I thank my God always on your be- half for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ : that in everything ye are enriched by Him, in all utterance and in all knowledge. " How like a psalm the great minister sings his ex- ultation over his beloved church! And then there come these other words, which seem to gather up into the most deliberate and thoughtful statements the real ground and substance of his delightful interest in them: "Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you." Just think what those words mean! Be- hind all other joy in his Corinthians, behind his personal affec- tion for their special lives and characters, behind his satisfaction in their best prosperity, behind his grateful recollection of their kindness to himself, behind his honor for the intelligence and ^T.47] RETURN TO BOSTON 443 faithfulness and sacrifice with which they had accepted the truth which he had taught them, and had tried to live the Christian life, — behind all this there lay one great supreme delight. In them he saw confirmed and illustrated the testimony of his Master, Christ. All that he knew his Lord to be became at once more sure and more clear to him as he read the lives of these disciples, as they lay before him flooded with the bright light of their mutual love. . . . The words at once suggest an illustration of their meaning, which is familiar to every devout and thoughtful man who has travelled much back and forth upon the wonderful, beautiful earth where God has set our lives. I praise the world for many things : king- dom beyond kingdom, city beyond city, race beyond race, there opens everywhere the fascinating mystery of human life. Man, with his endless appeal to man, piercing through foreign dress and language, strange traditions, uncouth social habits, uncon- genial forms of government, unapprehended forms of faith, finds out our hearts and claims them, and makes our paths from land to land a constant interest and joy. And the great physical earth in which this human life is set is worthy of its jewel. The ocean rolls in its majesty; the great plains open their richness from horizon to horizon ; the snow peaks lift their silver mystery of light against the sky; the great woods sing with the songs of streams. How beautiful it is! And yet, without losing one element of all this beauty, without robbing eye or ear or mind of one of these spontaneous delights, how instantly poorer this earth of ours would be to the devout and thoughtful man if it meant nothing more, if everywhere it did not bring him even additional testimony and revelation of that supreme intelligence and love which had first made itself known to him in the experiences of his own soul! . . . The words of Paul and the illustration of his words, which I have just been giving, may furnish two natural divisions of what I want to say to you to-day. He was talking to Christian disci- ples, and it was peculiarly and specially over the exhibition of the power of Christ in those who were declaredly his disciples that the apostle was grateful and exultant. But, besides this Paul shows us more than once that he conceived of Christ as a universal power, so present everywhere and always in the world, that no part of the world, not even that which was most ignorant or most contemptuous about Him, could help feeling His influence and becoming a witness of His power. To Paul, then, any sav- age barbarism or any heathen civilization, as well as his Christian church in Corinth, would have found its meaning, its explanation, 444 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 its key and clue in Christ. He would have stood among the palaces of Kome or among the wigwams of America and learned from them something of his Master. To them as well as to the streets of Corinth, though with different sense and tone, but with no less sincerity and interest, he would have said, "The testi- mony of Christ is confirmed for me in you." . . . The " testimony of Christ. " Must we not ask ourselves, first, however, whether we understand exactly the meaning of these words ? Do they refer to the doctrine which Christ taught, the truths which He left burning in His Gospels for the world's undy- ing light ? No- doubt they do ! But we should little understand the richness of the Divine Kevelation in the Son of Man if we let ourselves think for a moment that any word which He ever spoke, or could have spoken, exhausted, or could exhaust, that revelation of Himself, which the loving Father of mankind in- tended to give the world through Him. Christ spoke the words of God, and that was much. Christ was the word of God, and that was vastly more; I beg you always to remember that. It is no doctrine, — not even the doctrine of the Incarnation, — it is the Incarnate One Himself that is the real light of the world. Let us get hold of that idea (as there does indeed seem reason, thank God, to believe that men are getting hold of it). Let us get hold of this idea, and then we are really ready for the great truth of St. Paul, that the world and the church get their true clearness and beauty as confirmation of the testimony of Christ. The testimony of Christ is Christ. A hundred golden words of His leap to our memory, but not one of them can unlock all our problems and scatter all our darkness. Not one of them — simply because it is only a word — can marshal and harmonize at once around itself all this discordant world. But He, the In- carnate God and the perfect Man, setting in living presence the holiness and love of God and the capacity of man as a true, visi- ble fact here in the world, He, if He be really this, may well become the centre of all history and life, and all the world and all the Church may find their highest glory and beauty, their key and clue, in being confirmations of the testimony of Him. With all this clear in our mind, let us turn, first to the world, — the great world as a whole. Christians and non-Christians all together, and see how in the Incarnation of Christ it finds its true interpretation and illumination. I must speak hurriedly, but I will try to speak as clearly as I can. 1. It is hard to speak of the world at large and not speak first of all of that which is, I think, upon the whole, the most im- pressive thing to one who travels much from land to land, and ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 445 takes in on the spot the record of humanity in every age. I mean the fact that, through all lands and in all ages, there have stood forth men who showed the spiritual possibilities of men in some supreme and beautiful exhibition. Where is the country whose history is so dead that it has not some such men to show ? Where is the tyranny of a false creed so mighty that it has been able to hold these star lives in its chains and forbid their soaring up into the dark sky ? In mediaeval Christianity, in gross, mate- rial, commercial, modern life, in brutal Hindu superstition, in the conceit of narrow learning, where has there ever been such all-powerful, earthward gravitation that the mountains have not risen through it here and there into the heavens ? The saint, the soul unselfish with perception of the higher purposes of its own life and aspiration after God, is everywhere. Can I see this, can I recognize this as one of the great facts of the world, and yet see no connection between it and the great apparition once upon the earth of the supremest Son of God, of one who by His very being made it absolutely certain that God, however far away He seemed, was always very near to man ; that man, how- ever gross and bad he seemed, was always capable of receiving and containing God? The truth we learn from every highest study of humanity is that the highest and divinest men are the most truly men; not the mean and the base, but the noble and the pure ; they are the men whom we have a right to take as the true revelation of what man, in his essential nature, really is. And that same truth applied to the old question as to what is the relation between the highest human lives and the life of the incarnate Christ gives us the right to think that they are to be interpreted by Him ; that in them we have simply the sunlight before the sunrise, the mountain tops of humanity, on which has struck first of all that truth which is the essential truth of human nature, — the truth that man belongs to God and is divine. By and by comes the Incarnation, and that is just the rising of the sun, whose light has been already glorious upon the hills, even while it, itself, was yet unseen. When from the hilltops down- ward to the lower regions creeps the sunlight, it finds out ever deeper zones of human nature and enlightens them. It brings out the godlike in the nooks and corners of humanity. All this comes afterwards; but the first testimony of that which Christ afterwards made certain was in the fact which fascinated men while it bewildered them, that everywhere and always there have been men who could not be satisfied except in finding out and claiming God, men whose souls told them they belonged to Him. Oh, my dear friends, it is not for us Christians to ignore the 446 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 spiritual glories which humanity has reached in regions where our blessed Christ has been least known ; rather to rejoice in and pro- claim them, for they are confirmations of the testimony of Him, unquenchable, indubitable witnesses of that without which He could not have been, the oneness, the essential oneness of man's life with God. 2. And if I talk thus of the spiritual glory of mankind, how shall I speak of its sin and misery ? Oh, my dear friends, one does not need to travel in order to find it out. Our own streets, our own hearts are full of it ; and yet there does come with long-contin- ued travel a reiteration, an accumulation, an overwhelming cer- tainty of the sinfulness of man that is most awfully impressive. The terrible disgrace and wretchedness of human life! City beyond city has its tale to tell. You cross new seas and find the darkness waiting for you on the other side. You lift some veil of old-world beauty and there it lurks behind, the hideous spectre of the lust, the cruelty, the brutishness, the selfishness, the awful wickedness of man. Sometimes one finds himself simply stand- ing in dismay before it. All faith in man seems for a moment to be perished ; all hope for man withers as if it were the silliest and wildest dream. And what then? Is there any sort of con- firmation of the testimony of Christ here ? Oh, is there not ? If the splendid possibilities of man in every exhibition of them showed the chance of a redeeming incarnation, does not the pervading wickedness of man, with no less mighty emphasis, declare its need ? We are so built (thanks to the grace of Him who built us) that our greatest and deepest needs take voices and prophesy their own supplies. Not merely the partial lightness of the twilight, but the very blackness of the midnight darkness tells beforehand of the coming light. The cry of realized want is always under- sounded and made pathetic by an almost unconscious tone of hope. And so, in the very dismay of which I spoke, when it comes over one as he stands in the presence of some record of how bad man has been, or some sight of how bad man is, there opens at the very heart of it all, the brighter for the darkness at whose heart it burns, a strange, divine assurance that this bad- ness is not man, but is an awful slavery which has fallen upon man, and that somewhere, some time, somehow, the true man must come and bring a rescue, and that when He comes He will come with a supreme witness, that He, the true man, belongs to God, that it is not merely man, but God, who comes and brings His strength. It is to a blind conviction such as this that the mis- sionary of the Incarnation everywhere appeals, and he does not appeal in vain. Whatever men have written, it is not hard for ^T.47] RETURN TO BOSTON 447 man, conscious, really conscious of sin, to believe in the promise of redemption. His sin, in subtle ways, has told him of the re- demption which was coming. When it comes he says, "It must have come. God could not have left me to perish." So it is that the world's sin becomes its "Confirmation of the testimony of Christ." The believer in the Incarnation goes everywhere, and his belief in the immediate presence of God and the vast capacity of man (and to believe in the Incarnation is to believe in both of these) fills everything with light. The glory and the tragedy of human life are both intelligible. The tumult of history becomes some- thing more than the aimless biting and clawing of captive wild beasts caged together in a net. Behind everything is the God whose children we are, and who could not let us live without telling us He was our Father. Over all, making life pathetic and full at once of penitence and hope, — the Christ, " Whose pale face on the cross sees only this, After the watching of these thousand years." Before all, as the one great promise, the one only hope, the com- ing of that same Christ in the clouds with power and great glory ; humanity redeemed and fulfilled by the occupation of Divinity, made at last completely Master of a world entirely obedient to its best life. Pitiable enough the man who travels through the world and sees no such vision, hears no such voice of a creation groaning and travailing for the manifestation of the Sons of God and is not moved continually to lift up his prayer: "Even so, come, Lord Jesus ! " But it is time to take our second point, to turn from the great world and think of the Christian disciple, to whom St. Paul's words were first of all addressed. His is the life which is trying to be, what, in the great view of it which we have just been tak- ing, the whole world must finally become. And so in him, in the Christian disciple, we ought to see some livelier struggle toward the expression of the Incarnation, toward the confirmation of the Testimony of Christ. As I say this, I cannot but remem- ber how the whole story of Jesus, even in its details, has often seemed to be only the parable of the life of every struggling ser- vant of Jesus who has walked in His steps. The servant like the Master has seemed to pass out of the childhood of Bethlehem into the profession of the Baptism, the wrestling of the desert, and the glory of transfiguration, and the harsh contacts with a misconceiving world, full always of a growing peace of deeper 448 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 understanding of the Father, until at last through the agony of some Gethsemane and the complete sacrifice of its appointed Cal- vary, it has come out fully into the brightness and the peace of the Resurrection life. When, a few weeks ago, I sat through a long, bright summer's day and saw the peasants of a village in the Tyrol represent in their devout and simple way the old, ever new story of the sufferings and crucifixion and triumph of the Lord, one of the strongest impressions on my own mind all the time was this : that not alone in old Jerusalem had those scenes taken place ; that it was the story not merely of the Master, but also of every faithful and suffering servant of the Master, which was being played ; that that patient figure, passing on deeper and deeper, as hour followed hour, His passion unveiling with every act some greater greatness of His nature, full of exhaustless pity and unfailing courage, now shaming His contemptuous judge with His calm dignity, now falling under the burden of His cross, now forgetting Himself as He turned to bless His fellow sufferers, and at last standing triumphant, with His foot upon the con- quered tomb, was not merely Jesus of Nazareth, but was at the same time every follower of the Nazarene who anywhere had caught His spirit and repeated the essential words of His life. But it is not only when we thus make the story of Christ's life the parable of our own life that we discover the confirmation of His testimony in ourselves. When in all the deeper experiences of our souls we find that there is no solution of our problems and no escape from our distress except in what the Incarnation meant and means forever, then it is that our poor pathetic histories get their great dignity as confirmations of all He said and did. When overcome by your own sin, nothing but Christ can make you know that you are so thoroughly God's, and God is so com- pletely yours that no sin can separate you from Him or forbid you the privilege of coming on your knees to Him, to repent and confess, and ask Him to forgive and be forgiven; when full of self-distress and self-contempt, nothing but the Incarnate Christ can keep you from despairing of humanity and show you how grand and pure it is in its essential nature, how capable of being filled with God and shining with His glory ; when thus, in the strength of the Incarnation, you gather up your helplessness and come full of trust and hope up to the door where He who made you stands tirelessly inviting you to enter in and become what He made you to be, then, then it is that the transcendent wonder of God manifest in Christ has translated itself into our human speech, and men may read in you, the poor saved sinner, what ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 449 your Saviour is. Is there a glory for a human life like that ? Can you conceive a humble splendor so complete as the great light which clothes the soul that has thus in pure submission made itself transparent, so that through it Christ has shone ? Among the new experiences, the deepest of them unknown in their ful- ness save to you and God, which must have come to you, my friends, in these months of our year of separation, may I not hope, may I not rejoice to Anow,that to some of you has come this crown of all experiences, this glad and complete submission of your converted life to Christ, in which you have become a new confirmation of the Testimony of His Grace and Power. I thank God with you for this, which is indeed the salvation of your soul. I must not seem to be pouring out on you on this first morning the flood of preaching which has been accumulating through a whole year of silence. But I have wanted to ask you to think vrith me of how the key of the world's life, and of every Chris- tian's experience, lies deep in that Incarnation which it is the privilege of the Christian pulpit to proclaim and preach. If what I have been saying to you is true, then that great manifes- tation of God must be preaching itself forever. All history, all life, must be struggling to confirm the Testimony of Christ. I have known well how faithfully the Gospel of the Incarnation has been preached to you from this pulpit since I have been away. With ever deeper satisfaction I have known that God was preach- ing it to each of you in silent sermons, out of all that He has sent or has allowed to come into your lives. You have had trou- bles and anxieties, sickness, pains; some of you sorrows which have torn your hearts and homes asunder, and changed your lives forever. Have they not shown you something ? Has not God, through them, shown you something of how near He is to you and how He loves you, and how capable your human natures are of containing ever more and more of Him ? You have had de- lights, joys; happiness has burst on some of you with a great gush of sunshine, and opened upon others with that calm and grad- ual glow which is even richer and more blessed. Have you not learned something in most personal and private consciousness of what the world meant when the tidings ran abroad from Bethle- hem: "Behold, your King is come. The Tabernacle of God is with His children men " ? The children have turned another page in the delightful book of opening life. The active men and women have seen what seemed the full-blown flower open some deeper heart of richness. The thinker has learned some new VOL. n 450 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 lessons of the infiniteness of truth. The old have found age, grown ever more familiar, declare itself in unexpected ways their friend, and seen its hard face brighten with the mysterious pro- mises of things beyond, which it cannot explain, but whose real- ity and richness it will not let them doubt. We are all growing older. Oh, how dreary and wretched it would be if those words did not mean that through Christ, in Christ, we are always gain- ing more knowledge of what God is and what we may be. As I look around upon your faces, I cannot help asking myself in hope whether it must not be that some of you are ready for the Gospel now, for whom, in the years heretofore, it has seemed to have no voice. Has not some new need opened your eyes? Has not some new mercy touched your hearts ? Has not the very steady flow and pressure of life brought you to some new ground, where you are ready to know that life is not life without the faith of Him who is the Revelation of God and of ourselves ? I will believe it, and believing it, I will take up again, enthusias- tically, the preaching of that Christ who is always preaching Himself in wonderful, and powerful, and tender ways even to hearts that seem to hear Him least. To those who do hear Him and receive Him there comes a peace and strength, a patience to bear, an energy to work, which is to the soul itself a perpetual surprise and joy, a hope unquench- able, a love for and a belief in fellow man that nothing can dis- turb, and, around all, as the great element of all, a certainty of God's encircling love to us which conquers sin and welcomes sor- row, and laughs at Death and already lives in Immortality. What shall we say of it that is not in the words of Christ's be- loved Disciple, who knows it all so well: "To as many as receive Him, to them gives He power to become the son of God." Let us say then to one another, "Sursum corda! Lift up your hearts! " Let us answer back to one another, "We do lift them up unto the Lord ; " and so let us go forward together into what- ever new life He has set before us. There was a change, it has been said, in the appearance of Phillips Brooks, when he was seen again in the piilpit, after his long absence. It required an effort to be reconciled to the altered aspect. He was thinner in form, also, having lost weight while in India, it may have been in consequence of the excessive heat. He had said as he was contemplating the possibilities which his year abroad presented, "Every now and then it comes over me that the gap is to be so great that .ET.47] RETURN TO BOSTON 451 the future, if there is any, will certainly be something dif- ferent in some way from the past." His manner showed the difference, and was not quite the same, as if he had been subdued into deeper hiunility by the honors which had been heaped upon him. The perspective of life had been modi- fied by the increase of knowledge and of wisdom. But the greatest change was in his preaching. He was now entering upon the third and last phase in his develop- ment. In the first, which included his ministry in Philadel- phia, he had written, perhaps, his most beautiful sermons, full of the poetry of life, disclosing the hidden significance of the divine allegory of human history, — a great artist, himself immoved as he unrolled the panorama of man. In the second period, he had been at war with the forces which were undermining faith, and not without suffering, his own soul being torn with the conflict; yet in those dark days, always appearing like a tower of strength. That period was over now. He had felt while abroad that another subtle im- ponderable change in the atmosphere of human existence was modifying the situation. The tendency was toward theism, not yet, perhaps, distinctly toward Christianity, but there was improvement visible from the highest outlook. The mechanical theory of the world was yielding to the evidences of faith. He had still the same message for those who were feeling the action of the storm as it subsided. He met with his old force those belated travellers who had not noted the new signs in the spiritual horizon. But to speak to the new age was now his distinctive mission. His preaching changed to correspond to the change within. He addressed himself in his totality as a man to the common humanity, doing greatly whatever he did, and assuming the greatness of those to whom he spoke. He fell back upon the simplest issues of life; the simplest truths were the main themes of his teaching. But in all this he illustrated the truth of Goethe's remark, "Whatever a man doth greatly, he does with his whole nature." In his earlier years, as in his "Lec- tures on Preaching," he had said that "the thought of rescue has monopolized our religion and often crowded out the thought 452 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 of culture." Now the idea of rescue became more promi- nent, but it was the rescue of men from the danger of losing the great opportunity of life, — the chance which was given of making the most of the divine privilege of the children of God. From this time he was wont to remark that he had l)ut one sermon. He said to one of his friends that he had given up writing essays and was going to preach sermons. The remark is recalled by Eev. C. H. Learoyd, who was im- pressed by it, as having some deeper bearing than the words conveyed. It had seemed to others the characteristic of his Boston ministry that he had been preaching sermons ; but he saw deeper depths in sermons, which he proposed to fathom. He had by no means grown indifferent to the intellectual problems involved in theological reconstruction. He followed them with interest, and took his part in their discussion. He retained his allegiance to the old formulas of belief, and yet with a difference, for at least he had learned that they had not the quality of finality. The full truth was some- thing larger always than the intellect could adequately for- mulate. But meantime the highest duty of man was to live, in the full sense of that great word, as apostles and evangel- ists, as Christ himself had used it. To help men to live in this sense now became his ruling passion in every sermon. His gifts of imagination he occasionally invoked, and there were occasional sermons when his creative genius seemed to flash living pictures upon the canvas, as of old, before his hearers. But these were not so common as before. His method of preaching became more frequently extempora- neous, when a great soul was set free to pour itself forth without regard to form of utterance. He allowed more range to the impassioned intensity of feeling, and he himself showed signs of being visibly moved by his own emotion, instead of standing, as in his early years, cool and unimpas- sioned, even nonchalant, while aU his hearers were thrilled with excitement. Yet in this new phase of his life he was listened to more intently than ever; there was an added ele- ment of awe, as the man in himself, in the lofty reaches iET. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 453 of Lis character, stood revealed in every sermon. He came closer to his world and dearer to the hearts of all the people. There was no longer any question about his greatness. He had made the final conquest of the human heart. It was un- derstood tacitly, if not explicitly, that when he declined the call to Harvard it had been that he might give himseK unre- servedly to all who wanted him. It now slowly dawned upon him that what the people wanted was himself, not his eloquence, or his gifts of any kind. All this was beginning to be understood when he came back to Boston to resume his work. But it was a beginning destined to increase its force with each successive year. There were still before him greater depths of sacrifice and of self-abnegation, to be met by an ever larger demand on the part of the people. This was the way in which saints had been recognized in the olden time, before the process had developed into the machine methods of later mediaevalism. The canonization of Phillips Brooks by the voice of a people's sovereignty had now begun, to be made manifest with growing emphasis in the years that follow. In a sermon preached on September 30, the second Sunday after his return, we have Phillips Brooks communing with himself as he takes up the burden of life anew. This chapter from his own experience, for such in reality it is, he has entitled "Visions and Tasks;" his text, "While Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said. Behold, three men seek thee." He was thinking of the possibility that the vision might fade as the emotions grow less eager and ex- cited with the passing of the years. The remedy lies in action. The picture is that of Peter, after the vision has ended, plodding over the dusty hills to meet the men who were seeking him. The practical life is needed in order to complete the meditative life. When a man has had his vision of some great truth which satisfies his soul, the com- ing of his fellow men, and their knocking at the doors of his heart, seems at first like an intrusion. " Why can they not leave him alone with his great idea ? " So ideas would hover like a great vague cloud over a world all hard and gross and 454 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 meaningless, if it were not for the man who brings the fire down and makes the whole of nature significant and vocal. These passages which follow have the essence of autobi- ography : — It is in the power of man to stand between the abstract truth upon one side and the concrete facts of life upon the other. To this end he must cultivate the two capacities within him, — the gift of knowing and the gift of loving. In some way he must still cultivate the capacity of knowing, " whether by patient study or quick-leaping intuition, including imagination and all the poetic power, faith, trust in authority, the faculty of getting wisdom by experience, everything by which the human nature comes into direct relationship to truth." On the other hand, he must culti- vate Love, the power of sympathetic intercourse with things and people, the power to be touched by the personal nature of those with whom we have to do, — love, therefore, including hate, for hate is only the reverse utterance of love. These two together, the powers of knowing and of loving, must make up the man, and must work together also in all men in order to a genuine man- hood. It is not a question of greatness, but of genuineness and completeness. The chemical elements are in a raindrop as truly as in the cataract of Niagara. The power of knowing and loving must be in every man as truly as in Shakespeare or Socrates. The more perfectly the knowing faculty and the loving faculty meet in any man, the more that man's life will become a trans- mitter and interpreter of truth to other men. This is the char- acteristic of all the greatest teachers. This is where the power of a mother lies, that she stands between the vision of the highest truths and a human soul on the other, and the knowing power and the loving power are moulded together into perfect oneness, and intelligence and love are perfectly blended. This was the characteristic of Christ, that He was full of grace and truth; no rapt self-centred student of the abstract truth, nor the sentimental pitier of other men's woes. He comes down from the mountain where He had been glorified with the light of God to meet the men who were seeking Him. It is the result of some great experience, also, in the life of a man that it makes him a purer medium through which the highest truth shines on other men. Henceforth he is altered ; he becomes tenderer, warmer, richer ; he seems to be full of truths and reve- lations which he easily pours out. Now you not merely see him, you see through him to things behind. It is not that he has learned some new facts, but the very substance of the man is. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 455 altered, so that he stands no longer as a screen, but as an atmo- sphere through which eternal truths come to you all radiant. This principle must be applied to every doctrine, to the truth of immortality, or of the Trinity, or of the idea of God. It may have been a vision of the sinfulness of sin. Overwhelmed with that knowledge, a man may sit and brood upon his sad estate. But all history bears witness that so to receive the vision brings despair. If there is any soul weary with its consciousness of sin and danger, the way to help such a soul is to make it to see in its own sinfulness the revelation of the sinfulness of all the world. Then let it forget its own sinfulness and go forth, full of that impulse of the horror of sin, and try to save the world. There is a danger of selfishness in religion, which makes a man to say, "I am content, for I have seen the Lord." It is a terri- ble thing to have seen the vision, and to be so wrapped up in its contemplation as not to hear the knock of needy hands upon our doors. As Phillips Brooks entered upon this new stage of his his- tory he casts a backward glance at the possibilities he has left behind him. He is determined to cultivate the faculty of knowing by every means in his power, but sdme of the methods of knowing may be closed to him as he follows after the men who are seeking him. In a sermon, also written soon after his return from abroad, he took for his text the words "I know how to be abased." There is something very personal in this extract : — I must pass on and speak about the way in which a man may know how to be poor in learning. That was our second point. There are many of us who need that knowledge, — many of us who before we have got well into life see what a great world learning is, and also see for a certainty how hopeless it is that we shall ever do more than set our feet upon its very outermost borders. Some life of practical duty claims us ; some career of business, all made up of hard details, sharp, clear, inexorable, each one requiring to be dealt with on the instant, takes posses- sion of us and holds us fast, and the great stream of learning, into which we long to plunge and swim, sweeps by our chained feet, and we can only look down into its tempting waters and sigh over our fate. How many practical men, men who seem to be totally absorbed and perfectly satisfied in their busy life, really live in this discontent at being shut out from the richness of learning. Is there a right way and a wrong way, a wise way 456 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 and a foolish way, of living in that discontent ? Indeed there is. The foolish ways are evident enough. The unlearned man who by and by is heard sneering at learning, and glorifying machiner- ies, boasting that he sees and wants to see no visions, and that he never theorizes, — he has not known how to be ignorant. He has let his ignorance master and overcome him. It has made him its slave. The man who, the more he becomes conscious of his hoplessness of great scholarship, has grown more and more sensible of what a great thing it is to be a scholar; and at the same time, by the same process, has grown more and more re- spectful toward his own side of life, more and more conscious of the value of practical living as a true contribution to the great final whole; the man, therefore, who has gone on his way, as most of us have to do, with little learning, but has also gone on his way doing duty faithfully, developing all the practical skill that is in him, and sometimes, just because their details are so dark to him, getting rich visions of the general light and glory of the great science, seen afar off, seen as great wholes, which often seem to be denied to the plodders who spend their lives in the close study of those sciences, — he is the man who knows how to be unlearned. It is a blessed thing that there is such a know- ledge possible for overworked, practical men. The man who has that knowledge may be self-respectful in the face of all the col- leges. He may stand before the kings of learning and not be ashamed ; for his lot is as true a part of life as theirs, and he is bravely holding up his side of that great earth over which the plans of God are moving on to their completeness. There is one other sermon to be mentioned here, for it is the companion of the sermon on "How to be abased," writ- ten at the same time, with only a week's interval, and from words in the same text, "How to abound." There are pas- sages here to be remembered, as if they were spoken for a warning to himself, prophetic words of those later years, in which, having learned to be abased, he reaped the fruit of abasement in the larger abundance of life : — Many of the popular men have been tyrannized over and ruined by their popularity. Their principles have crumbled ; their self- hood has melted away; they have become mere stocks and stones for foolish men to hang garlands on, not real men, real utterances of the divine life, leading their fellow men, rebuking sins, inspir- ing struggles, saving souls. Ah, yes ! Not merely to make men love you and honor you, ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 457 but how to be loved and honored without losing yourself and growing weak, — that is the problem of many of the sweetest, richest, most attractive lives; and there is only one solution for it, which blessed indeed is he who has discovered! ... If the much loved man can look up and demand the love of God, if he can crave it and covet it infinitely above all other love, if laying hold of its great freedom, he can make it his, . . . then let him come back and take into a glowing heart the warmest admi- ration and affection of his brethren, the heaven that he carries in his heart preserves him. They cannot make him conceited, for he who lives with God must be humble. . . . He who knows that God loves and honors him may freely take all other love and honor, however abundant they may be, and he will get no harm. The recognition given to Phillips Brooks in England had had no counterpart hitherto in America. It had been taken for granted that he knew in what honor his name was held. But the return to his work was an occasion for extending some formal welcome. A dinner was given him by the Clericus Club at Young's Hotel, on the evening of Septem- ber 24. The feeling was very deep and tender when once more he stood among them, the same, and yet changed in some imperceptible way within. He was silent, and the usual hilarity of his manner was wanting. Rev. Charles H. Learoyd presided, with the guest of hoi^or on his right, and the Bishop of Rhode Island on his left. Bishop Clark re- marked that we had a lion present, but a lion who would not roar. In the very few words spoken by Mr. Brooks, one sentence is recalled: after alluding to his journey he said that he felt more than ever what a good thing it was to be an Episcopal minister, in the diocese of Massachusetts, and in the city of Boston. There were speeches made, telling him the estimate in which he was held, and he listened with head bowed, his characteristic attitude. No record has been kept of the evening, beyond the poem by the Rev. William R. Huntington : — NATURA NATUEANS Natura, Mistress of the Earth, A study hath, they say, 458 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 Where century by century, She sitteth moulding clay. Fast 33 the images are wrought, Her lattice wide she throws. And on the ample window-sill Arranges them in rows. A sprightly critic happening by. One idle summer's mom, Made bold to chaff this lady fair, In half good-natured scorn. " Natura, Bona Dea," said he, " I 'm bored to death to find What everlasting sameness marks These products of your mind. " The men you sculpture into form Might just as well he rolled ; Peas in a pod are not more like. Nor bullets from one mould. " Dear lady, quit the ancient ruts. Betake the point of view ; Do differentiate a bit, Evolve us something new." Piqued was the goddess at that word, Resentful flashed her eye, While all the artist in her rose To give his taunt the lie. *' I '11 show you something fresh," she cried, " I '11 teach you how it looks ; " — Then plunged her fingers in the clay. And modelled PHiii.iPS Bkooks I Another reception followed, given him by his "brethren of the clergy " in the diocese, which took the form of a break- fast at the Hotel Brunswick, on the morning of Thursday, September 27, and the bishop of the diocese presided. This was the letter of invitation expressing to him the feeling of the clergy, through a committee appointed for the purpose : — Medfokd, Mass., July 2, 1883. Deab Mr. Brooks, — Some of your brethren of the clergy in this diocese, having learned of your expected return home in September, beg to ask you to meet them at a breakfast at Hotel Brunswick, September 27, or at such other date as will suit your convenience. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 459 In conveying this invitation, we venture to assure you not only of the pleasure with which we have heard of the distinguished marks of respect and honor you have received in other lands, but of the greater pleasure with which we have felt that all those honors were so worthily bestowed on one who already possesses the admiration and affection of his brethren at home. You are sure of a warm welcome from all who may have the privilege of meeting you on the occasion proposed. Believe us to be Very sincerely yours, ChAS. L. HuTCHUfS, Charles C. Grafton, Percy Browne. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church, to which he was a delegate from the diocese of Massachusetts, was held in October, and, fortunately for Mr. Brooks, in the city of Philadelphia, for it enabled him to fulfil his ecclesiastical obligations, and, at the same time, to satisfy his longings to be with his friends in the place he had not ceased to love. In a letter to Mr. Cooper he indulges, as he often did, in his expression of devotion to the city which was so much to him, — "Why did I ever leave Phila- delphia ! " But these words, so easily understood by his friends, must not be construed as meaning that he regretted the change. It was rather a sigh from a man who was bear- ing the burden and the heat of the day, as he thought of the moment when, in his earlier years, with all the freshness of the morning of life, Philadelphia had given him his great opportunity, and revealed to him the joy of pure living, as he had not dreamed of it before. Nothing could quite com- pensate to him for the loss of that glory of his youth. As honors and renown increased, he was trying to disown the conviction that there had passed away a joy and beauty from the earth. It was his pleasure to talk of Philadelphia as if the glory and beauty would have remained if he had never left there. When the General Convention was over he was ready at last to resume his work as a parish minister. He had formed a great resolution to give himself henceforth more exclusively 460 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 to the duties of his parish, and as far as possible deny him- self to outside calls on his time and strength. How the reso- lution was kept will appear. There were some things quite beyond his control. He took up, of course, his new posi- tion as one of the chaplains at Harvard, going to Cam- bridge in November to conduct morning prayers. There came to him, while in Philadelphia, a call from the Evangel- ical Alliance to make an address on the 13th of November, when it was proposed in New York to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. He struggled hard between his new resolution on the one hand, and on the other his desire to speak his mind regarding the g;reat reformer : — Philadelphia, October 13, 1883. Dear Aethttr, — I have your telegram and shall look for your letter in Boston, whither I go to-night. The Evangelical Alliance are very good, but I fear it is impossible, for 1. I am no man for snch occasions. 2. I think there is something of the kind in Boston. 3. I must, MUST, MUST begin to stay at home and do my work! Convention is flat, stale, and unprofitable. People are jolly. PhiladeIiPhia, October 15, 1883. Dear Arthub, — I have just g^t back from Boston, and find your note about the Luther occasion waiting for me here. I have been thinking about it ever since I received your telegram on Saturday, and have wanted exceedingly to do it, but this morning I have felt compelled to telegraph you that I must not think of it. If there were six months in which to get ready for what would be to me a most unfamiliar duty, I would try with trem- bling. But in a month all crowded full as this next month is to be, I do not dare to do it, in justice to those who have asked me, or to Dr. Luther. I agree with you that it is a most splen- did opportunity to say things that we want said. It cannot be made a small or party celebration. It must open the whole rela- tion of Christianity to human kind. But all that makes it the more necessary that the Oration of the occasion should be no crude and hurried thing, but something well matured and thor- ough. I am very much afraid that I could not do it in any length of time. I am sure I could not do it in three busy weeks. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 461 I hope somebody may be found who will be able, by having more leisure or by having preparation already made, to undertake it, for I should think, as you do, that one great Oration would be far better than a nim:iber of addresses. I hope the new ar- rangement will not have to be adopted. So I must not accept what I hope will not be proposed. But all I can say is I am so much interested in the subject, and so sensible of the honor which the Alliance haa done me in asking me to come, that I will do anything I possibly can. I am sure you will let the committee know that I do not slight their invitation, nor decline it without careful consideration. But the call was one which he found he could not refuse. His soul was full of the significance of all that Luther meant to the modern world. The days he had spent in Germany wandering in the Luther land were still living in his memory and were charged with inspiration. I made a delightful journey [so he had written to one of his friends] down through the Luther land, stopping at every place I could find which had anything to do with him, — a new great big German "Life of Luther" in my trunk, which I spelled out of evenings. He had watched the proceedings among the Germans pre- paratory to an adequate celebration of the greatest German man. To no address did he ever give himself with more glowing enthusiasm, for with it was combined a true historic insight into Luther's work. The glory of his eloquence was at the highest as he spoke; he was uttering his strongest convictions : — It is the personality of Luther which holds the secret of his power. . . . We are to think of one of the greatest men of his- tory. . . . Indeed, the name and fame of Luther coming down through history under God's safe-conduct has been full of almost the same vitality, and has been attended by almost the same ad- miration and abuse as was the figure of Luther in that famous journey which took him in his rude Saxon wagon from Witten- berg to Worms when he went up to the Diet; and at Leipzig, Ntlrnberg, Weimar, Erfurt, Gotha, Frankfttrt, the shouts of his friends and the curses of his enemies showed that no man in Ger- many was loved or hated as he was. 462 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 The force of Luther was distinctively a religious force. These words of Phillips Brooks about the man whom he was praising describe his own experience and remind us of his own career : — There are two sentences out of two parables of Jesus which de- scribe indeed the two components of the strongest strength of all religious men. One is this, from the parable of the vineyard: "When the time of fruit grew near, the lord of the vineyard sent his servants to the husbandmen that they might receive the fruit of the vineyard ; " and the other is the cry of the returning prod- igal: "I will arise and go to my father." Put these two to- gether into any deep and lofty soul (you cannot put them into any other) and what a strength you have! The consciousness of being sent from God with a mission for which the time is ripe, and the consciousness of eager return to God, of the great human struggle after Him, possessing a nature which cannot live without Him, — the imperious commission from above and the tumultuous experience within, — these two, not inconsistent with each other, have met in all the great Christian workers and reformers who have moved and changed the world. These two lived together in the whole life of Luther. The one spoke out in the presence of the emperor at Worms. The other wrestled unseen in the agonies of the cloister cell at Erfurt. To Phillips Brooks, Luther appeared as the exponent of religion, pure and simple, rather than the theologian. He boldly declared Luther a mystic and the highest representa- tive of mysticism for all time. In view of this aspect of the man, he placed him above Calvin the theologian, or Zwingle the politician, or the English ecclesiastics. But conjoined with the mysticism was morality: "He was the moralist and the mystic." And again, as he expounds these two charac- teristics of Luther, we are thinking of Phillips Brooks. These are the universal human elements of religious strength and character. The theologian may be far separated from human- ity, the mere arranger of abstract ideas. The ecclesiastic may be quite unhuman, too, the manager of intricate machineries. But the man who is truly moralist and mystic must be full of a gen- uine humanity. He is the prophet and the priest at once. He brings the eternal Word of God to man, and he utters the universal cry of man to God. Nothing that is human can be strange to ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 463 him, and so nothing that is human can count him really strange to it. David, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul — nay, let us speak the highest name, Jesus, the Christ Himself — these elements were in them all. Grace and truth, faith and conscience, met in them and made their power. These elements united in our Luther, and so it was, as the result of them, that he inspired hu- manity and moved the souls of men and nations as the tide moves the waves. The following passage shows that Phillips Brooks under- stood the meaning of Luther's principle of Justification by Faith. He saw beneath the letter its correlated truths : — The mystic took a still deeper tone. To him the whole pic- ture of man bargaining with God was an abomination. God and the soul are infinitely near to each other. God is in the soul. The soul also is in God. In a great free confidence, in perfect trust, in the realization of how it belongs to Him, in unquestion- ing acceptance of His love, the soul takes God's mercy and God's goodness into itself in virtue of its very belonging to Him. Not by a bargain, as when you buy your goods across the counter, but by an openness amd willingness which realizes the oneness of your life with God's, as when the bay opens its bosom to the inflow of the sea, so does your soul receive the grace of God. However he may have stated it in the old familiar forms of bargain, this was Luther's real doctrine of justification by faith. It was mystic, not dogmatic. It was of the soul and the experience, not of the reason. Faith was not an act, but a being, — not what you did, but what you were. The whole truth of the immanence of God and of the essential belonging of the human life to the divine : the whole truth that God is a power in man and not simply a power over man, building him as a man builds a house, guiding him as a man steers a ship, — this whole truth, in which lies the seed of all humanity, all progress, all great human hope, lay in the truth that justification was by faith and not by works. No wonder that Luther loved it. No wonder that he thought it critical. No wonder that he wrote to Melanchthon, hesitating at Augsburg, "Take care that you give not up, justification by faith. That is the heel of the seed of the woman which is to crush the serpent's head." He takes up the question whether Protestantism has been a failure. If it is to be thought of as a power aspiring to take the place of Kome, and to govern mankind after the 464 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 same fashion, or if we think of it as a system of fixed doc- trines, claiming infallibility, and refusing all prospect of development, seeking to hold men together by loyalty to Confessions of Faith, or in submission to some central eccle- siastical authority, then it has failed as it ought to have failed; But there is more to say than that. These centuries of Anglo- Saxon life made by the ideas of Luther answer the question. The Protestantism of Milton and of Goethe, of Howard and of Francke, of Newton and of Leibnitz, of Bunyan and of Butler, of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, of Wesley and of Channing, of Schleiermacher and of Maurice, of Washington and of Lincoln, is no failure. We may well dismiss the foolish question, and with new pride and resolve brighten afresh the great name of Protestant upon our foreheads. Have we not seen to-day something of what Protestantism really is, — the Protestantism which cannot fail? Full of the sense of duty and the spirit of holiness there stands Luther, — moralist and mystic. Conscience and faith are not in conflict, but in lofty unison in him. Through him, because he was that, God's waiting light and power stream into the world, and the old lies wither and humanity springs upon its feet. Ah, there is no failure there ! There cannot be. The time will come — perhaps the time has come — when a new Luther will be needed for the next great step that humanity must take, but that next step is possible mainly because of what the Monk of Wittenberg was and did four hundred years ago. There is no failure there. Only one strain in the music of the eternal success, — fading away but to give space for a new and higher strain. The address on Luther must take rank with his best pro- ductions, such as his tribute to Lincoln. He could not have spoken with such wisdom, devotion, and insight if he had not freely absorbed what was great in Luther. But what is now most striking, as one reads this beautiful, glowing oration, is that men were even then speaking of Phillips Brooks in terms similar to those he was applying to Martin Luther : — Some men are events. It is not what they say or what they do, but what they are, that moves the world. Luther declared great truths ; he did great deeds ; and yet there is a certain sense ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 465 in which his words and deeds are valuable only as they showed him, as they made manifest a son of God living a strong, brave, clear-sighted human life. It is thus that I have spoken of him so far, feeling his presence still through the deep atmosphere of these four hundred years. It is not certainly as the founder of any sect; more, but not most, it is as the preacher of certain truths ; but most of all it is as uttering in his very being a reas- sertion of the divine idea of humanity, that he comes with this wonderfully fresh vitality into our modern days. The address as written or as published is not quite what it was in the delivery. He dwelt at length on the drama of Luther's life, and portrayed vividly its striking scenes. I heard his Luther speech in New York [writes Bishop Lawrence], and then he did what I never knew him to do at any other time. He had a great audience in the Academy of Music, and it was a great occasion. He felt it. He read from his manuscript, but when it came to the burning of the Pope's Bull he left his man- uscript, stepped to the side of the desk, then to the front of the platform, and launched forth on a most eloquent and impassioned description of the scene. He then returned to the desk and con- tinued to read from the manuscript. My impression was that on the impulse of the moment he depicted it in extemporized lan- guage, or expanded what the manuscript contained. In the fall of 1883 appeared the third volume of his ser- mons, published simultaneously in England and America, with the title, "Sermons preached in English Churches." As he put the sermons in order for printing, he had in view the reception given him by the English people, dedicating the volume "To many friends in England in remembrance of their cordial welcome." The circumstance of the sermons having been preached in England is the bond of unity in the volimie rather than their careful selection out of a large number with reference to some special purpose of his own. While in India he had written to his brother in Boston : — There is something which I wish you would do some time, when it is not much bother.- When I left I took some sermons with me in a great hurry. I did not make a very good selection, and do not like what I have brought ; when I get to England I may preach some more. Would it be much trouble for you to go some afternoon into my study, and look in the back of my VOL. n 466 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 writing-table and find six or eight sermons, among the later ones, which you think would do, and send them to me at Banng's, only marking them not to be forwarded, but kept for me there ? You will know about the ones to send. There is one about Gamaliel, which I remember. But the character of the sermons is of the same purport as in his other volumes. He never wrote a sermon vaguely, for the mere sake of writing one. Indeed, he could not write one unless he were moved by some motive. Very often a special controversial aim is buried beneath a form which seems adapted to general circumstances, and we can still feel the force of his moral indignation as we recall the moment in which the sermon had its birth. Such, for example, are at least two of those included in the " Sermons preached in English Churches." One of them is called the "Mind's Love for God," from the words of Christ where He enjoins the love of God not only with the heart but with the intellect. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with aU . . . thy mind." In this sermon we have vigorous protest against the tendency he had so often encountered, in the church and outside of it, to depreciate the intellect in matters of religion. No- thing more excited his intellectual contempt than the atti- tude of those who, as it seemed to him, after the fashion of a spurious intellectualism, held up the intellectual formulas of other ages as final and authoritative, yet refused to allow to the present age the right to examine those formulas, or even to attempt to restate them in the language of the mod- ern world, as though the mere action of the modern intellect were, in the nature of the case, either ineffective or else de- structive and dangerous. In this sermon he passes in review the different religious attitudes, — those who cling to the Bible with the affection of the heart, but refuse to it the love of the intellect, declining to consider any questions as to where it came from, or from what parts it is made up, how its parts belong together, and the nature of its authority. He alludes to those who repel all questions about the na- ture of God, crying out, "You must not try to understand, you must only listen, worship, and obey ; " or those who. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 467 when the incarnation of Christ is mentioned, and the ques- tion is raised among other questions, of the way the sonship of Christ is related to the sonship of all other men in God say in rebuke, "You must not ask; Christ is above all ques- tions." Or again, when one would learn of the saint at Christ's sacrament, what that dear and lofty rite means to him, must he be told, "You must not rationalize. It is a mystery; the reason has no function here." He goes on to remark that he is not disparaging "in the least degree the noble power of unreasoning love." But what he pleads for is the possibility of a deeper, fuller love, the love of the reason and the understanding as well; for the deeper the knowledge the greater the possibility of love. "What most arouses his indignation is not the devout Christians who take this ground of refusing a place to the mind in religion, but a curious way of talking which seems to me to have grown strangely common of late among the men who disbelieve in Christianity. It is patronizing and quietly in- sulting; it takes for granted that the Christian's faith has no real reason at its heart, nor any trustworthy grounds for thinking itself true. At the same time, it grants that there is a certain weak side of human nature where the reason does not work, where everything depends on sentiment and feeling, where not what is true, but what is beautiful and comforting and reassuring is the soul's demand; and that side of the nature it gives over to re- ligion. Because that side of the nature is the most prominent part, and indeed sometimes seems to be the whole of weaker kinds of men and women, it accepts the necessity of religion for these weak people, and does not desire its immediate extinction ; only it must not pretend to be a reasonable thing. Theology must not call itself a science, and Faith must know it is a dream. Against this one of the many forms of the exaggerated, provoking sentimentalism of the nineteenth century he pro- tests in the name of religion and of historical Christianity : — Think of David and his cry, "Thy testimonies are wonder- ful. I have more understanding than my teachers, for thy testi- monies are my study." Think of Paul, "0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God." Think of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Milton, Edwards, and a hundred 468 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 more, the men whose minds have found their loftiest inspiration in religion, how they would have received this quiet and contemp- tuous relegation of the most stupendous subject of human thought to the region of silly sentiment. They were men who loved the Lord their God with all their minds. The noble relation of their intellects to Him was the supreme satisfaction of their lives. Another sermon in this volume which deserves mention is called "Gamaliel," from the text, "Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people " (Acts v. 34). To this sermon we have seen that Mr. Brooks attached importance, for it was the only one he specified when asking for sermons to be sent to him. It is a plea for absolute free- dom in the search for truth, resting on faith in God as the final safeguard of the truth, — " If this work be of men, it will come to naught; but if it be of God, ye cannot over- throw it, lest haply ye be found even to fight against God." Every great teacher, every great scholar, ought to be aware of the mystery and of the mightiness of truth, and therefore he ought to be prepared to see truth linger and hesitate and seem to be retarded, and even seem to be turned back, and yet to keep a clear assurance that Truth must come right in the end and that the only way to help her is to keep her free, so that she shall be at liberty to help herself. . . . The scholar of truth must trust truth. . . . The student must claim for himself and for all men, liberty. ... If you limit the search for truth and forbid men anywhere, in any way, to seek knowledge, you paralyze the vital force of truth itself. That is what makes bigotry so disas- trous to the bigot. The sermon on Gamaliel is personal, as when it describes the ideal of a great teacher such as Phillips Brooks would fain have been. He took Gamaliel to be the type of such a teacher, broad-minded, inculcating earnestly his own views of truth, knowing at the same time that truth is larger than his view, — one of those men who give others the chance to make his- tory, while they relegate themselves to obscurity. "There are few things finer than to see the reverence and gratitude with which the best men of active life look back to the quiet teachers who furnished them with the materials of living." "With such an ideal of teaching, he contrasts the ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 469 men who are set upon making all the world live in their own way, who have no real faith in God, and therefore no real faith in men. Human force and goodness seem to them to be not vital growths with real life in them, but skilfully arranged de- vices all artificially planned and pinned together, when, if you altered the place of any single pin, the whole must fall. Such men must blight the possibilities of any community they live in. . . . With God are the final issues and destinies of things. Work as man will, he cannot make a plan succeed which God disowns; work as man will, he cannot make a plan fail which God approves. . . . These words of Gamaliel are the words of all really progressive spirits. They were the words of Martin Luther, who opened Europe and made the best of modern history a possibility. . . . Luther worked; Gamaliel worked. To hold your truth, to believe it with all your heart, to work with all your might, first to make it real to yourself and then to show its preciousness to other men, and then — not till then, but then — to leave the ques- tions of when and how and by whom it shall prevail to God ; that is the true life of the believer. There is no feeble unconcern and indiscriminateness there, and neither is there any excited hatred of the creed, the doctrine, or the Church, which you feel wholly wrong. You have not fled out of the furnace of bigotry to freeze on the open and desolate plains of indifference. You believe and yet you have no wish to persecute. All this came straight from the heart and head of the preacher. He had spoken the word "persecute," which seemed almost out of place in "this enlightened tolerant age." But there were ominous signs in the body ecclesiasti- cal. The preacher was forecasting the future. It is some- what remarkable that the nineteenth century, with its boasted freedom, has seen more attempts at religious ostra- cism, and caused more suffering for the sake of religious beliefs, than has been known for two hundred years. We must go back to the seventeenth century for an analogous moment in human history since the great Reformation. In the middle of the nineteenth century Mr. MiU foresaw the danger and made his plea for Liberty. Phillips Brooks, in this sermon, is occupied with the thought which he will later elaborate in his book on Tolerance. Now he closed his ser- mon with a great appeal, invoking the time when every 47° PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 "form of terrorism shall have passed away, when we shall frankly own that there is nothing for which God in any world will punish any of his children except sin." This sermon on Gamaliel was in every sense a sermon for the times. He preached it in the Temple Church in London, rich with historical associations, its audience mostly made up of men, lawyers in large numbers among them, and the most cultivated people of England. He was standing in Hooker's place, and his utterance was worthy of Hooker, and such as he would have welcomed. The sermon left a profound im- pression, and is still recalled as great. One who listened to him wrote him such a letter as he was wont to receive, but he was touched and pleased. The letter conveyed also a request that a sermon which had produced such an extraor- dinary impression should be printed. If I had obeyed my impulse last Sunday I should have written you after the service to tell you how deeply your words sank into my heart, and, may I say it, with what pride I saw you in the old Temple, and knew that more noble words of truth had never resounded through its historic walls. The appearance of this new volume of sermons was fol- lowed, as previous volumes had been, by letters expressive of admiration and gratitude. But no letters more beautiful or genuine ever came to him than those from his English friends. Your visit to us this summer [writes a high dignitary of the Church of England] has left a mark, spiritual and intellectual, which, by God's help, will not soon be effaced from the Church which welcomed you and delighted to listen to you. And we, who have to preach and teach, feel that a prophet has been among us, and a new stimulus given to us, for which we are heartily grateful and solemnly responsible. My gratitude [another writer says] has grown and deepened, and now cannot find the proper and suitable words in which to express itself. I can assure you [[writes a member of the legal profession who heard him in the Temple Church] I will never forget the lessons of charity you urged upon us. The older I get, and the more of the world I see, the more I am convinced that if Christianity is to lay hold on the higher order of intellects, it must be by such noble, broad, elevating preaching as yours. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 471 The notices of the book in the papers showed that the English people still had their prejudices against transatlantic eloquence to overcome. But Mr. Brooks was declared to be an exception. "The quality which will first strike the reader of these sermons," says one of these book reviews, "is their thoroughly English and Anglican tone." It was remarked by other critics that the sermons in reading did not suffer from the absence of the impressive manner of the preacher. On every page we come across sentences which lend them- selves readily to detached quotation, and they are of a quality which will stand examination and provoke thought; indeed, pas- sages of this kind are so frequent that it is next to impossible to select quotations in illustration. Among the sermons noted as most remarkable "for fresh- ness and originality," or " as masterpieces of profound thought conjoined with eloquence of expression," are the one preached at Westminster Abbey, headed "Man's Wonder and God's Knowledge," and another at St. Paul's Cathedral, on the "Christian City." Almost every one of the sermons receives some special mention as finer than any other. One of these notices is here given : — We are disposed to assign to Mx. Brooks the rank of the first preacher of the day. Or, if that be too strong a statement, we shall mend it by saying that his printed sermons are the best we have read. They are, without exception, great sermons. Of the fourteen sermons in this volume, it may be said that they are great in all respects. Great in the gravity of their solemn elo- quence, great in the felicity with which word is fitted to thought, and perfect simple expression is given to deep and profound thought, great also in the insight into character, motive, and action, and specially great in the act which poses thought, speech, emotion, into one organic whole. Each sermon stands out clear and vivid before us, perfect in the one simple impression it makes on our mind. It is only as we proceed to analysis that we dis- cover how much complexity and variety have gone to make the unity which is perfect as the unity of a true or of a living organ- ism. There is boundless variety, manifoldness of many sorts, but all held together by a principle of life from within, and not of outward constraint, as staves are held together by means of 472 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 hoops in order to make a barrel. Let our readers get these sermons. Some of the letters of Phillips Brooks are here given, which cover these three months after his return. 233 CiABENDON Stbbkt, Boston, September 24, 1883. Dear old Cooper, — I 've got home ! A thousand thanks for your greeting! I 'm coming to your house! Tuesday afternoon! October 2d ! We had a quiet, happy, sunny voyage in the stead- iest and most comfortable ship I ever sailed in, which, however, does not trouble herself much about speed. But she landed us safe on Saturday afternoon, and the Custom House people chalked my old shirts and trousers, and I was safe in my big bed by eleven o'clock. Yesterday I preached the gospel again, and the people, I am afraid, wondered whether I had not forgotten how. Lemuel Coffin and his wife graced the occasion with their presence. . . . Thank you for telling me about the Ledyards. They were most pleasant and interesting, and added a very great deal to the interest of my voyage. Well, well, next week I shall see you. Look for me on Tues- day afternoon, and you don't know how glad I shall be to set eyes on your dear old face again. Yours ever and ever, P. B. In the following letter Mr. Cooper acknowledges a present from his friend : — 2026 Speucb Street, Philadelphia, St. Guy Fawkes Day, 1883. Dear good Phillips, t— Thanks, heaps upon heaps of thanks, for remembering such an old fogy upon his birthday! Surely you have given such evidences of your love and affection that this beautiful etching was unnecessary; but as you have sent it I have given it the most conspicuous place in my study, and when- ever I shall look at it, I shall be reminded of your generous heart, and of the many years we have known each other, the happiness we have experienced, and never a ripple of discord between us. May God bless you, dear old fellow, and make your remaining years the best and happiest of your whole life. As for me, why, when the seventieth milestone is passed, there can't be many more on the road. Well, it does n't matter much. I know in whom I have believed, and I am sure He will keep that which I have committed to Him against that day. . . . Yours very affectionately, Cooper. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 473 In this letter to Kev. W. W. Newton of Pittsfield is a reference to the Inter-ecclesiastical Church Congress, which Mr. Newton had been interested in organizing : — Deae Willee, — I cannot bear to be thought guilty of " the blank silence of unconcern," and so I must write and tell you that I have your Berkshire Circular, and I wish nothing but good to the Inter-ecclesiastical Church Congress. But I am of no use in such organized movements, nor have I any great faith in them. I think that the more freely the spirit of union works the better, and any attempts to put it into organic shape, or even to give it definition and expression, only do harm. I may be wrong. I probably am. I am not writing in any foolish idea of dissuading you, nor of throwing even a dipperful of cold water on the scheme; only to say why I myself cannot take part in it ; and you will understand me, and if you don't we '11 talk it out the next time you get down your feet before my fire. Meanwhile I wish all good to everything you do, and I am sure of the fine purpose with which you do it. Your old friend, Phillips Brooks. 233 Clabendon Steeet, Boston, November 19, 1883. Deae Aethuk, — I am truly sorry that there is a hitch about Peters's acceptance of the professorship. I should be glad enough to do anything I can to make it possible. As to the money trou- ble I will gladly subscribe $100 a year with others to make up $500 additional salary. He certainly ought not to have to de- pend upon the precarious chances of supply, although I have no doubt that he could have considerable income from that source. Is anything of the nature of a guarantee fund possible ? I see no harm in sending the article to Bishop Stevens. They might as well know beforehand what the general drift ( " trend " as would say) of his instruction is to be. But surely Bishop Stevens has not the choice or rejection in his own hands. My only ob- jection to sending the Article would be that it might seem to recognize a right on his part to a larger share in the selection than belongs to each of the other overseers. You will know best about this. I do sincerely hope that such a man may not slip through our fingers. They had better have lived in huts forever and had money enough to pay first-class professors. 233 Clabekdon Stbeet, Boston, November 27, 1883. Deae Arthue, — Thank you for your note. You must let me contribute this check to the Washburn Book fund, in which I 474 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 am very much interested, but of which I never happen to think just at the right moment to send money. I rather like to give the Luther money in memory of Washburn, and for the sending of liberal books to Episcopal parsons. There seems to be a sort of fitness in it all round. If you vrill send me some of the Cir- culars, I '11 try to put them where they '11 do the most good. I have heard from the Evangelical Alliance wanting the Luther Manuscript, which I shall send, but I suppose it will do to let what I had written about Luther's life stand instead of the epit- ome of it, which I tried to extemporize on that tumultuous even- ing. I am glad you liked [Eev. Endicott] Peabody and his plan of a school at Groton. I have hopes that he will make a school quite as good as St. Paul's, without its drawbacks. To the Rev. G. A. Strong: — 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, December 6, 1888. Dear Geokge, — What a wretch I have been to get home here and go to work and think a thousand times of you, wander- ing about in those delightful places and never once send a word to tell you how glad I am that you are having such a splendid time. Almost three months now since I had to make up my mind that we were not to meet in England, and turned my face homeward. I should not like to have the people here know how restless I am, and how hard it is to get to work again. But in- deed it is only a few weeks since I have really been able to count myself thoroughly settled in the old life. Just after I got home there came the General Convention, which was weary beyond all description so far as its public business was concerned, though there were many pleasant social things connected with it. I saw much of Richards, which, of course, I enjoyed immensely. You would have liked to be at the breakfast of the Alexandria semi- nary men, where Potter and Charles Richards and Paddock and I represented pretty much all there was of our time. Dr. Pack- ard was there. Then we all went up to Henry Potter's conse- cration, which was very long and gorgeous, and by and by the Prayer Book got revised and the dreary convention adjourned, and we all came home. Sometimes I shut my eyes, and it seems ridiculously impossible that there is really a sermon to write for next Sunday, or that Wednesday evening lectures have begun again. London and Berlin and Delhi seem so much more real than Boston. Oh, I envy your being abroad, and I pity your coming home! ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 475 Mention has been made of the project to translate the "Lectures on Preaching" into French. In the correspond- ence between Mr. Brooks and M. Nyegaard, we find the translator occasionally puzzled with an English idiom. Here is one which Mr. Brooks explains : — To "shoot without a rest " means, in our American vernacular, to fire a gun ■without leaning it on any support, with only the steadiness of the hand to hold it. In this sense it was used by the backwoodsman to describe the Bishop's preaching without a manuscript. "To shoot" is to fire a gun. "A rest" is a support, or something for the gun to rest upon. I remember wondering, when you first told me of your intention to translate the Book, whether this particular anecdote might not give you trouble. If you desire to consult me on this or any other point, I shall be very glad to hear from you. I am much interested in the account of your "Caf^ de tempe- rance." I shall be glad to hear of its success and usefulness. That you are wholly right in opening it on Sundays, and in al- lowing the use of cards, I do not doubt in the least. On receiving a copy of the translation, Mr. Brooks wrote this letter : — 233 Claeendon Stbbbt, Boston, December 7, 1883. Mt dear M. Nyegaard, — I have just received the two copies of the "Conferences sur la Predication " which you have kindly sent me, for which I thank you very heartily. I am sure I need not tell you that I value very highly the care and thought and labor which you have so generously bestowed upon my book. I wish the book to which you have given so much time were wor- thier of the pains which you have lavished on it. I fear there may be people who will say, "Materiam superabat opus." But, none the less, I thank you, and if any help or encouragement should come to any preacher in your country through this book, I shall feel that it is to you more than to me that the credit will belong. It is very strange to read one's own words in a foreign tongue. It is almost as if one's image in a mirror took a voice and spoke to one. The words are familiar and yet strange, and thoughts seem sometimes to put on new shades of meaning along with their new forms of expression. I have found myself reading my own book quite through with the attraction of the new interest which it gained from the new form. I have no right to speak about the merit of your work. I am too poor a French scholar to make 476 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 my opinion of any value. I can only say that I have found it very smooth and easy reading. I do not doubt that critics who are competent to judge will find abundant reason to approve and praise the way in which the work of the translator has been done. I ought, perhaps, to mention two slight inaccuracies in your Preface. Although I believe I was the first, I have not been the only American preacher who has occupied the pulpit of West- minster Abbey. Several have preached there since my first ser- mon. And I did preach at Windsor Castle a few years ago, on the only occasion on which I have been invited. When will you come to America and be my guest, and let me thani you personally for what you have done ? I beg you to be- lieve you will be always welcome. With the assurance of my kind regard, believe me always. Yours most sincerely, Phillips Bkooks. Should you see any notices, favorable or unfavorable, of my book, pray send them to me. In a letter to Eev. Dr. W. N. McVickar, he speaks of the forty-eighth birthday : — December 17, 1883. Dear William, — It was delightfully kind of you and your sister to remember that I was forty-eight last Thursday, and to send me this delicious little token of your good wishes, which I received to-day. Your kindness and the beauty of your little lamp almost reconciled me to the sadness of the event. The day passed calmly. There was no salute upon the Common nor any special form of prayer put forth by the Bishop; but Jim and Sallie came up from Salem and dined with me at my brother's, and we made believe it was good fun to be forty-eight years old. Wait till you try it, my good fellow, and see how you like it, to have your golden bowl and pitcher in this dilapidated condition. But how lovely this lamp is. I long to have the 20th of Jan- uary come, that you may see how it has taken its place at once as the central glory of my house. I shall smoke myself to death for the mere pleasure of lighting my cigars. But lovelier than all its loveliness it is that you should have thought how old I was, and should have cared that I should enter on a new stage of my pilgrimage with your blessing. The 20th ! Already we are getting the city ready for you, and you don't know how eagerly we shall welcome you. You know that I expect you both to preach for me on the following ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 477 Sunday, and shall not take No! You must ask Cooper whether he would rather take the afternoon or morning, and you will take the other certainly. A Merry Christmas to you all ! P. B. To Eev. Mr. Lefroy of Delhi: — 233 Clarkkdon Street, Boston, December 19, 1883. Dbae Me. Leskoy, — Your kind note "has lain too long unan- swered. If you knew how glad I was to get it, and how many times I have meant to tell you so, you would forgive me. I am at work again, however, and quite well, and every day I see your picture, which is on my study table, and think of your work, and it makes me stronger for my own. Boston is not as bad as Delhi, but, indeed, it is heathen enough; and though I am im- mensely fond of it, I never realized till I got home this time how much there was to be done in it to make it a true Christian town. But the work is delightful in Delhi or in Boston, and we do not work alone. You cannot tell how constantly I go over all the days of last winter, and especially the happy days in your mission. Only last week my box arrived from Calcutta, and I saw again the queer things which I bought in those hot January days on your veranda. It was great fun to look them over and think how different the snowstorm in our streets was from the sunlight on your field, where you tried to drown out the ants. Tell me, are the Maconachies in Delhi still, and have they forgiven the wan- dering Yankees who came and turned them out into the yard? Do give them my best love. How I should like to get all the old company together to-night in my small Rectory. I will send you a picture of it, so that you may all know where to come when you come to Boston. I will send you my church, too; of myself I have no picture. If you really want one I will send one, if I ever submit to the photographer again. You are just now welcoming your friends who will reinforce your strength. I congratulate you on the new life which will fill your house. If you want another, send for me and I will come ! Meanwhile I ventured the other day to give a note to you to an old friend and college classmate of mine, Professor Agassiz, one of our first naturalists. I shall always rejoice to hear from you. Remember me most kindly to Mr. Allnut and Mr. Carlyon. May all best blessings be with you and your work. Your friend, Phillips Bbooks. 478 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 December 23, 1883. Dear John and Hattde, — Just as I came home from Sun- day evening service here arrives a Sabbath-breaking express boy with my lovely owl. I must sit down at once and thank you for him, and tell you how delightfully he looks in his new home, and how he seems not to miss Wiesbaden the least bit in the world. As to his not being anything but a reproduction, I don't believe a word of it. He is an original, I know ! If he could speak, he would tell how Caius Julius Caesar drank Rhine wine out of him in the Bello Gallico; and he surely has a wisdom in his stocky form and out to the tips of his two head-wings which no- thing but eighteen hundred years of meditation under ground could give. Here follow a few extracts from the note-book kept on board ship, as he was returning to America : — One feels there is great danger in the present attitude of mul- titudes of English people towards Christianity, accepting it with- out facing its problems, as the religion of their people, dwelling on its beautiful or comfortable features, and almost ready to resent as simply disturbing and unnecessary any effort to make its statements more reasonable. Not so common among us. It is closely mixed up with the loyalty and practicalness and insti- tutionalism of the Englishman. The other temper also there. Tou ride along in a railroad train racing with another which runs parallel to yours, — the other train is going faster ; if you look at it you seem not merely to be going slower, but to be going the other way, backwards. But turn and look at the fixed land- scape, and you see that you are making no mean speed. So of the rates of progress in thought. As on shipboard particular care is taken against fire, not be- cause it is most likely, but because its consequences would be most terrible, so of unbelief in religious things. Let us never disparage the value of certain and sure belief about truth. Whatever compensations may come in its absence and delay, it is nevertheless, and we can never forget that it is, the ultimate purpose and ambition of the human soul, until it reaches which, it never can be satisfied. Sermon on the great revelation of the Immanence of God in these days. ^T. 47] RETURN TO BOSTON 479 The fallacy of thinking there ever was a time of fixed, unchan- ging religious ideas. All ages, ages of change ; ours not pecul- iar; fears in all. As Columbus sailed to find the Old World and found the New, so possibly a reaction (like the Puseyite) may help the progress of truth. Putting wood on fire and having it become dry and hot all through, then burst into a fiame, so of missions or conversions. The ocean, ever defeated by man, and never conquered. The perpetual presence behind our life, with its temporary im- pulses, of God and His life. How old things may pass away without all things becoming new. As useless and provoking as it is to have one of those matches which won't light without the box, and you haven't got the box. No sooner done than said. French talk of a man having the danger of his qualities. Like the long zigzags up the hills, always coming back into sight of the same points, but viewing them from higher points, — so of theological progress. All the attractions of the world are of two kinds, — those made by true cohesion, and those made by outside motives, whether of pressure or of vacancy. "Thou shalt tread upon the Lion and Adder; the young Lion and Dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet;" "The sun shall not be Thy light by day," etc., — the universal Eastern pray- Text : He was wandering in the field, and the man asked him saying, "What seekest thou ? " And he said, "I seek my bre- thren; tell me, I pray thee, where they feed their flocks." The lonely soul wandering in doubt and personal experience, and crav- ing the familiar ways of other souls which may be the very thing that will be his death. The time for confirmation, I think, is not childhood, when others think for us ; not middle age, when life grows weary, but just at the time when obedience to authority changes into per- sonal responsibility, — in the period of youth when life is fresh 480 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1883 and untried, but the way has to be trodden and the traveller just setting out needs a guide and a helper. Sermon on the old man's poetry, — the way in which the ro- mance and picturesqueness of life ought to increase for him as he grows older. The way in which it often is not so. Pity if the joy of life were mere animal spirits. The hope of the Eternal. Sermon on "Like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city. " Describe (1) the hopeless clutching after the dream when you wake up. It was so real an instant ago, and now you cannot even tell what it was about. The moment's struggle to remem- ber, then the rising and going about one's work. The image' vanishing out of the city is first, in the simple Jewish sense, dying. The moment's remembrance of such a man; sometimes the thought of him flashes vaguely across people's work, but they go their way without him. Apply (2) to the remembrance of people, and the many expedients of people to maintain it. Apply (3) to the preservation of influence. The unvanished image of forgotten men. It is in our city now. The three kinds of im- mortality, Personal, Memorial, Influential. When I see how the real difficulty of multitudes of bewildered men is not this or that unsolved problem, but the whole incapa- city of comprehending God; when I see this, I understand how the best boon that God can give to any group of men must often be to take one of them and, bearing witness of Himself to him, set him to bearing that witness of the Lord to his brethren, which only a man surrounded and filled with God can bear. The following passage is significant for the development of Phillips Brooks and might be taken as a motto for his later years : — "The Beauty of Holiness." It seems as if the Good Taste of Goodness, the ugliness of sin, while it cannot be used as the first creative motive for a new life, must certainly come in by and by to certify and assure the work which conscience and obedience to the Law of God have done. Brought in at first it must create a feeble moral sestheticism and be fruitful in false and conven- tional standards. But it may apparently be recognized and en- forced sooner with reference to the conditions of the world and society at large than with reference to the individual. CHAPTEE XVI 1869-1892 THEOLOGY. TENDENCIES OF THE AGE. FKEEDOM OF IN- QUIRY. AUTHOEITY AND CONSCIENCE. ORTHODOXY. FKEEDOM THROUGH DOGMA. PROGRESS. TOLERANCE. THE NEW THEOLOGY. DANGERS OF FREEDOM. THE BIBLE. THE PRAYER BOOK. CREEDS. ANGLICANISM. THE INCARNATION. THE TRINITY. THE NEW THEISM. PANTHEISM. MIRACLES. SIN. ENDLESS PUNISHMENT. THE ATONEMENT. EMPHASIS ON THE WILL. SUPER- NATURAL EXISTENCES. MYSTICISM. MORALITY The decade of the eighties was marked by efforts at theo- logical reconstruction. Of course, no exact limits can be put for movements in the world of religious thought. Such movements have a fashion of beginning before they began and of going on after they are over. But if we may here repeat, for the sake of emphasis, what has already been said, it is true, speaking in a general way, that the age of reli- gious doubt and of disaffection within the churches toward dogmas and creeds dates from about the middle of the nine- teenth century. Those who were then young men and after- wards rose to prominence had, for the most part, felt this mood. To escape into a larger freedom from the limitations of an inadequate theology was their aim. The question of subscription to religious formulas was then a subject of anx- ious interest, which each man must determine for himself. Of this experience the story is told in the biographies of Maurice and Robertson, Erskine, Ewing, Stanley, Kingsley, Tait, Jowett, and many others. Maurice was then the strongest force in the English-speaking world, but Eobertson VOL. n 482 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 was the man who brought the greatest relief. Both Maurice and Kobertson were reinforced by Tennyson, of whose "In Memoriam " it has been often said that it was the most influ- ential theological work of the age. But Tennyson carried the appeal to the feelings. There was a work still to be done by the intellect, and by criticism, in collating the results of science and of Biblical research, in comparing and estimating the products of thought which had been working over the old dogmas, especially in the depart- ment of historical theology. A new impetus had been given to historical research, in the application of the principle of development. In the book "Essays and Keviews," which appeared in England in 1860, the effort was made to bring these issues together and acquaint the English mind with re- sults which had been accomplished. The principle of devel- opment, the antiquity of man and the popular chronology, science and the miracle, the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the true nature of prophecy, in a word, the results of German investigation ; the doctrines also of atonement and of endless punishment, — these all came up for discussion in "Essays and Reviews." Its authors had determined, each for himself, to speak freely, with the result that consternation followed in those circles where free inquiry had not penetrated. Two of the writers were brought to trial before the English courts, — Mr. Wil- liams for denying the doctrine of verbal inspiration, and Mr. Wilson for denying the doctrine of endless punishment, — and both were acquitted. It was then affirmed (1864) by the Judicial Committee of Privy Council that the Church of Eng- land, while maintaining the inspiration of Scripture, gave no theory of inspiration, and that to indulge the hope of the final restoration of all the wicked did not contravene her formula- ries. The manifest object of the decision was to secure for the Church of England the largest freedom to theological In- quiry, and as such it must be regarded as most significant. The formula of subscription to the Articles was also modified, relaxed, as it seemed to many, and a general statement of acquiescence in the doctrines of the Church took the place of JET. 33-56] THEOLOGY 483 the more stringent form calling for agreement with each and every article. Hardly had the freedom been gained for which many had striven and longed, when it seemed to lose its value and be- come of no avail in the severer crisis that followed, — in the seventies, when Darwin's name became supreme in the scientific world, when Tyndall, as in 1874, gave his famous Belfast address, where h6 deified matter as the promise and potency of life, and when, for a moment, it seemed as if science had the church at its mercy. The physical or me- chanical theory of the universe, as then presented by Spencer, the discrediting of miracles, the disbelief in the efficacy of prayer, the doubt or the denial of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, — these were the subjects then agitating the mind of the church, casting theological formulas, for the time, into the background. But with the eighties there came another change. Philosophers and theologians, despite the difficulties they encountered in the conflict with science, and despite their many weak and apparently futile efforts, whether at resistance or at reconciliation, had not struggled in vain. The spiritual interpretation of the uni- verse began slowly to show its superiority over the material. The remarkable controversy in 1884, between Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Frederic Harrison, revealed at least that the situation had changed. The tide of religious doubt, which had threatened to remove the foundations of religious belief, was at last retreating. The worst of the danger was over. Years so recent as the eighties cannot yet be regarded as affording material for history, but they may be chronicled. Recent as they are, they have been quickly forgotten by many under the agitations which have marked the close of the nineteenth century. The foremost characteristic of these years was the widespread realization, within the churches, of freedom to revert again to creeds and dogmas, and attempt the reconstruction of theology. In the many books that ap- peared, the questions, whose discussion had only been posV poned, came up for a rehearing, — inspiration and revela- 484 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 tion, the right use of the Bible, the doctrines of atonement and incarnation, the dogma of endless punishment. A few of these books maybe mentioned: Mulford's "Eepublic of God," Munger's "Freedom of Faith," Newman Smith's "Old Faiths in a New Light," Newton's "Use of the Bible," and "Progressive Orthodoxy," by Professor Smyth and others. Mr. John Fiske contributed a valuable essay, which, coming from a distinguished exponent of Spencer's philosophy, was significant, — the "Idea of God," where the effort was made to reconcile with science the doctrine of the Divine Imma- nence. In England, from the younger school of the followers of Dr. Pusey, there came "Lux Mundi," with restatements of the doctrines of the incarnation, the atonement, and in- spiration. It was characteristic of these many efforts to recommend the church and Christianity to the modern mind, that they accepted the principle of development in theology. But, on the other hand, those now began to speak, who ad- vocated the retention of the old dogmas unchanged in their statement, uninfluenced by any touch of the modern life. What position did Phillips Brooks take in this era of creative theological activity, of confusion also, and of contro- versy ? As we study his work, it will be apparent that what he stood for was most characteristic of the man, most impor- tant also, when these years shall come up for more deliberate valuation. In his book "The Influence of Jesus," he had already made a contribution to theology of the highest im- portance ; indeed no more important or influential utterance in theology either preceded or followed it. He did not now write any treatise which can be construed as a direct con- sideration of the question, — in what way religious recon- struction must proceed, what were to be its methods or its limits, or what its results. But he read the books of im- portance as they appeared; always an interested spectator of what went on around him. In his own way he took frequent occasion to speak his mind. When he spoke, it was with force and directness, with the tone of mastery and authority. He felt a sense of responsibility to the church and to the world. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 485 In considering subjects which come before us, we may allow a multitude of complicated circumstances to distract our mind, but as soon as anything seems to be of great importance it lays hold of the sense of responsibility within us and becomes abso- lutely simple. These words of Phillips Brooks, in one of his occasional addresses, give us the man and his method. In everything he said during these eventful years there is the air of so- lemnity, the sense of responsibility, as of one who carried the burden of his contemporaries, and was accountable for every utterance to the supreme tribunal of humanity. One thing he fastened upon as absolutely simple and of the highest significance amid all complications, — the grandeur of the moment which had brought liberty and freedom of inquiry to the modem world. With regard to all advances in theology, whether by the race at large or by the single thinker, there are one or two observa- tions which may be made, and which, it seems to me, ought con- stantly to be kept in mind in times like these, when the world of theological thought is so full of free activity. For the first time in many centuries the hand of external restraint is abso- lutely taken off from theological thinking. Neither painful pen- alties nor social disesteem — hardly, except in the extremest cases, even ecclesiastical reproof — will attach themselves to free speculation in theology. To many people this state of things seems full of danger. To many others it seems full of hope. But those who hope the most from it must be supremely anxious that those who feel the spirit of the age should feel it worthily, and move from conviction to conviction, not lightly and frivo- lously, but seriously and calmly, always valuing each special movement only as a stage in the long, never-forgotten search of the soul after the perfect truth and God.^ 1883. We have seen during all these years a deepening of the reli- gious thought of our people. We have seen God lead us into those broad fields of speculation where we once thought it was unwise or unsafe to go. We have seen the books of criticism opened and examined freely. We have seen those things which seemed essential to Christianity again and again shown to be 1 Cf . Essays and Addresses, p. 227. 486 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 incidental to Christianity. "We have seen how absolutely simple Christianity is.* 1885. If I were to group together all the things that I have tried to picture to you, — and remember that religion is nothing in the world but the highest conception of life, — the word that is to express this all, the word that is to carry forward men as they come to believe in it, what shall it be? In every department of life, whether I look at politics, at government, at social life, and the relation of ethics thereto, whether I look at religion, there is only one word that expresses the cord that binds the human race : that word is sympathy. Present and past religion seems to have been developing conditions under which sympathy- might work. The characteristic word of the past hundred years has been Liberty. Liberty is a negative term, — the removal of obstacles, the setting free of conditions under which the essential and absolute and positive power of sympathy, of the relation of man to man under the recognition of their brotherhood, should find its place and expression.' 1889. There are three things which constitute the characteristics of the religion of our time: its greater humanness extends what it believes to every man ; its larger conception of sanctity finds its operation in fields that used to be counted secular; and its conception of work, of labor to be carried on and of effect pro- duced, finds expression in its practical activities.' 1889. In the largest survey we can take of Mr. Brooks's the- ological position, he appears as solicitous that the freedom of inquiry, which has been gained, shall not be imperilled by the dangers that wait on liberty. Against the dogmatist, on the one hand, who denied individual freedom and asserted the claims of an external authority, and against the individ- ualist, on the other, who rejected the past as having no claim on the reverence of the present age, he waged equal war. It is hard to say which position was most obnoxious to him. He would fain mediate between them. His first impulse was controversial, 'but the sober second thought prevailed, to keep him out of controversy. It has been already remarked, and more than once, for the point is an 1 Cf . Essays and Addresses, p. 148. 2 Cf. Ibid. p. 176. 8 Cf. Ibid. p. 174. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 487 important one, that in his preaching his constitutional re- serve disappeared, and he gave his whole heart to the people. But, in doing so, he still obeyed the laws of the preacher's art, and kept out of sight the reminders of controversial the- ology. While they were in his consciousness and affected him in the preparation of every utterance, yet in the completed product his treatment is so impersonal that one might ima- gine he had never heard of their existence. There were occasions, however, when he yielded to the first impulse, and let himself go with the full force of his nature, against what he believed to be false in theology. Then he was like the cyclone in his destructive power. He gave vent to his gift of saying things in perfect form, — epigrammatic sentences which linger in the memory as axioms. These occasions were rare, — meetings of the Church Congress, essays at the Clericus Club, and one mem- orable occasion, to be mentioned in a later chapter. Thus, in 1884, in a paper on Authority and Conscience, read before the Church Congress, which met at Detroit, he denounced the principle that external authority was the ground of reli- gious faith, or that it afforded any basis for certitude, or carried any moral or spiritual value. Such a principle would kill faith and the Christian church altogether, for the mere assent which it demanded had in it nothing of the nature of faith. He passed in review the career of Newman, the grounds of High Anglicanism, the Vincentian canon, the claims of what some had called the "cECumenical mind." The theory that the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries were infallible, and had given final limits to the human mind in theological inquiry, he dismissed with the remark that any dangers which the Church might have to encounter by making conscience and free inquiry her guides, even with the possibility of error, — these " dangers are alive and hope- ful in comparison with the dead and hopeless dangers of a church which, under the strong power of authority, commits itself to a half -developed, a half -recorded, and a half -under- stood past." ^ 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 118. 488 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 But, in the midst of this invective, he could not be one- sided or allow the comprehensiveness of his intellectual and spiritual outlook to disappear. He advocated individualism and private judgment as the final court of appeal, but in so doing sought to reconcile them with authority. There was this truth " in the current laudations of authority and depre- cations of individualism: " — The individual does not stand alone. Backed by the past, surrounded by the present, with the world beside him, nay, with the world, in the great old Bible phrase, "set in his heart," it is his right, his duty, his necessity, to feed himself out of all, while yet to his own personal conscience must come the final test. The true individualism is not the individualism of Eobinson Crusoe, but the individualism of St. Paul. . . , To use author- ity for evidence ; to feel the power of reverend beauty which be- longs to ancient goodness; to distrust ourselves long when we differ from the wisest and the best; to know that the whole truth can and must come, not to the one man, but to the whole of humanity; and to listen to that whole as it groans and travails with its yet unmastered truth — to do all this, and yet to let ourselves call no conviction ours till oxa own mind and conscience has accepted it as true — that which is really the great human truth after which the theories of Church authority are searching, • — that is the genuine relation, I take it, of the conscience to authority. And that has nothing in it of the spirit of slavish- ness or death. There is another essay entitled "Orthodoxy," resembling in its tone the essay on Authority and Conscience, but even more severe in its arraignment of the principle of authority, when applied in an exclusive way, without the corrective of individual responsibility or of the freedom of private judg- ment. The essay on Orthodoxy was read before the Clericus Club in 1890. It differs from the earlier essay, in that it was not written with a view to publication. There is humor here, and satire. He notes that the word "Kakodoxy," which the old Fathers coined as the opposite of "Ortho- doxy," a "delightful word" he calls it, has not maintained its place, but has yielded to "heresy," which indicates the more personal element. His comments on the "spirit of orthodoxy" are these: (1) It makes much use and wrong MT. 33-56] THEOLOGY 489 use of the principle of authority; (2) it is haunted and hin- dered by the sense of the need of immediate utility of truths ; (3) it associates itself with the idea of unity, and regards the spirit of freedom, the personal search for truth as dis- turbing the unity of the church; (4) it is inspired by the notion of safety ; (5) it satisfies the disposition which is very strong in many natures, the desire for fixity. On all these points he comments at some length. He satirizes the desire for safety as "singing the timid psalm of the man who is thankful for the refuge of orthodoxy, — ' Thou hast set my feet in a small room.' " In regard to the disturbance of the church, which was the complaint made of those who were engaged in the personal search for truth, he felt strongly and expressed himself with vigor. He had denounced publicly and privately the silen- cing of a clergyman, who had been giving a course of lectures on the Bible, because it created disturbance. He criticised much of the speculation of religious writers at the time as beset by this consideration, — fear of disturbing the peace of the church : — Here is the essential limitation, both of the interest and the importance of two much-read and much-talked-of books of our own day. The authors of "Lux Mundi " and the writers of "Progressive Orthodoxy " alike are asking not simply what is absolutely true, but what can be reconciled to certain preBstab- lisbed standards of unity, outside of which they must not go. This makes the unsatisfactoriness of both the books. They have no primary or intrinsic value. They are uninteresting except as considered in relation to the positions of their authors. They are rather psychological studies than investigations of truth. All such secondary questions besetting an argument or exposition destroy its reality, and make even the unity which it tries to pre- serve an artificial thing, a mere modus vivendi of parties, con- scious of but trying to conceal discordance rather than a true harmony of frankly differing but sympathetic minds. In his criticism of orthodoxy, Phillips Brooks was not combating formulas or articles of faith which go under that designation. There is no evidence that he rejected any of the decisions of councils to which his Church had lent her 490 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 sanction. He is not known by the denial of any article of the creeds, or as giving his approval to any attitude in his- torical theology which the church of the past had condemned as false. In this sense of the word he was orthodox. What he was resisting was a tendency in the use of the word "or- thodoxy" to condemn free inquiry, or the duty of private judgment. But even while opposing what he felt was at war with the interests of truth, he yet strove to be fair, to recognize the good there was or might be in an attitude with which he had no sympathy. It is important to let him speak here for himself : — Orthodoxy is, in the Church, very much what prejudice is in the single mind. It is the premature conceit of certainty. It is the treatment of the imperfect as if it were the perfect. And yet pre- judice is not to be ruthlessly denounced. It is not only to be ac- cepted as inevitable ; it, or that for which it stands, is to be ac- knowledged as indispensable. If prejudice can only be kept open for revision and enlargement, if it can be always aware of its par- tialness and imperfection, then it becomes simply a point of depar- ture for newer worlds of thought and action, or, we may say, a working hypothesis, which is one stage of the progress toward truth. It is possible to think of orthodoxy in that way, and then it clearly manifests its uses. It does beyond all doubt put into forms of immediate effectiveness great truths which in their large conception seem to stand so far away, and so to wait for their full revelation, that they are hard to apply to present life. It does no doubt seem to make capable of transportation and transmission truths which in their deeper spirituality it is not easy to think of except as the sacred and secret possession of the individual soul. It has no doubt served to carry the Church over, as it were, some of those periods of depressed and weakened vitality which come between the exalted and spontaneous conditions which are its true life. The same service, perhaps, it renders also to the personal experience, bridging the sad chasms between the rock of belief on this side and the rock of belief on that side with the wooden structure of conformity. These, briefly stated, are the uses of orthodoxy. Against these meagre uses are to be set the vastly predominant evil which the whole principle of orthodoxy brings to personal freedom and reality on one side, and to the purity and extension of truth upon the other. The indictment which can be sustained against it is ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 491 tremendous. Orthodoxy begins by setting a false standard of life. It makes men aspire after soundness in the faith rather than after richness in the truth. It exalts possessions over char- acter, makes more of truths than of truthfulness, talks about truths as if they were things which were quite separated from the truth-holder, things which he might take in his hand and pass to his neighbor without their passing into and through his nature. It makes possible an easy transmission of truth, but only by the deadening of truth, as a butcher freezes meat in order to carry it across the sea. Orthodoxy discredits and discourages inquiry, and has made the name of "free-thinker," which ought to be a crown and glory, a stigma of disgrace. It puts men in the base and demoralizing position in which they apologize for seeking new truth. It is responsible for a large part of the defiant liberalism which not merely disbelieves the orthodox dogma, but disbelieves it with a sense of attempted wrong and of triumphant escape. It is orthodoxy, and not truth, which has done the persecuting. The inquisitions and dungeons and social ostracisms for opinion's sake belong to it. And in the truths which it holds it loses dis- crimination and delicate sense of values, holding them not for their truth so much as for their use or their safety ; it gives them a rude and general identity, and misses the subtle difference which makes each truth separate from every other. Orthodoxy deals in coarse averages. It makes of the world of truth a sort of dollar-store, wherein a few things are rated below their real value for the sake of making a host of other things pass for more than they are worth, and in the lives of those who live by it orthodoxy makes no appeal to poetry or imagination. There, too, it delights in the average condition. It would maintain the sea of belief and emotion at one fixed level. It would give no place on one hand to great floods of fulness which uplift the soul, nor on the other to pathetic periods of ebb and emptiness which lay bare its deepest, most unsatisfied desires. It has its own tumults of the lower sort, — tumults of envy and contempt, of suspicion and dislike, which it stirs in human minds, but the loftiest and profoundest passions and struggles it catches sight of only to shudder at and denounce. These are the evil things which the spirit of orthodoxy does and is, all of which sum them- selves up in this, — that it is bom of fear, and has no natural heritage either from hope or love.^ At the opposite extreme from the ecclesiastical temper, with its devotion to dogma, stood the so-called Liberal 1 Ussays and Addresses, pp. 193-195. 492 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 school, and the Free Religionists, who regarded freedom as attainable only by the rejection of dogma. But from this attitude Phillips Brooks diverged as widely and deeply as from the ecclesiastical attitude. He, too, was free, — and this was what puzzled and confused many of his contempora- ries, — he could stand in a pulpit of the Episcopal Church, speaking forth with all boldness, no man hindering him, the living truths which their own souls hungered after and eagerly welcomed, unhampered by dogmas and traditions, apparently more free than they were. They could draw only one inference, — like themselves, he must have attained his freedom by the abandonment of ecclesiastical dogmas and traditions. But then came the question. How could he re- main in the Episcopal Church, with its Creeds and Articles of Religion? They could not impugn his honor or sincerity, for these were the most transparent qualities in his nature, and his sincerity and simplicity were manifestly sources of his power. The only alternative was to discredit his intel- lectual capacity. It was also said that he was so absorbed with the supreme motive of love for humanity, that he gave no thought to these things with which other men were con- cerned. Some of these expressions of opinion regarding him are here given : — He was not, in the ordinary sense of that word, a thinker, a logician. He never argues, he never attempts to establish a cer- tain position, to controvert the position of another. He is not a logician; he is not, in that sense, a teacher. He seems to have had no sort of interest in theological debates, theological distinctions or questions of any kind. He seems to have been entirely unaffected, consciously at any rate, by modern criticism, for example, the authenticity and authorship of Biblical books, the question of miracle, the natural and the supernatural. All these questions he put on one side. He did not care for them. His mental make-up did not lead him to become interested in them. A distinguished Unitarian clergyman, who held Phillips Brooks in high esteem, says of him : — He was not a theologian, as Jesus was not. . . . Had he been a man of an intellectual cast, he might have wavered in his faith. Mr. 33-56] THEOLOGY 493 ... I am not sure that, through his love of man, this preacher ■was always strictly consistent in all his words and acts. Few who maintain the orthodox view nowadays are consistent. They axe apt to be larger than their creeds. . . . His intellectual lim- itations defended and favored him in his peculiar office. Had he been more profound and philosophic as a thinker, he might have lost something of clearness in his vision. . . . Some of his fellow churchmen dreaded him for his breadth of view and feeling ; and some of us, for these, would have claimed him as a Unitarian. Well, he was Unitarian in his assertion of mental freedom. In these extracts there is contained the implication that religious and intellectual freedom is only to be gained by the rejection of tradition and dogma. That was one of the com- monplaces of "liberal religion." But it was the character- istic of Phillips Brooks that he stood above the sphere of the commonplace, whether in ecclesiasticism or in liberalism. He was cast in a very different mould. He had attained his freedom through dogma, not by its rejection, and dogma continued to minister to his freedom. This is one of the secrets of his power, of his superiority, of his universality. He had a larger freedom than those who rejected tradition, for they were free to move only in one direction, and he was free to move in every direction. Such freedom, so rare, so unparalleled, had come to him by the secret he had learned when he was preparing his soul for his work, — the power of appropriating dogma by translating it into terms of life. Only a man of the highest intellectual capacity was capable of such a process. Let Phillips Brooks speak on this point for himself. In a preface which he wrote for a little book compiled from the writings of Maurice called "Truth and Action," he says: — The days in which we live are a good deal given to contempt for theology. In this great teacher of our day there was a noble rebuke and protest against that feeble and enfeebling scorn. He was altogether a theologian. For him all knowledge which de- served the name of knowledge was theology. Our weak way of talking about dogma as an excrescence and encumbrance found no tolerance with him. He was no dogmatist, but he got rid of dead dogmas, not by burying them or burning them, but by filling them with life. 494 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 In his note-book for 1882 are to be found these hints : — A serious sermon on Dogma. What difference it really does make whether men believe these things ; whether they should teach them to others ; whether character has relations to belief ; what it all has to do with destiny. The justification of the belief that all men have always had of the Importance of believing. This same principle is stated often in his earlier writings, in his "Lectures on Preaching" and in "The Influence of Jesus." In 1884, in his address on Authority and Con- science, he repeats it : — Authority is the ship in which the dogma sails. I get my dogma from authority, as I get my package from the ship. But it is the soul, the conscience, which turns the dogma back again to truth. No soul can feed on dogma, as no man can eat the package which is landed on the wharf. Authority may bring what dogma has been given it to bring. Only the dogma which can be opened into truth can live. Only the truth which the soul appropriates gives life. Authority is responsible for safe packing and safe transportation, but the real living part of the process is when, after the unpacking has taken place, the conscience tries to turn the dogma which it has received back again into truth. ^ And again, so late as 1890, there is evidence that on this point his conviction had not changed : — And what is another question that is before us perpetually? It is the question of the separation of dogma and life. Men are driven foolishly to say on one side that dogma is everything, and on the other that life is everything. As if there could be any life that did not spring out of truth! As if there could be any truth that was really felt that did not manifest itself in life! It is not by doctrine becoming less earnest in filling itself with all the purity of God ; it is only by both dogma and life, doc- trine and life, becoming vitalized through and through, that they shall reach after and find another. Only when things are alive do they reach out for the fulness of their life and claim that which belongs to them.^ The explanation of Phillips Brooks's development, which gave him this method of attaining the highest and largest freedom possible to man, has been already shown, as we 1 Cf. Msays and Addresses, p. 114. - Cf. Ibid. p. 181. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 495 have traced the process of his growth from boyhood. His love for humanity included the past as well as the present. He assumed as an axiom, borne out by his knowledge of life and history, that freedom was the end of human existence, for which it was seen toiling in every age. He built upon this presumption as the corner-stone of his religious philoso- phy, that dogmas had not been fastened upon the church for the purpose of limiting the freedom of man, but rather for enlarging and securing it. History became unintelligible upon any other basis, and in the history of humanity his soul delighted, as "bringing him at every point the confirma- tion of the Divine revelation. In one sense he was not a dogmatic preacher, defending in the pulpit ecclesiastical doc- trines. Yet, on the other hand, the hidden motive and inspi- ration of many, if not most, of his sermons was some recondite aspect of dogma, into whose meaning he had penetrated, and in so doing, caught fresh confirmation of the higher possi- bilities in humanity. But it was his method to conceal the process in his own mind, and to make such a doctrine glow with life and beauty as to charm his hearers, till it seemed like a new truth. And there was this further peculiarity about him, that he would not discuss doctrines, as mere opin- ions. When that kind of talk went on he was silent. But let him gain a new glimpse of some relation between the doctrine and life, and then his whole nature would be stirred to its very depths. And it must still further be said, that he was constantly revolving these doctrines of the church in his mind. They were never absent from his consciousness at home or abroad. They constituted his mental furniture, the conditions of all his thinking. They had been drilled into him from his childhood, as had the hymns which he had learned to repeat on Sunday evenings, as a boy at home. For three years he had devoted himself to studying their deeper meaning in the theological school. For the first ten years of his ministry it had been his highest enjoyment to review the whole field of doctrines, interpreting them in terms of life, and in so doing had laid the foundation of his fame and power as a preacher. 496 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 Enough has been said to show that Phillips Brooks was not quite the man that he was assumed to be by those whose motive it was that liberty was to be attained by the negation of the historic faith. His view of progress and the method of progress, also differed from the popular conception. Pro- gress was a great word with him, constantly on his lips, and the idea for which it stood inspired him with hope and enthu- siasm. He could not separate his conviction of progress from his faith in humanity. But he felt that true progress was endangered by a tendency to regard it as an emancipation from the past. Thus, in a sermon preached before the grad- uating class of the Institute of Technology, in 1892, he took Progress for his theme. His text was the words of St. Paul (Phil. iii. 12), "I press on, if so be that I may apprehend that for which also I was apprehended by Christ Jesus: " — There are two kinds of progress in St. Paul's life, — the one where he is represented as migrating from one situation to an- other, the other where, as in the text, he makes deeper entrance into the condition in which he already stands. Now these two kinds of progress which Paul sets hefore us are seen in every individual life that truly completes itself, and in all the development of mankind. There is a progress of migra- tion in which one leaves the country in which he has heen living and goes forward into another; and there is a progress of occupa- tion, where a man enters deeper and deeper into the things in which he is already involved. It is the last of these two forms of progress that is the greatest and richest to the soul, by which a man takes deeper possession of the thing already possessing him. Our fathers migrated to this country and occupied it, but their occupation has been greater than was their migration. It is the same in regard to truth. Sometimes a man goes on to new truth, but he never loses his hold on the great truths he has acquired. I always hold my truth, but I am forever progress- ing in it. It is always given more and more as I am able to receive more and more. The real truth in the troublesome theology of these days is that God is leading the people, not away from the old truths, but down deeper into them. It is not primarily a time of belief or unbelief, of the accep- tance or rejection of the things which our fathers believed ; but ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 497 it is a great time of definition, in which God is letting us see more deeply into the real meaning of those things which our fathers believed, which have held the world in ages past, and which the world will come to hold more and more strongly in the future, until it comes to see how in the heart of them — contra- dictory as many of the statements and applications of them have heen — lie the eternal verities, the rich and blessed certainties, of how man is forever God's, and how God has striven for the possession of the children to whom He longs to give Himself. Although he was in sympathy with what was called the "new theology," yet his motive in advocating its claims was distinctively his own, and not wholly to be identified with the position of many of his contemporaries. His reason for rejoicing in the movements of thought and the expressions of religious conviction was the implication of the larger freedom which had come to the Christian church. It had been, as we have seen in his early years, the fear that his freedom would be reduced by becoming a Christian minister, which had de- terred him from committing himself to the ministry as a pro- fession. Then had come the discovery that in reality he had enlarged his freedom as he could have done in no other way. He was free in the pulpit and in the parish and in the world to manifest himself in the rich variety of his endowment, to give expression to the whole content of his soul. More than he valued the "new theology " did he value the freedom of which it was the evidence. In this respect his own age seemed to him one of the few greatest in the world's history; and he looked forward to the future as still more glorious, because it would have the opportunity of realizing what was wrapped up in this treasure of human freedom. Because he loved and cherished freedom, he resisted the ecclesiastical moods which were urging authority as a means of repressing freedom. But there was another side to the question, there was a danger to be encountered and to be feared. Intimations abounded that the new freedom might degenerate into laxity or indifference. Against this danger he protested with even more earnestness, if that were possible, than against the or- thodoxy which assailed freedom in the opposite direction. VOL. n 498 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 It is difficult to do full justice to his position, but at least the attempt must be made. He had been called a Unitarian, "in his assertion of mental freedom, in his superiority to narrow lines of sect, his wide sympathies, his more than tol- erance for all sincere and earnest thought." All this was true of him. He did believe in tolerance. But he also be- lieved that the tolerance which was grounded in indifference to dogma or rose from the ruins of its rejection was a dan- gerous thing. He saw that a new word needed to be spoken on the subject of tolerance. He had gone through the books on the subject, the various pleas that had been put forth in the different generations in behalf of tolerance, and none of them satisfied him, — Milton's "Areopagitioa," Roger Wil- liams's "Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Con- science," Jeremy Taylor's "Liberty of Prophesying," Locke's "Letter of Toleration," Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty." He determined, there- fore, to bring to his age a contribution of his own, showing on what principle his own tolerance rested. In 1885 he accepted the invitation from the "Select Preachers' Syndi- cate," to preach before the University of Cambridge. He took for his subject "Tolerance," as that of all others upon which he most wished to speak on a representative occasion. In 1886 he enlarged his sermon into two lectures, which he delivered before the General Theological Seminary in New York, and afterwards before the Philadelphia Divinity School and the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, and then he gave his further sanction to his utterance by their publication. In its artistic form, its learning, its in- tellectual penetration, this small book deserves a place by the side of his Lectures on Preaching. But there came to him no chorus of plaudits on its appearance. In eccle- siastical circles the subject was unwelcome, and in the cir- cles of "liberal" thought tolerance upon the grounds he urged seemed unmeaning and vain. Yet one may believe his conclusion is that to which the world must ultimately come. The book on tolerance is a very personal one, for he was ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 499 vindicating his own position, his mental freedom, his supe- riority to narrow sectarian lines, his wide sympathies, his own tolerance for all sincere and earnest thought. He was guarding himself against "being travestied and misdescribed either by bigotry, on the one hand, or by what is called ' free thought ' on the other," His tone is at times tender and pathetic. He was gentle and kind, for he had adversa- ries to conciliate if possible. He knew that his position was a difficult one to maintain, but he was determined to make it clear, and to enforce and recommend it by the fascination of his eloquence and his wide observation and experience of life. He took for his text, if we may call it so, a passage from the writings of Maurice, which he admits sounds like a paradox, but will come to be an axiom, — " It is the nat- ural feeling of all, that charity is founded upon the uncer- tainty of truth. I believe that it is founded on the certainty of truth." The Lectures on Tolerance are of importance as giving the latest convictions of Phillips Brooks on the questions relating to his age with which he had been concerned. In some re- spects there had been a change in his attitude compared with that of his earlier years, and yet of no fundamental charac- ter. But the philosophy underlying these expressions of his soul is more clear and emphatic and profound than when he first began to teach. This little treatise so abounds with striking thought and felicitous sentences that it must be read to be appreciated. A few extracts from it may serve the purpose of showing its leading motive. There are few subjects so interesting and important which have been so inadequately treated. There is no worthy book on the subject. To write one might well be the satisfaction and honor of any man's life. The passion for toleration in our time has much to do with the vagueness and uncertainty of belief. "We must realize the inten- sity with which men believed things in the seventeenth century before we presume to judge their intolerance. In the way we merely try to be harmless we are like steamers in the fog, whis- tling that they may not run into others nor they into us. It is 500 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 safe, but commerce makes no great progress thereby, and it shows no great skill in navigation. In his argument for tolerance he was required to meet that class of minds which have been in the habit of thinking that strong, positive conviction was incompatible with tolerance. It would not be strange if we had all felt such a fear. It would be strange if any of us had escaped it, so studiously, so constantly, so earnestly, has the world been assured that positive faith and tolerance have no fellowship with one another. "The only foundation for tolerance," said Charles James Fox, "is a degree of skepticism." The perfect tolerance could not come about by mere eclec- ticism. Some day — this Is the dream that haunts some amiable minds — some great peacemaker will pick out from every system of thought its choicest dogma and, setting them together, will build a dogmatic home where every soul will be completely satis- fied, because when it looks up it will see its own chief article of faith set in a place of honor in its walls. But the result of such an efEort would be a thing of shreds and patches, dropping to pieces as soon as the man who devised it was dead. It is the fatal difficulty of eclecticism, "that each man wants to make his own selection, and no man can choose for others, but only for himself." He defined true tolerance as "the willing consent that other men should hold and express opinions with which we disagree, until they are convinced by reason that those opin- ions are untrue." "Earnest discussion is a part of tolerance." "It might have all the power to put down error by force, and it would never use it. But true tolerance must be utterly impatient toward dishon- esty, hypocrisy, self-conceit, or cant. There is a moral intoler- ance which must go with intellectual tolerance to give it vigor." The nature of tolerance ... is composed of two elements, both of which are necessary to its true existence, and on the har- monious and proportionate blending of which the quality of the tolerance which is the result depends. These elements are, first, positive conviction; and second, sympathy with men whose con- victions difEer from our oWn. ^/e/rAfJ ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 501 True tolerance consists in the love of truth and the love of man, each brought to its perfection, and living in harmony with one another, . . . orbed and enfolded in the greater love of God. The love of truth alone grows cruel. It has no pity for man. . . . And the love of man alone grows weak. It trims and moulds and travesties the truth to suit men's whims. The advice to give to every bigot whom you want to make a tolerant man must be not, "Hold your faith more lightly and make less of it," but, "Hold your faith more profoundly and make more of it." Get down to its first spiritual meaning; grasp its fundamental truth. So you will be glad that your brother starts from that same centre, though he strikes the same circumference at quite another point from yours. It is true, strange as it sounds at first, that the more deeply and spiritually a man believes in fixed, endless punishment of wicked men, the more and not the less tolerant he will become of his brother who cherishes eternal hope. Nor is the promise of the future to be found in the idea that some day one of the present forms of faith, one of the present conceptions of God and man and life, shall so overwhelmingly assert its truth that every other form of faith shall come and lay its claims before its feet and ask to be obliterated or absorbed. Truth has not anywhere been so monopolized. And no man who delights in the activity of the human mind, as the first condition of the attainment of final truth by man, can think complacently of any period short of the perfect arrival at the goal of absolute certainty with reference to all knowledge, when man shall cease to wonder and to inquire, and so pass out of the possibility of error and mistake. The real unity of Christendom is not to be found at last in identity of organization, nor in identity of dogma. Both of those have been dreamed of and have failed. But in the unity of spir- itual consecration to a common Lord ... all souls shall be one with each other in virtue of that simple fact, in virtue of that common reaching after Christ, that common earnestness of loy- alty to what they know of Him. There is the only unity that is thoroughly worthy either of God or man. That seems to many, I know, to be dim and vague. It is a terrible and sad sign of how far our Christianity is from its per- fection that now, after these centuries of its sway, the central key and secret of its power should seem dim and vague to men. 5oa PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 The modifications of theological belief, whose coming had been long delayed, and the expansion and development of dog- mas, requiring the contributions of many thinkers, were tak- ing shape in the decade of the eighties, as a distinct system of doctrines to which the name was given of the "new theo- logy." For this result Phillips Brooks had been preparing the way. No one in America had done more than he to show that a change was needed, and what the nature of the change must be. From this point of view, if his Lectures on Preaching and his book on the Influence of Jesus, as well as almost every sermon he preached, were studied, it would appear that he was in sympathy with the attempt to reconstruct the foundations of religious belief. It was the one issue imparting unity and consistency to his thinking from the time that he began to preach. On this point he has spoken most plainly. In a sermon preached in 1884, and afterward published with his sanction, he says : — We hear much of what is called the "New Theology." Let us not quarrel about a name. In that which is generally and vaguely designated by that name I think we ought thoroughly to believe. It seems to me as if the Christian world to-day were entering upon a movement, nay, had already entered upon and gone far in a movement, which is certainly to be not less profound and full of meaning than the great Protestant Eefor- mation of three centuries ago. The final meaning of that move- ment really is the nearness of the soul of God to the soul of man, and of the soul of man to God. It is the meaning of the Incar- nation.^ In his essay on Authority and Conscience (1884), there is a similar statement : — We hear much to-day about the " New Theology." It is not a name, it is not a thing to fear. If man is really growing nearer to God, not farther away from God, every advancing age must have a new theology. And again, in a sermon, preached so early as 1878, he had spoken even more strongly : — 1 The sermon from which this extract is taken was published in Unity Church- Door Pulpit, Chicago, December 15, 1885. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 503 I believe the new is better than the old. The new theology in all its great general characteristics I love with all my heart. I rejoice to preach it, as Moses must have felt his heart fill with joy as he went forth to pray for the calmer sky and the stilled thunder. In the same sermon he took occasion to speak of some of the more special features of the new theology. ^ Shall we take, then, at once the most prominent of all in- stances, the growing freedom of thought about the Bible ? It is the tendency over which lecturers shout on their platforms and church councils in their council chambers. The lecturers and the church councils both recognize the fact. A fact no doubt it is. To very many Christian men to-day the Bible stands no longer surrounded by that kind of supernatural authority which establishes the truth of every statement in its pages. It has come to seem to many men what it really is, a gathering of many wonderful books from many times, — the time and authorship of some of them being doubtful, — which have been brought together because of their common character and their common bearing on one great religious process which runs through the history of man, — the revelation of the Eternal Father to mankind in Jesus Christ. Clearly enough, such knowledge of the nature of the Bible must set the mind free for a treatment of it and a study of its contents such as has not always been possible. . . . The world will never go back again to the old ideas of verbal inspira- tion. It was an unusual thing for Phillips Brooks to make state- ments like these in the pulpit. Indeed, he avoided so care- fully any allusion to current theological questions, about which opinions were at variance, that it came to be assumed by many that he had none, and some even thought he was incapable of forming theological conclusions. He had them, but he kept them out of the pulpit. In his preaching he looked at things sub specie etemitatis. His aversion to ab- stract discussion, where opinions as such were defended or criticised, his desire to get at the concrete reality of life, from whence opinions grew, and to bring all religious notions to this supreme test, was his ruling motive, which gave him his distinctive quality as a preacher. But there came excep- 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. viii. p. 341. 504 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 tional moments, when he felt the necessity of putting himseK on record, that men might know where he stood on the special issues of the hour. When he made these statements about the new theology, his object was not merely to take sides in a controversy, or to rank himself in the lists. He had a more serious purpose, — to utter a warning against impending danger which threatened the issues of life. He was jealous for freedom's sake; he was consumed with zeal as he saw the tendency of the time to rest in mere notions, or to suppose that there was any advantage gained simply by changing one's opinions in theology. Thus, in his ser- mon on the "Mitigation of Theology" (1878), he took for his text a passage in Exodus, where Moses tells the Egyp- tians that he will pray for the thunder and hail to cease, but yet he knows that the cessation of fear will not bring Pha- raoh and his people to the obedience of the divine will. The general character of the change taking place in theology is the subject before him. " It is a desire to escape from the severer, stricter, more formal, more exacting statements of truth and duty, and to lay hold of the gentler, more gracious, more spiritual, more indulgent representations of God, and of what He asks of man." With this great change in the aspect of faith he confesses his deep sympathy, as the prophecy of a new and richer coming of the kingdom of the Lord of love and of life. But then comes his protest. Men are attributing a power to the mere change of thought on the nature of God which it can never possess. There is a temptation to think that the work of religion will be accomplished for the world when these new and glorious ideas shall have become supreme and uni- versal, when the old severe theology shall have been de- throned and the truth be proclaimed that "God is love." The time has, therefore, come when some one ought to speak the words that Moses spoke to Pharaoh, — "The thunder shall cease and there shall be no more hail. But as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will not fear the Lord." Men are in danger of attributing to the new theology that same impossible virtue which men attributed to the old the- ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 505 ology, — the virtue in itself of making men good and strong and pure. Against that danger I want to warn you and myself. . . . Constantly in New England, which a generation ago was full of the sternest teachings, I hear the lamentations of men who were brought up under the Puritan theology. I have grown familiar to weariness with the self -excuse of men who say, "Oh, if I had not had the terrors of the Lord so preached to me when I was a boy, if I had not been so confronted with the woes of hell and the awfulness of the judgment day, I should have been religious long ago." My friends, I think I never hear a meaner or a falser speech than that. Men may believe it when they say it, — I suppose they do, — but it is not true. It is unmanly, I think. It is throwing on their teaching and their teachers, or their fathers and their mothers, the fault which belongs to their own neglect, because they have never taken up the earnest fight with sin and sought through every obstacle for truth and God. It has the essential vice of dogmatism about it, for it claims that a different view of God would have done for them that which no view of God can do, that which must be done, under any system, any teaching, by humility and penitence and struggle and self- sacrifice. Without these, no teaching saves the soul. With these, under any teaching, the soul must find its Father. From such a passage as this one might almost infer that the preacher's sympathy with the new theology was weak or half-hearted. But it was not. He takes up in turn the points at issue, where the arbitrary has passed into the essen- tial, the narrow into the broad, the formal into the spiritual. He was in profoundest accord with the change at every point : — It is so radical that we cannot fully comprehend or state it, but it fills us with joy. It has made religion a new thing for multitudes of souls. It has swept the heavy cloud away, and let the sunlight into many a life. It has brought fertility to many a desert. And the thanksgivings of men and women who have found that their religion may be just the love of God because He has loved them, and that in that pure love of God lies their salva- tion, makes the song and the glory of these new years of God. He considers briefly some of the points at issue between the theologies, and finds in them a deeper gain for the soul. 5o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 This outbreak of protest against the dreadful doctrine of end- less punishment is really nothing but an utterance of the profound conviction that not by threats of punishment, however awful and however true, but by the promises of love are men to be brought into the best obedience of God. He touches upon the question of the sacredness of the Day of Kest, the departure from the severer rules under which men lived some twenty years ago. But if these things are welcomed only because they bring freedom from constraint, there has been no gain, but rather injury. The change which has been effected, when rightly viewed, has been "from the easy to the hard, and not, as men are always choosing to think it, from the hard to the easy." The change has, indeed, been to freedom, but it is harder to live in freedom than to live as a slave. The dangers of freedom are far more subtle and far more dangerous than those from which the escape has been made. "As much deeper as this new love lies below that old terror, so much the deeper must the new watchfulness and scrupulousness go below the old." Unless this is its effect in us, our milder conception of God's present and future dealing with the souls of men, however true it may be in itself, is a curse to us and not a blessing. Unless it does this for us, we are making the truth of God have the power of a lie. We ought to be afraid of any theology which tampers with the sacredness of duty and the awfulness of life. I would far rather be a believer in the most material notions of eternal penalty, and get out of that belief the hard and frightened solemnity and scrupulousness which it has to give, than to hold all the sweet broad truth to which God is now leading us, and have it make life seem a playtime and the world a game.^ This sermon, from which these extracts have been made, was a very special sermon, called forth by some special ex- perience, some exceptional urgency of motive. But, in a sermon preached in 1884, and sanctioned for publication by himself, he takes up the same issues, going over the ground in much the same way. Once more he defends the new the- ology, and proclaims his adherence to it in most emphatic words. His text was the words of St. Peter, — " As free 1 Cf . Sermons, vol. viii. pp. 337 ff. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 507 and not using your freedom for a cloak of maliciousness but as the servants of God." All the earnestness and intensity of his nature was thrown into this sermon as he discussed his theme, —the "dangers of liberty." Because he was the champion and friend of the new truth, he had the best right and the best wisdom to declare its dangers. The fact is, the world has now become a place where it must become a great deal worse world, or a great deal better world, than it has been before. It is a familiar truth to us that men come to such places in their lives ; why should not the world come to such a place in hers ? The new theology called for better men if it was to hold its own. Unless this followed there was danger of relapse into a state of things worse than had been before. In pro- phetic vision there could be recalled the situation in the age before the Eeformation, where each successive effort at re- form only seemed to set the world back, and the bondage was renewed in more bitter form. Even when Luther came, and the reform at last was accomplished, and men were set free to rejoice in their freedom, there had followed an age of decline and moral weakness which put in peril the very existence of the Protestant religion. So, too, in the age when Christ appeared and proclaimed the freedom of the children of God. If the larger liberty and freedom from outward constraint now coming to the modem world were not construed as the greater necessity for an inward self- restraint, it would have come in vain, and the world would fall back into its old leading-strings. Freedom is thrust upon us, and we must take it whether we will or not. Happiest is he who takes it most completely and most joyfully, but also most seriously and with the deepest sense of its dangers. . . . O generous young man rejoicing in your freedom, there is no manly way to use your freedom except this. God grant you the grace to be great enough to live in these days of freedom. II Those who only heard Phillips Brooks on Sundays in the pulpit of Trinity Church, especially those who heard him 5o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 only occasionally, got but an incomplete expression of the man. There was another side to his life as a parish minis- ter. In his Wednesday evening lectures, and in his Bible class, he presented a different aspect of his teaching. The congregation of Trinity Church, those who were familiar with this part of his work, were inclined to attach to it an equal if not a higher importance than to the Sunday ministrations. The Wednesday evening lectures were not only interesting in the highest degree, but they came closer to many people than did his sermons. Here he attempted, what he seemed to avoid in the pulpit, the impartation of religious know- ledge, the discussion of religious theories and theological opinions. Notwithstanding his aversion to dealing with abstractions, or mere head notions about the truth, yet, as people were embarrassed by the variety and conflict of theo- logical opinions, or by intellectual difficulties, he made it part of his duty every year to deal with these things. It was thought and said by some that he was indifferent to the distinctive teaching of his own church, or cared but little for the Book of Common Prayer and its usages and rites. But the criticism came from those who knew only of his work on Sundays, when his sermons were addressed to the whole body of humanity, and rose above the level of religious in- formation to the higher walks of the spiritual life. And yet for Wednesday evening lectures or for Bible class he had made the thorough preparation, whose final outcome was in the sermon, when the limitations of opinions and the empty abstractions had disappeared from his mind. In these special ministrations he appears as doing a work which of itself alone woidd have been regarded as sufficient by the ordinary parish minister. His note-books bear wit- ness to the preparation for each lecture, with what care he collated opinions and traced their relation to the realities of human life. In this way he took up the Prayer Book and its offices, giving courses of lectures in successive years on the Church Catechism, on the Ten Commandments, on the Creeds, treated article by article, on the Baptismal Office, and on the Office for Confirmation. One year he lectured upon ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 509 the "Versicles" in the Morning and Evening Prayer, and in the other offices. Another year he took up, verse by verse, the Te Deum. Studies in the life of Christ were rich and almost exhaustless in their variety. The fruits of them appeared in his sermons, or in his book on the "Influence of Jesus ; " but in their form as given in the "Wednesday evening lectures they have a peculiar charm of their own. As all this work was done extemporaneously, the record of it only re- mains in the written analyses prepared for his use, or in the notes, more or less full, made by those who were present. For this work the preparation required must needs be thorough, for his audience was intelligent and cultured, and there were always present those who were familiar with the latest literature in Biblical criticism. Thus we find him studying Ewald and Kuenen and WeUhausen, as he treats of Old Testament history, or Keim and Hausrath, Eeuss, Shiirer, and other modern writers on the New Testament times. Those who heard him preach on Sunday sometimes fancied that he knew nothing of Biblical criticism, or was indifferent to it, because no mention of modern Biblical literature was made, no names referred to or cited as au- thorities. He did his work by a sort of intuition, it was supposed. Perhaps he himself was at fault for this impression, in his careful removal of all traces of his work in the finished re- sult, just as the perfect story must be so told, that no evi- dence of labor on the part of the narrator shall be evident. But another reason for this impression about him was that he made so prominent the positive truth that remained, after criticism had done its work, that the hearer came away im- pressed with this alone. And, in truth, he did so subordi- nate modern Biblical studies to the end of making the divine revelation stand forth more clearly, using it for this purpose alone, that he tended to become indifferent to it, as one discards the scaffolding when the structure is done. The "higher criticism " of the Bible is in danger of becoming a subject of such absorbing interest that the student is tempted to linger in it, as if it were an end in itself, and not the 5IO PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 means to a higher end. But what Phillips Brooks valued was the stronger witness it bore to the reality of the truth which God was imparting. He carried his own torch with him wherever he went, the conviction that God was speaking to the soul, and high above aU the critical details it shone clearly, the one thing most unmistakably evident. The question was discussed in these years in the Clericus Club and elsewhere, whether it was the duty of the clergy to give to the people the results of modern Biblical criticism, or how it should be done in order not to weaken, but, if possi- ble, increase the people's confidence in the Bible. He had no difficulty on this point. He kept back nothing that he thought or believed, and yet so presented it as to make the old truth about the Bible seem the clearer and the stronger. We may look in upon him, in one of those Wednesday even- ing lectures in the chapel of Trinity Church. The date is January 7, 1880, and his subject was the Doctrine of the Bible. It was one of a course on Christian Doctrine, where other topics were the doctrines of God, the Trinity, the In- carnation, the Work of Christ, Conversion, the Holy Spirit, the Church, and the Lord's Supper. It may be taken as a fair specimen of hundreds of similar occasions in his week-day ministry, and incidentally as a specimen of his mode of work. From these rough notes in his sermon book, the clear tenor of his way is visible : — THE DOCTEINE OP THE BIBLE Reasons why this doctrine comes in here. All the future doc- trines are to be gathered out of the Bible, and so we must know where the Bible stands. Its close connection with the doctrine of God was shown in the last lecture. Bear that in mind as we speak. After a short recapitulation, turn to the antecedent pro- bability of a Revelation. Not likely that God should leave His children unreached if He could communicate with them. Espe- cially if they and He were moral creatures, and the experiment of their life were, as would appear, a moral experiment. The witness to this probability by all the religious systems and their revelations. Growing sense that revelation is constant, only coming to climax at certain times. Now such a Revelation, what shall it be? Primarily to a ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 511 Person, because it is of a Person. Nothing but a personality can really alter a personality. No description can do it. Let me see a man's son, and know that he and his father are in true accord, and then I understand the father. So to brutes a man may tell of manhood. So to men God may declare Himself through manhood. And so the real exhibition of God must be through human life. Books may record. that, but their real value is in what they record. Thus Christ is the true Revelation of God, and the Bible gets its value from being the description of Christ. The story of a revelation, more properly than a revelation itself. And so its various parts differ with the quality of what they have to tell of. So the Revelation lies behind the Bible, and the Bible is to the Revelation like the sunshine to the sun. Trace then the growth of the Bible; a familiar tale. Suppose some person who knew nothing of it ; show how you would begin with the Gospels, the free place for critical inquiry. The his- torical Christ. The character of Christ. The Divine Christ. Then the Disciples and the Future Books from them. Then the Old Testament and its authority. The degree of Christ's sanc- tion; the sufficiency of it. Authenticity, Authority, meaning of these words. There stands our Bible, then! Where did we get it? The saying that the Church gave it to us. The mean- ing of that. Only that the Church. assured us that such and such books were written by such and such men. There lies their true value. This is seen in the clear certainty that if a new epistle of St. Paul could be identified, we would accept it, or if one of the accepted ones should be discredited, we would cast it aside. And now, how did these writers write? The old theories of verbal and plenary inspiration. But without them look at the real state of the case. A solemn and dear person to be written about. A watching world. A deep sense of responsibility. A mind quickened by sympathy with his mind. All these together seem to make a power of accuracy and faithfulness which is all we could desire. Apply this to the Apostles. Apply to the Old Testament prophets. Add there the Jewish love for geneal- ogy, etc. This, too, a divine ordinance. As the result of all we have a noble certainty gathering about the precious story. Does it involve unerring accuracy? Answer, "No." Still, in the historic record there may be misstatements of detail. And in the Apostolic development there may be wrong anticipations (like the anticipation of the end of the world), but yet the picture is true. Suppose this state of things, and then suppose we had such a record of it, would it not be vastly valuable ? ETWugh. 5ia PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 The cases of direct communication, as wten the words are used, "The word of the Lord came unto me," etc. The fact certain and credible enough. The manner of conveyance. The revisions of the Bible : modern learning on it. Eeturn to the idea of Christ being the true Revelation. The Bible showing Him. This feature of Mr. Brooks's work in his capacity as a parish minister is important and might be studied at much greater length. But it was richer in its quality, and more vital in its bearings, than any summary of it would reveal. The testimony to its value from those who had the privilege of its enjoyment equals, if it does not surpass, any testimony borne to his preaching. Especially are the courses of lec- tures on the Catechism, on the Creed, and on the Ten Com- mandments recalled as glowing with the beauty and truth with which he clothed them from his wide studies and his large observation of life, and especially from his own reli- gious experience. He made his people love and rejoice in the Prayer Book, till the vestiges of prejudice or misunder- , standing, if such there were, faded away. He loved the Prayer Book as he loved the Bible. It was an integral ele- ment in his life. He believed in it as it stood, and for himself never desired improvement or change, whether by addition or omission. Its literary value was like that of the Bible, dis- closing at every turn the rich, deep moods of a humanity larger than that of the individual man. He loved it as a product of the Christian ages. There were those who were annoyed at its phrases, sometimes at what seemed its dark assumptions, who could never quite be reconciled to passages in the marriage, baptismal, or burial offices. It was not that he had become callous to these things by much repeti- tion, or recited them in a perfunctory way, attaching no meaning to them. It fell to him as the minister to large congregations to say these offices frequently, but he never said them without feeling more and more keenly their signifi- cance, or asking himself anew as to the meaning of their words. Nothing with which he came in contact could long remain conventional or meaningless. The process of his ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 513 inner life consisted in vitalizing his environment, in the church, in the Bible, or in the Book of Common Prayer. As by the methods of Biblical criticism he had entered more fully into the meaning and reality of the revelation recorded in Scripture, so by the process of historical criticism did he seek to penetrate more deeply into the moods of a common humanity as uttered in the Prayer Book. In the interpre- tation of the Prayer Book, as in the interpretation of the Bible, he advocated freedom. He had found this freedom for himself in the summary given in the Church catechism, where historical Christianity as presented in the creeds is condensed into the statement that we learn from them to believe in " God the Father who made me and all the world ; God the Son who redeemed me and aU mankind; God the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth me and all the people of God." Evidently any statement of belief in which two men, or more than two, unite must be of sufficient simplicity and breadth freely to hold within itself these vital differences. This is the beauty and value of our Church's Creed. "We all believe it, and no two thinking men hold it alike. It is as various as their various personalities with which it has entered into union. The Church has no unwritten law, no interpretation of her creed to which her children must conform. That is a truth con- cerning her on which we must always insist. She has her creed in which all her children believe, and all believe differently. Thus she keeps the union of identity and variety, which all living things must have. Thus she bids each believer be a sharer in the belief of all, while at the same time he holds his own per- sonal conviction clear. Dogmatism loses the liberty and life of personal conviction, skepticism loses the largeness of the univer- sal faith. The Church, if she holds her creed as a creed ought to be held, is neither dogmatic nor skeptical, but keeps both the special and the universal, and makes them minister to each other. This is why she is the home of generous belief. This is why, if one may recognize how, as is the case with most epigrams of comparison, not merely the laureate's famous words but also their reverse is true : — " There lives more faith in honest creeds Believe me, than in half the douht." i Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 216. VOL. n 514 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 There were times in his experience when he rejoiced to rise above the monotonous plains of life, but quite as often he loved to walk them with the race, as one indistinguishable from the mass of men, sharing in the common fears and the common hopes, and loving the common language wherein they had found expression. If he seemed at times to soar almost beyond the sight of human vision, or to be standing on heights inaccessible to ordinary human aspiration, yet it also pained him to differ from the great human verdicts, the voice of the people, till it bred the suspicion that he might be wrong and must revise his individual judgment. Such was his attitude toward the offices of his own church. The only criticism he made was on the danger of a conservatism which could see nothing outside the Prayer Book. In his ser- vices at Appleton Chapel where he frequently made the extem- poraneous prayer, for it was not a congregation of the Epis- copal Church, he experienced the difficulty, not unfamiliar to the Episcopal clergy, when attempting to say the prayers without the book. He would sometimes begin with repeat- ing a form of prayer, and when his memory failed him, in the nervousness of the situation, would break away into im- passioned language of his own. One might gain the impres- sion that he was hampered by the form and abandoned it for a higher liberty. These things are mentioned here because they have their connection with his theology. It would be a waste of time to conjecture what kind of man, or of preacher, or of theolo- gian, he would have made, if his mother had not migrated in his infancy to the Episcopal Church. He had been brought up to the Prayer Book, and the foundations of his religious life were built upon the teaching of the Church catechism. So deep had the training gone that he could not have escaped from it if he would. More than with most children, had it taken hold of his inmost being. And to it he owed his peculiar character as a theologian. When he came to years of discretion, he ratified his mother's judg- ment, and in his manhood rejoiced in his lot among the churches. His theology was Anglican theology in its high- MT. 33-56] THEOLOGY 515 est but in its most typical form. When he went to England he made this impression upon the best judges of preaching. One reason for his popularity in England was his power to address the Anglican mind, more forcibly even than those who had never left the English soil. One characteristic of Anglicanism was its large human inclusiveness, the importance it attached to nationalism as of more value than ecclesiastical distinctions. The Anglican church had a long national history behind it, and honored all its children who had contributed in whatever way to the greatness and the glory of the nationality. In its national sanctuaries their ashes reposed, — great warriors, great cap- tains on sea or land, scholars and thinkers, and poets in whom England has abounded more than any other country, side by side with saints and ecclesiastics, without distinction or discrimination on the grounds of religious experience. Shakespeare and Bacon and Walter Kaleigh were among her honored children no less than Hooker or George Herbert or Jeremy Taylor. In the hour of her rebirth in the Reforma- tion it was the good fortune of the Anglican church to secure the alliance of humanism in its purer form, which Luther distrusted and Calvin rejected. She became a thoroughly Protestant church, but in a different way from that followed by Knox in Scotland or Calvin in Geneva. Through Cran- mer, who was a humanist as well as a scholar and theologian, there passed into the Prayer Book a large human influence, a hiunanizing tendency, which could embrace all truly human efforts, and was only at war with doctrinaire schemes in the interest of some ecclesiastical theory or religious abstraction. It was on this ground that the Anglican church had rejected the papacy and mediaeval religion, — they interfered with the growth and expansion of the national life. There were other grounds which might be and were urged, but this was the dominant motive of the Anglican church, which was regarded as the religious side of the one national life. Her conflict with the Puritans is the one blot on her history ; but in that fearful struggle, two incompatible forces were struggling for the mastery, neither of which could coexist with the other, 5i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 and one or tte other must yield. The destiny of Puritanism was a great one, but it could not be revealed in England, whieh had another ideal, and Puritanism was forced to go out and look for a home elsewhere. While the departure or the ejection of the Puritans was a loss to the church and the nation, yet when the struggle was over, the Anglican church was once more free to pursue her mission in building up the English nationality. There came to England, in conse- quence, her expansion in the eighteenth century, till she covered the globe with her colonies. This was the church and this was the tendency to which the mother of Phillips Brooks entrusted her son when she made the change from her ancestral faith to the Episcopal Church. The boy grew up under the influence of the Evan- gelical party in the church, but when he became a man he entered upon his Anglican heritage. For, amidst all the changes through which the Anglican church has passed, there runs one common principle, which gives consistency and coherency to her life, the unwritten law or constitution it may be called, of genuine Anglicanism, that the pulpit shall be free, and that the Prayer Book as it is, and not as it might be or ought to be, shall be used in its integrity. All that the nation asks of the Church of England is com- pliance with these requisitions. She allows reasonable lib- erty in the use of the Prayer Book, only she insists that the Church of England shall not be made over in the interest of any ecclesiastical theory, till it resembles so closely the na- tional churches of Italy or of Prance that no difference be- tween them can be discerned. And, as to preaching, one cannot easily depart very far from the spirit of the Prayer Book, or if he do, the corrective is furnished by its constant, invariable use. To these principles Phillips Brooks was true throughout his ministry. The Protestant Episcopal Church in America has difficulties of its own to encounter, in domesticating what seems to many an alien church in a land where Puritanism had first entered in and taken possession. There are various ways of attempting to meet these difiSculties, as shown in the ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 517 various answers given in tracts with the familiar title, " Why I am a Churchman," or an "Episcopalian." No one in the history of the Episcopal Church in America ever met these difficulties with such triumphant success as did Phillips Brooks. As he impersonated it, it seemed like a native church, with its roots in the native soil, till his career was taken by sanguine souls as a type and pledge of its future. The influence of his own church must then be recognized as one of the formative elements in the theology of Phillips Brooks. Year after year, during his long ministry, he gave himself to the study of the life of Christ, and the study bred admiration and imitation. In the fall of every year he be- gan his contemplation of the coming of Christ, and its larger aspects for the world. As the ecclesiastical year went on, he came to the renewed study of every incident in the life of Christ, and in every Passion Week for thirty years he took up day by day the events which culminated in the Cross and the Resurrection. Thus the conviction of the Incarna- tion of God in Christ became his leading motive, and the ground principle of his theology and of his life. The Incarnation meant to him that God and man had met together in the person of Christ, — the fulness of God and the complete perfection of humanity. But not only his ecclesiastical position, his whole experience, his natural con- stitution, his ancestral life, prepared the way for this con- summation. His interest in the human race, his love for humanity, came to him by direct inheritance on the one side of his family descent. In an age when the trend of thought and fashion was toward the love and the study of nature, he kept his hold on humanity as higher and richer, more impor- tant, than the love of nature. He loved life simply as living, and his interest in man surpassed his interest in beautiful scenery. He loved the city more than the country, and did not feel that he was really living to advantage when away from the haunts of men. He loved the outer world as the environment of his race. Prom that point of view it as- sumed its significance, not in itself alone. The laws of na- ture were inferior to the laws of human life. No study of 5i8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 nature's liandiwork, however marvellous and beautiful, could for a moment compete in interest with the study of man. . Once, at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston, when he was call- ing upon friends, some one spoke of the green fields and beauties of nature. He rose and looked out of the window over nothing but roofs and chimney tops and said, "Oh, no! not nature, but this beautiful view. Give me this, for these chimney tops even, stand for life, for humanity, and that is what attracts me, and makes life worth the living." He found his chief repose and solace, when travelling, in the works of man, in aU the forms of human art. Literature, as the revelation of man and of human life, friends, little children, society at its best, the communion with great men in biography, where the range of his reading was wide, — these were the sources from whence he drew strength and in- spiration. Through all he kept his deep sense of the family life, and the freshness of the great child nature which was in him, so that he was held in perpetual joy and in living wonder and admiration. This was his preparation for the religious conviction that in Christ humanity had come to its perfection. Humanity, and all that contact with humanity which we call life, becomes our teacher of religion — life as the manifold inter- preter of God, as the first awakener of those powers which any specific commandment must direct, as the first suggestion of those questions to which any particular revelation must give an- swer. Life, personally conceived as the pressure of the universal humanity on the individual human nature, must always have its place as the greatest and broadest approach of God to man. This found its perfection in the Incarnation. Through the di- vine humanity of Jesus, God was manifest in the flesh, and there- fore all that Jesus taught and ever teaches, whether by word or action, is the consummation and fulfillment of that presentation of Himself which God is ever making through humanity to man.* . . . And the great teachers of religion who have done the most Christlike work have always been those whose personality has been most complete, and who have been in truest human relation to the souls they taught. Parents, friends, pastors, have been I Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 210. ^T. 33-56'] THEOLOGY 519 the truest teachers of religion. The work of scientific theolo- gians has come to practical effectiveness through them.^ This was one side of his inheritance. On the other there came down to him, what was even deeper and stronger, the God consciousness, with which this love of humanity must be conjoined and reconciled. The concentrated force of the Puritanism of many generations, which made God supreme, till it seemed as though no place were left for man, — that tendency in his being to assert the priority of God was like fire coursing through his veins with an ever-accumulating momentum. He found the solution for what might have been a dualism which would have paralyzed his energies, in the incarnation of God in Christ. In one of his Philadel- phia sermons (1864), on the "Eternal Humanity," he gave to this conviction a theological expression : — I hold, then, that the Incarnation was God's commentary on that verse in Genesis, "In the image of God made He man." Yes, from the beginning there had been a second person in the Trinity, — a Christ whose nature included the man-type. In due time this man-type was copied and incorporated in the spe- cial exhibition of a race. There it degenerated and went off into sin. And then the Christ, who had been forever what He was, came and brought the pattern and set it down beside the degenerate copy, and wrought men's hearts to shame and peni- tence when they saw the everlasting t3rpe of what they had been meant to be walking among the miserable shows of what they were. Over the mystery of the Incarnation Phillips Brooks was perpetually brooding, till it became to him what the doctrine of the "Divine Sovereignty " had been to his Puritan ances- tors. He struggled with all the forms of literary art in order to seize an expression of it in his sermons, adequate to convey the fulness of the reality, as he grasped it, to his hearers. But the words seemed weak and powerless in com- parison with what he saw. "Oh, to preach a great sermon on the Incarnation ! " is the aspiration recorded in one of his sermon note-books. No one can do for him what, from his 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, pp. 209, 210. 520 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 own high standard, he felt that he had failed to do for him- self. If we turn his living attitudes of faith into the for- mulas of theology, we only lose by the process. But some remarks must be hazarded on the subject lest a worse injus- tice be done. He looked upon Christ's mission to the world as intrinsi- cally different, and different in kind, from the missions of all the other great teachers of the race. He held that the dif- ference consisted in this, that other teachers had manifested the truth of God, but it was the mission of Christ to man- ifest God Himself. Christ, he believed, was conscious of this difference, and had expressed it most emphatically in the parable of the vineyard, where he compared those who had gone before him to servants sent by God; when ser- vant after servant had been sent, at last God sent His Son.^ He maintained that the truth of the divinity of Jesus did not hang on a few texts of Scripture, but that it shone through all His thought about Himself and broke forth in every description of the work he had to do.^ Here is an extract from a manuscript sermon, written in 1882, and delivered for the last time in 1892. Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are ; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness ; it is in the Word which Jesus is that the great manifestation of God is made. I read the words and ponder them, but most of all I look at Jesus and try to understand His life, when I want to know the fullest truth regarding God. And when thus I look at Him, what do I learn? First of all, the true divinity of Christ Himself. I cannot doubt what is His own conception of His own personality. Through everything He does, through everything He says, there shines the quiet, intense radiance of conscious Godhood. Again, I say, it is not a word or two which He utters, though He does say things which make known His self- consciousness, but it is a certain sense of originalness, of being, as it were, behind the processes of things, and one with the real source of things, — this is what has impressed mankind in Jesus, and been the real power of their often puzzled but never aban- 1 Cf. St. Matthew xxi. 32 fE. " Cf . Sermons, toI. vii. pp. 328, 329. *T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 521 doned faith in His Divinity. He has appeared to men, in some way, as He appears to us to-day, to be not merely the channel but the fountain of Love and Wisdom and Power, of Pity and Inspiration and Hope. There is one aspect of the Incarnation upon which Phil- lips Brooks often dwelt, — its naturalness, its essential har- mony with the ordering of human life in this world. This was the message to his soul as he first stood in the sacred places on the earth's surface where Christ had lived. It was not necessary to deny His divinity in order to give him the human prerogatives, nor to overlook his humanity in order to see and feel the divine. Upon this thought he enlarges in the following extract from the manuscript sermon above referred to. The wonderful thing about this sense of Divinity as it appears in Jesus is its naturalness, the absence of surprise or of any feel- ing of violence. "We might have said beforehand, if we had been told that God was coming into a man's life, — we might have said, "That must be something very terrible and awful. That certainly must rend and tear the life to which God comes. At least it will separate it and make it unnatural and strange. God fills a bush with His glory, and it burns. God enters into the great mountain, and it rocks with earthquake. When He comes to occupy a man, He must distract the humanity which He occu- pies into some unhvunan shape." Instead of that, this new life, into which God comes, seems to be the most quietly, naturally human life that was ever seen upon the earth. It glides into its place like sunlight. It seems to make it evident that God and man are essentially so near together, that the meeting of their natures in the life of a God-man is not strange. So always does Christ deal with His own nature, accepting His Divinity as you and I accept our humanity, and letting it shine out through the envelope with which it has most subtly and mysteriously min- gled, as the soul is mingled with and shines out through the body. It was said of the late Mr. Gladstone that when he was asked what was the foundation of his faith and hope, he replied, "The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ." That would not have been quite the answer of Phillips Brooks. With him It was not a doctrine concerning Christ, but Christ Himself : — 522 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 This is what I see about God when I look at Christ. It is God that I see there. Not a doctrine about Him, but it is He, the light of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Metaphysical speculations as they have gone on in the schools about the person of Christ had no interest for him. They seemed not only unprofitable and vain, but in their de- tachment from reality they belittled and degraded the great theme. Yet there was one of these questions which became to him a living and fruitful thought : — I cannot read the story, I cannot know the Person of the Divine Christ without becoming aware of two things. There is a Life behind Him, and a Life before Him, — a life on which He rests, and a life in which He issues. It is no lonely existence which suggests itself as He walks among men. At any moment He turns aside upon a mountain top and communes with a Being which is like Himself. As He draws near the end of His peculiar work, and looks forth into the years which are to come. He sees a divine life, like His life, going on, finishing his work. He feels the Father from whom He came, the Spirit who is to come when He is gone. In ways like this, undogmatic in form, did Phillips Brooks often express himself in regard to the threefold name of God, — the doctrine of the Trinity. Its prominence in An- glican theology and in the Book of Common Prayer forced him to its deeper consideration. He loved the truth for which it stood with what he himself has called the "love of the mind for God." It difEered from other truths, in that it could not be primarily reached by the action of the individ- ual mind, but was rather a heritage from the past, the result of the thought and experience of the ages, of many confluent influences converging at last to a focus. Because it summed up the convictions of what seemed to him hu- manity acting at its best and highest, he received it and gloried in it. As Trinity Sunday came round, with each revolution of the Christian Year, it found him ready and eager to speak. Trinity Sunday was to him the high intel- lectual festival of the Christian church, and, as on Thanks- giving Day, he came up to it bringing the richest tribute he could offer. Others complained sometimes that they found ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 523 difficulty in writing sermons for Trinity Sunday, but he an- swered that he did not; there was always some new aspect of the subject, which he had not yet presented. People were constantly coming to him for explanation of what they did not understand, and out of these conversations were the hints often derived, which proved the themes for sermons. These Trinity Sunday sermons, of which there are a large number, would make a most important contribution toward the popular elucidation of the great Christian mystery. He would not condescend, he often said, to "defend the doctrine." He made it clear that his object in treating the subject was to explain it. He gloried in the doctrine because of the rich- ness of the idea of God which it involved. In his own words it "palpitated with life." If a man does believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, he ought to rejoice and glory in his faith as the enrichment of his life. It is the entrance to a land where all life lives at its fullest, where Nature opens her most lavish bovmty.^ In an essay which he wrote on the "new theism " in 1886, and read before the Clericus Club, he criticized two recent books in theology, Mr. John Fiske's "Idea of God as af- fected by Modern Knowledge; " and Mr. Francis EUingwood Abbott's "Scientific Theism." This essay has a personal interest of its own, in showing his capacity for subtle theo- logical discrimination. It was rare for him to turn aside from his work to an effort like this, but in doing so he exhibits the hand of a master, while yet it is done with such ease and natural grace as to indicate that he was at home in the field of theological speculation. That he had followed the course of theistic thought in other writers is ap- parent, but he chose these two books mentioned because they illustrated what he wished to say. He remarks on them both, that while they proclaim the immanence of creative power, "they draw back from an assertion of the personality of God, and steady themselves by vigorous railings against anthropomorphism. " ^ Cf. Sermons, vol. i..p. 228; ii. p. 380; and vii. p. 318, for Trinity Sunday senuoDS. 524 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 The valuable element in these two books, as he points out, is that they come bringing with them the fruits of a long wandering in the wilderness of agnosticism ; they have gained the sense of the liveness of the universe. The doctrine of the divine personality needs, from time to time, to be bathed in the truth of universal life, lest it become too hard and dry. This is the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity, which both these writers overlook or reject. The doctrine of the Trinity is a protest against the hard, tight personalness of the conception of God which thinks of Him as a, big individual, with definite limits to His nature, and almost to a visible frame in which He lives. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to give richness, variety, mystery, internal relation, abundance, and freedom to the ideas of God.-' Here lies the significance of the Incarnation, in the history of theistic thought, that it brings the divine idea out of its distance into our human life. The Incarnation brought into union with God's supremacy the sacredness of man. There may be a yet unreached though often anticipated theism which shall bring into union with God's supre- macy the liveness of the world. He fears that this "new theism," in the minds of many who hold it, is nothing but the old pantheism ; yet it is sig- nificant that those who teach it are eager to assert that it is not pantheism. Surely we Christians ought to understand how one feels who sees pantheism close at hand and yet draws back from it and will not be a pantheist. For the New Testament is always just on the brink of pantheism, and is only saved from it by the in- tense personality of Jesus and His overwhelming injvmction of responsibility. Surely He gives us reason to believe that there is a real possibility of holding both together, the personality of God and the divine life in the universe. The representatives of the "new theism" refuse the aid of anthropomorphism, because it has often been false and crude. He feels the force of the protest, but the remedy ' Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 157. JET. 33-56] THEOLOGY 525 lies in a truer conception of the nature of man from whence to rise to the nature of God. The man which is made in the image of God is manhood. Not this man or that man, save as he is an utterance of the uni- versal manhood. Not this man or that man, with his partialness and fixed simplicity, but the universal manhood, with its multitu- dinousness, its self-related and various internal life, its move- ment and ever-opening vitality, its oneness yet its multitude, its multitude within its oneness — that is the man which was made in God's image and by whose study the image of God may dimly open again upon the soul. We create first an artificial simplicity for our individual life, and we assert that only in such an individ- uality as that is there a real personality. The first enlargement of such a narrow conception as that is in the necessity of conceiv- ing of the personality of man. The next is in the even deeper necessity of conceiving of the personality of God. The new theism finds itself face to face with that necessity. It hesitates about the possibility of solving the difficulty and reaching the conception which yet it sees that it cannot do without. The religion of the New Testament stands ready with its clear utter- ance of that divine personality long known and realized. As it offers to the new theism the definiteness and positiveness of its Christ, may it not hope to receive again from it something of the largeness and breadth which the very definiteness of its Christ- hood is always in danger of losing? In the search for the "Infi- nite Personality," may not the old theism give to the new its vividness of personal beliefs, and may not the new theism give to the old its realization of Infinity ? ^ After these words of Phillips Brooks, the charge which has been made against his teaching, that it was pantheistic in its tendency, is hardly worth mentioning. When a man says with all the force he can command that he believes in a personal God, possessing conscious intelligence and will, that such a deity is distinct from his creation, whether of outward nature or of humanity, however He may indwell within them, it would seem to dispose finally of such an ob- jection. It should be remembered that the accusation of pantheism was the ground on which Jesus was condemned by the Jews, — to their minds he was confusing humanity with God, and guilty, therefore, of blasphemy, in calling 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 159. S26 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 himself the Son of God. It has been the standing objection against the doctrine of the Incarnation that it was pantheistic in its tendency. The cry of the Arians and the semi-Arians against the doctrine of Athanasius and the Nicene creed was pantheism, the confusion of God with the creation. Pan- theism was the sin of the Christian church in the mind of Mohammed, and on this ground the doctrine of the Trinity was rejected. We may dismiss the charge then, as unreal, as indicative of a tendency on the part of those who make it to revert to pre-Christian ideas of Deity, uninfluenced by the doctrine of the Incarnation. These are the striking words with which Phillips Brooks concludes his essay on Theism : — The thing which this great inflow of nature, half moralized and half personalized, needs is to attain a complete morality by which alone can come a complete personality. That the religion of the ages has to give. Its continual assertion of God as the source of duty must give substantial clearness to this universe, which thus far seems in the new theism almost to reel and tremble with the intoxication of its immanent Deity. The word of David must be the story of what is to come: "He commanded, and it stood fast." When that has come, may we not look to see the great idea of God made no less clear and yet truly infinite? May we not look to see a Christ in whom the whole need of all the living world shall find its satisfaction? May we not look to see a Church which shall truly express the meeting of the whole of manhood with the whole of God, and the perfect satis- faction of the human and the divine? In an age when the miracle was far gone in discredit among thoughtful minds which had come under the influence of science, Phillips Brooks kept his faith in it as an integral element in the personality of Jesus. While others were rejoicing in the universal "reign of law " revealed by science, he was rejoicing in the prospect of the higher reign of human- ity, of which the miracle was the pledge. It was natural, he thought, and inevitable, that the miracle should be associated with the Incarnation, wherein the highest triumph of humanity was exhibited. Thus, in a sermon for the second Sunday in Advent, he says : — ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 527 There are two things about the whole history of the Advent of Christ which will be constantly presented to our thoughts during the next few weeks. One is its miraculousness, and the other is its quietness. He came girt round with wonders, and He came so gently, so unnoticed save by the few who clustered nearest to His life, that the great surface of the world's existence was hardly rippled by the wonderful touch that had fallen upon it. Of the first of these characteristics of the Advent, — its miracu- lousness, — we are sure that the credibility will be more clear to us if we have really felt how vast was the importance and how great was the necessity of the event. If ever miracle might be let loose out of the rigid hand of law, when should it be but now, when the King of all the laws is coming in His personality? If there are angels, now certainly is the time for them to appear. If the stars can ever have a message and lead men, now is the time when their ministry can plead its strongest warrant. If ever the thin veil between the natural and the supernatural may break asunder, it must be now, when the supernatural power enters into earthly life and God is present among the sons of men. To any one who believes in the possibility of miracle at all, and who knows what the meaning of the Incarnation is, the wonder would be if it had no miraculous accompaniment. The breakage through the ordinary laws of nature's life seems natural and fitting, as when a king passes through a city we expect to hear trumpets and cannon replace the common sounds of trade and domestic life, which are all that its streets commonly echo. But then along with the miraculousness comes an impressive quietness. Quiet even to homeliness will be the simple scenery on which the supernatural light is thrown. The village inn, the carpenters' household, the groups of peasants, — all is as simple as the story of a peasant's childhood. With wonderful power, but with wonderful stillness, — no noise, no tumult. Surely such a description falls in with the spiritual intention of the event. It is a spiritual miracle, and the miracles of spiritual life are always as still as they are powerful, as powerful as they are still. So the whole nature of the Advent was written in the historical circumstances that were grouped around the great his- toric fact.^ To this view of the miracle he adhered. If anything could have shaken his belief, it would have been that men whom he respected should differ from him. But he saw clearly enough that those who differed came to the subject from the ^ Cf . Sermons, vol. vii. p. 24. 528 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 point of view of nature and her laws. He came to it from the study and the preference of humanity. He differed from Paley and the whole Paleyan school of evidence-writerS, in maintaining that the miracle was not primarily to be regarded as an evidence of divine revelation, but as the resultant of revelation. When thus regarded, it came in the end to be evidence that revelation must have been given. But the revelation as in Christ took the precedence. In his notes for his Bible-class studies in 1887, on the Creed, he writes direction for himself as he comes to the miraculous incidents in the life of Christ: "Now take up the story with the miraculous element in it fully accepted." And again, in his course of lectures to his Bible class in 1889, he went more thoroughly into the subject, analyzing and classifying the miracles with criticism interspersed as to their value. He remarks that "there is a difference between belief in the miraculous and belief in each particular miracle." He pro- tests against the modern tendency in those who accept the miracle to get rid of seeming difficulties by referring to it as the working of unknown law: "But we must not, we do not want to, get rid of personal power and presence which is the soul of the whole." As we study the writings of Phillips Brooks, in order to fix his position in accordance with conventional theological tests, we are baffled by the universality of his mind. His religious inclusiveness comprehended other ages as well as his own. He valued the dogmatic utterances of synods pro- testing against errors, and yet also detected the affirmations of truth contained in half utterances by those condemned as heretics. He was in sympathy with the great stream of tendency in the Christian ages. But he saw more clearly than did those engaged in controversy the truth involved on either side. The chief value of his work is in giving ex- pression to the vast range of Christian instincts, those which have, and those which have not found expression in religious formulas. The religious mind and heart of the world lay open before him. If he proclaimed the saoredness of human ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 529 nature manifested in its divine possibilities, he did not lose sight of the fact of human sinfulness and its power to frus- trate the divine purpose. It would be untrue to say of him that he dwelt on one more than the other. They were so connected in his mind that he could not separate them. At times he so presented the fact of sin that its evil and wrong seemed solely to consist in injury done to the sacredness of the human soul : — Only when men have daxed to think of themselves sublimely, as possible reflections of the life of God upon earth, only then does sin become essentially and forever horrible. This mode of appeal was effective in an age when the thought of God and of His will had grown weak in many minds. But on the other hand, and with increasing fer- vency after the transition had set in which was turning the world again toward God, did he urge obedience to the will of God as the highest ideal of man, and in disobedience point to the source of all the sin, its evil and its degradation. The fulfilment of the good involves the destruction of the bad. Make anything in the world complete and perfect after its true nature, and you must, therefore, drive out whatever there is of falsehood and positive corruption in it. That statement does not deny the fact nor change the character of sin. God forbid ! I have no patience with the foolish talk which would make sin nothing but imperfection, and would preach that man needs nothing but to have his deficiencies supplied, to have his native goodness educated and brought out, in order to be all that God would have him be. The horrible incompetency of that doctrine must be manifest enough to any man who knows his own heart, or who listens to the tumult of wickedness which rises up from all the dark places of the earth. Sin is a dreadful, positive, malignant thing. What the world in its worst part needs is not to be developed, but to be de- stroyed. Any other talk about it is shallow and mischievous folly. The only question is about the best method and means of destruction. Let the sharp surgeon's knife do its terrible work, let it cut deep and separate as well and thoroughly as it can, the false from the true, the corrupt from the uncorrupt; it can never dissect away the very principle of corruption which is in the substance of the blood itself. Nothing but a new rein- voL. n 530 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 forcement of health can accomplish that. There is the whole story. Tear your sins away. Starve your tumultuous passions. Kesist temptations. Aye, if you will, punish yourself with stripes for your iniquities. Cry out to yourself and to your brethren, with every voice that you can raise, " Cease to do evil ; " but all the time, down below, as the deepest cry of your life, let there be this other, "Learn to do well." If you can indeed grow vigorously brave and true and pure, then cowardice and falsehood and licentiousness must perish in you. O wondrous silent slaughter of our enemies ! O wondrous casting out of fear as love grows perfect! O death to sin, which comes by the new birth to righteousness! O destruction, which is but the utterance of fulfilment on the other side ! O everlasting assurance, that evil has of right no place in the world ; and that if good would only lift itself up to its completeness, it might claim the whole world and all of manhood for itself ! ^ To the theological question of endless punishment, Phil- lips Brooks had given earnest thought since the time when he read Maurice's "Theological Essays," in the Virginia Seminary. He followed the revolution of opinion as it went on before his eyes, and the argument which accompanied it. He felt that the neglect of the doctrine of God's fatherhood underlay the issue involved in punishment for sin. But on the whole it must be said that he refused to dogmatize on the subject. He was chiefly concerned with implanting "the conviction of the essentialness of punishment, as dis- tinct from the arbitrariness of punishment ; that is, the mis- ery which follows and accompanies sin is bound up in the very nature of the sin itself." If one had gained that con- viction there was no further difficulty with the question. He wrote an essay in 1884, after his return from India, begun while he was in India, where he takes up this subject in order to illustrate his theme, " The healthy conditions for a change of faith : " ^ — Many people find fault with changes of opinion because they go too far. Is it not quite as often the trouble with them that they do not go far enough ? They stop in the criticism or denial ' Cf. Sermons, vol, iv. p. 217. ^ Essays and Addresses, pp. 218 3. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 531 of some special doctrine. They do not go on to some height where they can see more of God, where they can see God anew. To take again the same illustration which we have been using, the thinker who has come to believe that no man shall necessarily suffer everlasting punishment has altered one view of one doc- trine. But he who has come to the sight of the essentialness of all God's working, so that thereafter, like a new sunlight, it saturates all his thoughts, has come to a new and fuller faith. And it is only in seeking and reaching a new and fuller faith that the alteration of one view of one doctrine is healthily made. It became him to speak much and often on the subject of the forgiveness of sin. He eschewed the whole business of priestly intervention and penitential systems. Nor did he speak the Evangelical shibboleths. Here are two of his most characteristic utterances : — The true sign of forgiveness is not some mysterious signal waved from the sky. . . . The soul full of responsive love to Christ, and ready, longing, hungry to serve Him, is its own sign of forgiveness. In all the places that are before us we shall either be delivered by Christ or be conquerors in Christ. . . . What does it matter which ? Nay, is not the last way the best way ? His tendency was to dwell on the active side of the Chris- tian life, the positive overcoming of sin and evil, rather than on the attainment of an assurance of forgiveness, which might end in the assurance and yield no fruit and inspire no future. But he never did despite to the Evangelical mood or to its deeper utterance. He believed that the death of Christ upon the cross was in some mysterious organic way connected with the forgiveness of sin. The death of Christ has saved the world. The death of Christ ! Not merely His character and teaching ; for historically, from the very first, the violent death of Jesus has had a promi- nence in religious influence which will not allow us, even as faith- ful students of history, to leave it out of view when we speak of the great formative power of modem human life. Always and everywhere the Christ whom Christianity has followed has been a Christ who died. The picture it has always held up has been the picture of a cross. The creed it has always held, however it might vary as to the precise effect of His death, has always ■ S3^ PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 made the fact of His death vital and cardinal. The Jesus who has drawn all men unto Him has been one who based His power upon this condition, "I, if I be lifted up." ^ In referring to that theory of the Atonement which makes its efficacy consist in appeasing the wrath of God, he is cau- tious lest he should go beyond what is written : — You say that it appeased God's wrath. I am not sure but that there may be some meaning of those words which does in- clude the truth which they try to express ; but in the natural sense which men gather from out of their ordinary human uses, I do not believe that they are true. Nay, I believe that they are dreadfully untrue. I think all such words try to tell what no man knows. ^ Elsewhere, speaking on this same subject he remarks: "There is no principle involved in the Atonement that is not included in its essence in the most sacred relations between man and man."^ Here is one out of many illustrations of his power so to penetrate the heart of a dogma as to make it seem like living truth to which assent is instinctive : — Wherein lay the power of the life and death of Jesus ? What was the atonement He accomplished? Did the change which He wrought come in God or man? But we have seen how man's disobedience inevitably made a change in God, — not to destroy His love, but to set His loving nature into hostility to the soul that would not do His will. And if the life and death of Jesus breaks down in penitence, as we know it does, the self-will of man, and makes him once more gratefully, loyally obedient, what then ? The change in God must follow. Not the restoration of a love that was withheld, but the free utterance for help and culture of a love that has never been held back, but which has, by the man's false position, been compelled to work against him. The wind is blowing all the time. The man is walking against it, and it buffets him and is his enemy. You turn the man round and set him walking with the wind. The wind blows on just as before. But now it is the man's friend. The wind has not changed, and yet, with the man's change, how completely the wind has changed for him.* 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. vii. p. 256. (1867.) " Ibid., vol. vii. p. 258. ' Ibid., vol. iii. p. 40. (1881.) * Ibid., vol. iv. p. 312. (1886.) ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY ^23 It must be said further of Phillips Brooks that in his presentation of the Atonement he reflected the attitude and spirit of the Anglican Church, with whose formularies he was in full sympathy. The charge made against him in his lifetime and after his death that he neglected or denied the sacrificial aspect of the work of Christ came from those who identify the fact of an Atonement with some theory of Atone- ment, Anselmic, or Grotian, or other, where the identifica- tion is so tense and rooted that it is found impossible to make the distinction. The same objection is raised from the same source against the Apostles' or Nicene creeds that they pass over in silence the Atonement. It would be truer to say that they offer no speculative theory of the significance of the death of Christ, while yet they give the fact of the death the most prominent position. This was Phillips Brooks's attitude. He would not narrow or pervert the mysterious and infinite significance of the fact of an atonement by any theory. He wrote no sermon or treatise, there is no sermon in his printed volumes, whose object is to maintain some new theory or defend an old one. But those who listened to hif preaching from Sunday to Sunday never missed any- thing so vital in Christian experience as this, — the omission of the Atonement of Christ in reconciling the world to God and God to the world. An eminent theologian said of him that the doctrine was implied in every sermon. The subject is an important one, and will be alluded to again in a later chapter. 1 III Those who compared the preaching of Phillips Brooks in the earlier and the later periods of his life were aware of ^ Phillips Brooks came as near perhaps to ofEering a theory of the Atone- ment as was possihle for one with his conception of it, in the third lecture of his book on the Influence of Jesus, where he maintains that not in the physical suffering in and of itself, but in the submission of Christ to the will of God, of which the suffering was an inevitable accompaniment, lay the mysterious po- tency of the sacrifice of Christ. But this is only one of the aspects of a sub- ject, concerning which there are many hints of other aspects scattered through- ont his sermons. Cf. ante, pp. 230, 231. 534 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 some change which it was not easy to define. His powers seemed to have expanded, the effect produced was greater ; he was listened to with a feeling of added solemnity and even of awe as he roused the slumbering spiritual faculties into the consciousness of a divine capacity, into enthusiasm for the highest things. Every limitation to his freedom, if there had been such, was removed. He went here and there on innumerable errands, and of every sort and description, from mothers' meetings to the gatherings of little children, the various associations of young men, the universities and col- leges within his reach, denominational meetings of every name, anniversaries of institutions, ordinations and solemni- ties of every kind. Wherever he went he seemed to carry the same message, yet adapted to times and seasons, till it became the special message of God for the moment. He lifted all smaller occasions into the universal relationship, and the greatest he reduced to the simplest motives. He had attained the consummation of that freedom and simplicity which had been the ideal of his youth. To account for the change in his attitude which all who heard him felt, yet could not describe, will not be attempted here. Many forces conspired to produce a mysterious in- ward revolution, or, to use again his own prophetic words of himself as he contemplated his year's absence from his work, "The gap is to be so great that the future will certainly be something different from the past." But while we may not attempt to explain the transition in his life, yet there are cir- cumstances in his development important to note, and about which there can be no uncertainty. We have seen from his correspondence how Phillips Brooks, when in Germany, had been reading Lotze with a feeling of grateful surprise. What "Ecce Homo " had been to him in earlier years Lotze was to his later years. To both he came prepared by his own previous work. In his philosophy of life and of religion he had been anticipating what Lotze could teach him. He had felt deep dissatisfac- tion with the abstract theories of prevailing systems of phi- losophy, a certain scorn for the one-sided intellectualism of ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 535 his age, whether in philosophy or theology. The speculative reason had seemed to him inadequate for the expression of the rich fulness of the contents of the soul or for the deduc- tions from human history. In these convictions his study of Lotze confirmed him, giving him the strength and confi- dence which a man standing alone must eagerly welcome. There was no break in his experience, only the continuation in bolder fashion of the principles which had hitherto given him freedom and power of utterance. These principles may be read in his sermons or occasional essays or addresses. He affirms with unhesitating confidence as the axiom of his procedure that the reality is larger than philosophy can represent it, and the Christian life than any system of theology. Conviaced of the emptiness of terms and of abstract notions, he turns away from them to the ful- ness of the individual life, or the life of the race recorded in history, with renewed and ever increasing interest in the examples of life to be found about him. There is another organ of knowledge than the dry light of the pure intellect ; and the truth attainable by this other organ of knowledge is objective and real, even though no appeal can be made to the theoretical reason in its defence. In this means of know- ledge the intellect is not inactive, but is fused in organic unity with the conscience and the affections of the believing soul. In order to know the things of Christ there must be purity of heart, the submission of the will, and what is known as the illumination given by the Holy Spirit. Hence he discarded theological gymnastics as having no value, but as illustrated in the experience of the New Eng- land people injurious to the interests of the spiritual life. He rejected the distinction between the theology of the in- tellect and the theology of the feelings as having no basis in actuality; or if one must choose between them the prefer- ence should be given to the theology of the heart. Eeligion must be simplified by bringing into prominence its funda- mental truths, ■ — that all men are the children of God in virtue of creation; that the moral life is the expression of the divine will; that the phenomena of the world's order are 536 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 incidents in the kingdom of God. The appeal for the defence of these primary convictions must be taken to an immediate inner experience, attesting the truths of religion directly, independently of logic, so that faith becomes the organ of spiritual knowledge, as the eyes of the body receive impres- sions from the visible world. In both cases alike the result is an objective actuality, valid and real. With these convictions came the freedom to disregard the materialism of science, the skepticism of shallow culture, the disquieting results of philosophical and historical criticism. No exact science can penetrate the value of realities in the spiritual world. The aspirations of the human heart, the contents of the feelings and desires, the aims of art and poetry, must be studied in order to give religious tenets any meaning of value. The "watchwords of easy currency" in theology are of little avail without the devoted search in that experience of life, from whence they had drawn whatever value they had once or might still express. But in this process we must note the absence of anything like a negative tendency which led him to pick and choose, or to reject as unworthy, any of the contributions of past ages in the church to the sum of religious knowledge. Beneath theological formulas, he assumed that originally heart and conscience had been at work in organic fusion with the think- ing mind. Even though the results might not be final, in the sense of attaining the ultimate absolute expression of the content of life, yet they were approximately true and constituted lines of advance which must not be withdrawn. In some cases, notably in the doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Triune distinctions in the nature of Godhead, he rested with a sense of security that no future progress in religious thought could possibly shake or destroy. Such were the deeper presuppositions, the underlying mo- tives, of the preaching of Phillips Brooks. He attempted no exposition or defence of his method in the pulpit, but simply applied it with triumphant success. It might have been feared that this application of religion in its simplicity would have proved jejune and monotonous in the pulpit. But, on ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 537 the contrary, life seemed to grow richer and its contents more varied and full of meaning as he carried the conviction into every department of human thought and experience that every man was actually the child of God. Under the influence of this conviction he was stimulated into deeper interest and solicitude as he brooded in contemplation over the stupendous drama of life. His natural endowment in the imaginative faculty, seen from his earliest years, which gave him the capacity for entering into all human interests, continued to grow in range and intensity, finding its oppor- tunity in the wide reading of the experience of other ages no less than in the remarks of casual conversation. He sub- jected himself to the best minds, but with no undue subjec- tion, enriching himself also by the best examples, finding inspiration everywhere in life, but above all in the life of Christ as the Son of God, and therefore the revelation of the Father's will. The evidence of a change in the later attitude of Phillips Brooks may be seen by comparing some of his later with the earlier writings. The change, it is apparent, is mainly one of emphasis, and yet it is accompanied with a certain modification of statement. We take, for example, his lec- tures on the Teaching of Religion, delivered at Yale in 1879. He had then given the initiative to the intellect, which, in turn, acts upon the feelings or emotions, and the feelings, when thus aroused, act upon the will. The intel- lectual aspects of truth are compared to "a clear glass held squarely between God and man; " and the function of "feel- ing is to furnish the middle term " between the knowing in- tellect and the conscience. While he admits that this is not the highest or most direct way of attaining the religious life, yet he recognizes it as legitimate and practical, and seeks to illustrate and enforce it. But in one of his latest essays, with a similar title, "The Teachableness of Eeligion," writ- ten in 1892, he discards this concession to the lower method, and boldly proclaims what he then considered impossible for many, the approach to religion by the unified totality of aU the human powers. 538 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 Religion must be imparted to the total man. The total man is something more than the sum of his parts. No definition of religion satisfies us except that which declares that it is the com- pleteness of the life of man. We are always taking man apart and treating him in fragments. Every highest consideration of him insists upon the restoration of his unity. He has a quality in his entire life which no examination of his partial qualities can account for. This is the first fact concerning the nature of religion, which must always dominate the method of its teaching. It belongs to the whole man in his unity. It is a possession, a condition, a quality of the total undivided human life. The invitation, " Come to Jesus, " is the exact utterance of the great Teacher of religion describing what the disciple is to do. It describes a complete experience, in which are enfolded the communication of knowledge, the imposition of command- ments, the awakening of aiiections, but which is greater than the sum of all these, as the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. Let us sum up, then, what we have said about the general method of the teaching of religion. It comes directly from the soul of God laid immediately upon and pressing itself into the soul of every one of His children. It is the gift of the total nature of God to the total nature of man. Therefore it can utter itself only through the total human life, which is personal life. And it is by the primary personal relationship, and by the great universal personality of man, and by the Son of God who is also the son of man, and by the Church which is the anticipated ful- filment of humanity, by these, as media, that the Eternal Father, who at the same time is always giving Himself most of all im- mediately, bestows Himself on man.^ But there is another tendency to be noted in his later representative utterances. He inclines to identify the total man in his unity with the will. He places the stress upon the will, as if in itself it carried the harmony of all the powers. He had always magnified obedience as the highest virtue, but he speaks at last as though the will were the essence of life whether in God or man. It begins to be more evident that he had himself been going through an inward revolution, and must therefore be ranked with those who had uttered their protest in history against the tendency to give too exalted prominence to the human intellect. He was 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, p. 215 ; also ibid. pp. 2-6 ; 34-60. ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY ^29 in sympathy with Duns Scotus, in the Middle Ages, who made assault on the intellectualism of Thomas Aquinas, and prepared the way for the decline of scholasticism in theology. In his own age he was in sympathy with Schopenhauer, who had renounced with scorn the Hegelian principle which makes the absolute idea or reason the basis of the universe. He, too, was inclined to regard the world as the manifesta- tion of will. But he reversed the interpretation of the "will to live," and gave it a positive purpose, till the "will to live " becomes the expression for the highest philosophy of human life, which is true alike for God and for man. In all this he was translating and interpreting his own history, — a hungry, voracious will ranging the world for the bread of life. In a sermon preached at Harvard University before the graduating class of 1884, when he was urging the im- portance of "character in transmitting truth and turning it into power," he thus spoke : — The first secret of all effective and happy living is in a true reverence for the mystery and greatness of your human nature, for the things which you and your brethren are, in simply being men. But surely among all the faculties which this mysterious human nature has, none is more interesting, none more thoroughly deserves our study and our admiration, than this, that it is able to carry over learning into life and to be a mediator between thought and action. If we ask what it is in human character that constitutes this faculty, we cannot hesitate to give the answer. It is the Will, that central constituent of character always. There can be no character without will. Fill a man with every kind of know- ledge, let him understand the sky and the earth and the sea, let him know all that history and all that metaphysics can tell him, that does not make him character. Those things may all lie in his mind as the apples lie in the basket. Not till a will, a choice, a distinct preference for one thing over another, a distinct approval of this and disapproval of that comes in, not until then has the man any true character; not until then do the know- ledges become faculties and unite into a man. Character having its virtue and its value in will, this is the critical power which stands between learning and life, and sends the one through in power on to the other. Hence it is that the really powerful thing, the only really pow- 540 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 erful thing in the world of man, is and always has been felt to be character. Men of little character, men of little will, may ac- cumulate material. It lies in great dead mass until the man of character comes and turns it into force. Everywhere Truth has lain helpless till character has come to concentrate it and hurl it as power upon life. The characteristic word with Phillips Brooks henceforth was "obedience" as the correlative of "will." He defined the essence of God as wiU. He complained of the "new theism " that it overlooked the will in God, and he an- nounced as the word for the future, "He commanded and it stood fast." In a sermon entitled the "Knowledge of God," preached in 1886,-' he went so far as almost to identify know- ledge with will, tiU all life seems to resolve itself into will. In the last sermon that he wrote, written not for his own parish immediately, but for the students of Harvard Univer- sity, he took up the word "obedience" and glorified it as the word of life : — He [Christ] seems to gather up his fullest declaration of this vital connection of man with God and call it in one mighty word obedience. You must obey God, and so live by Him. How words degrade themselves! . . . This great word "obedience" has grown base and hard and servile. Men dread the thought of it as a disgrace. They refuse to obey, as if they were thereby asserting their dignity. In reality they are asserting their own weakness. He who obeys nothing receives nothing. Rather let us glorify obedience. It is not slavery but mastery. He who obeys is master of the master whom he serves. He has his hands in the very depth of his Lord's treasures. "When God says to His people, Do this and live. He is not making a bargain ; He is declaring a necessary truth. He is pronouncing a necessity. He who does my will possesses Me. For my will is the broad avenue to the deepest chambers of my life. . . . "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." So speaks the infi- nite God to the obedient Child. . . . Obedience ineans mastery and wealth. Therefore let us glorify obedience, which is light and life, and dread disobedience, which is darkness and death. ^ 1 Cf . Sermons, toI. iv. pp. 280 fE. ^ Cf. The William Belden Noble Lectures, 1898, p. 21, where this passage is cited. ^T. 33-56'] THEOLOGY 541 This was the root difficulty with Agnosticism, that it sep- arated the intellectual faculty from the will which is the essence of character, and as mere intellect went sounding on its dim and perilous way. When Christ says, " The Father knoweth me," that means God has a wUl for every act of mine. What, then, can " I know the Father " mean except, " In every act of mine, I do the Fa- ther's wtZZ"? Obedience becomes the organ and utterance, nay becomes the siibstance and reality of knowledge on the side of Him who is aware that in this more special sense God knows Him. . . . God cannot know anything in pure passivity. He always wants something to be done about the thing He knows. Every knowledge of God involves and issues in a will. . . .Oh, how we separate our knowing and our obeying powers, our mental and our moral natures, as if they could be separated, as if either of them could live without the other. > It is difficult to classify Phillips Brooks in his theological attitude because he is unlike any theologian with whom we may compare him. In giving the prominence to the will in Deity and in humanity he resembles Calvin and Augustine, — a possible inheritance, also, from his Puritan descent. But on the other hand he was emancipated from every trace of the doctrine of election, whether ecclesiastical or individual, whether through the church by baptism, or by the action of special grace in conversion. In the prominence which he gave in his preaching to the conviction that all men are the children of God, by creation and by redemption, he departs from the teaching of Calvin and Augustine; going back to the earlier theology, which in its comprehen- siveness regarded all humanity as the body of Christ; re- fusing to reduce the body of Christ to the " Catholic " Church, however defined, as involving a limitation which neutralized the power of the Incarnation. But again, he was not in sympathy with what seemed to him the exaggerated intellectualism of the age of creeds and councils in the an- cient church, while yet he accepted the results which had been reached. He dwelt more upon the obedience of Christ as the evidence of His divine nature. It had been the 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. iv. pp. 290, 295. 542 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 objection to the divinity of Christ, the standing objection in every age of the church, that He professed obedience to the Father's will; and obedience, it was assumed as an axiom, implied inferiority, — he who obeys is inferior to him who is obeyed. For this reason, certain passages of Scripture speak- ing of Christ's obedience to the Father had been greatly neglected, if not discredited, by those maintaining the co- equality of the Son with the Father. But these were the favorite texts with Phillips Brooks. He reversed the argu- ment and rested upon the presupposition that perfect obedi- ence means perfect equality. Had he cared to formulate his theology into a system this would have been one of his leading motives in maintaining the divinity of Christ. The point cannot be expanded here, but it has a profound significance. God's will and Christ's obedience. Here there is the perfect mutualness, the absolute understanding and harmony, of the Fa- ther and the Son. ... In the words of completed obedience the mutual knowledge of Father and Son is perfect, and being blends with being. . . . Father and Son have come close to one an- other. In mutual knowledge, in harmony of will and obedience, they are absolutely one. Of no act that the strong, gentle hands can do can we say anything but this, that Father and Son to- gether do it, making one power, working one result. ... It is the Father and the Son. It is God in Christ. It is Christ filled with God.^ This importance attached to the will, as if it held the in- tellect in solution, explains some characteristics of Phillips Brooks otherwise unintelligible to an age which gave the supremacy to the intellect. Thus he admitted the existence of the devil, treating the subject with seriousness, not merely for rhetorical purposes, when others amused themselves with writing the autobiography of a being who was defunct. It gave urgency and point in the resistance to evil to regard temptation as not wholly a subjective mood or passing senti- ment, but as instigated by a being who was personal, who could be fought and overcome. It made the battle of life more real and tangible to regard it as a conflict of wiUs.^ 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. iv. p. 291. (1886.) ' Cf. Ibid. vol. vi. for a sermon on the Mystery of Iniquity : also, The Spiritual ^T. 33-5611 THEOLOGY 543 This same tendency to magnify life as will showed itself in another form. He did not like to think of an empty space in which the world was swinging; his nature abhorred a vacuum, and to people space with life, with spirits good or evil, did not seem to him irrational. In one of his sermons, on the Battle of Life, preached in 1885, he laments that the belief has faded away "in a universe all full of unseen forces." It has not faded away because of its unreasonableness, but because men have made this unseen world a field for witch- craft and magic obnoxious to the moral sense. When men can get rid of the paraphernalia of ghost stories and the false supernatural which brings its double harm, degrad- ing the souls that believe in it and hardening into blank material- ism the souls whom its absurdities or enormities drive into dis- belief ... I do believe that we shall see a great restoral of healthy belief in spiritual presences.^ In the last experience of PhiUips Brooks there emerges a peculiar type of mysticism, springing out of the conscious- ness of oneness between the divine and the human will. It is a mysticism wherein there is no sensuousness of emotion, no luxury of sentimental feeling, as in forms arising from other sources, whose tendency is to degenerate into empti- ness. And yet there is no sense of union so close as that springing from the harmony of will with will. In compari- son with it intellectual sympathy is weak, or the sentiment of a common emotion. In this consciousness of oneness of will, there is, also, the possibility of infinite tenderness, of an adoring love surpassing human comprehension. Here are some of the passages where Phillips Brooks describes the experience of his later years : — Many of the noblest souls have always felt, what they could not entirely describe even to themselves, such a mysterious union between their personal life and the deep spirit which works in all things, that they have known that the unit of their existence and Man, an English volnme of his sermons, for a sermon on the Temptation of Christ. 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. vi. p. 79. See, also, vol. -viii. for a sermon on Unseen Spiritual Helpers, in ^rhich the same thought is presented from a different point of "view. 544 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1869-92 their action was not the simple personality which in the tightest and most literal sense they called themselves, but was something more and greater. Just as the Body is not the Man, but the Body with the Soul flowing through it and filling it, so — such has been the thought of many of the greatest natures, the thought of which we have all caught sight in some moment of our lives — I am not merely this compact and single group of powers, pervaded with this consciousness of personality; I am all this, kept in communion with the heart of all things, fed by the spirit of the universal life. Translate this floating, mystical persuasion into the terms of Religion, and it becomes the conviction that God and man are so near together, so belong to one another, that not a man by him- self, but a man and God, is the true unit of being and power. The human will in such sympathetic submission to the divine will that the divine will may flow into it and fill it, yet never de- stroying its individuality; I so working under God, so working with God, that when the result stands forth I dare not claim it for my personal achievement; my thought filled with the thought of One who I know is diflferent from me while He is unspeakably close to me, as the western sky to-night will be filled with the sunset. Are not these consciousnesses of which all souls that have ever been truly religious have sometimes been aware? "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, " wrote the Apostles to the brethren at Antioch. "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me," vrrote Paul to the Galatians. "Who has not felt it? It was God and I, making one unit of power, that conquered my great temptation, that did my hard work, that solved my pro- blem, tliat bore my disappointment. Let me not say that it was God alone. That makes me a machine, and responsibility floats off like a cloud. Let me not say that it was I alone. Tliat robs the work of depth and breadth and height, and limits it to what I know of my poor faculty. No ! It was this active unity of God and me, His nature filling my nature with its power through my submissive will. It is not something unnatural. It is most natural. I do not truly realize myself until I become joined with, filled with Him. This is the religious thought of character. I could not preach to you of character, of human selfhood and its great function, as I have preached to you to-day, and not carry it as high and deep as this. Men call it mystical and transcendental; they say it all sounds dreamlike to the great majority of men. I confess that objection weighs with me less and less. A thousand things seem dreamlike to the great majority of men which by and by ^T. 33-56] THEOLOGY 545 are going to be known as the great moving powers of the world.' The work of Phillips Brooks as a theologian was to render the formula in terms of life. To apply the reverse method, and reduce again his thought and its expression to the cate- gories of traditional opinion, does injustice to his attitude. Yet the foregoing study of his theology will not have been in vain if it serves to make his position more intelligible when judged by conventional standards. Let one final word from him close the discussion. He is speaking of the supreme test to which all changes in religious thought must come : — Every change of religious thought ought to justify itself by a deepened and extended morality. . . . The manifestations of devoutness are variable and mistakable. The manifestations of moral life are in comparison with them invariable and clear. About my being humble and full of faith any man may be mis- taken. About my being honest and pure it is far less possible to err. Therefore it is a blessed thing for all religions that the standards of morality stand clearly facing it and saying, "Can you do this ? Can you make men brave instead of cowardly, kind instead of cruel, true instead of false ? " For every new form of religious thinking it is a blessed thing that, full of its first fresh enthusiasm, it is compelled to pass along the road where the old solemn judges sit who have judged all the ages, the judges before whose searching gaze many an ardent young opinion has withered away and known its worthlessness, the judges who ask of every comer the same unchanging question, "Can you make men better men ? " No conceit of spirituality or wisdom must make any new opinion think it can escape that test. He who leaves the plain road where the great judges sit, and thinks that he can get around behind them and come into the road again beyond where they are sitting, is sure to fall into some slough of subtlety and to be seen of men no more.' 1 From Baccalaureate Sermon, Class of 1884, Harvard University. For sim- ilar utterances, cf. Essays and Addresses, pp. 208, 378. 2 Cf. in Essays and Addresses, p. 230. See, also, the Theology of Phillips Brooks, by Leighton Parks, Rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston (1894), for a valuahle discussion of Dr. Brooks's theology, with references and citations ; and " PhUlips Brooks as a Theologian," by Rev. John Fox, in the Presbyterian and Reformed Beview, July, 1895. vol,, n CHAPTEE XVII 1884-1885 EXTEACTS FROM LETTERS. VISIT TO WASHINGTON. THE OLD HOUSE AT NORTH ANDOVEE. THEATRE GOING. SISTERHOODS. THE NEWTON CONTROVERSY. MISSIONS. LATIN SCHOOL ADDRESS. VISIT TO ENGLAND. DEGREE OF D. D. CONFERRED BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY. SERMON AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOK In the robing-room of Trinity Church is a window given by Phillips Brooks in 1884, a thank offering to his people for their generous kindness, and representing also an epoch in his career. The window has a further interest in being his own conception, worked out under his supervision. This is a description which reveals something of its significance : — E$$A®A. [Be opened.] The picture is that of Jesus and the man of Galilee "that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech." At the left stands Jesus, his arm stretched out that his fingers may touch the lips of the man who has been brought to him. Around stand the Apostles and friends of the afflicted man, while in the back- ground one sees the sail of a ship upon the Sea of Galilee. Above are representations of three angels holding a scroll with the words €ts a iTndvfji,ovcrLV ayyeXoi TrapaKvtpai, [" Which things the angela desire to look into."] At the bottom of the window two small pictures represent the Baptism and the Supper of our Lord: on the left the Baptism, — John upon the bank pouring the water upon the head of his Master, who stands in the stream; while above, the dove is de- scending from the heavens; on the right. The Lord's Supper, — Jesus breaking bread at the table with His disciples, and St. John leaning upon His shoulder.-' 1^ Cf. An Historical and Descriptive Account of Trinity Church, with a Guide to its Windows and Paintings. By A. H. Chester, Cambridge. 1888. ^T. 48] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 547 Of this window, which meant vastly more to him than he ever confessed in words, he wrote to a friend who admired it: — I am glad you like the little window in the robing-room, be- cause it was my own thought entirely and one in which I took the deepest interest. The makers did their work just as I wanted them to, and the result has already given me great satis- faction and inspiration. I hope that it will help a long line of the future Rectors of Trinity to speak with free and wise tongues. The Coopers and the McVickars spent the last week in January at the Rectory ; after the happy days were over Mr. Brooks wrote Mr. Cooper, sending him a gift : — February 12, 1884. May it remind you of him who tenderly remembers your visit as one of the bright spots in his dark pilgrimage. I missed you awfully after you had gone. The house seemed empty, and I wandered up and down the stairs looking behind all the doors to find my jovial friends. But by and by I found they were not there, and so I dried my tears and went to work. I had a plea- sant visit with John at Springfield. Then I went up to Willie Newton's, and he sleigh-rided me and talked to me about the Inter-ecclesiastical Church Congress, and showed off his children, and was as nice and sentimental as possible. Then I went over to Williamstown in the snow, and saw Mark Hopkins, and preached to the boys, and wished I could stay longer, and came home. Since then we have lost Wendell Phillips, and all the town has been debating whether he was the noblest or the basest man that ever lived, and we discriminating souls have decided that he was a mixture of the two. On the appearance, after a long delay, of the "Life of Frederick Dennison Maurice," he writes to his brother Ar- thur : — March 21, 1884. I have got the advance sheets of Maurice's Life, which Scrib- ners sent me, and am enjoying them immensely. He was the strangest, moodiest creature, but with such a genuine intellect and such a true love for his race and time. ... Is n't it sad that we shan't see dear little Clarkson [late Bishop of Nebraska] any more in this world ? To a letter from Kev. C. A. L. Richards, asking in re- 548 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1884 gard to a current report that Mr. Brooks had surrendered his faith in the miracle, he wrote : — Boston, March 22, 1884. What a curious question! No, I have not "surrendered the miraculous element in the New Testament, " nor do I "believe Jesus the natural son of Joseph and Mary," nor do I "think Stopford Brooke needlessly withdrew from the Church of Eng- land, " and points like these. Who on earth can be the man who cares to know what I think about these things ? He is recalled at this time as once entering his study, where friends were waiting for him, throwing his hat across the room indignantly, and refusing to talk. It appeared that he had just come from a conversation on the street with a clergyman of another denomination, who quietly assumed that he did not believe the creeds he was in the habit of re- citing. He had broken out in moral wrath against the man and against his assumption, asking him if he realized the meaning of what he was saying. To a clergyman who had published a statement to the effect that Mr. Brooks no longer believed in the tenets of his creed, he wrote an emphatic letter, saying plainly that the statement was untrue. This difficulty which he encountered might afford opportunity for a curious psychological study. People wanted him to be- lieve as they did. It shook their faith in their own posi- tion if it were shown that he did not. Hence they assumed the agreement. They were unwilling to accept his denials. They apologized for him on the ground that he could not know himself on such points. If he were a consistent logi- cal thinker, he would see that he did not believe what he thought he did. When Easter had been kept, he went to New York for the visit previously arranged with his brother and thence to "Washington. Just as he was leaving New York, he wrote to Boston, commending to his assistant at Trinity a case of need : — New York, April 19, 1884. Will you go and see a colored man named who is in the City Hospital, Boston ? It is a bad case. The man shot him- self some six weeks ago, in consequence of some fraudulent pro- ^T. 48] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 549 ceedings in which he had been caught, and now he is in a wretched state. He will probably die, — or, if he lives, will be a helpless creature. He is half paralyzed, and at times he is more or less out of his head. I wish that you would see him, for when I left him he was very desolate. Do comfort the poor soul, and set him right if you can. A round of festivities awaited him in Washington. Lunches and dinners, at which distinguished men were in- vited to meet him, filled up the days. Among his hosts were Senator Bayard and the historian Bancroft. He met Senators Hoar, Dawes, Pendleton, Tucker, and Wade Hampton ; Judges of the Supreme Court Gray, Field, Har- lan and Matthews. At a dinner given in his honor by Mr. Bancroft, he met, among others. General Sheridan and Presi- dent Arthur. He called upon the President at the White House, and the President returned his call. He took the occasion while in Washington to revisit the Theological Seminary at Alexandria, and "grew very sentimental about old times." Leaving Washington, he returned to New York; from there he went to a missionary meeting at Troy, where he spoke, returning to Boston by way of Springfield, where a reception was given him by his brother. In Pennsylvania the name of Phillips Brooks had been mentioned as a candidate for the bishopric in case Bishop Stevens should ask for assistance. He writes on the subject to Eev. Arthur Brooks : — 233 Clarendon Steekt, Boston, May 18, 1884. Dear Abthuk, — I thank you for your kind note, on which I have been pondering since it came. It is a funny feeling to be brought face to face with the question whether one would be a Bishop if he were elected. But when I ask myself the ques- tion, I become quite sure that I would not. First, I feel confi- dent that I do not want it, and second, I am sure that I am not made for it. And in the case of Pennsylvania, if there should come an election there, they have so good a man in McVickar that there is no need of looking farther, and it would be wrong to distract attention from him to anybody else. . . . Let him be Bishop, and if anybody asks anything about me, tell them you believe — as I now assure you is the case — I would not accept it if I were chosen. 550 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1884 An incident occurred in the spring which gave him great pleasure, — the invitation to stand as sponsor for the oldest son of the Eev. H. H. Montgomery, then Vicar of Kensing- ton, afterward Bishop of Tasmania. Mr. Montgomery's wife was a daughter of Archdeacon Farrar. To his infant godson, Harold Robert Montgomery, he writes this letter : — Boston, June 9, 1884. Mt deab little Godson, — I sent you by express to-day a little package, which, when it arrives, I beg you to open and to keep its contents as a token of the love and remembrance of your far-away Godfather. I hope that you will find it useful for a while, and by and by when you outgrow it, I shall be very glad if it still serves to remind you that there is Somebody away off here whom you belong to, and who cares about you very much indeed. Your Father and Mother have shown me the great con- fidence and kindness of asking me to be your Sponsor. They will tell you one of these days how they and I first met. But I am afraid that I myself will have to tell you the whole story of how good they were to a wanderer who had strayed across the ocean. I should have been very deeply interested in their child even if they had not made such a sacred tie between us. As it is, nothing can happen to you for which I shall not deeply care. May you grow very strong at once, and after a while very wise, and never fail to be very happy, and be always very good. Next year I shall be a few days in England, and then we will see each other's face. And some day I shall have the chance to show you this country, which I want you to grow up liking very much, and thinking only next best to your own. I am so glad that you are born now, for I think that you are going to have the best and most interesting time to live in that anybody has ever had. You must be very good to be worthy of it. But just at present you must give your whole mind and time to growing very big and strong. May God give you His best blessings alway. Affectionately your Godfather, Phillips Brooks- He had an attack of lameness in May, which shut him up in the house as a cripple for several days. Otherwise his health seemed to be good. He went out to Commencement at Harvard as usual, "going faithfully through the whole programme," and pleased with the $ B K oration by Profes- sor Jebb, of Oxford. ^T. 48] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 551 We all went out to Class Day evening, and the yard was ex- ceedingly beautiful. Then Bishop Harris was here and preached the Ordination Sermon at Cambridge, and preached for me at Trinity yesterday morning. He 's a fine fellow. . . . Had he gone to England in the summer, he would have acted as representative of Harvard University at the three hundredth year celebration at Emmanuel College, Cam- bridge. But the summer was spent at home, part of it at Sharon Springs, N. Y., of which he writes: — What a pretty, quiet place it is, — a place for children to run wild, and for old folks to sleep. Even Dr. S was not half so ugly last night as I expected him to be about and Father X did not stand to his ritualistic colors worth a cent. He speaks of attending tbe services in the Episcopal Church, but they were not wholly to his taste: "I sat in a pew at both services and enjoyed my mind." Here is a specimen of his analysis of character, in which his letters abound : — Shabon Springs, N. Y., July 9, 1884. Thank you for letting me see the remarkable epistle in which our friend pours forth his soul. It is a strange being. I doubt if he himself has any idea where sincerity ends and insincerity begins. And with this fulsome and unreal part of him there are mixed up such good qualities, so much energy and kindliness and desire to be useful, that it seems a perpetual pity that he should not be a great deal better than he is. He is a curious study of the way in which one's weakest and strongest qualities not merely lie side by side, but also are twisted in with one another, and get each other's strength and weakness. Altogether the summer rather dragged. " What a dread- ful time summer is! I long for Lent and its labor, or Christmas and its carolling, in contrast with this loungy, hot, dissipated life." One event, however, did interest him deeply; he had come into possession of the old homestead at North Andover. He felt for the first time the sensation of being an owner of land, and was impressed with the circum- stance that he should have fallen heir to the home of his an- cestors. It gave him a new sense of dignity to walk over his lands and contemplate them as his own. He magnified S50. PHILLIPS BROOKS [1884 to its full importance this consciousness of possession, and yet played with it as if he had been presented with a new toy. It was his pleasure, from this time, to represent him- self as spending his summers at North Andover, and car- rying on there extensive farming operations. Many im- provements within and without the house made things more comfortable and attractive. A study was fitted up with its large fireplace, where he was surrounded by the portraits of his ancestors, — a so-called study, for he spent but little time there ; he could not get accustomed to living in a country town, and when he was there he sighed for the city and the ways of men. But he did his best to win himself to the en- joyment of his property. The old corn barn he made over into a playhouse for the children of his older brother. A stove was put into it where the children could play at cook- ing, and where he was to go and take tea with them. A study table was also provided, for it was assumed that he would spend there much of his time. With his own hands he lined almost every inch of the wall surfaces with pictures in both its stories, for anything in the shape of a picture pleased him, and even cheap woodcuts were better than no- thing. In the midst of the changes and improvements he writes, "How I wish we had taken hold of it and made these changes ten years ago, while Father and Mother and the Aunts could have got the enjoyment of them." "With the exception of a few weeks at Sharon Springs he was in his place at Trinity Church for the summer, preach- ing on Sundays, visiting the sick and the poor during the week, anxious that they should not feel forsaken. The care of the mission chapel of Trinity, then situated on Charles Street, had for a time been assumed by him. It was one of the anecdotes told of Mr. Brooks that in urging upon Kev. Eeuben Kidner to come to Boston and take up this work, he mentioned as an inducement the crowded congregations which awaited him in this wayside chapel ; this had been his own experience on the Sunday evenings when he had preached there. Plans were now talked of for enlarging the work under Mr. Kidner's direction, and of building a larger ^T. 48] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS SS3 chapel in some better situation. He speaks of his interest in the mission in a letter to Miss Derby : — Boston, July 26, 1884. I am very glad indeed to hear you speak as you do of the new chapel work. I have great hopes of it, and that first evening seemed to me to be full of promise. I mean to try to be of more use there next winter than I have been of late years. Along with your note came that of Mr. N , suggesting so kindly that some overworked clergyman should come and enjoy Campobello for a while at his house. It is very good of him indeed. I am not able to claim that I am overworked, and yet I was much tempted to suggest myself. But I must look about and see if there is not somebody that needs it more. If you see me arriving in the character of an exhausted and destitute minis- ter, you must not expose me. Sut I am afraid that I must stay at home and look after Trinity, for we have just met with a sad mishap. Oui suit with reference to the small triangle in front of Trinity Church has gone against us, and either a very large amount of money must be raised to purchase it or it must be built upon, and a big tenement house must stand right up before our front door. But this will all come out right somehow and the new West-End chapel also will get built some day. In the fall, political issues were causing great excitement throughout the country. The nomination of Mr. Blaine for the presidency caused widespread dissatisfaction in the Re- publican party, giving rise to what was known as the "Mug- wiunp " movement, by whose aid the Democratic candidate, Mr. Cleveland, was elected, — the first Democratic President in a period of twenty-five years. While Mr. Brooks did not vote for Mr. Blaine, yet he positively refused to join in the revolt from the Eepublican party. The Church Congress met at Detroit in October, where he read his paper on "Authority and Conscience." ^ He accepted an invitation to deliver lectures in the following year at the General Theological Seminary in New York, and fastened at once on the subject of Tolerance, which had long been in his mind, as needing some new and stronger exposi- tion: "I propose to give its history, and discriminate it from its counterfeits and anticipate its future." 1 Cf . Essays and Addresses ; see, also, ante, p. 488. 554 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1884 The proposed visit of Archdeacon Parrar to this country was hailed by Mr. Brooks with delight. He charged him- self in advance with the duty of making preparation for it, offering suggestions as to how the time shall be most prof- itably employed : — 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, December 3, 1884. My dear De. Faerar, — -This is a joy indeed! Henceforth I will not cease to hope for any good thing which I want very much, for I shall be sure that some changing year will bring it in some most unexpected way, as it has brought your promise of a visit to America. Already I look at our Boston streets with jealous eyes, and hope that you will like them; and last night, when I went to hear your countryman. Dr. Gosse, lecture at the Lowell Institute, I was thinking all the time how much I wished that it was you already in possession of the platform, where we shall see you by and by. I care little what you do in New York. Boston is the centre and the Hub. First, you and your friend who comes with you will make my bachelor house your home when you are here, won't you? It is only a wayside hut, where I live quite alone, but there shall be the heartiest of welcomes and liberty to do the thing which you like best. Will you not tell your companion what pleasure it will give me if he with you will come to me for all your Boston visit ? And then when you are here, would it be pleasant to you if an audience should gather for your Bamp- ton Lectures made up of the students of all the Divinity schools of various churches, — Episcopal, Congregationalist, Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, and Universalist, — together with the clergy of all of those denominations ? Such an audience would delight to hear you, and you could do them vast good. There would certainly be the wish to make an acknowledgment of several hun- dred dollars for the trouble you would take. As to the Lowell Institute, Mr. Lowell would, I know, be overjoyed to know that you would lecture for him, if — and that brings me to the one point of difficulty about it all — you can make your visit late enough to let him give you an audience. The trouble is that everything is dead here almost until the first of November. September is an almost useless month to be here. Society, schools, lectures, are almost hopeless. Our Divinity schools and colleges begin about the first of October. The nearer a course of lectures can be brought to the first of December the better it succeeds. I am anxious, therefore, that your visit here shall be as late as possible. If you can write to me at what ^T. 48] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 555 time you can come, making it as late as you can manage it, and will let me know that some such arrangement as I have suggested would he agreeable to you, I will see at once that the arrange- ments of it are set in train. I am so glad that you are coming! You do not know how true and deep is the regard which hosts of people here have for you, or how much good your visit will do to us all, or how much I want to see you in this dear old town ! You are to preach your first sermon in my church. I wish with all my heart that Mr. Montgomery would also come with you. Is it impossible? I thank you for your kind words about my little visit for next summer. I am afraid it will be very short, and I am to be so much in the power of my friends with whom I travel, a whole family of them, that I must not hope to accept your kind invitation to be your guest in London. I must call a hotel my home, but you will let me come in upon you as I used to do, and sit sometimes among your children at your table. I have promised to preach at Cambridge on the first Sunday in June, and when Jowett wrote to me about Oxford I told him of this plan and said that if there were no impropriety in accepting both invitations, I would come there on the last Sunday in May. What sort of sermons ought these to be ? I have heard nothing further from Dr. Jowett. I wish that you were here to-night ! But it is very much to know that you are coming. With the kindest regard to Mrs. Farrar and to all your family, I am ever faithfully yours, Phillips Brooks. To Dr. Weir Mitchell he writes, speaking of his recent book, " In War Time:" — 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, December 20, 1884. Mt deae Weik, — Just after I had finished " In War Time " there came in the copy of it which you, in your kind thoughtful- ness, had sent to me. I should have sent a line anyway to say how much I had enjoyed the story, but now I must also tell you how very much I value the copy of it which you have given me yourself. I have not had enough to do with great people to have ceased to feel a thrill at an author's gift of his own book. An author, the man who can wave his wand and summon all these people and make them behave themselves like folks for four hun- dred pages, is a mystery and a marvel to me. And to have him open the door to me with his own wonderful hands is a surprise and delight. And then the book comes from a dear old friend, which is far more. It is full of the dear old times. The very smell of Ger- 556 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1884 mantown is delightful, and I cannot be mistaken in thinking that here and there I have a reminiscence of people I have known with you. And the people whom I have not known you have, and I feel as if I knew them through you. I thank you, my dear Weir, for writing it and for sending it to me. I take it for a Christmas present, and send back swarms of Christmas wishes for you and yours. God bless you, merry gentleman ! Ever affectionately yours, P. B. To Lady Frances Baillie he writes : — 233 Clakendon Stbeet, Boston, December 25, 1884. Deae Lady Frances, — Before I go to church this Christmas morning I want to send you a word of greeting, which I wish that you could get to-day, but oh! for those three thousand miles of sea! At any rate you will know that I thought about you on this best morning of the year, and sent out this bit of a letter from the midst of our snowdrifts to tell you of my kind and grateful remembrance. I should not be ashamed to have you see how our New England Christmas looks, — such sunshine and such spotless snow, fresh fallen during last night; and a tingling, clear, cold air which makes everybody who goes by under the windows go springing, as if they were so full of Christmas joy that they could not walk soberly. And so we are in the depths of another winter, full of work and full of all sorts of interesting experiences. It must be a dreadful thing to live after life has ceased to be interesting, and when folks have become tiresome. Every now and then some- body comes in on us from your great land to make variety for us, and to remind us how alike and how unlike the mother country and the daughter country are. We have seen many pleasant Englishmen and Englishwomen here this autumn. Whenever they come I feel the old pleasure rise up in my heart, and I want to be among you for a while in June. Well, I am coming in June. Now I must go to church. May all best blessings of the Christmas and the New Year's come to you and yours. Ever, dear Lady Frances, Yours most sincerely, Phillips Brooks. It was not often that Phillips Brooks had the opportunity to go to church as one of the congregation, and listen to the preaching of others. Here is a picture of him in the old ^T.48] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 557 church on Tremont Street, sitting in the familiar pew where he had grown up from boyhood. He writes, "December 26, 1884: — The Bishop had us all to talk to the other day in old St. Paul's, and I sat alone in Pew No. 60, and heard him, and used Mother's old Prayer Book in the service. 1885. The following letters were written to a lady who had thoughts of entering a sisterhood in order that her life might be under "rule " and subject to a "spiritual director." The tone of the remonstrance is urgent, for on this subject the feeling of Phillips Brooks was as deep as Luther's when he broke with asceticism, or of the English reformers when they sanctioned the abolition of the monasteries : — 233 CiiAKENDON Strbbt, Boston, January 3, 1885. Mt dear Miss , Is there not very great danger that, in seeking to lose the worst part of yourself, its anxiety and oppression, you may lose the best which God has given you in the submission of your life to rule and machinery? I cannot help telling you once more how sad is the mistake which I feel sure that you would make if you gave way to the impulse which has taken possession of your mind. But may not this one thing have weight with you, the duty which you owe to your present work ? Can you desert the souls which look to you for help ? Can you give up your school-teach- ing into which God has allowed you to carry so much of life- giving power ? Can you abandon your class in which you have gathered so many young hearts, all growing earnest under your inspiration? I do not see how it is possible. If ever God marked out one of his servants for a certain kind of work and showed His purpose for her by the blessing which He gave to her labors, He would surely seem to have done it for you. Can you disregard all this, and give yourself up to a system in which you certainly do not thoroughly believe, and by your embracing of which you would assuredly seem to disown the method of the healthy, human, and spontaneous work in which you have accom- plished so much. I need not tell you that you can make no change in your work which will change in the least degree my faith in your singleness of purpose and devotion to Christ. But, my dear friend, for 558 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 your own sake, and the Church's sake, and the sake of the souls which you are training, may I not beg you to continue the work for which I have so often thanked God? May He give you His light abundantly. Your sincere friend, Phillips Bkooks. 233 Clarendon Stebet, Boston, Jannary 8, 1885. Mt dear Miss , I am more glad than I can tell you. I do joyfully and solemnly thank God for your decision. Now may your whole life realize more and more in ever increasing usefulness and happiness that it is Gtod whom you have followed, and that in His rich world is the place where He wiU give Him- self to you most richly. May He bless you, my dear friend, always. Faithfully yours, Phillips Bkooks. It may have been partly in consequence of his deep, con- stitutional repugnance for anything savoring in the least degree of the monastic tendency that he sympathized with movements whose object was to give women a greater oppor- tunity in the world of action. He felt the significance of the juncture in the circumstances of the time begetting the two alternatives, one of which would send them to semi- monastic seclusion, as in the Middle Ages, and the other throw open to them spheres of influence which had hitherto been closed. In his experience of evils to be reformed in municipal life, he felt that women could take an important place which could not so well be filled by men. He gave his sympathy to those who were laboring to this end. Among the changes in clerical life which Mr. Brooks de- plored as reducing the richness of his environment was the transfer of the Eev. William E. Huntington from his long rectorship of All Saints' Church, Worcester, to the rector- ship of Grace Church, New York. His desire to keep his friends about him led to the suspicion that he even put obstacles in the way of their removal, when there was danger of their getting beyond his range. While there was no truth in the suspicion, yet he did want to keep his friends about him, for it seemed to shake the stability of his universe to let them go. He writes to Dr. Huntington with reference to an exchange : — ^T. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 559 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, February 3, 1885. My dear Huntington, — Thank you for your kind note. Boston is expecting you for Sunday, and I will do the best I can to keep New York from grumbling. I shall not be able to go on until Saturday afternoon, but I hope to get a good part of next week in your great town. My brother Arthur will expect me to be his guest, so that I must not accept your courteous offer of the pleasant hospitalities of the rectory. But I shall pay my respects to Miss Reynolds and your children, and perhaps you will be back before I leave. I suppose I may take it for granted that you have a surplice at Grace Church which I can wear, and if you will tell your sexton to have the pulpit desk four feet and three inches from the floor, the gospel as I try to preach it will be more effective. A good club last night, at which we should have rejoiced to see your face. Ever yours affectionately, Phillips Brooks. He writes to Eev. K. Heber iNewton of New York : — 238 Clakendon Street, Boston, February 14, 1885. Mt dear Newton, — I thank you very much indeed for your note, and I am glad to know from it that the impression which I formed this week in New York is correct, that the Newspapers are making the mischief, and that we are not to see your real work hindered and the Church disgraced by a presentment and a trial. I am sure that the work which you have done is one for which you may well be thankful, and for which those who love our Church most wisely may rejoice. You have had a true mes- sage to many whom others' messages have failed to reach. You have done very much indeed to keep the mind of the Church open to the light. Whatever God may have to say to her, you have made it more possible for her to hear. That is a great work for any man to have done. In that, more than in the impression of his own exact ideas upon the Church's mind, any progressive man's best service to the Church must lie. We certainly cannot be surprised or angry that such a work excites anger and opposition. I, for one, believe that no opposition will exasperate you, and that you will be kept from any word which can hinder the best result of what you have seri- ously and devoutly undertaken. I wish you would rest yourself for a Sunday by coming on and staying with me and preaching in my church. Any Sunday that you will name I shall be delighted to see you. Ever yours most sincerely, Phillips Brooks. 56o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 In February Mr. Brooks went to New York to deliver his lectures on Tolerance. Of this event he speaks in a letter dated February 14, 1885 : — I have been at New York lecturing ... at the General The- ological Seminary. ... I saw Buell, and Eigenbrodt, and all those others who have been vague names to me from my child- hood. . . . They were civil, and the fellows sat and took my lectures ; and when the last was over, we went over to the Eden Mus^e and saw the was works and the chamber of horrors. To his brother he writes in the capacity of an officer of the Church Congress with reference to the appointments of speakers : — 233 Clabendom Stbeet, Boston, March 12, 1885. Mt dearest Arthur, — The man who can say what side X will take on any imaginable topic is a dangerous member of society. He possesses a degree of insight and perspicacity which it is not safe to have about ! On the whole, I think that X does n't like sestheticism in Christian worship. But I dare not say that his paper will not be a furious abuse of Puritan- ism and an assertion that only by altar lights and superfrontals can the Church be saved ! Still, do put him on. Better, a thou- sand times better, X in the wrong than T in the right ! X will be interesting at any rate, which Y never was, nor is, nor will be for ever and ever, Amen. Honestly, I have no serious doubt that his talk would all be on the side of simpli- city and sense, and I should think he would be a first-rate man for the place. He writes on the subject of attending the theatre : — 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, March 24, 1885. Dear Miss Derby, — I understand and appreciate your feel- ing perfectly, but I think that it is better not to go. If I could tell people frankly about it, I would not hesitate to do so. But the trouble with the Theatre is its dreadful indiscriminateness. The same House which gives good Mrs. Vincent her benefit to-day may have almost anything to-morrow. What can we do with an institution such as that? When you come home I will tell you more fully what I think about it if you care to hear, but at pre- sent I know that I may beg you to believe that I have not de- cided without thought this question which you have asked me. I am sure that Mrs. Vincent will not doubt my respect for her because I do not go to her benefit, and you will not imagine that I do not value your judgment on the subject. ^T. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 561 I send my kind remembrances to your mother and to Carrie, and I am, Ever yours sincerely, Phillips Bkooks. In giving Ms impressions of Phillips Brooks, Mr. Edward W. Hooper recalls how when men complained of the churches as incompetent to distribute the bread of life, or as "trying to dam up the water of life that it might be distributed only to regular subscribers," — a familiar complaint at the time, Mr. Brooks would reply that he had no sympathy with such remarks : — Such speeches have just enough truth in them to make them pungent, but they are not really true. The churches to-day are honestly trying to bring the Water of Life to all men. They blunder and they fail, but they do try. And I do not know, for myself, any other agency with which I can combine such poor eSort as I can make in that direction, except with them.^ In this, as in other cases, Mr. Brooks strove to recognize the situation as it actually was, — there were men outside of the churches whose aim was to be good and to be useful, but who no longer went to church or cared to do so. He alluded to the relation of the church and the clergy to these men, whom the community might hold in the highest respect, in a sermon preached at Appleton Chapel April 26, when his text was "Watch ye therefore, and pray always that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man " (Luke xxi. 36). The division between church-goers and non-church- goers was not to be explained by the operation of a "special " and a "common grace," as the earlier Puritan divines had taught. There was fault upon both sides to be removed, but a common ideal held both classes in the same responsibility, — worthiness to stand before the Son of man. The attention of Mr. Brooks was called, in a direct and practical way, it would seem for the first time, to what are known as "Missions," by a request from his brother that he would "hold a mission" in the Church of the Incarnation. He dismissed the request, saying he had not the special gift 1 Quoted from The Harvard Monthly, February, 1893, p. 206. VOL. n 562 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 required, but the subject lingered in his mind and took shape in after years in efforts of a similar kind which will be described in their place. 233 Clarendon Stbeet, Boston, March 28, 1885. Dear Arthuk, — Your letter talking about things to happen after Lent is over sounds delightful, but very far away and mys- tical, very like the most glorious and mysterious passages of the Revelation. But it will all come to pass in good time. Indeed, it is nearer now than it seems. Confirmation is over, and there is only one more Bible class after to-night. I wonder if those innocent boys have any idea how much I dread the meetings, and how awfully I am afraid of them. I am startled at the idea of holding a "mission." I don't know how, and, so far as I do understand it, I don't think that I have the right sort of power. I have an idea that there are mysterious methods of which I am profoundly ignorant, and, besides, I have made tremendous reso- lutions about staying at home next winter and working up my parish, which is running down. But we will talk about it all in that blessed week when we shall be together. . . . Easter Day fell on the 5th of April, and from that time he gave himself to the preparation of his address before the Boston Latin School. What the prayer he made at Harvard on Commemoration Day in 1865 was to the Uni- versity, that his oration was to the Boston Latin School, revealing his genius in a new light, his sympathetic insight into the meaning of events in history, his subtle power of characterizing historic personages, the large atmosphere wherein he environed the institution with his loving heart, the exquisite sentences, the humor and the gentle satire, the directness, the simplicity, the naturalness of it all, — these characteristics of Phillips Brooks were here seen in their conjunction and at their best. The address was given on April 23, 1885. The enthusiasm it elicited from a con- stituency representing old Boston may be inferred from these tributes : — Apra 24, 1885. My deab Sib, — The Latin School Association are under great obligations to you for your admirable oration. All are enthusiastic in praise of it, and well they may be. ^T. 49] LATIN SCHOOL ADDRESS 563 As a literary, historical, and eloquent production, it was the best I ever listened to, and my experience has been a large one. The committee have been commended for their sagacity in selecting you as the fittest of all the host of graduates for such a service. Believe me, ever with the highest esteem, Your friend, C. H. Dillawat. I cannot refrain [says Mr. Merrill, the head master] from giving you the assurance again of my unbounded satisfaction and pleasure in your memorial address. After a day's retrospection and hearing so many words of commendation, with not a shadow of adverse criticism, it is evident that the committee were most fortunate in their unanimity, from the very beginning, in the selection of an orator. The spirit of your address, its sentiments and eloquence, were just what I expected from you, and I thank you with all my heart for it. Nothing could have been better [writes the late Mr. Robert C. Winthrop] than your account of our old school, — nothing certainly more brilliant. My little gold medal has increased tenfold in value since it found a mention among the prizes of 1824 in your admirable oration. Eev. Dr. Pynchon, President of Trinity College, Hart- ford, vrrites in the same strain, and gives interesting remi- niscences of the old days : — Tkinity College, Haktfobd, April 27, 1885. Dear Dr. Brooks, — I was very sorry not to find you at home on Saturday. I wanted particularly to express to you my very high appreciation of your Latin School Address. To say that it was a masterly oration, powerful and interesting and full of humor, and worthy of the most famous of the old school of Boston orators, would be but small praise, because I think its greatest merit consisted in wise lessons and in its certainty of being very useful. I hope a very large edition will be printed, and that a copy will be placed in every family of young children in the entire city, and especially in the hands of the rich and well-to-do people. It is a very great misfortune to them as well as to the public that they no longer send their children to the city schools, and particularly to the Latin School. The reason they give for not sending them there is the very reason for send- ing them, viz., that they may come into contact with the sons of the people, and grow up with them as part of them. It would 564 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 be of the greatest benefit to them all their lives. For myself, I feel under a debt to the city of Boston which I can never repay. Not a native of the city, or even of Massachusetts, I was sent there after my father's death, when about eight years of age, to live with my guardian, and as soon as possible was placed at the Latin School, where I got the very best education that America afforded for nothing. The school was then on School Street, in the heart of historic Boston. King's Chapel, Sir H. Vane's house. Governor Bowdoin's mansion, Hancock's house, Faneuil Hall, the Provence House, the Old South, were close at hand. Frances Anne Kemble was playing in the Tremont Theatre. Bishop Wainwright was the pastor of Trinity. Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, A. H. Garrett, Theodore Lyman, Martin Brim- mer, walked the streets, and often visited the school. All those surroundings were calculated to make a deep impression upon a boy; they did on me, and Lhave never lost it. I have had all my life a consciousness of dignity, as having been educated by the city of Boston, and have nourished a strong desire to be able to do something, some day, in return. It was this feeling that drew me to Boston the other day. Mr. Dillaway was then Master, assisted by Sebastian F. Streeter, Gardner, and H. W. Terry. Dillaway I loved, Gardner I feared, Terry I enjoyed, Streeter I admired. Your delineation of Mr. Gardner was to the life. It was truly a masterly portraiture. The last time I saw him was in Essex Street, as I was going from the B. & A. Station. "Are you still engaged in teaching the young idea?" "Yes," I said. "Ah, it is a wearying life. We deserve some- thing better." This was not long before his death. No old scholar can ever forget him and his appearance in the schoolroom as he walked over the floor, — his hair, his hands, and his legs. Yet he was exceedingly kind, and it was only upon the dull, the lazy, and the wicked that he poured out his wrath. I was delighted to hear everybody in Boston, from President Eliot down, say that this was positively the finest thing you have ever done. If so, it was simply because it was the offspring of filial devotion to the old school and its master. May the oration of the five hundredth anniversary be equal to it ! Believe me to be always. Most cordially yours, Thos. R. Ptnchon. A letter came to Mr. Brooks from the late Bishop Vail of Kansas, which is valuable for the light it throws on the relationship between the two, and for its references to the friendships which they held in common : — ^T. 49] VISIT TO ENGLAND s^S April 25, 1885. . . . Your words in your previous letter touched my heart. The very mention of Cooper's study down there on the east side of Franklin Square brings up so many tender thoughts, — Cooper, Vinton, Bishop H. W. Lee, Strong, Yocom, et id omne genus, — what days those were! Dear Vinton! I used to call him the "noblest Roman of them all," and I shall pass the title over to you by right of inheritance. What times by and by, when in the blessed home we shall all meet and talk over the past, when our work here is done, and we come home from our work there, from time to time, and chat over the past of our work here, in those abiding mansions. May God pity our imperfections, and pardon our sins, and admit us to see the King in His beauty and glory, and evermore to work for Him! Among the papers of Mr. Brooks, this following receipt finds its place here : — Boston, April 29, 1885. Received of Rev. Phillips Brooks ten dollars for drawing his will. F. E. Parker. On Saturday, May 8, Mr. Brooks sailed for England by the Cunard steamer Etruria, arriving at Queenstown the fol- lowing Saturday, after a passage of six days, twelve hours, and twenty-five minutes, regarded at the time as the best record made in ocean travelling. He writes to Mr. Cooper, "I feel as usual when about to start, that I wish I were not going." But in reality he was eager to go. There were many friends in England who were expecting his com- ing, homes stood open to him there as here, where the warmest welcome awaited him, and there were many who looked for him, as for a messenger sent from God. He had important engagements to fulfil, and high honors were to be bestowed. The same social recognition given him in 1883 was to be repeated in 1885, with equal if not greater cordiality. The English appreciation of Phillips Brooks seems almost to surpass the devotion of his own country- men. He was inundated with letters, which began to pour in upon Mm before he left home, asking him to preach in many of the most important churches in London and elsewhere in England. When his arrival in England was 566 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 announced, the flow of letters was increased, reminding him of conditional promises he had made to preach here or there, on his previous visit. It was now taken for granted that he would come to England every other year. On reaching London he betook himself immediately to the house of Archdeacon Farrar, where he saw his godson Harold Montgomery. His first sermon was preached for Dr. Farrar at St. Margaret's, Westminster. At the Abbey, where he preached on June 7, the crowd was vaster than ever that surged into the church before the service began. His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Benson, was not among the early comers, and- secured but a poor place, where it must have been difficult to hear. Mr. Brooks alludes to the occasion briefly in one of his home letters: "Preached in Westminster Abbey to a host of people. The great place looked splendid, and it was fine to preach there." Mr. Brooks had preached notable sermons in the Abbey, but the sermon on this occasion, on the Mother's Wonder, from the text, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?" enhanced his reputation and brought to him many letters of gratitude. On June 11 he went to Caterham Valley to preach the ordination sermon at the request of the Bishop of Rochester, when there were forty candidates to be pre- sented. At the Chapel Eoyal, Savoy, whose chaplain. Rev. Henry White, was another friend, he preached, on June 21, from the text, " As free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God." In its issue for June 25, the London "Truth" refers to the oc- casion : — The Chapel Eoyal, Savoy, was densely crowded on Sunday to hear Dr. Phillips Brooks preach his last [sic] sermon in London during his present visit to England. ' The multitude was so great that Dr. Brooks might well have imitated the practice of a former chaplain of the Savoy, the renowned Thomas Fuller, and redeliv- ered his sermon in the garden which surrounds the Chapel, to the disappointed audience outside. On Thursday, June 25, he preached twice, in the morning at St. Mark's, Kennington, and in the evening at Lincoln ^T. 49] VISIT TO ENGLAND 567 Cathedral, where he was entertained by his friend Precentor Venables. On Saturday he went to Salisbury as the guest of Dean Boyle, and the following day he preached in Salis- bury Cathedral. If he could have accepted all the invita- tions which came to him, it would have required a sojourn of several months. But he found time to go again to Har- row, at the urgent request of the head master, Dr. Mon- tagu Butler, and roused the boys with his stirring appeal. He also went to a meeting in behalf of the Mission at Delhi, where he spoke out of a full heart and from a knowledge of the actual situation. He was asked by the Bishop of Winchester, Dr. Harold Brown, to preach the sermon at the opening of the Church Congress, but was unable to com- ply with the request; and was also obliged to decline a re- quest from the Dean, Dr. J. Stewart Perowne, to preach at Peterborough Cathedral. Two events stand out in this visit which distinguish it from like occasions in other years, — his reception at the two imiversities of Oxford and Cambridge. Dr. Jowett, the Master of Balliol, Oxford, and Vice-Chancellor of the Uni- versity, had long been desirous that he should come to Oxford. On Trinity Sunday, May 31, he preached to a crowded congre- gation in St. Mary's Church, from the text Proverbs viii. 1, 22, 23 ; the sermon was published in part in the Oxford "Magazine" for June 3, and in full in the Oxford "Ee- view." These were among the comments on the sermon and on the man : — Those who were wise enough to go to hear Mr. Phillips Brooks in St. Mary's certainly were not disappointed. There was a large crowd, especially of senior members of the University. The American preacher has certainly nothing of the proverbial Yankee about him. His style is flowing and dignified, and an occasional slip in his delivery only made its force and vigor seem more natural. It is a rare treat to hear a mean between the cultured homily, with which we are too familiar in Oxford, and the ranting, which seems to be the only prevailing alternative. We hope this is not the last time that Mr. Brooks will rouse Oxford from St. Mary's pulpit. Mr. Brooks has come among us to be welcomed as the author 568 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 of much of the delicate analysis of human motive and aspiration which in American literature we have learned to love. He was long enough at Oxford to become a "familiar figure" to the students. On Monday night, June 1, he was a guest of Trinity College. On the next day he was present at a congregation in Convocation House. On Jime 16 he went to Oxford for a second visit, to receive the hon- orary degree of Doctor of Divinity, where he was the guest of the Vice-Chancellor, and of Dr. Hatch, the author of , the Bampton Lectures on the "Organization of the Early Christian Churches." Dr. Hatch had been eager to know Mr. Brooks as a man with a spirit kindred to his own. In a convocation held in the Sheldonian Theatre, on Tuesday, for the conferment of honorary degrees, the Vice-Chancellor presiding, Dr. Ince, the Regius Professor of Divinity, pre- sented Mr. Brooks, recounting the circumstances of his career, how, not long after his ordination, he had gained recognition in America for keen intellectual power and re- markable eloquence ; as an eloquent expounder, also, of the true Catholic faith. Some years ago his fame as an orator and preacher had reached England. The University had now been given an opportunity to hear him preach, and he could, therefore, plead his own claim best for the honor of a degree.^ ' The address of Dr. Ince in presenting Mr. Brooks for the degree is here snhjoined : — " Post episcopos nostrates ad honores Academicos admissos non incongruum cuiquam videbitur si Theologum quendam gente nobis arctissimis vineulis con- juncta oriundum ad eundem honorem accipiendum prsesentare pergam. Fama egregii conoionatoris Teritatem Christianam mira eloquentia edentis ab America ad nostras oras pervenerat. Intra hunc terminum speciali universitatis deereto data est nobis Oxoniensibus occasio ipsum concionatorem accipiendi, videndi, et (quod melius) nostris auribns audiendi. Non eget commendatione mea, hie vir reverendus, Phillips Brooks. Si gratiam vestram, Aeademiei, petere necesse esset, ipse causam suam in Ecclesia S. Mariaa Virginia voce sua jamdudum egit. Hsec tantum mihi dicere lieeat. Postquam literas humaniores et scientias quse ad disciplinam eujusque hominis exculti pertinent in CoUegio Harvardensi didi- cisset, orator noster ad Theologise studium so contulit. Turn ad sacroa ordinea Diaconatus et Presbyterii admissus, ingenio subtili, f acundia, copia sententiariim et verborum uberrima, annis adhuc juvenilibus eminere "visus est. Nunc regit Eoclesiam S. S. Triuitatis apud Boston, urbem Transatlanticam, cujus nomen ^T.49] HONORARY DEGREE 569 That the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford should commend Phillips Brooks as a defender of the Catholic faith, and that, too, in Oxford, the home of ecclesiastical conservatism, shows the impression he had made by his sermon at St. Mary's. He had taken for his text verses from that striking chapter in the book of Proverbs which reveals the influence of Hellenic thought upon the Hebrew mind, where the complex life of Deity is suggested by the personification of Wisdom: "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was." The sermon was marked by the richness of imagination which had characterized his earliest preaching, when he was stiU fresh with the dew of the morning, that had brought him the fuller revelation of God. He must have been recalling, as he wrote the sermon, those vigils at the Virginia seminary, when for the first time he was read- ing the works of Philo and Origen. They had borne fruit with him, as in the ancient church they had prepared the way for the fuller Christian faith. The subject of his sermon was the "Life in God." I have known that I was to come here and speak to you to-day, while the whole air of the place and of the Church in which I originem Anglicam et mig^ationis memorabilis historiam nunquam obliTiscen- dam rerocat. Quo in loco notus eat Fidei Christianae et vere CatholicsB Vin- dex. Gives sno3 inter qnos inveniuntur multi Uteris et philosophise dediti, Chriati Evangelii dootrina et prseceptis instruit : et adolescentes ingenuos in academia vicina Harvardensi apud Cantabrigiam Americanam aUicit, deleotat, ad veram sapientiam peranadet. Rationem prsedicandi et Saoras Scripturas ad vitae hodi- emse ustis aecommodandi in praslectioniboa coram Collegio Yalensi habitis et a nostrisTheologis avide leotia expoauit, artis suae oratoriiB ipse exemplar idemque praeceptor. " Hunc igitnr vimm, de Theologia, de Keligione, de Academica republics ubicnnque gentium poaita, optime meritum ad tos duco ut admittatur ad gradum Dootoris in Sanoti Theologia honoris causa." The bishops alluded to, upon whom the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred at the same time, were the Et. Rev. Edward Harold, Lord Bishop of Winchester, Et. Eev. Lord Arthur C. Hervey, Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Et. Kev. Charles John EUicott, Lord Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (the Chairman of the Committees for the revision of the Authorized Ver- sion of the Old and New Testaments). 570 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 spoke was full of the great truth to which this day belongs, — the truth of the Trinity; and I have thought much of how I might best make what I desired to say seem fitted to the spirit of this lofty festival. It has not seemed to me best, even if it were in my power, to enter into dogmatic definition of the doc- trine which tries to sum up in itself the Christian's faith in God. Rather I have chosen to preach to you of Life, its glories and its possibilities, to try to make the men to whom I was to speak feel with a deep enthusiasm the splendor and the privilege of life as the mysterious gift of God. It has appeared to me that, speaking so, I should not be speak- ing in a way inappropriate to Trinity Sunday. For what is the truth of the Trinity? It is the truth of the richness of the Divine existence. The statement of the doctrine of the Trinity is the attempt to tell in our poor human language how manifold and deep and various is the life of God. This is the special meaning of the Feast of the Trinity. Other festivals of the Christian year remember what God has done. Christmas, Epiph- any, declare the manifestations of His love and power in the ex- periences of His Son. Good Friday makes real anew, from year to year, the tragedy in which mercy and righteousness triumphed over sin and death. Whitsunday bears witness to His perpetual presence with mankind. Once in the year, on Trinity Sunday, the Church dares to lift herself up, and think with awe and loving fear of what God is. That is the sublimest occupation of the human mind. If the human mind dares to think itself equal to that occupation, dares to believe that it has fathomed God or surrounded God with its adventurous thought, how weak it grows in its audacity. But if, as it thinks of Him, it finds itself filled with this one truth concerning Him, that He is Life, that He is infinite and endless Life, that not in one tight compact personality but in a vastness and variety of being, which reaches our human nature on many sides, making it vital on them all, that so God the Creator, the Redeemer, the Inspirer, comes with His mani- fold living influence to man, — if so the Church of God can think of God on Trinity Sunday, then what a blessed, what a glorious festival it is. How all of human living and thinking becomes the stronger for its devout observance.^ One of the undergraduates who was present when the degree was conferred recalls "the hearty applause which the appearance of Phillips Brooks commanded : " — 1 Cf. The Oxford Beview, June 3, 1885, p. 354. ^T. 49] VISIT TO CAMBRIDGE 571 More than any man I have ever known, Phillips Brooks pos- sessed that which commanded instant trust, complete conjSidence, — a power not only the outcome of a splendid physique, eloquent of strength and protection, of a broad, quick, and ever-sympa- thetic mind, but of a great heart filled with love for all his fel- low beings, a love blind to all differences of class and race, and which, shining ever from his kindly eyes, lit up his face with a sunny smile, and made him godlike. I was an undergraduate at Christ Church when Oxford conferred the degree of D. D. upon him, and I shall never forget him as he appeared before the vice- chancellor — Jowett, I think — clad in his gown of crimson and scarlet, nor the surprise with which many of my Oxford friends regarded his splendid athletic proportions, and his perfectly formed head. There was nothing of the Jonathan about him, and the mass of even educated English people still picture an American as a thin man with a long nose and a goatee. ... In applauding Phillips Brooks, men did not merely applaud a famous preacher. The praise was not that of the scholar, the artist, the athlete, but of those who felt instinctively when they saw him that here was a man as God intended a man to be; and there were no hands that were not busy clapping; even the heads of colleges forgot for once to remain unmoved. On June 13 he went to Cambridge, to fulfil his appoint- ment as one of the Select Preachers before the University. During his stay he was the guest of the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Ferrar, and of Professor Jebb, v?hose acquaintance he had made in the American Cambridge. He had the plea- sure of witnessing a boat race on Saturday afternoon. Dis- tinguished men were invited to meet him, among them the late Professor Freeman, and Dr. Westcott, the present Bishop of Durham. On Sunday he preached in Great St. Mary's, and -his subject was chosen v^ell for the place and the time, — in substance the first of his lectures on Tolerance, already referred to in a previous chapter. The occasion has been described by the late Dr. Hort, the eminent New Tes- tament scholar, in a letter to his wife dated June 14, 1885: — St. Mary's was a strange sight to-day. The scaffolding was prominent, now moved into the middle of the church. The crowds were enormous, at least downstairs. I do not think I 572 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 have seen so many M. A.'s for many years, and the ladies swarmed and overflowed everywhere. The undergraduates alone put in a comparativdy poor appearance. The lahors of the week had probably been too much for them. The sermon itself did make me very sorry indeed that you missed it. I do not know how to describe the rather peculiar appearance of Mr. Phillips Brooks. He is very tall, with a marked face and manner. It is a shame to compare him to so very unlike a man as Thackeray, but there was a real likeness; something, also, of Mr. Hotham aTid of Sedgwick! In the Bidding Prayer it was startling to hear him , " as in private duty bound, " speak of Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He began, as Mr. Litchfield had described after hearing his Oxford sermon, with quite extraordi- nary rapidity. It was a great effort to catch what was said, the voice being at that time rather low and by no means emphatic, and the manner, though interesting to an intelligent hearer, was not impressive to any one who needed rousing. But in all these respects he improved as he went along, though almost always too fast. But the simplicity, reality, and earnestness could hardly have been surpassed, and I should imagine that few ever let their attention flag. The matter was admirable, — a carefully thought- out exposition of Maurice's doctrine of tolerance, as the fruit of strong belief, not of indifference. There was no rhetoric, but abundance of vivid illustrations, never irreverent, and never worked up for effect, but full of point and humor. Altogether it was one of the sermons that it is a permanent blessing to have heard. If possible, I will get an extra copy of the " Review " before afternoon post on Wednesday, that you may be able to read it.' The sermon excited so much interest, and so many persons expressed a strong desire to possess it, that Mr. Brooks was requested to give it for publication, the Cambridge Mission offering to take the responsibility of an edition. But the offer was declined, as the sermon only represented in part wtat he had in him to say on the subject of tolerance. There was a continuous round of lunches and dinners marking each day of the month that he remained in Eng- land. The Earl of Aberdeen gave him the opportunity of spending a Sunday with Mr. Gladstone. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London were among his 1 Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 317. ^T. 49] ENGLISH FRIENDS 573 hosts at dinner parties, Lady Frances Baillie and the Bar- oness Burdett-Coutts, Professor Bryce, author of the "Amer- ican Commonwealth," Lord Mount Temple, Kev. Gerald Blunt, Mrs. Alice Stopford Greene, the widow of the histo- rian, Dr. Sewell, Sir H. Adams, Dr. Thorold the Bishop of Rochester, Dr. Russell Reynolds, and many others were among those who entertained him. He met TyndaU and Hux- ley, Miss Ingelow, William Morris, Browning and Matthew Arnold, Mr. Bosworth Smith and Dr. Boyd (A. H. K. B.). He had now many friends among the English clergy, and he made many calls, which must have been a serious tax upon his time and strength. The artistic side of his nature was kept in view by Mr. Edward Clifford the artist, under whose guidance he studied the work of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. He speaks of his pleasure in meeting the Tennyson children, and of a day on the Thames with Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery and Eric, Sybil, and Lillian Farrar. He re- newed his relations with friends of former days, — the Bu- chanans, the Messers, and others. Among the names recur- ring in his letters are Rev. Stopford Brooke, Sir George Grove, Rev. Llewelyn Davies, Canon Duckworth, Rev. Harry Jones, Canon Spence, Rev. H. R. Haweis. There was no reserve among the English people when it was a question of some one whom it was desirable to know, nor did they stand upon ceremony in the matter. Very touching were the things said to him by those who knew and loved him, or by those, and they were many, who had gained strength and life from his words or writings. Dr. Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff, and formerly Master of the Temple, writes to him : — June 30, 1885. It was a refreshment to look upon you in the church and pul- pit at Kennington, and to feel assured that the old strength, the old grace, the old love, were fresh and young in you still. May it be so for many a long year on both sides of the great deep ! To have known you, to have had your kind thought and your kind wish, will always be a memory and a hope too, to Your respectful, admiring, and loving friend, C. J. Vaughan. 574 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 Clergymen and laymen, ladies of high distinction and cultivation, told him what he had done for them ; and chiefly it was that he had brought consolation and faith and hope to many who were walking in darkness. He had extended his pastoral office till it knew no limits of nationality. In all this there was neither rest nor leisure, but as he leaves Eng- land he writes: "Everything here has been delightful. Peo- ple have been very kind and invitations flow in in far greater numbers than I can accept them. I have left England (July 15) after a most delightful visit. It was full of interesting occurrences, and I shall look back upon it with the greatest pleasure." In another letter he speaks of his visits to Ox- ford and Cambridge and contrasts the two Universities : — In Oxford I have had two delightful visits ; staying first with Jowett, and then with Hatch, who wrote the Bampton Lectures about the organization of the Church. It is a curious world, full now of the freest thought running in the channels of the most venerable medisevalism, which is still strong and vigorous and controversial. Almost everybody you see in Oxford believes either too much or too little. It is hard to find that balanced mind, so rational yet so devout, so clear and yet so fair, with which we are familiar in the Club. Cambridge, where I also had a pleasant visit, seemed to me to be freer, but less interesting. It is less burdened with the past, and also, it would seem, less picturesquely illuminated by it. The remainder of the summer was spent on the Continent in the company of Mr. Robert Treat Paine and his family, who joined him as he was leaving England. His real holi- day had now begun. The party travelled through Germany, stopping at Bonn and then going through the Tyrol to Ven- ice. Venice brought refreshment and repose. As usual, during his summer wanderings in Europe, he took as much, if not more, delight in revisiting places with which he was familiar as in seeing them for the first time. It fed his sense of humor to think of himself as carrying the whole world with him, and then to feel the contrast in places which had lived without him. Then, too, he had established personal associations with such places in the company of friends with whom he had lingered in them. In writing as he does ^T. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 575 numerous letters in this reminiscent mood, to McVickar, Cooper, Franks, and Strong, or to his brothers, he never fails to remind them of the mutual associations they have with the place where he is tarrying. Indeed, he seems to have valued the return because it brought back delightful mem- ories in which there was no alloy. In this invisible com- panionship of his friends, he looked again at Bellini and Titian, Tintoretto and Carpaccio, lotmged in gondolas, went from Venice to Switzerland, gazing upon old scenes, with fresh eyes, recalling his first visions. He wrote in these idle days some of his charming letters to children where he in- dulged his gift for arrant nonsense, and yet showing a psy- chological capacity to read the heart of a genuine child. ^ To Eev. W. N. McVickar he writes: — St. Mokitz, August 2, 1885. I cannot bear to let the whole summer pass without sending you a word of greeting, and so — how are you, my dear boy ? In what happy fields are you walking, with what happy girls? And what fragile country vehicles are you overloading with your preposterous weight? For myself, I was informed by the scales of a remote but entirely trustworthy Tyrolese village the other day that I had lost forty pounds, and now weigh only a contempt- ible two hundred and sixty. Since then I have not blushed to look the meek diligence horses in the face, nor trembled as I stepped into the quivering gondola. I was there last week, at Venice, I mean. Antonio and Giovanni still haunt the quay in front of Danieli's, and tempt you to go with them and smoke Minghettis on the Grand Canal. Not only there, but in many places which I have touched this summer, the fragrance of your footsteps lingers, and often, when I have fallen asleep in the railroad cars, I have stirred at some slight noise which seemed to me to be Jimmy feeling for his roll. While in Venice he heard of the death of General Grant : — What a blessed release, after his brave waiting, and what a fine, strong, simple figure he will make in our history ! There could not be a more distinctively American life and character than his. 1 Cf. Laters of Travel, pp. 325 ff. 576 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 To Archdeacon Farrar he sends his thanks for the words he had spoken in Westminster Abbey on the national loss : — LucBRiTE, August 8, 1885. My dear Db. Fabkab, — May I thank you for your Address of last Tuesday, a part of which I have just had the opportunity of reading in the "Times." You cannot know how deeply it will touch the hearts of our people, and how they all will thank you for carefully studying and valuing one to whom they owe so much, and whose character has in many respects appealed to them 80 strongly. You have done very much to bring the nations very near to one another at this time when the heart of America is softened to receive lasting impressions. On the return from Switzerland he stopped at Paris, where he met M. Nyegaard, and he also listened for the first time to M. Bersier. To M. Nyegaard, after he had reached home, he wrote this letter: — 233 Clakendon Stbebt, Boston, October 17, 1885. Mt dbak Friend, — It is good indeed to know that I have seen you, and that I have held the hand which writes this plea- sant letter that I received the other day. I look back to the hours which we spent together in Paris with sincere delight. Do you remember that we spoke of Emerson, our American philoso- pher, whom I ventured to praise, and whom you said that you would read. I took the liberty, the other day, of sending you a copy of his works, which I trust you will do me the favor to accept as a token of my afBectionate regard. I think you will find much in him to like as well as much with which you will profoundly disagree. I saw M. Bersier on the Saturday after we were together, and spent a very pleasant hour at his house. I was delighted with him. There is a vigorous and healthy manliness about him, mind and body, which refreshes and inspires. The next day I heard him preach, and the preacher was the man. You added a new favor to the many for which I already am your debtor when you took me to him. I have received the Dutch translation of my Lectures, "Bood- schap en Getuigenis." Ponderous and incomprehensible name! With it there came a courteous note from M. Valeton. I can- not read the book, but I turn its pages with interest and awe. It is a most tantalizing tongue. It always seems as if you ought to be able to read it, and you never can. I shall dare to hope that something in it may help some far-away Holland ^T. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 577 preachers and congregations ■whom I shall never see. Now, I want you and your wife to come to America, and to make me a visit in Boston. Let it be soon. I send my kind regards to her, and I am faithfully yours, Phillips Bbooks. To Mr. Cooper, who sent him greetings on his safe return to America, he wrote : — 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, September 17, 1885. Deak Coopee, — Thanks for your greeting. Yes, I am at home again, and glad to be on the same side of the pond with you again. McVickar was here to receive me, and I only needed you to make the thing quite perfect. You won't fail me this winter, will you ? Dr. Tyng has gone. That breaks another link with the old times. I hope the new ones are better, but the old ones had a great deal of a sort of good about them which it is not easy to find now. And again to Mr. Cooper he writes a humorous letter, thanking him for a little book for which he had furnished an introduction, whose object was to improve the ways of life among the poorer classes : — 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, Sunday evening, October 4, 1885. Deak Coopek, — I thank you very much for sending me the pretty little story about "Alice Dean." I have read it with great interest, and shall profit by it all I can. I have also read your introduction to it, and shall put it in practice right away. I read the paragraphs on pages four and five, and straightway had my study carpet swept, and put a dictionary and a commentary on the table, and ordered some plaster figures of a boy in the street for the mantelpiece, and hung your picture and Willie McVickar's in a good light, and told Katie to wash the table cloth, and set the table for supper; but there I came to a stand- still. Whatever shall I do for a bright, cheerful, tidy wife, with clean children ! These I cannot beg, borrow, or steal, and it is too late now to come by them in the regular way. So this workingman's heart will never leap with joy, or at least only halfway. But there are plenty of other workingmen whom your little book will help, and it was a capital idea to have it printed. Aren't you coming to the Congress? We shall all be there, and I, for one, badly want to see your blessed face. You need not go to all the meetings if you don't want to, and you shall VOL. n 578 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 smoke all the pipes you will. Do come ! How I wish I were in your study, and not here this Sunday evening ! One of Dr. Brooks's sermons, written in the fall, was on the text, "Luke, the Beloved Physician." Already there were in the air symptoms of the movement known as Chris- tian Science. In this sermon he touches upon the organic relation between good health and good morals. The duty of physical health and the duty of spiritual purity and loftiness are not two duties; they are two parts of one duty, — which is living the completest life which it is possible for man to live. And the two parts minister to one another. Be good that you may be well; be well that you may be good. Both of these injunctions are reasonable, and both are binding on us all. Sometimes on one side come exceptions. Sometimes a man must give up being well in order to be good. Never does an exception come on the other side. Never is a man under the necessity of giving up being good in order to be well; but the normal life of man needs to be lived in obedience to both commands.* He goes on to compare the clerical and the medical profes- sions. Both are apt to make the same mistakes, to lose sight of their ends in their means. Theology has driven human souls into exquisite agony with its cold dissection of the most sacred feelings, and medicine has tortured sensitive animals in a recklessness of scientific vivisec- tion, which has no relation, direct or indirect, to human good. The reference to vivisection brought to him a protest from a physician who urged that the real correlative to the cleri- cal sin he mentioned was the very common medical sin of attending to the disease and ignoring the patient's personal needs. "The few physicians who vivisect in this country are our most humane men, respected and loved by us all." To this letter and to its protest Dr. Brooks replied : — 233 Clarendon Strbet, Boston, October 22, 1885. Deak Doctor, — Thank you for letting me hear from you again. We are not likely to meet often, I am afraid. It is good that once in a while we can get greeting of one another, and be sure that we are caring for the same things, and working for the same Master. I beg you let me see you when you can. 1 Cf. Sermons, toI. v. p. 230. AT. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 579 I have not forgotten the talks which we had years ago, nor ceased to be thankful to the God who led and is leading you. You are right about the sermon. The true correlative of the clerical sin in medical life is the one which you named and not the one which I named. I shall make the change, but I must still somewhere put in my word about vivisection. I do not know how much of cruelty there is. I know that there is some. God bless you always. Your sincere friend, Phillips Beooks. During the fall he gave up much of his time to the prepa- ration of a chapter for the "Memorial History of Boston," entitled " A Century of Church Growth," ^ where he reviewed the history of the Episcopal Church. It is interesting as showing how faithfully he devoted himseK to a task for which he might not have been thought specially fitted. He had already shown, however, what he could do in this line of historical or antiquarian research, by his address before the Boston Latin School, where he had not only been punctiliously accurate in his collection of facts, but, what was more, had shown that he could make history as real and as living to the imagination as was the passing event of the day. He made thorough preparation for what was to be small in its seeming result. He wrote down every name, and in connection with it events or circumstances reflect- ing any light on the personality. He studied the data in the history of each parish, scanning its reports for the symp- toms of life, however feeble its outward existence. Nothing seemed small or unworthy to him. But he kept in full view the larger life of the time in order to give the true setting. As we follow him in his studies for the work, there breaks forth, now and then, a sense of humor at the situation. After going through the records of the episcopates of Bass, Parker, Griswold, and Eastburn, he sighs, " Oh, for a touch of genius! " But these humorous touches disappear when he comes to write, and every word is serious and dignified. Mr. Brooks had been requested by his brother to make some inquiries while in England in regard to clergy who were said to have accomplished successful results in holding 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, where it is published in separate form. 58o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 Missions. He had fulfilled the request, and in so doing had become interested in the subject for himself. But it was with hesitation, and only after misgivings overcome, that he committed himself to approving the idea which the mission involved. For the mission seemed to imply that the regular work of the parish minister was not by itself sufficient to awaken an interest in religion, and that the pastor must go outside of his parish for aid. All the evils of the revival system, with wandering, irresponsible evangelists who caused ephemeral excitement by drawing crowds to whom the ordi- nary ministrations of the churches were dull, — these things were before his mind. It was an effort to introduce into the Episcopal Church what many regarded as an element foreign to its ways. In several letters to Eev. Arthur Brooks he speaks on the subject: — Athbn^tjm Club, Pall Mall, June 8, 1885. As to the Mission, I asked all the people I saw who the best missioners were, and the Bishop of Rochester specially praised and glorified Eev. R. B. Eansford, of St. Jude's Vicarage, East Brixton, London. So I went out and took luncheon with him, and we talked it all over. He is a fine fellow, broad in the- ology, earnest in spirit, cheerful in temper, and thoroughly sen- sible about the whole matter of missions. Does not believe in the minister of the parish giving himself over into the missioner's hands. Hates the name of missioner, and altogether goes fur- ther towards making the whole thing seem sensible and practi- cable than I supposed was possible. I have not the least idea whether he would come to America, but if I were going to have a mission, and wanted an Englishman to run it, I would ask him. Wengern Alp, August 1, 1885. When the Congress is safely over, there will come your mis- sion. I am so glad that you have got a good man, and I shall be all curiosity to know how it goes on. On the whole, I am very glad it is to take place. It will at least break the rigidity of the church's ways, and strike the true keynote of preaching. Boston will be ready when New York has proved that it is the true thing to do. 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, October 9, 1885. I am glad Ransford is coming, but it almost took my breath away when I heard it. I felt for an instant as if the whole re- sponsibility of your mission was on my shoulders. But you know I didn't warrant him, — only said that he seemed to be a first- ^T. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 581 rate fellow, with real sensible ideas regarding what a mission ought to be, and that I should certainly engage him if I wanted a missioner. Awful word! That is all I said, and that, you see, isn't much! 233 Clabbkdon Stbeet, Boston, November 23, 1885. Dear Abthttb, — I feel as if I were taking a solemn farewell of you when I see you plunging into this mysterious Mission. I wonder to myself whether I shall know you as you come out. All looks very interesting about it, and I am sure I hope and pray that it may do great good. I am delighted that Ransford makes so good an impression. I hope that I shall see him before he leaves the country. Would he be willing, and would it be a good thing for him, to come on here, — say, on the second or third Sunday in December, — and tell my people about the mis- sion ? I will write to him about such a plan on a word of en- couragement from you. The usual routine of work in the fall was varied by the visit to this country of Archdeacon Farrar, who during his stay in Boston was the guest of Mr. Brooks, and on All Saints' Day preached for him in Trinity Church. Mr. Brooks had been looking forward to the visit, and had done all in his power to bring it about by urging it upon his friend. He was anxious that Dr. Farrar should see the country to advantage. He felt somewhat like a boy in college when he takes his friend home with him for the vacation. A sense of proprietorship, as it were, in his native city took posses- sion of him, as he thought of its people, or looked at its streets and its buildings, and saw them in a new light as he gazed at them through the eyes of another. Although he loved England, he was proud of America, and of the oppor- tunity to interpret America to one accustomed to English ways. He made no apology for the homely fashions or social usages which had been preserved in rural New Eng- land, but gloried in them as evidencing the triumph of the democratic principle in its purity and strength, and among the sources of American greatness. He rejoiced in the cor- dial welcome everywhere given to Dr. Farrar, in helping to bring England and America to that better understanding of each other which should lead to international amity. 582 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 On Thanksgiving Day, he chose for his text the words describing the dream of Nebuchadnezzar: "I saw a dream which made me afraid, and the thoughts upon my bed and the visions of my head troubled me," — words where "the Baby- lonian king had summed up his realm in his feelings." The subject of the sermon was the "Temper of a Time," how one ought to feel in the days which were passing. For our own time this was the summary: (1) great sense of danger; (2) great expectation; (3) great hope in man; (4) great trust in God. He dwelt on the function of wonder as indispensable to any man or age. He passed in review the current feeling in regard to social changes, mechanical discoveries, and theo- logical disturbances. It was indispensable for a man, if he would help his age, that he should be a man of the time. A value was to be set upon every movement which was in the right direction, however slight or unconnected, because no man could say how or where it would ultimate. There should be an earnest desire to get at the heart of things under their form, — yet keeping forms, — the mixture of con- servatism and radicalism. He saw grounds for hope in the pursuit of mechanical discoveries and pointed out their true value. Everything should be valued which tended to in- crease true faith in and true hope for man in the reign of the coming democracy. Let religion grow deeper and more simple. Freedom was the word to be applied as a test in the political confusion which threatened to dissolve political parties. But the supreme need was for strong moral pur- pose, as the ground and basis of everything. Although Phillips Brooks was an optimist, cultivating hope for the world as a solemn obligation and responsibility, yet at this time, as in previous years, he was wrestling in secret with the foes of hope, as Jacob wrestled through the night in mortal combat with his mysterious antagonist. He could not assume that all was well until he had measured the motives which begot the moods of pessimism. In the search for its causes he found them in the theoretical philosophy of fatahsm, in partial views of life, in personal disappointment, m an affectation of contempt. "Pessimism," he writes it ^T. 49] OPTIMISM 583 down in his note-book, "comes from and tends to the loss of individuality." While he was engaged in working up a ser- mon on the subject, texts of Scripture flashed upon his mind : "In the daytime he led them with a cloud, and all the night through with a light of fire." Every theist must be an optimist, but before one could say, "The Lord is good," he must take in the range of the divine activity : " See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no God with me. I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal; neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand." He saw a truth in pessimism, something from which an inspiration for higher living could be obtained. But he condemns the folly of vague optimism as of vague pessimism, or of vagueness anywhere. "Define yourseK." Schopenhauer he designates as a "scared pessi- mist." Christ's view of man must be the true one; He was no pessimist; "not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved; " and yet He says, "For judg- ment have I come into this world." The salvation from pessimism is in the unselfish service of men. To get at the facts of life and place them in their true light is the first duty. Much of the pain in the world comes from memory and from anticipation, from the past and from the future, not from the present. He repeats the lines of Victor Hugo : — C'eat le bonheur de vivre Qui fait la gloire de mourir. He recalls, in a picture of Domenichino's, at Bologna, the little angel trying the point of one of the thorns in the Crown of Thorns with his finger. He notes the correspondence of general human good and ill, hope and despair, with the same in the personal life. "Progress must be seen as law, as well as fact. There remains, (1) the perpetual faith with which men trust each other; (2) the hopefulness with which they want to live ; (3) the complacency with which they see their children start out in life. ' The Lord is good. ' The book Ecclesiastes gives the picture, — enjoyment with a back- ground of judgment; neither wanton self-indulgence nor cyn- ical pleasure and hatred; neither idle optimism nor wanton pessimism." 584 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 Among the sermons which issued from the inward conflict, where he was weighing the materials of his own life as well as studying the world around him, there are three, written at this time or very nearly, which may be mentioned by their titles: the "Battle of Life" (1885),i the "Giant with the Wounded Heel" (1886),2 and the "Sword bathed in Hea- ven" (1886).^ In these sermons, which are the types of many others, there is felt a difference of tone as compared with his earlier preaching, — the tone of a man in the thick of mortal combat, a giant in the toils, and yet in the process of escape, who discerns light and victory. The essential characteristic of human life, which the age is in danger of overlooking, is perpetual warfare, — of all life, whether in celestial regions or in earthly places. God is in the conflict as well as every man, and the battle is of Titanic propor- tions. There is victory for every man, though the type of human life at its best must be the giant with the wounded heel. There is victory for every man, but on one condition, that the sword with which he fights must have been bathed in heaven. To the Hon. George F. Hoar, United States Senator from Massachusetts, who wrote Mr. Brooks, asking why St. Paul, in the midst of his lofty statement of the great doctrine of immortality, in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, should break the connection by the thirty-third verse, • — "Evil communications corrupt good manners," Mr. Brooks sends a letter, interesting and characteristic, as though he read the Apostle through the knowledge of himseK : — 233 Clabbndon Stkeet, Boston, December 3, 1885. Mt deae Sie, — I am sure that we must all have been struck, as you have been, by the curiously incongruous tone of the thirty- third verse of St. Paul's fifteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians. I have been in the habit of finding the explanation, first, in the fact that the verse is a quotation (from Menander), and one, no doubt, so familiar to the people that it had become a pro- verb; and, second, that the Greek words had none of that par- ticular tone which belongs to the words which our English trams- 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. yi. » Cf. Ibid. vol. iv. 3 Cf. Ibid. ^T. 49] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 585 lators used; particularly the word "manners," which surely has not either the dignity or the range of the Greek "rfdrj." At the same time, it seems to me to be altogether characteris- tic of St. Paul to interrupt a glowing and lofty argument by a few words of special and homely exhortation and warning sug- gested by what he is saying, then resuming his argument all the more loftily beyond. Such passages are not, I think, uncommon with him. Certainly they bring out very forcibly the way in which the two impulses, of high speculation and of care for men's behavior and character, were both always present with him; and I have come to feel that in this particular passage the two impulses add to each other's vividness and force. There are a few words on these verses in Dean Stanley's "Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians," which seem to me to be suggestive. I am, my dear sir, Yours most sincerely, Phillips Beooks. On the IStli of December, 1885, Phillips Brooks crossed the line, the approach to which he had been dreading, as only one so full of life could dread it, and kept his fiftieth birthday. All his life, as we have seen, he kept, or was forced to keep, these memorial days, and he made far too much of them for his own comfort and peace. The resem- blance to his mother comes out in the common tone they assume in speaking of life after the age of fifty. In a letter to Mr. Cooper he seems to make light of the event, saying, "I reached the half century, and shook myself as I started out upon another half century." But this is on the surface. In reality he was beginning to assume that youth was over. Though he had written it and said it many times before, now he felt and meant it when he said it. He began to speak of himself as old. In addressing young men he would assume that life for him was over, or that he was a spectator of the scene in which they were the actors. When he was remonstrated with for taking such a tone, which only pained those who listened to him and who were surprised at his saying of himself what they did not believe was true, he would answer that he supposed he felt it or he would not say it. To Mrs. Eobert Treat Paine he writes : — 586 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 233 Claeendon Street, Boston, Deeember 13, 1885. Deae Mrs. Paine, — I wish you could know how very bright your kind note and the beautiful gift which came with it make this semi-centennial morning. You know how much your friend- ship has been to me — the friendship of you all — for a good third of this long life of mine. You cannot know it wholly, but I do hope that you know it in part. This kindness has deepened and assured my happiness in your friendship, and my gratitude to all of you. Now, in spite of blunders and defects which seem to me to increase in me, in melancholy fashion, let me hope that you and Bob and all your children will give me still a place in your aiiection till the end. I am not very conceited this morning ; the past looks pretty poor so far as it has been my work. But I am very grateful to God for all these happy years. I should be a wretch indeed if I were not. And high among the causes of my gratitude stands the friendship of my friends. This kindness was good indeed ! Thank you again and again. Ever sincerely yours, Phillips Bhooks. 233 Clakendon Stkeet, Boston, Monday morning, December 21, 1885. Deae Abthur, — How good you and L were to come on here for the semi-centennial dinner. I cannot thank you enough, and I shall remember it forever as the most delightful piece of brotherly and sisterly affection. You have been awfully good to me many and many a time, but you never were better or gave me more pleasure than when you took those two long journeys to wish me a happy New Year and start me ofE on my second half century. It was so good to be all together once again, the total family. The times get rarer, and one small consolation in being fifty years old is that I have furnished the opportunity of such a meeting, and that you were good enough to come. I felt very guilty at first when I saw how much pleasure you had taken for me, but now I accept it all without a qualm and am very happy about it. Do let L know how heartily I thank you both. . . . Forefathers' Day ! Blessed old Puritans ! How glad I am they lived and that they don't live now! To the Kev. G. H. Strong lie writes : — December 24, 1885. Dear George, — ... I was fifty a week ago last Sunday and you are — who can say how old? Well, no doubt it is all right, but there is getting to be a very "Jolm Anderson my Jo ^T. 50] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 587 John " feeling about it all which I don't like nearly so well as the old cheery, hopeful feeling of the days when and — ■ were daily and hourly visions. I send you still with my own venerable hand, like Paul the aged, my best thanks and heartiest good wishes. . . . Ever affectionately, P. B. Here is a letter written to his two little nieces in Spring- field, on receiving from them for a Christmas present the portrait of some remote ancestor : — December 26, 1885. Dbak Dodo akd Hattie, — It was very good of you to think of your old relative and send him the picture of an even older relative for a Christmas present. I thank you very much indeed, and I shall hang him up and love to think of how kind you were and of how good he was. I do not think he was ever as kind as you are, and I do not think you will ever be as good as he was. I hope not ! You never knew him. He died before you were born. In- deed I did not know him very well myself, for I was very young the last time he was here. But everybody says he was a nice old man and hated Christmas with all his soul. How little can he have ever thought that he himself would be turned into a Christmas present some day! I do not know but what it was wrong in you to play such a joke on him, but I am sure that it was very funny. I cannot think how you ever got hold of him. I thought he was dead up in Andover, and now here he comes from Springfield in a box just as if he had been alive in your town all these years. Tou must tell me how you came to find him, and if he has a way of running about, because if he has, I must tie a string to him, for I shoidd be very sorry to lose him, partly because he is so good and pretty, and partly because you are so kind. I thank you for him a million, million times. And I hope you had a merry Christmas, and lots of presents, and a nice sermon, and a good dinner, and pies and ice cream, and nuts and raisins, and gum-drops. Give my love to John and Hattie, and believe me, Very respectfully your affectionate uncle, P. The following extracts are from his note-book, made while travelling during the summer of 1885 : — Sermon on the impulse every now and then to every one to get 588 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 loose from the despotic course of life and break things. The Radical in everybody. The love of camping out. Sermon on the disciples' dispute which should be greatest, the humanness of it. Show how ambition may be nobly turned into which shall be usefullest and meekest. The demon of compari- son. Sermon on "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he." Cf. Des- cartes, Cogito, ergo sum. The relation of thought to life. As crossing a Paris or a London street, when we are halfway over, we cease to look for danger on the one side, and begin to fear it only on the other, so of growing old. Thanksgiving sermon on the whole modern relation of rich and poor. The old relation was between distinctly superior and inferior beings. The attempt next to create absolute equality: Declaration of Independence. The solution must be in the real valuing of things. Apply to conceit of rich, apply to jealousy of poor. This with free power to change conditions. Does this suit Christianity? Yes, in special precepts, but still more in the general emphasis of character. Do not be carried away by super- stition of wealth either way. Strong theistic tendency arising. Socialism struggling for definition. The spread of representation, with strong question- ings about it. Ours a transition time, — all times so, but some peculiarly. Real meaning of the struggle for honest government. Civil service reform. The nation realizing itself for its future, gathering itself together for advance. Not a mere economic question. Death of McClellan and Grant; final end of the period ; first absolutely non-war President. Subjects for Wednesday evening lectures. Certain Bible words and their meanings. In the first lecture show how they came to be misunderstood. The confusion of allegory and liter- alism. The love of the concrete and the definite. The plain- ness and distinctness of the superficial reason; the wish to make them strictly ostensible. 1. God. 2. Heaven. 3. Hell. 4. Re- demption. 5. Salvation. 6. Sacrifice. 7. Eternity. 8. Reward. 9. Atonement. Time, that aged nurse, rooked me to patience. Some men make themselves God, without knowing what they are doing. The deity they appeal to is really their deeper, higher self. When they feel God's approval, it is really their own self-praise. When God reproaches them, it is their own MT. 50] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 589 self-rebuke. When they go apart from the world to hold com- munion with Him, it really is an entrance into their own self- consciousness. To other men, some good fellow man, more or less consciously and completely enlarged into an ideal of human- ity, answers the same purpose, and is in reality their God. To still others, a vague presence of a high purpose and tendency felt in everything. Tennyson's "one increasing purpose," and Arnold's "something not ourselves which makes for righteous- ness." This fulfils the end and makes the substitute for God. But none of these supply the place of a true personality outside ourselves, yet infinitely near to us. Clear plea for search after truth in religion, as distinct from search for pleasure or for safety. Protest against aesthetic ritu- alism and against stubborn orthodoxy. Text: "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." The great desirable end. Light. How Christ and the Bible dread and hate darkness. That their glory. The enemies of moral light are Cowardice, Contempt, Cruelty, and Sloth, — these the powers of Darkness. Selfishness behind all. Our aim is to show how clear, simple, unselfish devotion to some great practicable purpose clears all these away. Christ the illus- tration. Only one question to ask : not. Is it safe ? or, Is it best for me ? nor. Is it popular ? nor. Is it easy ? but, Is it right ? The danger of one-sided men. This is not that. Unselfish devotion to another the only way to singlefy the life of devotion to Fam- ily, Country, Science, Humanity, God. Apply to political mat- ters and to Theology. The general love for complication, univer- sal sympathy, etc. But a deeper love below it for simplicity. The real solution and union of the two in centrality. The lack of this; the way Christianity supplies it. Christ the man of men, the Lord of being. The return to simplicity in religious questions. Is there a God? The new departure theories. Text: "The summer is ended." For most of us, the ship going home. A period of relaxation over. A touch of disap- pointment. It must be so wherever there is no real ideality and lofty hope. The summer a ripening of spring seed into autumn fruit. True value of foreign travel in ripening home affections and connections. The unity of a life is in God. His nearness. The summer and the whole year conception of life make it depend on God as the sun. There is a true and a false simplicity, and when the time 590 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1885 comes that simplicity is desired it makes all the difference whether we choose the true. Such a time does come — hatred of all complication, in all deeper moods, in all mature life. Then shall you get simplicity by exorcism or by centrality? 1. In civilization. Let us return to Barbarism, let us cut o£E elaborations ? Not so ! But let us get sight of the one increas- ing purpose. 2. In the personal nature. Give us the simple man? Nay, so you get the meagre man. Give us the manifold man, with one great purpose. 3. In thought. Let us stop this ranging of thought every- where? But no, let us think devoutly. 4. In action. Let us stop and come down to simple life? No, but men should be nobler by it all. Text: "Be still, and know that I am God." God's great assertion of existence, as if that was so much. " Be still, " — the hush of this endless talk. A great reverse or accident, break- ing the special methods of life down ; Z . The breakdown of a Faith and its perception of Truth behind it. The perplexities of life (labor, etc.), ignoring first principles and the deeper powers at work. The whole return to what seems pure theism. Battling in God. The ship on the ice. Ice melting lets it down into the sea. Mystery behind all life. CHAPTER XVIII 1886 POETEAITS OF PHILLIPS BROOKS AT THE AGE OF FIFTY. MISAPPREHENSIONS OF HIS POSITION. ESSAT ON BIOGRA- PHY. ELECTION AS ASSISTANT BISHOP OF PENNSYL- VANX4.. VISIT TO CALIFORNIA. VIEWS ON IMMIGRATION. ABOLITION OF COMPULSORY ATTENDANCE ON RELIGIOUS SERVICES AT HARVARD. NORTH ANDOVER. CHAUTAUQUA ADDRESS ON LITERATURE AND LIFE. DEATH OF RICH- ARDSON. FOURTH VOLUME OP SERMONS. PROTEST AGAINST CHANGING THE NAME OF THE PROTESTANT EPIS- COPAL CHURCH Phillips Brooks was now walking the high table-land of human renown, followed by the devotion and love of the people, to an extent beyond conventional bounds in its manifestation. There was mingled with the popular devo- tion a sense of reverence which, in spite of his will, and strive as he might against it, kept him somewhat separate and apart, as though he were made in a different mould, no longer to be ranked with ordinary men, but something phe- nomenal in human experience. It needed no effort to gain him a hearing, the final conquest had been assured in a sway which all men acknowledged. There had been strange and unacknowledged misgivings about him when he passed out of sight for a year, in what seemed to be an inexplicable silence. Misgivings, however, had faded away when he returned in the fulness of his power, with his charm un- abated, resuming again the preaching of the same old and familiar gospel, yet with a certain indescribable tenderness and pathos in his appeal which exceeded anything in his previous years. The ablest and the most learned bore this testimony, as the unlearned and the poor felt it and gave it 592 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 recognition in their own way. One of the most eminent of American scholars said only what others felt, that Phillips Brooks seemed to have the leverage for moving the world. A highly cultivated lady, a Unitarian in her religious faith, said that when she heard him for the first time she could have gone down on her knees and kissed the hem of his gar- ment. The popular faith expressed itself in strange un- wonted ways. One case will suffice for many. There were two poor women in Salem, belonging to the Eoman Catholic Church, who had never seen or heard him, and one of them tells the other, bemoaning her boy falling into evil ways, that the thing to do is to take him to Phillips Brooks. Peo- ple from far or near, in critical moments when the issues of life were in the balances, thought of Phillips Brooks. It made no difference whether they knew him or not, whether they were connected with the church in any of its forms or not, his name carried with it some magical appeal; they called for his aid ; and it must be said he never disappointed them. He, too, had learned his lesson, as well as they. He remarked that there were many living the gospel while he was only preaching it. The time had gone by, at last, when he could look forward to the future, as bringing him the leisure for study of which he had dreamed. If he had once cher- ished ambitions in that direction, he had renounced them now, or seen their futility. The work that remained was to keep on till the end, giving himself to every claim. He did not understand it, or try to do so. But he knew that he possessed the gift, in his presence and in his word, and he gave himself, reckless of health or any other consideration. There was a new pleasure in this spendthrift exercise of his power, as though he had at last learned the secret of true living. He was drinking more deeply of the joy of life, be- cause, as the years went on, he was convinced that it had its roots not in the mere exuberance of animal spirits belonging to youth, but was grounded in God. He believed in conver- sion, not as the work of a moment, or at any moment com- plete, but rather a lifelong process, with ever recurring stages of deeper consecration to the divine will. To the ^T. 50] POPULAR ESTIMATE 593 world his life seemed like one constant succession of con- quests and victories, a triumphal procession in the broad sunlight, without reverses or failures. His inner life he stiU kept to himself, but there were epochs and crises in his ex- perience of which, indeed, he makes no formal record, but in his preaching he discloses them impersonally, to those who had the ears to hear. His sermons are his autobio- graphy. The flowing years did not diminish the beauty of the coun- tenance, or the dignity and symmetry of form, but lent rather a higher beauty, wherein might be read the traces of some deep inward moods purifying and enriching the whole nature; depths ever deeper, of a soul that had fathomed, if it were possible, the mystery of human existence. So he appeared. The "royal carriage," the "kingly majesty," the "exquisite beauty," the "spirit of childhood," but combined with "the virile strength of manhood," — these were the phrases applied to him. A fineness and delicacy unsurpassed in women, but utter freedom from any remotest approach to sentimentality ; the powerful rugged will that, when roused, was like the whirlwind ; scorn for whatever was base or unworthy written all over him ; the love of the beautiful, which entered into his religion and his life, making it an end to do always whatever should seem beautiful to all, showing itself also in little things, the minutiae of life and manner; what was rarest of all, perfect simplicity and nat- uralness, with total absence of anything like affectation or hint of self-consciousness, as though he never gave himself a thought; and utter transparency, until the nature within was revealed in the voice and look; the mastery of human speech, so that he could say the things which were important and vital with a grace and clearness and force that was as admirable as it was rare, yet the result of long and severe practice and of constant study, — such were some of the characteristics of Phillips Brooks as he now stood forth in the years which remain to be reviewed. In any company, however distinguished, he carried the highest distinction in appearance; even when foreign visitors were present, whom VOL. n 594 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 all were anxious to see, it was Phillips Brooks upon whom the interest centred and the gaze was concentrated. In his stature he stood head and shoulders above ordinary men, but so perfect was the symmetry of his proportions that, as was said of him by a lady with a fine discrimination, which the common judgment of the time would approve, it was not he that looked large, but other men that looked small. He seemed to stand for the type of the normal man. But what was most remarkable was that, when any one came near to the man, as near as he ever allowed any one to come, there was found in him the heart of a simple boy playing with life as it went on around him, as any boy at his games; or, better still, it was the veritable life of a child, with childhood's delight, interest, and curiosity, free- dom from care, freshness of outlook, perpetual wonder, and aU this with such rare manhood at his call, such intense earnestness, such intellectual power and insight, such know- ledge of men and of the world, as to make the transition from the one phase to the other a constant marvel. He gave his capacious, loving heart full scope for its exercise, yet concentrated his energies upon one supreme purpose, going forth to meet every soul with the same boundless affection and earnest, impassioned longing for its salvation. Behind it all lay his theology, — every sermon revealed him, but let the reader turn to a sermon entitled " The Priority of God," which will give, as well as any, the secret of the hiding-place of his power. These, then, were the things that were true of him, or that the people were saying and thinking of him, in the years to which we are now to turn. He wrote many letters at this time, a large part of them letters of friendship, for his friends were grown to a multitude, and he had a genius for friendship; but most of his letters are too personal to be given in full, and the extracts will seem but tame. It is by putting the letters and the sermons together that we get the approximate conception of the man. In this year, 1886, he sat for his photograph, in order, apparently, to give his sanction to the picture which he ^T. 50] PORTPIAITS 595 henceforth would be willing to distribute to friends who called for it. He was averse to allowing his photographs to be exposed for sale, giving the strictest injunctions to pre- vent it; and not until the last years of his life was this em- bargo removed, with his consent. These photographs, taken in 1886, are the best, and, indeed, almost the only ones, which fairly represent him. As one studies them, he sees the distance travelled since the portrait was made at the age of twenty-two, given as the frontispiece of the first volume. The mouth has now grown to express the firmness of the dis- ciplined will. The look of intensity and wonder, with which he was taking in the world of the divine revelation, stiU lingers in the background, but there is added the efiEect of the experience of life, and of the many years of strenuous endeavor to bring the world to his own standard. There is no faintest touch of disappointment or disillusion with life written here, and yet a strangely solemn expression in con- trast with the merriment, the humor, or the scorn, in the pic- tures of his middle years. In one of these now familiar pho- tographs, the head is thrown back as in the consciousness of his power, — a leonine face and head, with a masterful au- thority stamped thereon. In the other, which has become deservedly the popular favorite, the head slightly droops, and the air and consciousness of power has yielded to a deep ten- derness in the large dark eyes. There is simplicity here and total humility, as of a man possessed with the sense of his own unworthiness, not sad but yet resigned, the far-seeing eyes taking in the tragedy and the pathos of life, but looking beyond into the eternal mystery, as though he were repeat- ing these words of his own, "Let us be clear-souled enough to look through and behind the present connection of life and pain, and know that in its essence life is not pain, but joy ; " or again : " It is the half -seriousness that is gloomy. The full seriousness, the life lived in its deepest consciousness, is as full of joy as it is of seriousness." It was about the time when these photographs were taken that he spoke, in his essay on Literature and Life, of those qualities in art separating a true portrait from a 596 PHILLIPS BROOKS [^886 photograph. "A portrait has a value of its own, entirely independent of its likeness to the man who sat for it a photograph has none." He declined requests to sit for his portrait. To his friend, Mr. S. H. KusseU, who had asked that Mr. Vinton should be allowed to paint his portrait, he sent the following letter, not to be taken too literaUy, and yet indicating what was more than a passing mood : — 175 Makleokough Stbebt, Boston, February 17, 1880. My dear Mb. Eussell, —I thank you very heartily for your kind note. It is very pleasant to me to know that you would care to have my picture painted, and Mr. Vinton flatters me very much by wanting to paint it. . j i. But, my dear Mr. Kussell, to have one's portrait painted has always seemed to me to be a very great and solemn thing, to be given as a privilege to very great people as they are getting to the end of life. I have almost a superstition about it. The modern promiscuousness of the cheap photograph seems to me to have taken the sacredness in large part from one of the most sacred things. Let us preserve the venerableness of the portrait. I am really serious about this, and I shall not think for twenty years yet, even if I dare to think it then, that I have any right to be painted. . . . Yours most faithfully, Phillips Bbooks. There is one portrait of Phillips Brooks painted by Mrs. Henry Whitman, wherein has been preserved a certain qual- ity of expression which his photographs do not give. Not only does it present the strength and grace of his stature, but the artist has caught what was, after all, the deepest, the most distinctive quality of his nature, the eternal child-like- ness, — something of that expression on his face, in those wonderful afternoon sermons in Trinity Church, which all remember and cherish, but no one can describe. The love of humanity for its own sake, the gifts of imagi- nation and sympathetic insight, these qualities, manifested in his preaching from the first, explain, to some extent, the impression he made as belonging to no one denomination or branch of the Christian church, but rather as belonging alike to all. A Swedenborgian lady remarked to her friend ■y/f/ .^r' ^T. 50] MISUNDERSTANDINGS 597 as she came away from listening to him that Dr. Brooks ■was a Swedenborgian. She was told that others said the same thing of him, that Unitarians claimed him, that Metho- dists held him as at heart one of their own, and so in other churches. That was all as it might be, she said, but she knew ; Swedenborgians had certain unfailing tests of know- ing, and she could not be mistaken. Indeed, so far did this conviction carry people, that they would sooner have believed that Mr. Brooks was mistaken, or did not understand him- self, when he denied their claims, than that they could pos- sibly be mistaken in their judgment about him. There was danger in this situation, and trouble Impending for PhiUips Brooks. He was too great a man to be judged by the canons of sectarian opinion. There was fear that he might be entangled in a complicated network of misunder- standings. But so it was that Phillips Brooks was claimed by all alike, and listened to by all, without regard to reli- gious differences and divisions. Methodists and Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians, Sweden- borgians, Free Eeligionists, Spiritualists, Episcopalians, Low Church and High, Eoman Catholics, Orthodox Greeks, and peoples of no religion, — these all bore the same testi- mony to his power of lifting them up to a higher plane where what they believed seemed to be transfigured in a diviner light. He spoke to all alike, as though it had been his spe- cial privilege to learn their own peculiar religious dialect. To Methodists he revived the sense of what Wesley must have been in the plenitude of his power. To Baptists he brought home anew the importance of the conviction for which they stood, — the individual as the final resort of spir- itual authority. To Congregationalists he spoke preemi- nently, as though he still remained in the fold of his ances- tors, and had known no alien influence. In his freedom and his appeal to humanity he met the Unitarian. Free Reli- gionists made many efforts to secure him as a speaker at their assemblies. When he went to England he seemed to reflect the best type of Anglican theology. But, on the other hand, there were those who were puzzled 598 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 rather than edified by such an attitude. There must be something wrong when a man could not be classified in the categories of religious opinions, when all were speaking well of him. Among those who sought to know the sources of his power were the Unitarians. Some of them were very confident that it came from Channing, from Parker, or from Martineau. Where else could it have come from ? But then there followed other questions: How could Mr. Brooks be honest and yet remain in the Episcopal Church? Apologies were made for him on the ground of theological inability, of unconscious change of opinion. It was useless to tell people who did not study religious history, or who kept away from the history of the Anglican Church as by the grace of God preventing them, that the large tolerance and freedom which Phillips Brooks exemplified had their congenial home in a national church, whose unwritten constitution included more than one variety of religious attitude. It was assumed that Mr. Brooks had reacted and broken away from the nar- rowness and severity of Puritan theology; and how, then, could he remain in a church whose standards it was also assumed were still affirming it. If two interpretations were put upon the Thirty - Nine Articles, one of them must be false. It was not uncommon to hear such language as this concerning Mr. Brooks or others of a similar attitude: "I have no question as to his honor, his sincerity, his devotion to truth as he sees it, to the church as he believes in it, and to God as he understands his duty to God. But I think his attitude is logically indefensible. Grant his premises, and I see no reasonable way for stopping where he stops." There was danger of misunderstanding here, for in Mr. Brooks's own communion there were some who argued that, if there were smoke there must be some fire, that the Unita- rians would not claim him for their own unless he had given ground for the claim. The Unitarians were thinking of the large humanity and the wide tolerance, and on the other side people were thinking of truths which Unitarianism denied, — the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Phillips Brooks saw clearly the diflSculties in which he ^T. 50] ESSAY ON BIOGRAPHY 599 was involved by this recognition and claim on the part of others, as well as by his own recognition of the various reli- gious bodies as having their place and function in the univer- sal church. But he was not the man to flinch from danger. He did what he could to make his position clear, as in his lectures on Tolerance, where he was justifying his own atti- tude when he maintained that true tolerance, and affiliation even with others of opposed beliefs, does not spring from indifference to the truth, but is grounded on a deeper persua- sion of the truth. In March Mr. Brooks went to Phillips Academy at Exe- ter, to deliver an address on Biography, afterwards pub- lished in pamphlet form "at the request of many teachers." The address shows how Phillips Brooks had cultivated in himself that original gift, with which he was by nature en- dowed, the interest in human life and the ability to interpret its meaning. " Life " was a word running through all his sermons and reappears in many of their titles, — the " Sym- metry of Life," the "Withheld Completions of Life," the "Battle of Life," the "Shortness of Life," the "Seriousness of Life," the "Positiveness of the Divine Life," the "Lib- erty of the Christian Life," the "Eternal Life," "New Starts in Life," the "Sacredness of Life," "Whole Views of Life," the "Law of the Spirit of Life." This ever recurring word is expressive of the man. For every one has his word by which we know him. He had other woFds, "rich," "large," "full," but these were the epithetsiof that commanding word " life." In the essay on Biography, he appears simply as the stu- dent of life, dropping for the moment theories of its purpose or conduct. He appears as an omnivorous reader of bio- graphies, so that when he came to speak it was from the over- flowing fulness of his knowledge combined with a critical capacity for estimating the art of biography. I think that I would rather have written a great biography than a great book of any other sort, as I would rather have painted a great portrait than any other kind of picture. The writing of a biography, or indeed the proper reading of 6oo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 it, requires one faculty which is not very common, and which does not come into action without some experience, — the power of a large vital imagination, the power of conceiving life as a whole. There are many things said in this essay ■which are redo- lent of his distinctive power. The New Testament is a hiography. Make it a mere book of dogmas, and its vitality is gone. Make it a book of laws, and it grows hard and untimely. Make it a biography, and it is a true book of life. Make it the history of Jesus of Nazareth, and the world holds it in its heart forever. I believe fully that the intrinsic life of any human being is so interesting that if it can be simply and sympathetically put in words, it will be legitimately interesting to other men. There is not one of us living to-day so simple and monotonous a life that, if he be true and natural, his life faithfully written would not be worthy of men's eyes and hold men's hearts. Not one of us, therefore, who, if he be true and pure and natural, may not, though his life never should be written, be interesting and stimu- lating to his fellow men in some small circle as they touch his life. Yet he condemns the exaggeration of Mr. Euskin in his saying that "the lives in which the public are interested are hardly ever worth writing." Notable and exceptional lives are entitled to biography, and " distinction is a legitimate object of our interest." He defines distinction as the emphasis put upon qualities by circumstances. He who listens to the long music of human history, hears the special stress with which some great human note was uttered long ago, ringing down the ages and mingling with and enriching the later music of modern days. It is a perfectly legitimate curiosity with which men ask about that resonant, far-reaching life. They are probably asking with a deeper impulse than they know. They are dimly aware that in that famous, interesting man their own humanity — which it is endlessly pathetic to see how men are always trying and always failing to understand — ■ is felt pulsating at one of its most sensitive and vital points. In the classification of biographies, he gives the highest place to BosweU's Johnson and Lockhart's Scott: — Johnson and Scott, — so human in their strength and in their weakness, in their virtues and in their faults : one like a day of clouds and storms, the other like a day of sunshine and bright JET. 50] ESSAY ON BIOGRAPHY 601 breezes, yet both like Nature, both real in times of unreality, both going bravely and Christianly into that darkness and tragi- calness which settled at last on both their lives. The biographies of these men, fortunate in their biogra- phers, are to be read and reread by all who want to keep their manhood healthy, broad, and brave, and true. Set these two great books first, then, easily first, among Eng- lish biographies. The streets of London and the streets of Edin- burgh live to-day with the images of these two men more than any others of the millions who have walked in them. But in a broader way the streets of human nature still live with their presence. The unfading interest in Dr. Johnson is one of the good signs of English character. Men do not read his books, but they never cease to care about him. It shows what hold the best and broadest human qualities always keep on the heart of man. The interest of Phillips Brooks in biography as one of the fine arts must have been nourished by that dream of his own to write the life of Cromwell, not abandoned until the years came which had no leisure in them. In his remarks on Cromwell he tells us, it may be, how he would have done it : — You must get deep into him. Tou must see how he led and was led; how he made his times and was made by them. . . . It does not mean that you are to make him slavishly your hero, and think everything he did was right ; but get the man, — his hates, his loves, his dreams, his blundering hopes, his noble, hot, half-forged purposes, his faith, his doubts, — get all of these in one vehement person clear before your soul. There is another observation here which is full of insight into the lives of men, to the effect that there are some very great men who are unsuited for biography ; and among them are Shakespeare, Shelley, and Wordsworth. The lives of these men are in their poetry. The more profound and spiritual the poet, the more impossible a biography of him becomes. In the latter part of the lecture he turns to the men who write biographies. There are lives of men written by them- selves, autobiographies, in which English literature is pecul- iarly rich ; lives of men which are " written by their friends, 6o^ PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 whose atmosphere must vary widely from those biographies which are written by men who never knew or saw their sub- ject, but have felt his power and wish to make it known to the world." And finally instructions are given as to how to read bio- graphies. The rule should be to divest one's self of the liter- ary sense as far as possible, and read only to get the man. "Then you may close and lose and forget the book. The man is yours forever." You may begin to read the biogra- phy in the middle, and when you have become interested in the man, then you will care to know how he came to be what you find him, — what his training was; what his youth was; who his parents were; perhaps who his ancestors were, and who was the first man of his name who came over to America, and where that progenitor's other de- scendants have settled. In the spring of 1886 Dr. Brooks was elected to be As- sistant Bishop of Pennsylvania, in succession to Et. Rev. William Bacon Stevens, whose increasing infirmities called for aid in his episcopal duties. The possibility of this elec- tion had already been suggested to him, and, as we have seen, he had not encouraged the suggestion. When the question was again brought before him he wrote to Eev. W. F. Paddock, of Philadelphia: — February 26, 1886. Mt dear Paddock, — The idea of your writing to me like that! You, that have known me from my infancy, that have played with me on the pleasant slopes of Shooter's Hill, that have roomed with me in St. George's, that have preached side by side with me in Philadelphia! That you should think that now, in my declining years, I would be a Bishop ! No, my dear fellow, I was not made for such a fate. Stop, I beseech yon, any movement that looks at all towards setting me up for that most unsuitable place. Kill it in the nest ! Nip it in the hud ! Blight it or ere it be sprung up! Yet let me not appear like a fool, declining and rejecting an office which I never have had offered me ! This letter is for your own friendly eye alone, and I tell you as if we sat upon the steps of St. George's and talked it over, that I am neither suited nor inclined to be a Bishop, nor do I see how anything could make me be one. There ! MT. 50] ELECTED ASSISTANT BISHOP 603' This letter would seem to have been sufficiently positive in its expression of unwillingness to accept the episcopate, either in Pennsylvania or elsewhere, to have decided the matter. So Dr. Paddock interpreted it. But where the episcopate is concerned no avowals of unwillingness seem to avail. The nolo episcopari, however vehemently uttered, is interpreted in the ecclesiastical usage as the language of a becoming modesty. In the long history of the episcopate it has been taken for granted that it would precede the final acceptance. There are well-known instances in the ancient church where the office was at last forced upon unwilling men. That Dr. Brooks or his supporters should have taken refuge in these ecclesiastical conventionalities was too im- probable for belief. But he had friends in Philadelphia who would not take no for an answer. As the time for the elec- tion approached, the feeling was universal among his friends that he must be the Bishop of Pennsylvania. Among all the candidates he was the one most earnestly, even passionately wanted. Dr. Brooks himself took a personal interest in the subject because he was anxious that his friend. Dr. Mc- Vickar, of Holy Trinity Church, should be elected. Against Dr. McVickar, however, this objection had been urged, that on a certain occasion he had gone to hear the Kev. James Freeman Clarke, an eminent Unitarian minister of Boston, and had even occupied a place of prominence upon the plat- form. Although it turned out that this prominent place had rather been forced upon him, yet the fact remained that he was there, and it was regarded by some as a damaging inci- dent, unfitting him for the episcopal office. To this incident Dr. Brooks alludes in a letter to Mr. Cooper: — 233 Clakendon Stbeet, Boston, Good Friday evening, April 23, 1886. My deab Cooper, — More than two months ago, it was on the 5th of February, you wrote me a beautiful letter, which I have been meaning to answer ever since. For a while I thought it not entirely impossible that I might get on to see you after Easter. I should certainly have done so if I had not worked up this plan of going out to California. On Thursday after Easter I shall start, and be gone until almost the first of July. How 6o4 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 I wish you were going. I do not expect to enjoy it half as much as a trip to Europe, but I think that one ought to get sight of the Pacific some time, and to have crossed the continent before he dies; so I am going. And at last Bishop Stevens has yielded and wants an assistant. Do you remember the night when he was chosen Assistant Bishop more than twenty years ago ? I hope that McVickar is your man. I have heard some fool- ish talk about his hearing of Dr. James Freeman Clarke stand- ing in his way. Surely that is not so ! It would be too absurdly narrow. A paper to-day says that my name is mentioned. Surely, if that stupid cause interferes with McVickar, it ought to interfere with me, for I honor and admire Freeman Clarke, and should go to hear him whenever I could, bjshop or no bishop ! But, Cooper, if my name is really mentioned for the assistant bishopric, in caucus or convention, I authorize you and charge you to withdraw it absolutely by authority from me. Under no circumstances could I accept the place. This is absolute, and I rely on you. I shall be off somewhere in New Mexico when your election takes place and shall know nothing about it; so I rely on you. I have written this to nobody else, and I rely en- tirely on you. To this letter Mr. Cooper replied, declining to abide by his decision. He took the liberty of an old friend, who, in an emergency, demands compliance with his wishes, and stated the only condition on which he would allow him to say that he would not accept : — Unless you have made up your mind never to accept the office of Bishop, you must recede from your decision. If you have fully decided that you never will accept any diocese, why then you must reiterate your orders. Dr. Brooks responded at once to this statement of the case : — CmcAGO, May 2, 1886. Deak Coopee, — In the hurry of getting ready to leave Bos- ton the other day I sent you a telegram, which now I must sup- plement by a bit of a letter. I do not want you to think that I have been careless about anything which you have written. I have studied and felt the force of it all. But it all comes to this, that perhaps McVickar may fail of an election. We all ear- nestly hope that he will not, for he is the very man for the ^T. 50] ELECTED ASSISTANT BISHOP 605 place. He suits it and deserves it. And the reason for the opposition to him is something totally beneath contempt. But I cannot feel that I am so responsible for any other election as to be bound, in order to prevent it, to accept an office for which I have neither taste nor fitness, and to spend the rest of my days in the Episcopate. And I would never consent to be elected without letting those who voted for me clearly know that I would do what McVickar did whenever I got the chance, and that I despise them with all my heart for transferring their votes from him to me on that account. Tell them that, and then see whether they will vote for me. No, my dear Cooper, it would be a delight to live in the same town with you again, and be once more together as we were when we were boj^s, but I could not be Bishop of Pennsylvania even for that. So you must withdraw my name absolutely if it is offered, for under no circumstances could I accept the office. Once more, / rely on you ! All blessings on you always. Affectionately, P. B. Mr. Lemuel Coffin, whose friendship with Dr. Brooks went back to the early years in Philadelphia, wrote him most earnestly, begging that he would accept the office to which he felt sure that he could be elected; and again Dr. Brooks sends a characteristic letter : — Chicago, Iluitois, May 2, 1886. Dbab Mb. Coffin, — There was only time for a bit of a tele- gram from Boston in answer to your kind letter. Now let me acknowledge it more fully, and say how good I think you are to want me to be your bishop after all you have seen of me for this last quarter of a century. I cannot bring myself to think it best, partly because I do not think I would make a good bishop, and partly because I am so disgusted that McVickar should be so contemptibly thrown over for such an absurd reason. Why, my dear Mr. Coffin, I would go and hear Freeman Clarke every week if I had a chance. If even you, who represent McVickar's friends, call that an "indiscreet act," why, I think the diocese deserves a Mr. X or worse! A man may go and hear mummeries at St. Clement's, or twaddle at a hundred churches, but if he goes to hear a great man and an old saint talk Essen- tial Christianity under another name, he is said to have denied Christ, and a thousand other foolish things. No. Grather around McVickar. Do not feebly apologize for him, but defend and approve him, and declare your manly contempt for this kind of 6o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 opposition to him; and if he is defeated upon this ground, let him fall honorably in the midst of his friends, and let Mr. X have the diocese. I do not know why anybody should want it if that is the stufE it is made of. I am sorry, very sorry, you are sick. Do get well; then, however the election goes, there is something to be thankful for. My best love to Mrs. CofiSn. Ever faithfully yours, P. B. Positive as was the tone of these letters, it still seemed to the friends of Dr. Brooks that they could read between the lines the possibility, even the probability, of his accepting the office if it should be once offered to him. . When the convention met in Philadelphia, on the 5th of May, it was well enough known what the tenor of Dr. Brooks's letters had been. But despite the discouragement they had re- ceived, his friends determined to nominate and elect him. He had not said in so many words that he would decline if he were elected, and that constituted a ground of hope. A peculiarity of Phillips Brooks was recalled, with which they were all familiar, — how he was wont to recede, under pres- sure, from a position which he had taken. Those who were unfavorable to his election conveyed the information to the convention that he was unwilling that his name should be presented, and that it was useless to vote for him. It is possible that this prevented some from voting for him who otherwise would have done so. In a crowded house, amid intense excitement, the balloting went on, and after eight ballots had been taken without result, on the ninth ballot Dr. Brooks was elected, receiving eighty -two clerical votes, — a majority of two over the total number of votes cast, and a plurality of sixteen over the vote for the rival candidate. The clerical vote was at once ratified by that of the laity, the lay vote standing sixty -four to thirty-three. While the convention was in session Dr. Brooks was absent from home, and the news of his election reached him by telegraph in the West, in the distant territory of New Mexico. Despite his previous utterances, and although his decision was a foregone conclusion, he yet acted honorably ^T. 50] ELECTED ASSISTANT BISHOP 607 by the convention and by his friends, reserving his final answer until he should have taken two weeks for considera- tion. There was no lack of pressure brought upon him to induce him to accept. Bishop Stevens expressed to him the pleasure and satisfaction he felt at the choice of the conven- tion, his earnest desire that he should accept, his conviction that they would work in harmony. He was also assured by his friends that they had not been unmindful of his wishes : — I am sure your best friends made every effort — at your re- quest, and not from their inclination — to convince the brethren of your unwillingness to fill this office. But when, in spite of all this, the meeting to select a candidate overwhelmingly went for you, I for one said I cannot stand and resist what may be the will of God, and accordingly did what I could for your election. I am emboldened [writes another clergyman] by what I be- lieve is a fact which has several times appeared in your life, and which convinces me that you possess the rare power of revising and changing your purposes, even when most deliberately and conscientiously formed, provided sufficient reason to do so is made evident to you. You shrank back from the first work you were called to in Philadelphia, — in the Church of the Advent. You shrank back still more from the call to Holy Trinity, and again God mercifully led you to reconsider your refusal. When you went to Boston, it was only after you had said No, and had thought it your duty not to go. "While the question was pending, it was intimated that considerations of health might influence the decision. "It is known," said the correspondent of a Philadelphia paper, "that the celebrated New England clergyman is not in the best of health, and that he is now travelling in the West for recuperation." But if this fear were an inference from the circumstance that he was travelling, it had no foundation. A clergyman, however, writes to him, who has been alarmed at something he has heard : — In talking with Mr. , I was surprised to learn that you ever felt the burden of preparation for the pulpit. From the first sermon I heard from you in Dr. Vinton's pulpit in 1860 (and it was the first he heard), I have been always impressed with the fact that you were only pouring forth from the abun- 6o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 dance and richness of your own mind, and that writing and speaking with you must be only a delight. Surely, on the whole, it must be so. You certainly write with an ease that comes to very few, and I believe that with ripening age and deepening experience you will do your work full as easily and from a fuller reservoir. I remember going home with Dr. Tyng one Sunday and his astonishing me by talking in the most depressed way about his work, and his inability to meet the demand upon him, and how he longed to escape from it at times. So I suppose thia is an experience from which none are exempt. But certainly God has given you uncommon gifts and a very wide usefulness, which, I trust, is by no means at its height. I used to know Dr. Bushnell, in days gone by, but there came a time when there was a vastly added power, a going down into deeper depths and a going up unto higher heights, and a bringing forth richer spiritual meanings, and so may it be with you. These letters of Mr. Brooks which follow show that, while he was touched by the action of his friends in their in- sistence that he should become the Bishop of Pennsylvania, and was determined to consider the question fairly, yet his predominant mood before the election took place had not changed. To McVickar he writes : — Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 9, 1886. Deae William, — This note which I enclose is formal enough, I hope. Now for a more familiar talk. How is it that you have allowed this thing to come about? Surely my declaration to Cooper was plain and positive enough. To that I hold, and when your letter comes I shall decline. My dear, dear Boy, I would do otherwise and be your bishop if I could, but I cannot. You will not think on such a question as this that I have been, or am, light or frivolous or prejudiced. I have considered it ear- nestly and solemnly. I did not think that there was any chance of my being elected, but I considered it exactly as if I thought there was, and conscience, soul, and judgment all said no! I see no reason whatsoever for a change. I am sorry to compel an- other convention and election, but I cannot let myself take a place which is not mine simply to save that trouble. Besides, in some sense, it is the Convention's fault, for I said, clearly as I knew how, that I could not accept. You will not think I am ungrateful to you all. I love you dearly. That my old friends should have proposed me and elected me touches me more deeply than I can say, nor am I ^T. 50] ELECTED ASSISTANT BISHOP 609 careless of the pleasure it would be to come and live in the old places with the old friends and new. Nor am I foolishly con- temptuous of the Episcopate. But simply I must not. I am not made for it. I can do better work elsewhere than I could do as Bishop. So my decision is absolute and final, and when your Committee's formal letter comes, I shall write and say that you must choose again. I am so heartily sorry that my telegram to Cooper did not come before the Convention had adjourned. Then you could have made your other choice at once. Who will he be ? I have heard, of course, nothing of the course which the Convention took, but, oh, that it could be you! I am just as much as before these things occurred, Tour afBectionate friend and brother, P. B. This was the formal letter of declination addressed to the committee of gentlemen appointed to convey to him the notice of his election : — Sah Fkancisco, May 22, 1886. Mt bear Fezeuds, — I have received your letter which gives me formal notice of my election to be the Assistant Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. I thank you most sincerely for the kind and courteous words in which you have given me your message. The question which has been so unexpectedly presented to me has received, I need not say, the most earnest and conscientious consideration which it is in my power to give; and I have not lightly concluded that I must not accept the high and interesting office to which I have been called. I have been deeply touched by the kind regard of my brethren of the Clergy and Laity who have elected me. I have felt anew the warm and grateful interest which I have never lost in a city and a Diocese where many of the happiest days of my ministry were passed. I have recognized the great and useful work which a Bishop of our Church in Pennsylvania may do for God and man, for Christ and the Church. I think I have not been deaf to any of the persuasions which plead for the acceptance of the work to which you call me. And yet I must ask you to report to the Convention that I cannot accept the invitation to become the Assistant Bishop of your Diocese. My present work, in which I have been long engaged, and to which I am profoundly attached, still, I believe, welcomes and demands my care. I must not leave it, not even for such a useful and important task as I should find in the service to which I am invited. I know how happy that service would be made by the sympathy and coBp- 6io PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 eration of the Clergy and Laity, on which the Bishops of Penn- eylvania may always count. There enters into my decision that I must not come to you no small element of regret, but I have no hesitation or doubt with regard to the result to which I have been led. It will always be a deep source of satisfaction to me to think of the honor and confidence with which my brethren in Pennsyl- vania have regarded me. Now and always I shall rejoice like one of you in every token of God's guidance and goodness to His Church among you, whose loving faithfulness in His work I know so well and honor so profoundly. I am, my dear friends, with sincere affection and respect, Your friend and brother, Pnii-iiips Brooks. To Rev. W. N. McVickar he writes on the same subject in more informal fashion : — San Feancisco, May 24, 1886. Ton are very good and kind, the same true friend you have been now for so many years, and I dare say you are wise, too, and that your arguments are good and sound. I think they are, or at least would be for any one but me. But while I feel them all, the balance is decidedly upon the other side, and so I have declined. I sent the letters yesterday. I told them all beforehand how it must be so, and said that if they chose me I could not accept, — and yet they chose me. I do not complain of that, I should be a beast if I did. They were very good, and I am proud of their regard. But this choice does not bring any- thing to change my previous judgment. It was by a bare major- ity, and after considerable struggle. It simply presents the chance to be bishop which I had considered in its possibility before, and yet I have carefully considered it again. Along the arid plains of Arizona I turned it over in the thing I call my mind. Under the orange trees of Pasadena I let it soak into me with the sunshine. Among the cataracts of Yosemite I lis- tened to the tempting invitation. But it was no good. I could not see myself there doing those things that a Bishop does, and so I wrote a formal letter (true, though, every word of it) to the committee, and declined ; so now that is all over. . . . What a queer town this is, and who would live here if he could live anywhere else ! But some of the beauty of this great Pacific slope passes one's dreams. I am ashamed sometimes to think what a Yankee I am, that all the beauty of the rest of the world makes me love our own ugly little corner of it all the more in- tensely. ^T. 5o] ELECTED ASSISTANT BISHOP 6ii Thank you again for caring what becomes of me, and I am more than ever, Affectionately yours, P. B. In the many letters he received, we may see again how Phillips Brooks had become, as it were, the common prop- erty of the people. The case was laid before him on both sides, as if he were incompetent to form an opinion for himself. His life as a parish minister was urged as a vaster field of influence than any episcopate could ever become. To be a bishop was thought to mean the loss or diminution of his power as a preacher because of the preoccupation with ecclesiastical affairs and the detail of administration. There does not seem, however, to have been any serious alarm in Trinity Church, Boston. It was somehow taken for granted that he would not think of leaving. But very gracious to him were the letters desiring him to remain, and the con- gratulations when his decision was known. Among the let- ters, this one from the late Bishop Paddock may be given : — AsHrrELD, May 15, 1886. Mt deab Beotheb, — Yesterday at our Diocesan Missionary Meeting at Amherst I saw the announcement that you had de- cided to remain at your present field of labor, and decline the honorable and great work to which you had been called in Penn- sylvania. I rejoice that you can see it your duty to stay with us and still contribute so greatly as God has enabled you to do to the building up of His Church in our Diocese and of His king- dom in the hearts of men. May He increase and multiply your great influence for good in your present field, and justify, by your abiding work and holy success, jour decision that your present field is your post of duty. I do not know what we should have done had you gone from us ; and with many other considerable cares, I am truly thankful that I have not got to work out that problem. I am, dear Brother, yours sincerely, Benj. S. Paddock. It was sometimes said of Mr. Brooks that he had scant respect for the office of a bishop. He may have expressed himself carelessly on the subject, and thus given rise to the impression. At one time, indeed, he distinctly asserted that 6 10. PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 in the presbyterate the more important work for the church was to be done. When he made this statement, he was speaking at the grave of Dr. Vinton. It had been his de- sire, however, that Dr. Vinton should become the Bishop of Massachusetts after the death of Dr. Eastburn, and he urged that in his election the office and the man who could exemplify the power of the office would be signally brought together. He was alive to the incongruousness of the situa- tion when the office was not adequately filled. But he had nothing of the Puritan dislike for the office in itself, as was sometimes suspected. Whenever personal criticism went so far as to suggest such a thought, he quickly and strongly re- sented it. The office was a high one, he would then assert, and it only needed to see the right man in its occupancy to bring out its charm and its efficiency. He hoped the day would come, as he remarked in one of his letters on the subject, when " the episcopate will stand not simply for the restraint and regulation, but for the inspiration of the church." He had a very free way of speaking on this as on many other subjects, when he did not talk to be reported, which gave rise to misunderstandings. Indeed, much of his conversation, as also his letters, needed to be interpreted by one who knew him. While Mr. Brooks was In California, he was turning over the question in his mind of the restriction of immigration to this country, particularly of the Chinese. He touches upon the subject in a satirical way in this letter to Mr. Eobert Treat Paine, and again alludes to the Pennsylvania episco- pate. Probably he was never so near looking upon his call to it with favor, and like a lost opportunity, as after he had given his irrevocable decision : — Monterey, California, June 1, 1886. My dear Bob, — Ever since I left Boston I have had dreams that you might write to me and let me know how everything was going with you all. Perhaps I may hear from you yet, but meanwhile, before I turn my face homeward, I want to tell you what a good time I have had, and how delightfully California has treated me. She has given her best weather, and her most pro- ^T. 50] HARVARD UNIVERSITY 613 fuse flowers, and her cataracts full of water, and her people pleasant and interesting everywhere. The journey out here was delightful, and the Yosemite was quite as grand as fancy had painted it, and the San Franciscan, American, or Chinese was full of interest. One thing all the Americans say about the Chinamen, — that no more of them must come. All intelligent people own that they could not have done, and could not now do, without them, and would by no means drive out those that are here; but they would let in no more. The unanimity on this last point is striking. I have not met with an exception. And yet one is much struck also by hearing the best of qualities, — thrift, industry, self-control, and patience, — so often made a large part of the burden of indictment against the poor Mongo- lian. Certainly the look of Chinatown and its inhabitants is surprisingly prepossessing when one considers that he is seeing the very dregs and refuse of a race. If these are the lowest, the highest specimens must be something very good indeed. I have had a lot of correspondence about that Episcopate in Pennsylvania. There was no moment when I thought of going. How could I, so long as I dared to believe that you all still wanted me to stay in Boston? Will you tell me, honestly and truly, and like a friend, when you think it is best to go away? Until you do, I shall rejoice to come back year after year and do the best I can. I am going back this year, taking it for granted that my work in Trinity is not yet done. Among the motives operating powerfully with Phillips Brooks to hold him fast by his work in Boston was his rela- tion to Harvard University. A change was now impend- ing there, when the University would rely upon his moral support before its whole constituency, and indeed the whole American people. Since the death of Dr. A. P. Peabody, the daily and the Sunday religious services had been conducted by clergymen in some way connected with the College, whether in its Faculty or its Board of Overseers. In 1886 it had been decided, as the best way for ministering to the reli- gious life of the students, to appoint a Board of Chaplains, six in number, representing the different religious denomi- nations, who should take their turns in conducting prayers and in preaching on Sunday in Appleton Chapel. For this purpose the ablest preachers in the country were to be se- lected, in order that everything might be done to give to 6i4 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 religion an important place in the University, and to this office Phillips Brooks had been chosen. One of the chief difficulties which confronted the Board of Chaplains was the question of voluntary or compulsory attendance on prayers. So long as those who officiated had been officers of the Uni- versity it had been easier to regard the question as one of college discipline. But to the new chaplains, coming into the college world from without, the question assiuned a new form. They were anxious not to be hampered in their work, lest religion should be misrepresented and suffer harm. On the threshold they encountered a feeling which had long been growing among the students, that it was not becoming that attendance on religious services should be compulsory. For several years the subject had been under discussion by the Faculty, the Overseers, and the Corporation. The senti- ment among the officers of the University was for the most part averse to the change. President Eliot, Dr. A. P. Peabody, and Mr. Kalph Waldo Emerson were among those who deprecated the growing opinion among the students, and indeed were strongly averse to the abandonment of a require- ment which went back in its origin to the foundation of Har- vard College, and was also established in other colleges and institutions of learning, not only in this country, but in Eng- land. Phillips Brooks had also been among the firmest opponents, more strenuous even than many in resisting the change. A petition of the students in 1885 had been referred to a committee of three, of which he was a member, to give the question thorough consideration, and return a final and exhaustive answer to the students' request. That the ques- tion was at last under serious consideration was widely known, and not only Harvard, but the other colleges were deeply in- terested in the decision. It was a great relief to many when the answer came, that Harvard remained true to the ancient ways of the fathers. Thus the president of an important college wrote to Dr. Brooks : — Like everybody else I have heard speak of it I am very much pleased by your report to the Board of Overseers in regard to college prayers. The abandonment of a custom so salutary and ^T. 50] HARVARD UNIVERSITY 615 so characteristic, as well as time-honored, would be fraught with most serious consequences to the whole fabric of our civilization. A brief summary of this report of the committee to the Overseers will bring out some interesting features of the situation. The students who petitioned did not, on the whole, rest their petition on the strongest ground. They asked that attendance at prayers be made voluntary for all over the age of twenty-one, and optional according to the wishes of parents or guardians for aU under that age ; and they based their request upon the assumption that compul- sory attendance is a "religious test" and "therefore repug- nant," and further that "it was a remnant of ancient en- croachments upon civil liberty, and therefore tyrannical and unjust." To this petition the committee replied that prayers were upon the same footing as other requisitions made upon students by which they resign their liberty to spend their time as they please and conform in manners and habits to what the college faculty regard as decent and proper. There was no tyranny more than in daily attendance upon recitations and lectures. It was not a religious test, for those were excused from attendance who could plead con- scientious religious scruples. There was no hardship, for those who lived at a distance from the chapel were excused, and those also who urged the plea of ill health ; and further, the religious service was a brief one and attractive in its character, as shown in the reverent bearing of the students. But the two most significant features in the committee's report were, first, the assumption that if attendance on prayers were not compulsory, the only alternative was the abandonment or discontinuance of the daily religious service altogether. That this would be the result was argued from the attendance at the English cathedral services, which was pitiably small under the most favorable auspices. The other assumption was that the large number of names appended to the students' petition carried no weight, for it was "well known how easily such signatures are obtained not only in college, but in the outer world." This petition, too, had not been left in some designated place, where those who wished 6i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 might sign it, but it had been carried from room to room with great urgency. These were the main points in the re- port. But there was one other reason given for denying the petition, although it was distinctly said the least of the argu- ments in behalf of the existing system: "Harvard College Ban ill afford the loss of reputation which would ensue on its being the first of all literary institutions in New England to abandon religious observances." To those who knew Phillips Brooks it must seem strange that he should have been willing to append his name to this report. But he was a conservative in temperament ; nor had he as yet looked deeply into the question. He probably acquiesced out of force of habit in the assumption that if students were not required to go to prayers they would not go. Hardly, however, had he signed the report than his attention began to go beneath the surface of both the petition and its answer. It might be possible that the students had better reasons for their request than they alleged. It was possible that they would continue their attendance, even if it were not required. If religion was natural for man and made its appeal to what was genuinely human, it might be properly thrown on its own native resources without being bolstered up by an extraneous authority. It indicated lack of faith in God and man to assume any other ground. It pained him to call in question the sincerity or earnestness of those who had signed the petition. The thing to do was to find out whether the sentiment of the students as a whole was averse to compulsory prayers, and then to trust and to honor their feeling in the matter as having some divine sig- nificance ; to have faith in religion also that its ancient power was not abated. It would indeed require a greater expendi- ture of spiritual force on the part of those who were to offi- ciate in the religious offices of the College, but that must be taken for granted. In February, 1886, the students renewed their petition. In May the first Board of Chaplains was appointed, and in June Phillips Brooks, in his place as one of the Board of Overseers, stood up and earnestly advocated the abolition ^T. 50] HARVARD UNIVERSITY 617 of compulsory attendance on prayers, declaring further his unwillingness to officiate as a chaplain of the College unless the change were conceded. He did not argue for the change as a concession merely to the expressed wishes of the stu- dents, but as in itself the ideal arrangement, to be adopted because of its inherent fitness and propriety. There was surprise and even astonishment at the complete reversal of his attitude. But his influence was great; he was willing to take the responsibility; it could not hurt the College if it was known that he approved the change, and his name, indeed, would be a guarantee of the success of the voluntary system; there was nothing else to do after his bold declaration of his faith in the new method. In taking this position Mr. Brooks had the sympathy and support of the other chaplains associ- ated with him. Their first joint act after their appointment was to recommend that attendance on prayers be voluntary, and their recommendation was approved by the Corporation and the Overseers. In the fall of 1886 the new arrange- ment went into operation. In the discussion of the order of service to be used at morning prayers, Mr. Brooks took part. With him origi- nated the brief address of three minutes. At the request of the students he said a few words before closing each service, and from this the custom grew until it became the general rule. It imposed a harder task upon the chaplains, but it tended to vitalize the occasion, and to prevent it from becom- ing a religious formality. That the new plan of voluntary prayers must be regarded as an experiment until it had been demonstrated a success was evident to Mr. Brooks, and in order that it might be made successful he was anxious that everything should be done to make the new arrangement attractive and impressive. In his letters to Kev. F. G. Peabody, who had been elected to the Plummer Professor- ship, and was president of the Board of Chaplains, he shows how deep his interest was : — 233 Claeendon Stbeet, Boston, June 29, 1886. Deab Mk. Pbabodt, — ... I feel very strongly, as I think about it, that the meeting of October 3 should be devoted to a 6i8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 full and comprehensive address from you, for which you should take plenty of time, and in which you should lay before the Col- lege and the world the complete meaning of the new movement. If it is thought well for one of the preachers to say a few words also, well and good; but the evening should be yours. Let us not fail to get the great musician. And we must not be cramped for money. And we must be very confident in hope. Ever sincerely yours, Phillips Brooks. 233 Claeendon Street, Boston, August 18, 1886. Mt dbak Me. Pbabody, — ... I hope' that on that day the service may be as rich and strong as it is possible to make it. I have begged the President that we may not be stinted in the matter of money. At any rate, for those two days, let there be no economy. Get the best musical material that can be had. Put our musical director on his mettle regardless of expense, and let us see what he can do, only let him know that it is excellence of quality and not simply abundance of quantity that we want. Ever yours most sincerely, Phillips Beooks. It may be added here that doubts and misgivings quickly vanished when the voluntary arrangement had been put to actual trial. The attendance at prayers was large and the service inspiring. Mr. Brooks took the month of Novem- ber, and every morning after service was over went to the chaplain's rooms at WadswortL House, where the students came to see him in increasing numbers. After his month was over, he wrote again to Professor Peabody : — 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, December 4, 1886. Deae Me. Peabody, — ... I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed this last busy month, or how deeply interested I am in the world over which you preside. Pray use me for it in any way, at any time, and do not let even Cambridge quench your hope. After returning from his trip to the West, Mr. Brooks took up his residence at North Andover for the summer, where, as he writes to Strong, "there is peace and quiet to a terrible degree. I go down to Boston on Sundays and wake myself up with preaching to a miscellaneous summer congregation, and then go back to my bucolic cares." He tried to get his three old friends, Cooper and Richards and Strong, to meet together with him there, and "talk over the ^T. 5o] CORRESPONDENCE 619 universe," but the scheme was not realized. To Mr. Cooper he writes : — July 3, 1886. Another journey is finished without accident. I have seen the Pacific, and now here I am, thankful and peaceful among my acres and bucolic cares at North Andover. The grass is to be sold this afternoon at public auction out behind the barn, and that makes me a little anxious and restless this morning. Except for that, I am very well and happy, and hope these few lines will find you the same. And you are coming to George Strong's week after next! I am sure you will not pass me by, but will look in and see my farming. There is nothing in the world to do. You shall not be bothered to go and see the cattle, for there are none ; nor the kitchen garden, for there isn't any; nor even the chickens, for there is only one poor lone rooster, which the man who kept the place last winter couldn't catch, but left behind him when he went away. No, you shall sit on the piazza and smoke, and sit in the study and smoke, and sit under the trees and smoke, and we will talk Pennsylvania and California, and you shall tell me all about the queer, queer things which have gone on in Philadel- phia since the first of May. Now write a beautiful letter at once and say when I may meet you and Mrs. Cooper in Boston, and bring you here for as many days and nights as you will stay. I am sure that you will not disappoint your ancient friend. His chief recreation at North Andover was in driving a quiet horse through Boxford and other adjacent towns, when he dressed in a most unclerical garb and seemed to enjoy it as if it were the proper thing to enjoy. But in his manner he had grown somewhat more quiet and subdued. In the course of these excursions he came to the ancient town of Rowley, where the first Samuel Phillips, son of the George PhiUips who was the founder of the family, had spent his long life. A call at the parsonage for the minister, who could have told him much that he wanted to know, was fruit- less. It seemed that in the quiet of those peaceful after- noons, where it was like a perpetual Sabbath, the minister had the custom of retiring to the prophet's little chamber on the wall, and was fast asleep while his distinguished visitor was knocking at the door. But there was a monument to be 620 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 seen, erected to the memory of this distant ancestor. The only relic which survived of him in the town was a fragment of a sermon on the "sin of wearing long hair." But there were traditions of him remaining to the effect that "he com- hined culture of mind, tenderness and sympathy of heart, and well-balanced Christian living." The days at North Andover were marked by another event, when on July 21 he went to Framingham and read an essay before the Chautauqua Assembly on Literature and Life. It was published in pamphlet form and has since been incor- porated in his "Essays and Addresses." Among the writ- ings of PhiUips Brooks, this essay holds an important place, valuable in itself for its profound and beautiful suggestions, most admirable as an introduction to the study of literature; but also important because it gives so clearly the method of his life work, revealing the springs of his enthusiasm and the sources of his perpetual freshness and power. His theme is that " life underlies literature and is the greater thing." " It is possible to treat almost any book so that the literaiy quality will disappear and the pulsations of the life beneath be felt." "Men must live before they can make literature." Very impressive and mysterious and beautiful are these noble years in the life of a people or a man, which are so full of living that they had no time or thought for writing. How many of us can remember it in our own lives, the time when life claimed utterance and clumsily, shamefacedly, secretly, but with a dim sense of crossing a line and entering a new con- dition, we wrote something, — a poem, an essay, a story, — some- thing which gave literary expression to life. He was asking himself why it was that in the last years of the nineteenth century there seemed to be a falling away in the quality of high literature. He thinks that the relations between life and literature are very delicate and easily dis- turbed. Life may become too strong for literature. There is question whether it be not so to-day, when the world is intensely and vehemently alive. It may be that former methods and standards are not sufficient for the expression of the growing life, its new ^T. 50] SERMONS 621 activities, its unexpected energies, its feverish problems. If the social perplexities of the age could be set forth in a more com- petent literature, catching the true meaning of the situation, then the pent-up torrent of life would find easier vent and open into broader, juster, and more charitable thought. Under these cir- cumstances a man must believe in the future more than he rever- ences the past. In the retirement of North Andover Mr. Brooks was thinking much of Eichardson, whose death had moved him deeply. He speaks of him in a letter: "Richardson is off alone on his long journey. I wonder how long it is." In an article for the "Harvard Monthly" (October, 1886), he paid a tribute to his character and genius. The qualities which he discerned and selected for praise are those which the two men held in common, and wbich served to draw them together, — the instinctive and spontaneous character of his genius, expressing great ideas, based upon thorough study, and yet of which he could give no account as to how they came to him, "not a man of theories," but "his life passed into his buildings by ways too subtle even for himself to Tinderstand." "He grew simpler as he grew older." "Whoever came in contact with his work felt that the wind blew out of an elemental simplicity, out of the primitive life and qualities of man." The loss which his death brought to his friends it is not possi- ble to describe. It is a change in all their life. When some men die it is as if you had lost your penknife, and were subject to perpetual inconvenience until you could get another. Other men's going is like the vanishing of a great mountain from the landscape, and the outlook of life is changed forever. His life was like a great picture full of glowing color. The canvas on which it was painted was immense. It lighted all the room In which it hung. It warmed the chilliest air. It made, and it will long make, life broader, work easier, and simple strength and courage dearer to many men.^ Mr. Brooks was further occupied during the summer with the preparation for the press of his fourth volume of ser- mons, which appeared in the fall with the title "Twenty Ser- ■• Essays and Addresses, p. 489. 622 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 mons," and was dedicated to the memory of his brother Frederick. The book has a distinct character from his other volumes of sermons, — his message to the hour, stamped with his imprimatur, and reflecting, also, the changes in his inner life and experience. The first sermon, with which the volume opens, entitled "The Mother's Wonder," is an epit- ome of his own spiritual history. It was written at the time when his father's health was declining, when he no longer attempted to exercise any semblance of a sway over his son's career. It recalls the moment in Philadelphia when the son was throwing himself into social and political reforms, advocating them with vehement eloquence from the pulpit, and the father's earnest remonstrance against his course. He had believed that he was right in following his own judgment, despite his father's protest. He was recalling his own reticence and invincible reserve in those mysterious years when he was trying to read the call of God to his soul, and his mother stood by perplexed, but silent and submissive, while he made no sign. He had changed much since those years went by, but they were up- permost in his consciousness still. He is sending now, as it were, his voice beyond the darkness to the father and mother in paradise, his apology for that which, in itself, was right or inevitable, yet had none the less given pain. The mother of Christ remonstrating with her son, "Why hast thou thus dealt with us? " is a type and illustration of that "which is recurring in every household as a boy claims for the first time his own life." He strikes the principle rest- ing beneath the familiar experience, how people are in dan- ger of realizing responsibility more than they realize God. He takes up the subject of reform and reformers, again, and in so doing shows that his father's protest had done its work and had mingled with his own judgment till it had modified his life method. The subject enlarges under his treatment till it becomes a discussion of God's part in the control of human affairs and in the development of every individual career. But this larger conviction has its roots in his expe- rience as a boy in the intimate life of the human household. ^T. 50] SERMONS 62^ Many of the sermons in this volume are noteworthy not only as great pictures on the canvas of life, but because they reveal the man behind the sermon. In "Visions and Tasks," already mentioned, he pays his tribute to his mother, and to every mother who mediates between the vision and the child whom she loves and thus brings the highest truth to the childish capacity. " It is a truth which we have all learned from some great experience through which we have been led, that any great experience, seriously and greatly met and passed through, makes the man who has passed through it always afterward a purer medium through which the highest truth may shine on other men." In the "Beautiful Gate of the Temple," a sermon first preached in Philadelphia, and afterwards rewritten, — a fa- vorite sermon and repeated many times, — he has described the religion of childhood, how it differs from the religion of the mature man, how it is to be taught and cultivated in order to its later healthy expansion. Upon this subject he could speak with singular force and wisdom, for he had the gift of knowing how to enter into a child's heart and to dwell there in joy and freedom. The text "Make the men sit down" was suggestive to his mind of the contemplative restful aspects of religion, as compared with its incessant call to activity. He was think- ing of his experience in India and the wide contrast between Oriental and Occidental types of religion. As he begins his sermon, he takes the congregation into his confidence, by telling them how often he has found that the wrong people take the wrong sermon to themselves. As he is proposing to speak of the peace and repose which religion may bring, he fears it will not appeal to those who are always rushing into more and more wild and superficial action, to those who really need meditation and quiet self-study, but to those already resting in quiescent calm, and need to be roused to action. This is one of the difficulties of the pulpit which it is almost impossible to overcome. He had preached a sermon, as most preachers have done, on "The Man with One Talent," published in an earlier 624 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 volume, but it required a certain degree of boldness and originality to speak on the place in the world of "The Man with Two Talents." His object was to show how the aver- age man may become great and almost infinitely multiply his gifts by living in the consciousness of God. The power of the God consciousness is also brought out in one of its most profound and far-reaching aspects in the sermon on " Standing before God," where he meets the difficulty which the mind encounters in thinking of immortality, because of the countless millions of himian souls who have lived or are yet to live on the earth, till the insignificance of any one soul in the infinite throng overcomes the conviction of its priceless value. "The Knowledge of God" is the title of another sermon, where he makes his plea against what is called Agnosticism. His chief argument is built upon the fact of Christ's unconquerable conviction as in the words, "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: " — i Surely it must forever stand as a most impressive and signifi- cant fact, a fact that no man who is trying to estimate the worth and strength of spiritual things can leave out of his account, that the noblest and most perfect spiritual being whom this world has ever seen, the being whom the world with most amazing unanim- ity owns for its spiritual pattern and leader, was sure of God. I cannot get rid of the immense, the literally unmeasurable meaning and value of that fact. There are sermons here which are the outcome of that consciousness of humanity in which he also lived. The sense of sin, the evil in life, the conception of life as a tragic struggle between hostile forces where God and man seem to be arrayed against each other, the awful mystery of the conflict and its appalling proportions, — these things are brought out in sermons, stiU vividly remembered by those who heard them, as revealing the preacher's power. In a sermon entitled "Destruction and Fulfilment," he traces the beneficent evidence of human progress. When we read the sermon on Going up to Jerusalem, it seems to have a pro- phetic character, as though the preacher, in urging upon his hearers to gain some clearer perception of the appointed ^T. 50] DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH 625 result toward which the steady tendency of their lives was growing, was thinking and speaking of himself. Life was changing for him now to its last appointed phase. From this time his own face was set, like that of the Master before him, to go up to Jerusalem ; and when friends remonstrated and would fain hold him back, he went steadily forward, and as they looked after him in his stride toward the end, they were amazed. "Do not pray for easy lives. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks." I bid you clearly know that if the life which you have chosen to be your life is really worthy of you, it involves self-sacrifice and pain. If your Jerusalem really is your sacred city, there is certainly a cross in it. What then? Shall you flinch and draw back ? Shall you ask for yourself another life ? Oh, no, not another life, but another self. Ask to be born again. Ask God to fill you with Himself, and then calmly look up and go on. Go up to Jerusalem expecting all things that are written concern- ing you to be fulfilled. Disappointment, mortification, miscon- ception, enmity, pain, death, these may come to you, but if they come to you in doing your duty it is all right. There remains to be mentioned one other sermon in this volume to which a special interest and importance must be attached. Its subject is the "Church of the Living God." It was preached in 1885, on the third Sunday in Advent, when it was the custom at Trinity Church to take up the annual collection for domestic missions. In this sermon Mr. Brooks defined his position on the questions then agitating the Episcopal Church. In the first part of the sermon he gives his definition of the Church Universal : — The Christian church is the body of redeemed humanity. It is man in his deepest interests, in his spiritual possibilities. It is the under life, the sacred, the profounder life of man, his regeneration. Every human being in very virtue of birth into the redeemed world is a potential member of the Christian church. His baptism claims and asserts his membership. . . . I cannot tell you, my dear friends, how strongly this view takes possession of me the longer that I live. I cannot think, I will not think, about the Christian church as if it were a selec- tion out of humanity. In its idea it is humanity. VOL. n 626 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 He defends the custom of baptizing the dying child, which sometimes has seemed like the "blankest superstition." "Will the ceremony do any good? " "Will the child be any the better for this hurried incantation? " He answers: — Baptism is the solemn, grateful, tender recognition of that infant's life on earth, of the deep meaning of his humanity. It is the human race in its profoundest self-consciousness welcoming this new member to its multitude. Only for a few moments does he tarry in this condition of humanity. His life touches the earth only to leave it; but in those few moments of his tarrying, humanity lifts up its hand and claims it, . . . appropriates for it that redemption of Christ which revealed man's belonging to God, declares it a member of that Church which is simply hu- manity belonging to God, the divine conception of humanity, her own realization of herself as it belongs to God. He exclaims what a world this would be if only baptism were universal, with this understanding of its significance. He turns to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper "as the rallying place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of this great Christian sacrament, this great human sacrament, to become that rallying place." It would be the evidence of the world's transformation if to this great "sacrament of man" all classes of people — the mystic, the seeker after truth, the soldier, the student, the schoolboy, the legislator, the inventor, men, women, and children — were to come, meeting in a great host at the table of the Lord, owning themselves His children, claiming for themselves His strength, and thence go forth to their work. "The communion service would lift up its voice and sing itself in triumph, the great anthem of dedicated human life." He speaks next of the Christian ministry. The old sacer- dotal idea has not died away. Sometimes it is distinctly proclaimed and taught. But the remedy does not lie in any negation, — not to deny the priesthood of the clergy, but to assert the priest- hood of all men. "We can have no hope, I believe, of the de- struction of the spirit of hierarchy by direct attack. It may be smitten down a thousand times. A thousand times it will rise again. Only when all men become full of the sense of the ^T. 50] DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH 627 sacredness of their own life will the assumption of supreme cleri- cal sacredness find itself overwhelmed with the great rising tide. He reverts to a subject already mentioned, but he was now speaking his mind fully and definitely on the debated opin- ions of the hour, and he was determined to be as complete in his utterance as he was clear. Why is it that the Church has magnified doctrine overmuch and throned it where it does not belong? It is because the Church has not cared enough for life. She has not overvalued doctrine: she has undervalued life. . . . When she thinks of herself as the true inspirer and purifier of all the life of man, then she will — what ? Not cast away her doctrines, as many of her impetuous advisers bid her do. She will see their value, their precious value, as she has never seen it yet; but she will hold them always as the means of life. The decrying of dogma in the interest of life, of creed in the interest of conduct, is very natural, but very superficial. It is superficial because, if it succeeded, it would make life and con- duct blind and weak. But it is natural because it is the crude, healthy outburst of human protest against the value of dogma for its own sake, of which the Church has always been too full. Let us not join in it. . . . Let us do all we can to build up life about dogma, and demand of dogma that service which it is the real joy of its heart to render to life. I will not hear men claim that the doctrine of the Trinity has no help or inspiration to give to the merchant or the statesman; . . . that it means nothing to the scholar or the bricklayer whether he believes or disbelieves in the Atonement. I must do all I can to make the world's ordinary operations know their sacredness and crave the sacred impulse which the dogmas have to give. I must summon all life to look up to the hills, . . . and so make it cry out to the truths of the Trinity and the Atonement to open the depths of their helpfulness, as they have never heard the call to open them when only theolo- gians were calling on them to complete their theologic systems. . . . Here in the assertion of the great human Church is the true adjustment of the relations of Doctrine and Life. Doctrine kept active by life. Life kept deep by doctrine. He goes on to affirm that this large human idea of the church is a vision which yet lacks fulfilment. The church and the world are now in conflict, and those who are in the 628 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 church must keep watchful guard, and dread and oppose the evil influence of the world. But it is unnatural. We must never lose sight of the vision, — the real church and the real world struggling each into perfection for itself and so both into unity and identity with each other. As the history of the church passes in review, there is encouragement: "Very interesting have been in history the pulsations, the brighten- ing and fading, the coming and going, of this great truth of the church and the world, really identical." He speaks of the Protestant Episcopal Church and of its relation to the church universal : — We value and love our Communion very deeply. To many of us she has been the nurse, almost the mother of our spiritual life. To all of us she is endeared by long companionship, and by famil- iar sympathy in the profoundest experiences through which our souls have passed. When we deliberately turn our backs for a moment upon all these rich and sweet associations and ask our- selves in colder and more deliberate consideration why it is that we believe In our Episcopal Church and rejoice to commend her to our fellow countrymen and fellow men, the answer which I find myself giving is that our Church seems to me to be truly trying to realize this relation to the whole world, this sacredness of all life, this ideal belonging of all men to the Church of Christ, which, as I have been saying, is the great truth of active Chris- tianity. I find the signs of such an effort in the very things for which some people fear or blame our Church. I find it in the importance which she gives to Baptism and in the breadth of her conception of that rite ; for Baptism is the strongest visible asser- tion of this truth. I find it in her simplicity of doctrine. I find it in the value which she sets on worship; her constant sum- mons to all men not merely to be preached to, but to pray; her firm belief in the ability and right of all men to ofEer prayer to God. I find it in her strong historic spirit, her sense of union with the ages which have passed out of sight, and of whose men we know only their absolute humanity. But he has a word of protest to make against those who, in the Episcopal Church, love to caU her in exclusive phrase "The American Church." That is a name to which she has no right, but rather it belongs to the total body of Christian- ity in America which, under many divisions and different ^T. 50] GENERAL CONVENTION 629 names, broken, discordant, disjointed, often quarrelsome, and disgracefully jealous, yet still bearing witness to the love of God, the redemption of Christ, and the sacred possi- bilities of man. The doctrine of Apostolical Succession he designates a fiction : — If our Church does especial work in our country, it must be by the especial and peculiar way in which she bears that witness; not by any fiction of an apostolic succession In her ministry which gives to them alone a right to bear such witness. There is no such peculiar privilege of commission belonging to her or to any other human body. He deprecates the exaggeration of the historic feeling in the Episcopal Church, which, while it makes part of the strength of the church, may also constitute its weakness. It may be tempted "to treasure overmuch its association with the great Church of another land, the Church of Eng- land," importing customs and costumes, names and ways, and so become "what she has been in part of her history, what she is in many parts of the land to-day, an exotic and not a true part of the nation's life." "The true apostolical succession, . . . she must not boast that she has, but she must struggle more and more earnestly to win." With thoughts like these already in his mind, indeed they had been in his mind from the beginning of his min- istry, Dr. Brooks went as a delegate from Massachusetts to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church which met in Chicago in October, 1886. This convention is remem- bered as having set forth what is known as the " Quadrilat- eral," — the terms on which the Episcopal Church would consent to approach the question of Church Unity. By some the terms she proposed were regarded as an invitation to organic union of the churches, and by others as a protest against schemes of church unity already broached. Dr. Brooks had been a member of the General Convention since 1880, but had not hitherto taken any important part in its discussions. At the session of 1886 he made himself heard upon various questions in debate. Thus he offered the fol- lowing resolution : — 630 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 Resolved, That the General Convention of the Protestant Epis- copal Church sends cordial greetings to the assembly of the Con- gregational Church now in session in this city, and expresses its devout hope that our deliberations, though separately conducted, may minister together to the glory of God and the advancement of our common Christianity. In support of this resolution he spoke, saying that the Congregationalists represented "a large body of workers in the cause of Christianity alongside of us, who sometimes seem to me unnecessarily separated from us." The motion commended itseK to the House of Deputies and was unani- mously passed, with this amendment: "And we assure them that we earnestly pray for such real unity as is according to God's will through Jesus Christ our Lord." On the question raised in the course of the debate on the revision of the Prayer Book, whether the " Venite" should be changed so as to correspond with the form in the English Prayer Book, Dr. Brooks opposed the change, deprecating the tendency to imitate the Church of England. Again, at a meeting of the General Convention sitting as the Board of Missions, there was considerable discussion on the subject of a proposed Enrolment Fund looking to the raising of a mil- lion dollars, to be devoted to missions only when the full amount should be raised. Dr. Brooks spoke earnestly in behalf of the scheme, urging that these features of the plan should be rigidly adhered to, — that the fund should not be used until the full amount had been subscribed, and that the money should be collected in small sums from the whole church. "Our church is too largely a church of the rich. There wiU be a temptation to seek the money in large con- tributions from rich men and rich women, in sums of f 1000 or f 10, 000. Our church should be interested in the one dol- lars, and the idea made prominent that the sum is to be raised by the people in a multitude of small subscriptions." The Convention of 1886 is also remembered for the effort made to change the name of the church by dropping from its title the words "Protestant Episcopal." Various names were proposed as substitutes, such as "The Catholic Church," JET. so] GENERAL CONVENTION 631 "The American Church," while others preferred that it should be known, after "Protestant Episcopal" had been elided, as "The Church in the United States of America." In his speech against the proposed change Mr. Brooks urged the fitness of the existing name "Protestant Episcopal" as discriminating the church from the Roman Catholic on the one hand, and from Protestant churches which had not re- tained episcopacy. It was easy to make the name sound ridiculous by a certain method of pronunciation, or by the prolongation of the syllables. But the name nevertheless answered its true purpose. It was not possible to abolish the present title without considering what title should be substi- tuted. Such names as "American" or "Catholic" implied an assumption which was not true, — that this church was one of such large prominence, so largely representative of the Christianity of America, that all other denominations are practically insignificant. That tendency in the church which sought to borrow traditions, vestments, and manner of wor- ship from the Church of England did not reflect the genius and spirit of America. Until the church identified itself more fully with the spirit of American institutions and ceased to support its claim by its relation to the Church of England, it was not entitled to be known as the American Church. But if this ground were untenable, upon what other ground could the church take its stand as the American Church? It must stand before the country with the distinctive assertion of Apostolical Succession as the very substance and essence and life of the Church. Now there are those who believe the apos- tolic succession to be the essence and substance of the Church. There is no doubt about that. The position which they take in regard to the Church is absolutely clear. That there are other men in our Church who believe nothing of the kind, there is no doubt. I, for one, and I think that I am speaking for multi- tudes in this congregation this morning, do not believe in the doctrine of apostolic succession in any such sense as many receive it. I do not believe in the exclusive prerogative which gives to the Church which receives it any such absolute right of Christian faith. That is not the question before us ; but there is no con- ceivable explanation of the desire to change the name of the 632 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 Church except the distinct adoption of that theory as the absolute condition on which it lives. We have been told, Sir, with great rhetorical flourish, that this Church, when it shall have taken its new name, is going to extend its area and take in all Christian- ity. I appeal to any reasoning man, whether, in any sense, this is to be considered an expansion of the power of the Church. It immediately dooms it. It dooms it to live in the corner and minister to men who are convinced of a certain theory with re- gard to the possession of the privileges of the Christian ministry. The passage of such a resolution as should fasten upon this Church the explicit title of the American Catholic Church dooms it to become distinctly the Church of those men who accept the theory which is based upon mere historical argument. Is that going to be the Church of America? Is that going to be the Church for praying people ? Is that the Church which is going to do a work worthy of the Church of Christ ? On October 31, the first Sunday after his return to Bos- ton, Dr. Brooks preached a sermon in which he gave to his congregation an account of the convention, and then de- nounced in pointed and vigorous language the attempt to change the name of the church. He was somewhat despond- ent in his tone, a thing so exceptional with him that this case forms almost the solitary instance in all the years of his ministry. The change of name had not been accomplished, and the vote dgainst it was decisive, but he had been im- pressed with the extent of the vote in its favor, and was haunted by the fear that in the next convention the change would be carried. This fear he did not disguise in his ser- mon. It was a critical moment for him, because he knew that if the name of the church were changed to the American Church, in accordance with a theory of apostolical succession, there was no longer a place for him in the Episcopal Church. He spoke out plainly what he felt and what he feared. The sermon which he now preached created a popular sensation throughout the breadth and length of the land, and in Eng- land also, where it was quickly carried. The sermon was extemporaneous, with no record of notes for its preparation, but from the full reports in the papers its drift may be gathered : — JET. 50] GENERAL CONVENTION 633 He began by tracing the growing belief in the theory of apos- tolical succession, since the time of the Oxford Movement in 1833, till at last those who held the theory proposed to make it the car- dinal feature of the Episcopal Church, and the warrant for chang- ing its name. The name proposed as a substitute, which seemed most acceptable to those desiring the change, was "The American Church. " Upon this name he commented to the effect, that there were only two grounds which would justify its adoption. On the first of these grounds, the Church claiming such a name should be the largest in the country, numerically so strong that all other Christian communities would appear as insignificant or unimpor- tant in comparison. But the change of name was not urged on this ground; it would be absurd, if it were, for the Episcopal Church stood seventh or eighth in the list, when tested among the churches by its number of communicants. It was evident there- fore that the change of name must be justified on another ground, — that the Episcopal Church, even though one of the smaller Christian bodies, had a distinct and absolute right, through a divine commission from Christ and the Apostles not possessed by other churches, and entitling her, therefore, to claim for herself, and to be known as, the only true apostolic, Catholic Church in America. If the Episcopal Church did indeed possess such an exclusive commission, then she would have the right to the name, "The Church in the United States" or the American Church. Upon this point he remarked that there was not a line in the Prayer Book which declares any such theory. It was simply a theory held by individuals, — a theory which many both of the clergy and laity did not believe. He avowed for himself that he rejected the theory and would not consent to it for a single day. If this movement in behalf of a change of name were not checked, and the change were accomplished, he did not see how he or any one, who did not believe in apostolical succession, could remain in the Episcopal Church. He was despondent as he considered that the proposition to change the name was defeated by what seemed a small majority ; but there was hope in the circumstance that the laity were more numerously opposed to it than the clergy; unless the feeling and intentions of the laity should be asserted more strongly in the next few years, he feared the change would be ac- complished, and the Episcopal Church be doomed in consequence to become a small fantastic sect. Having freed his mind on the subject Dr. Brooks refused to be drawn into controversy. He became the target for crit- icism, but, while many expositions were offered of the falsity 634 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 of his argument, he kept silence. He had not yet realized the importance of his utterances, or how, when he was speak- ing from the pulpit of Trinity Church, the whole people were listening to him. No one in the Episcopal Church com- manded the hearing that was accorded to him. It did not give him, in this case, any pleasure to know that the stric- tures he had made upon the attitude of a party in his own church were listened to by all the churches, as though he had been specially speaking to them. He was annoyed by the way in which the press had given publicity to his re- marks. "A man," he said, "may go on all his life preach- ing the gospel and no one takes any notice of it, but when he speaks of some matter of church administration, he is treated as if he had made some marvellous discovery." Yet there was justification for the popular interest aroused by this remarkable sermon. How it impressed the congrega- tion listening to him is evident from this testimony of one who was present : — It was the most thrilling, dramatic thing I ever heard. He was intensely stirred, and the stillness as people listened was painful. By and by the sound of sobs was heard in different parts of the church; the excitement was so great that tears must come to relieve the tension. Phillips Brooks was stirred to the depths of his being. All that he held most true was in the issue. Indignation min- gled with alarm, as in vehement speech he gave expression to his convictions. He had never been so moved in any single utterance since the days of the civil war. Under ordinary circumstances he would have taken a different method of com- bating what he regarded to be an error, admitting, indeed, that the Episcopal clergy were right in aspiring to claim an apostolical succession, but that the clergy of other denomina/- tions stood upon the same footing, equally entitled to the same ambition, nay, that every man and woman, imitating the life of the apostles, as the apostles imitated Christ, were truly constituted in actual, and even tangible, apostolic descent. Now he followed the opposite method, — the denunciation of what was untrue when it was made an exclusive claim. He ^T. 50] THE NAME OF THE CHURCH 635 believed the moment had come which called for the courage of a reformer, who must overthrow before he could rebuild. Under this conviction, roused to moral indignation, he became like the whirlwind in its devastating power. But in taking this attitude he felt that he was not alone ; that he was supported by eminent scholars in the Anglican Church : Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Bishop Lightfoot of Durham, Dr. Hatch in his studies of early Christian organization. Such, also, he knew was the attitude of the reformers in the English Church in the sixteenth century. In the American Episcopal Church there had been many bishops and clergy from the time of Bishop White, who held the same convic- tion, valuing episcopacy, regarding it as having apostolic sanction, yet as not essential to the existence of a Christian church. Of some of these the lives have been written and their opinions placed on record : Bishop Griswold of Massa- chusetts,^ Bishop Mcllvaine of Ohio,^ Bishop Meade of Vir- ginia.^ Among them was also his revered teacher in Virginia, Dr. Sparrow, with whose more outspoken words on the sub- ject he was in sympathy.* The attempt to change the name 1 Cf. Life of Bishop Griswold, by Est. John S. Stone, D. D., pp. 221, 343- 345, 361-364. ^ Cf. Life of Bishop Mcllvaine, by Cams, p. 273 ; also Hall, Works, vi. p. 56. 5 Memoir of Bt. Bev. Wm. Meade, D.D., by the Et. Rev. J. Johns, D.D., pp. 175, 176. * Cf. Life and Correspondence of William Sparrow, D. D., by Cornelina Walker, D. D. p. 155 : — " On the subject of the Apostolic Succession I am clearer than ever ; and I do not think that a man can logically and consistently hold to that as an essen- tial of a valid ministry, and maintain true Protestant principles. That was the nov ara on which the Tractarians planted their lever, in the first numbers of their series, and by which they have been enabled to move the Church, as with an earthquake. And so long as a man, or a church, holds to it, he is liable, or it is liable, to go off in a Romish tangent, further and further, till met by the secant of Romish infallibility." " The doctrine of Apostolical Succession as commonly taught is the back- bone of both systems [Roman and High Anglican]. Both alike resolve the being of a church into it. Those that have it, no matter how heretical (I had the statement alike from a Catholic and a Protestant Bishop), are a Church ; those who have it not, no matter how orthodox and pious and outwardly regu- lar, are no Church. Good Lord deliver me from such a caricature of the sim- ple and spiritual Gospel of Christ." Ibid. p. 195. 636 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 of the church was equivalent to the condemnation of these and many other honored names. Had it been accomplished, he himself would have been driven from the Episcopal Church. From this time Phillips Brooks never ceased to hear the renewing echoes of his utterance. The letters poured in upon him at once from every part of the country and from England, most of them thanking him for his sermon. There was a tone of excitement in them, or exhilarated gratitude. Many of these letters came from persons of distinction or of high social position, but also from hum- ble women and inquiring students, who thanked him for his words. It was the laity who were chiefly moved to thank- fulness. It is not without its pathos and its deeper mean- ing that many who wrote him belonged to other denomina- tions. It was clear that it had not been without pain that they had seemed to see the Episcopal Church withdrawing from the fellowship of the other Protestant churches, and erecting an impassable barrier between them. They were loyal to their own communion, but they also loved the Epis- copal Church, and would fain have had the privilege of its ministrations whenever convenience allowed. Phillips Brooks had spoken to them with authority and in the interest of Christian unity and fellowship. His name now became dearer than ever to those who professed and called them- selves Christians, to whatever denomination they belonged, and to those unchurched masses who looked up to him as their teacher and spokesman. And there also came letters of another kind, some of them anonymous, asking him to confine his attention to preaching the gospel and let the church alone. He was only renewing old controversies which would otherwise have died out, and he was embittering party spirit. Others called his attention to parts of the Prayer Book, which in his supposed ignorance he had overlooked. This was not all. An aged clergyman, who, with his wife, had been devoted to him, finding comfort and inspiration from his sermons, wrote to him in great dis- tress because of a report which was in circulation, and had ^T. 50] THE NAME OF THE CHURCH 637 found its way into the newspapers, to the effect that he had become an "apostate," had "denied the truth of the Trin- ity, of the Incarnation, and of apostolic succession, and was about to leave the church for Unitarianism." Others still thought it was not, perhaps, too late to labor with him, and to give him some light on the origin of the Christian minis- try. The disturbance which this subject brought to Mr. Brooks did not at once subside. In proportion to his depth and intensity of his feeling was the inward revolt through which he was passing. It required time before he could again regard the future of the Episcopal Church with complacency and hope. Meantime it was fortunate that immediately after his return from the convention, it fell to him to take up his work at Harvard, where association with the young life brought its healing balm to a spirit that had been wounded. The following extracts are from his letters writ- ten while in Chicago : — Chicago, Illinois, October 19, 1886. My dear , Did you ever get a letter from the General Convention? It is getting pretty dull. The long debate upon Appellate Courts has just got decided, and they are talking about some useless Canons, in a very helpless way. So I have come out into the lobby here to write and tell you all about it. There is a long table at which a lot of black-coated clergymen are writing. Some, I suppose, are writing to their wives, and some to their senior wardens. . . . The people of Chicago are very hos- pitable, and I have had a first-rate time. Last week I went out to dinner every day, and it was great fun. They have very big houses and are very rich. The men are better than the women, whom I do not like. The city is enormous, and when they take you out for a drive there is no knowing when you will get back. But the convention is not good. The great debate of last week was upon changing the Church's name, and the change they wanted to make would have left no chance for sensible work in the Church, nor even, as it seems to me, for sensible men to con- tinue in her ministry. Fortunately it was defeated, but by so small a majority that it is evidently pretty sure to come some day. But I must go back to my seat. Good-by, my love to Gert, and I shall be at home week after next. 638 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 Chicago, October 27, 1886. Dear Coopek, — You were a very good man to write me a letter which broke the monotony of the convention, and cheered my soul up very much indeed. W has not come up yet from breakfast, and I will answer your note before he gets here and wants to smoke. The convention has been really very bad indeed. No spark of generous or noble spirit has appeared in its debates. The crowding forward of the hard formal Ecclesi- astical spirit has been evident everywhere. The friends of the new name are rejoiced, as they have reason to be, and confidently expect to carry their purpose (as they will) at the next conven- tion, and I am glad that we are going home to-morrow. I wish that I could stop on the way and see the big statue inaugurated in New York. That would be well worth while, and vastly more interesting than the convention. But I shall get home in time for the great festival we are going to have over the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Harvard. That is going to be the big Boston sensation of the autumn. To Mr. Brooks, in his despondency, there came letters of reassurance, telling him that his fears were groundless. Thus an eminent lawyer wrote to him : — Boston, November 1, 1886. Notwithstanding your apprehensions, I assure you that, under no possible circumstances, will the laity of our Church, who mingle so much more with the members of other churches than do the clergy, ever consent to adopt any such name as " The Church in the United States," or the Holy Catholic Church, or anything like it. No — never! One reason they were not more generally heard from in the late convention, I doubt not, was the belief that no such absurd proposition ever could pass. In looking over my list of those who voted "Nay" on this subject, I note the absence of many from the East who would undoubtedly have voted against it, while the Western dioceses were more fully represented. Mark my words, they will never come so near passing it again ! A prominent layman of Boston wrote to him : — Boston, November 2, 1886. Deab De. Brooks, — I have read with great interest the report of your sermon on last Sunday morning, and I want to say that I agree to every word of it; and further wish to thank you for so clear and positive an utterance. It is high time that a warning voice be raised ; at the same time, I believe that the MT. 50] HARVARD ANNIVERSARY 639 laity of the country are overwhelmingly of your way of thinking, and they will never consent to a change of name for the church, nor approve the extremes which the men who live in closets advocate. In my opinion there will always he a Protestant Episcopal Church regardless of any action that may he taken by any future convention. And should these matters in dispute be pressed to a division of the Church, the advocates of a new name will be the outsiders. Sincerely yours, ^— . This letter was written by the president of a New Eng- land college : — I cannot refrain, after reading the report in yesterday's "Trib- une " of your sermon on Sunday last, from expressing to you my gratitude at your frank repudiation of a doctrine which has been a great hindrance to the advance of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and, as I believe, to the progress of the kingdom of God in America. Thousands who have read your words hitherto with the deepest interest will henceforth feel towards you a loving loyalty that knows no limit. Not that before I have really believed that you held such a doctrine as that there are no other ministers of Christ but those in the supposed direct apostolic descent, but the frank rejection of this belief, and the loving brotherhood expressed by you for others, will certainly give the deepest joy to a great many. The Harvard festival, commemorating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, began on the 5th of November, the festivities lasting for four days. Friday, the first of these days, was the Day of the Law School; Saturday was Under- graduates' Day; Sunday was Foundation Day, and Monday the Day of the Alumni, when the honorary degrees were con- ferred. Congratulations came from Cambridge University in England, and from the Universities of Edinburgh and Heidelberg. Foreign visitors were present as delegates of these universities: Professor Mandell Creighton (now Lord Bishop of London) with a message from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, " of which John Harvard was a member; Dr. Charles Taylor, Master of St. John's College, Cambridge; and Et. Hon. Sir Lyon Playfair, of the University of Edin- burgh. The President of the United States, Grover Cleve- 640 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 land, honored the occasion with his presence on Alumni Day, and the festivities culminated, when James Eussell Lowell was the orator, and Oliver Wendell Holmes read the poem. A large number of the alumni were there, for Harvard counted among the living graduates of the College alone 4600 names. Everything was done which could give pres- tige to the celebration. One day, Sunday, the 7th of November, was consecrated to religion, when alumni of the College who were in the min- istry had been requested to recall in their respective places the history of Harvard. The sermon in the morning of that day was preached by Professor Francis G. Peabody, at Apple- ton Chapel, and in the evening came the sermon by Phillips Brooks. His subject had been assigned him, the religious history of Harvard. He took for his text the words of St. Paul, "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for- ever." The changes through which the College had passed he refused to look upon in a negative way as a mere casting off of restraints, but rather as so many successive enlarge- ments, wherein the partial was gradually reconciling itself to the universal, the temporary fulfilling itself with the eternal. He could speak but briefly of these religious vicissitudes, in a history which covered two hundred and fifty years. But his brief summary reviewed the ground where momentous controversies had been waged : — There was a discipline of the Christian church larger than the discipline of the Puritans, in which the discipline of the Puri- tans had floated as the part floats in the whole. The discipline of the Puritans felt that; was pressed on, was tempted by it, and at last broke open in the attempt to find it. Experience was larger than Whitfield, dogma was larger than Calvin, life was larger than theology; and so, one after another, in these which are the concentric spheres within which human nature lives, the successive openings of the partial into the universal, and the temporary into the eternal came. . . . What is this universal and eternal power within which these and all the temporary struggles of mankind are included? We open the Sacred Book, we turn to the majestic letter written centuries ago to members of the great sacred nation, and there we find our answer, "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever." JET. 50] HARVARD ANNIVERSARY 641 He was thus led to ask the question, What and who is Jesus Christ ? At this point in his sermon, the inextinguish- able theological curiosity was alert to know the answer he would make. The mere curiosity would have been satisfied had he announced his adherence to the Athanasian formula, as given in the Nicene Creed, carefully discriminating it from Arian or Socinian teaching. This formula he held with mind and heart, but it was not the time or place for theo- logical discussion. He could have satisfied curiosity, but he would have alienated the larger part of his audience and killed the effect of his utterance. He did not stand there merely for the purpose of putting himself on record, or of "bearing witness" as he has called it in his "Lectures on Preaching," which has the tendency to weaken the message. He therefore gave the conditions, the atmosphere, out of which the formula had originally grown, and left the infer- ence to his hearers : — And what and who is Jesus Christ ? In reverence and humility let us give our answer. He is the meeting of the Divine and Human, — the presence of God in humanity, the perfection of humanity in God; the divine made human, the human shown to he capable of union with the divine ; the utterance, therefore, of the nearness and the love of God, and of the possibility of man. Once in the ages came the wondrous life, once in the stretch of history the face of Jesus shone in Palestine, and His feet left their blessed impress upon earth ; but what that life made mani- fest had been forever true. Its truth was timeless, the truth of all eternity. The love of God, the possibility of man, — these two which made the Christhood, — these two, not two but one, had been the element in which all life was lived, all knowledge known, all growth attained. Oh, how little men have made it, and how great it is ! Around all life which ever has been lived there has been poured forever the life of the loving deity and the ideal humanity. All partial excellence, all learning, all brother- hood, all hope, has been bosomed on this changeless, this unchan- ging Being which has stretched from the forgotten beginning to the unguessed end. It is because God has been always, and been always good, and because man has been always the son of God, capable in the very substance of his nature of likeness to and union with his Father, — it is because of this that nobleness has never died, that truth has been sought and found, that struggle VOL. u 642 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1886 and hope haye always sprung anew, and that the life of man has always reached to larger and to larger things. This is the Christian truth of Christ. "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men." This is the truth of man's re- demption. As any man or any institution feels and claims around its life, as the element in which it is to live, the sympa- thy of God and the perfectibility of man, that man or institution is redeemed; its fetters and restraints give way, and it goes forward to whatever growth and glory it is in the line of its being to attain. On December 15 Mr. Brooks took part in the commemo- ration of the two hundredth anniversary of King's Chapel, making an address which was felicitous under difficult cir- cumstances. As the rector of Trinity Church, a daughter of King's Chapel, it was appropriate that he should be pre- sent; but recalling the theological divergence in consequence of which King's Chapel had been lost to the Episcopal Church, the occasion called for wisdom and moderation. Under these conditions he spoke, dwelling on the civic in- terests which united the two parishes, on their common rela- tion to American history, on the deeper issues which under- lay theological discussion and religious differences. "The present condition of the religious world was not a finality. There was to be a future for the Christian church, bringing richer results than the past had attained. There were pro- blems which had not yet been solved. To prepare for that future, it was not needful to revive old disputes, but, while recognizing their earnestness, to strive for a deeper consecra- tion to Christ in personal obedience." It seems to me that any one who looks back on the past and recognizes in history the great providence of God in His dealings with men — so much deeper than men have begun to compre- hend — simply wants to say to any church, speaking for his own as he speaks for others : Let us go and seek that Christ, that in- finite Christ, whom we have not begun to know as we may know Him; that Christ who has so much more to show us than He has shown ; that Christ who can show Himself to us only as we give ourselves in absolute obedience to Him. May that Christ receive from us, in each new period of our history, more complete consecration, more entire acceptance of Him as our Master; and ^T. 50] THE CHRISTMAS SERMON 643 so may we receive from Him rich promises of new light, new manifestations of His truth, new gifts of His Spirit, which He has promised to bestow upon those who consecrate themselves to Him in loving obedience, unto the end of time and through all eternity! If one may turn a greeting to a prayer, may I not ask for you, as I know you ask for all of our churches, a more profound and absolute spirit of consecration to our Master, Christ, that in Him, and only in Him, we may seek after and come to His ever richer life ? Among the books lie was reading was the Life of Long- fellow. "How charming it is! What a bright, happy, friendly existence he had!" The approaching Christmas brought to him, as usual, an inward peace and delight. He commemorated it this year by going to a Sunday-school cele- bration of poor children, where a stereopticon exhibition was to be given to which he had been invited to comment on the different pictures. But on the Sunday before Christmas he could not refrain from reverting to the topic which had pained him. He preached a sermon on the apostolic com- mission, from the text St. Matthew xxviii. 20 : " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," and brought out in more positive form the truth whose denial seemed to him to be fraught with grave danger. The sermon was heard from by an anonymous letter, reproaching him for higgling about a name and talking of a danger which no one saw but himself. CHAPTER XIX 1887 INCIDENTS IN PARISH LIFE. INVITATION TO DELIVEE THE BAMPTON LECTUEES. EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOKS. SERMON AT FANEUIL HALL. ST. ANDREW'S MISSION CHURCH. TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CONSECRATION OF TRINITY CHURCH. SERMON AT ANDOVER. SUMMER IN EUROPE. ILLNESS. CORRESPONDENCE The events described in the last chapter are important, but the most important features in the life of PhiUips Brooks baffle description. It defies the imagination when we attempt to reproduce the scene at Trinity Church on successive Sundays in each revolving year, when every Sun- day seemed like the bridal of earth and sky. Of any one of these years the same story may be told. There was no diminution in the power of the preacher, but rather an in- crease in the mystic potency of his appeal. There was no decline in the people's interest. What a newspaper writer says of the Sundays in 1887 was true of the preceding and of the following years: "Every Sunday crowds are to be seen packing the vestibules and the corridors of Trinity in vain efforts to enter." Whatever might be the subject of the sermon, it was impossible for the preacher to be dull or uninteresting; it was impossible to be present and not to listen. No theatre could compete for interest or fascination with Trinity Church, where religion was invested with per- petual freshness, as if therein lay the charm of living. One Sunday a stranger was observed, who, after the service was over, seemed to be confused, looking about in a distracted way. He was asked if he had lost anything. He replied : " I feel as if the gods had come down again to the earth. I have come aU the way from Canada just to hear him preach, JET. 51] HENRY WARD BEECHER 645 and I would come again." A person who went to Trinity for the purpose of studying the congregation as well as the preacher, looked about him for a moment to find every face upturned to the pulpit, and was unable to cast more than this furtive glance for fear he would lose what the preacher was saying. We must not attempt to describe these occa^ sions, or even to enumerate the sermons still remembered by those who heard them. But the mind seeks points on which to rest in a bewildering environment of wealth, as in a pic- ture gallery where nothing is seen if the attempt is made to look at everything. In the midst of this distraction let a few incidents be taken as types of the rest. It was a custom of Mr. Brooks through many years to speak in his sermons of eminent persons who had died, whether in church or state. One of his favorite hymns was, "Who are these in bright array?" When he an- nounced it, the people knew that he had lost some friend, or was about to commemorate the departure of some one known for distinguished services. On the Sunday after Henry Ward Beecher died, he took for his text, "He that over- cometh shall inherit all things." "It seems very strange," said some one who was present, "that no daily paper of the following Monday contained any report of that sermon." This was in substance what was said of Mr. Beecher at the close of the sermon, as it is recalled by an interested lis- tener : — I know that you are all thinking as I speak of the great soul that has passed away, of the great preacher, for he was the greatest preacher in America, and the greatest preacher means the greatest power in the land. To make a great preacher, two things are necessary, the love of truth and the love of souls; and surely no man had greater love of truth or love of souls than Henry Ward Beecher. Great services, too, did he render to the- ology, which is making great progress now. It is not that we are discovering new truths, but that what lay dead and dry in men's souls has awakened. The Spirit of the Lord has been poured into humanity, and no one more than Mr. Beecher has helped to this, pouring his great insight and sympathy and courage out upon the truths which God gave him to deliver. A great leader in 646 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 the theological world, believing in the Divine Christ and in eter- nal hope for mankind, foremost in every great work and in all progress, one of that noble band of men whose hands clutched the throat of slavery, and never relaxed their hold till the last shackle fell ofE; inspiring men to war, speaking words of love and reconciliation when peace had come, standing by the poor and oppressed, bringing a slave girl into his pulpit and making his people pay her ransom. A true American like Webster, a great preacher, a great leader, a great patriot, a great man. We feel sure that Mr. Beecher knew these Revelation pro- mises. Wonderful was the vitality given him. Surely he had inner communion with God. Truly was he a pillar of the tem- ple. Rejoice in the dead who die in the Lord. They have overcome and shall inherit all things. Part of the impressiveness of the moment lay in the feel- ing which all shared, that it was the greatest of living preachers who was paying this tribute, and in so doing was unconsciously describing himself. Phillips Brooks had often listened to Mr. Beecher in the pulpit or on the platform of the lecturer, but the two men had never met. An extract from a letter to Dr. Brooks is here given, which describes a scene worth remembering, — a picture of Henry Ward Beecher visiting Trinity Church : — New Tobk, March 27, 1887. I regret very much that you did not know him [Beecher] per- sonally. He was an admirer of yours. He was very fond of the Episcopal Church. His mother was of that denomination. One forenoon he and I visited your Church. No one but the janitor was there. We spent three hours there. His admiration of the architecture and of the decorations was great. He went so far as to carry out the unfinished decorations, and made many suggestions as to what he would put in such and such panels and niches and arches. He said there that he wished to know you. It was there he told me about his mother, and took from his pocket a lock of her hair and showed me. As he related the history of her saintly life he wept. He never knew his mother; but few men ever loved more deeply a mother's memory. There was one sermon most characteristic, which for some reason was made the occasion of criticism in the daily papers. The text was from the words of the children of Israel to Moses: "Speak thou to us; let not God speak to MT. 51] RELIGIOUS TEACHING 647 us, lest we die." One of those who heard the sermon, and commented on it, thought that "he did not sufficiently ap- peal to the understanding, but stirred the emotions beyond all precedent." Another critic of the same sermon thought that he magnified the understanding at the expense of the emotions. Another remarked that he did not make a prac- tical application; that after a sermon of thirty minutes, in which he had said as much as most preachers would require forty-five minutes to utter, he closed too abruptly, before he had a chance for the familiar exhortation. Some of his hearers said that he underrated the power of sin and worldliness in individual lives, but the general impression was to the effect that sin and worldliness were never so forcibly exposed and tracked to their inmost lairs. This is a report of the sermon by a listener who was asked for his opinion : — There was a profomid spiritual morality in the sermon. God was so presented that you felt as if to live unto God and to allow Him to live in you was the first and only thing to be thought of. There were times when the preacher presented this truth so strongly that you felt as if God had come to live in each separate soul in the congregation. You felt intensely the smallness of the lives of those who fear to have God speak with them lest the enjoyment of life should cease. Mr. Brooks was reappointed a preacher to Harvard Uni- versity for the year 1887-88, as indeed he continued to be reappointed until 1891. The degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon him by Columbia University at its one hundredth anniversary. He declined a request from the editor of the "Contemporary Review," asking him to de- scribe the working of religion in America, about which the English mind was not clear. Any one who knew Phillips Brooks will be amused at an invitation he received to meet the late Mr. Ingersoll in joint debate on some question touch- ing the essentials of the Christian religion. To enumerate the many invitations to occasions outside of his ministerial life is needless, but among them may be mentioned a speech which he made in 1887 before the insurance societies, where he turned over the principle of "safety" in its relations to a 648 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 man's work in the world in such a way as to make an inval- uable advertisement if it could have been utilized for that purpose. He went to a meeting of Methodist ministers, where the subject of Christian Unity was to be discussed. His address deepened the conviction that Christian unity already existed. During Lent he took for his subject with his Bible class the Apostles' Creed. The course was one of great interest, and was largely attended. He treated his theme in the manner of a conventional systematic theologian, making formal definitions, stating objections and meeting them, dealing with modern theories. It was unlike his method in the pulpit and it may not have been wholly con- genial to him, but no one could surpass him in this line when he chose to undertake it. The very full analysis made for each lecture is so admirable that one regrets he did not put his work in permanent form. In April he received an invitation from Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford, to deliver the Bampton Lectures, with the assurance that if he would comply with the terms of candidacy by sending in a schedule of the lectures he pro- posed to give, there was no doubt of his appointment. He seems to have considered the request for some time before he dismissed it, as is shown by his note-book, where he went so far as to write out an analysis for five of the lectures. There is a certain pathos and an illumination of his whole career in the subject which he was proposing to himself. He enti- tled the projected lectures, the "Teaching of Religion," or "On the Philosophy of Religious Teaching." But he did not complete the schedule, and finally wrote declining to be- come a candidate. Years later he worked up some of the points in his mind in an address before the Twenty Club (1892).! The following extracts are from his note-book, written while he was contemplating the possibility of accepting Dr. Jowett's invitation : — The true symmetry of the Intellectual and Spiritual in the 1 Cf. ante, p. 537. ^T.5i] RELIGIOUS TEACHING 649 religious teacher. The Seminary is the place to produce it. One-sidedness of College and other-sidedness of much popular religious life; the minister to restore the balance and to learn how in the Seminary. The relation of religious teaching to the hard, knowing man. One suggestion about style. Never allow the desire to es- cape awkwardness or secure grace to interfere a moment with the purpose of it all, the making of the people understand and feel. Like an ivy that has been for years growing on a wall, that is breaking the wall down, but that has grown so completely a part of the wall that it cannot be taken down without destroying the wall another way, — of excrescent doctrines which have fastened themselves on to religion. The present tendency to reduce doctrinal demands. Shall we insist on full requirements for the sake of consistency, or reduce faith to its barest terms for the sake of peace and conciliation? Either implies a power over truth which we do not possess. No, the duty of such times as these is to go deeper into the spiritual- ity of our truths. Instance the Everlasting Punishment Discus- sion not to cut off the hard corners, but to make them soft with life. The tendency of good people to object more to a dissenter than to an infidel; to hate another shade of truth more than error. (See Lord Falkland's Speech in Rushworth, vol. iii.) The parental character of all teaching. The parents' teaching is the type of it. The sense of sadness in life as one grows older, not wholly a sign of the badness and unsatisfactoriness of the world; partly a mere regret at leaving what is pleasant even for something pleasanter. Landing from a steamer. Partly the sense of vast- ness, which is always sad. Do not make Heaven attractive merely by deposing Earth. A cheap expedient. Make earth its richest and best, and then be able to make heaven still higher. The need of teaching sure religion ; something definite. The fallacy of hoping to teach religion in general, to inspire mere devotional feeling. Danger of disparaging the teaching of Theology in favor of the teaching of religion, so called. It concentrates men's thoughts on man, and what he is, not on what God is. (Cf. Mysticism.) The old question about being damned for God's glory, debated by Catholics as well as Puritans. (Cf . F^nelon, vol. vi. pp. 249, 250, etc.) 650 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 Study the way in which deliberate beliefs of the cultivated pass into the opinions of the people, and, on the other hand, how the common opinions are made systematic and finished with reasons by the learned. The different temperaments, intellectual, mystic, and practi- cal; the different ways in which each receive truth. The real Church comprehends all. Dangers of asserting either solely as the office of the Church. The need often of approaching the practical side. First soft- ening the ground with duty. Both ways are possible. Only always the connection must be natural. The place of Ecclesiasticism in the Truth. Teaching the way in which Partisanship comes in. The words of Sir T. Browne about "Founding a Heresy." The impulse to claim one's own pet ideas as ours, not God's. Paul's "my gospel." The death, then, of proportion in your teaching. Oh, how frequent this is in ministers ! The teaching of Truth, of Truths, of The Truth. The moral preparation for every spiritual truth. The vague talk about the good in other religions as if it de- tracted from the value of Christ's teaching. The insincerity of method which may go with the most com- plete sincerity of idea and plan : " I believe this thoroughly, and would not preach it a moment if I didn't, but I will let myself tell it in false ways for these people's sake, — ways that I don't believe in." " The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the mar- tyrs." God keeping some hemispheres of opinion, as He kept His half- world of America vacant till the old should overflow, — vacant till it should be needed by human growth. It is the clear and constant feeling and presentation of the personality of the gospel that prevents its becoming monotonous. A person is endlessly interesting. You can tell men of him for- ever, men who care for him. But a truth once stated is not to be forever repeated. The two things this leads to in different believers and preachers, — in one dulness ; in another, as an escape from that, fantasticalness. Teaching by Parables. That and the God-revelation, the points of contact between spiritual and natural worlds. The faculty of peroeiving what is needed ; the way in which it belongs to some men and not to others. The presence of it makes the good preacher, the lack of it shown in men who argue endlessly for nothing. This is the fault of many preachers. Hammering on the iron for the fun of the blows. ^T. 51] RELIGIOUS TEACHING 651 Use of mistakable and undefined words, as "coming to Jesus," "being in Christ," or "out of Christ." Overstatement of experience. Kelation of general teaching of religion to advocacy of some special hobby, correcting of some special evil, etc. Danger of relapsing into this, yet necessity of something of the kind. The relation between the whole and the part, between religion and our doctrine, between God's kingdom and our sect. The need of a special place, but of a wide belonging. The part treated as a part is all right, as a whole it is all wrong. A thought provoked is worth ten thoughts imparted. The impossibility of teaching religion in one sense. Keligion as a life, a character, is to be evolved. The broader use of the word that is regained. « The teaching of religion by art. Its history, its imperfections and essential limitations. Its need to-day. Jesus taught — by personal presentation, awaking conscience, reaching truth on moral side, and establishing church (John vi.). Paul taught by starting from old knowledge. Address at Athens. How many loaves ? John Baptist taught by convicting of sin and arousing hope. They all went to work to break up dead satisfac- tion, and create lively desire. The way in which people listen. We say they listen stupidly, but really what they want is Eeligion. The sifting power of a congregation. It takes what it comes for: if poetry, or science, then that ; if religion, then that, throwing all else aside. The way in which means are always healthy only with relation to ends. Don't preach that people ought to go to church; if you do, when they have gone to church they '11 think that they have done everything. But make religion so great and attractive that they '11 want to go to its headquarters. We have seen that Mr. Brooks had been interested by the effort to import into the Episcopal Church the methods known as evangelistic, giving his sanction to " holding mis- sions." When, therefore, the invitation came to him from the young men of the Trinity Club, an organization connected with his parish, to preach on Sunday evenings at Faneuil Hall to the unchurched classes, he welcomed the invitation and prepared himself, but with inward perturbation for the result. There was the possibility of failure, and it might be the verdict that he could preach a comfortable gospel to those 652 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 in easy circumstances, who knew nothing of the darker, sadder side of life, but could not reach the masses of men. The experiment was hazardous, for he was putting his theology, his religion, his life, to the final test. Before and after his sermons he walked the streets of old Boston, where he had grown up, for inspiration and encouragement, and then for relief, — High Street, where he was born, and Eowe Street (Chauncy Street), where he had grown from youth to man- hood. The first of these Sunday evening services at Faneuil Hall was held on January 23. It had been the task of the Trin- ity Club, of which Mr. Lorin F. Deland was the president, to do aU in their power to make the experiment successful. And it required no slight effort to prepare the way, to get access to the people at the North End in Boston, and make it known that Phillips Brooks was to preach. They were care- ful to have it understood that it was the Trinity Club which initiated the movement and secured the preacher; that the object in view was not a religious revival, but simply to in- crease the range of Mr. Brooks's influence, and to give those an opportunity to hear him, who were unable for whatever reason to listen to him at Trinity Church. The services were announced some time in advance, tickets were distributed in order that those for whom the services were intended should not be crowded out, as there was danger might be the case. The presence of a brass band was announced as an attraction, as well as the circumstance that there would be "no collec- tion ; " and a large voluntary choir was secured, including the Harvard Glee Club. So the announcement was altogether a sensation ; the experiment was anticipated with unusual interest as an event in the ecclesiastical life of Boston. We may linger a moment on the picture of these services where Faneuil Hall is associated with the memory of Phillips Brooks : — The sound of sacred chant [said the Boston Journal] echoed last night through the streets around Faneuil Hall, which the hush of marketing had left in lonely stillness, and a scene en- grossed the auditorium which was unique even in a place that has ^T. 51] FANEUIL HALL SERMON 653 furnished the setting for so many and varied pictures. On the historic platform, surrounded hy a hundred singers and musicians, and confronted hy a strangely commingled gathering, stood for once a man who was not dwarfed hy the colossal impression of Webster in the painting overhead, the notable rector of Trinity Church, Dr. Phillips Brooks. Beyond a comparatively limited element, the congregation was largely made up of persons who claim no church and are claimed by none, — men and women on whom the heavy hands of spiritual and temporal asperities have been laid. It was the meeting of the Back Bay and the North End. . . . Religious services with such surroundings and with helmeted policemen in conspicuous force, as if the menace of civil authority was necessary to supplement the persuasiveness of the moral, presented a curious study; but it must he said that the secular guardians were not needed, as no more attentive or appreciative congregation could have been gathered in any church in Boston. Here were pale-faced men, with unkempt locks and manifest indications of failure in life's high purposes ; here indi- viduals whose aspect bespoke frequent relapsing; young men and women who form the floating, unchurched, and aimless elements of a large city; . . . the rector of Trinity conducting a service which had no trace of rubric or ritual, and preaching in an every- day garb, with no aid from alb or stole or ecclesiastical insignia whatever. His was manifestly a personality that needed none, and as he came forward upon the platform with no manuscript, book, or pulpit to come between him and his hearers, and spoke with all the fervor and impetuous utterance which seems to be a part of his nature, there was something in his commanding pre- sence that bespoke his hold upon their deferential attention. The only question by those who came to study the working out of the undertaking was as to whether he would touch their feelings by heartfelt expressions as fully as he would gain their admiration by his eloquence. But as he proceeded, all doubt on this ground was dispelled, and the upturned and sympathetic faces before him indicated that his searching appeal to the kindly and hopeful ele- ments in their nature, together with his picturing of God's fatherly pity for the lowliest and most downcast of His chil- dren, had wrought an effect that was worthy the effort and the theme. The text of the sermon was a verse from the Psalms: "Like as a father pitieth his own children, so the Lord piti- eth them that fear him." The sermon meant so much to Phillips Brooks that a few extracts from it are given, 654 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 although they must fall short of revealing the power infused with tenderness and love which went into his appeal : ^ — When fatherhood is spoken of, it means this love which takes the child simply because it is the child ; not because of what the child has done, or what the child is in its character, but simply because it has been cradled in these arms in its infancy, and all the hopes and affections of the parent have gathered around that little life. Underneath all the approbation or disapprobation of God, under- neath His approval or disapproval of what we do, there is the great, patient, indestructible love of God for us because we are His children, the wickedest of us as well as the best of us, those who are living the most upright life as well as those who are living the most profligate life, — they are all God's children. If you are ever going to understand or to get any conception of that great enfolding life which lies all around us, to rest on it and to trust in it and test its consolations, its encouragements, and its supports, the first picture of it must be in your own house. I almost hesitate when I talk to a multitude of people such as this, and ask them to consider their relations with regard to God from the way in which their own families are living. I hesitate and draw back and say, "Do these people want me to talk to them in this way, to ask them to understand that God is to them just exactly what they are to their own children ? " I should have to look round and think that I saw better men and women than I know that I do see here to-night. Where is the father who is willing to let his child draw his idea of God from the way in which his fatherly life is related to his child's life? I am struck, and I am sure you have been, by the way in which people think the basest moments of their lives the real and true moments, and are not willing to think of the grandest moments in their lives as the true ones. The noblest thing you ever did, the noblest emotion you ever felt, the deepest and tenderest and most self-sacrificing love ever in your soul, that is your true self still, through all the baser life into which you have fallen. Men are continually preached to that they are a great deal wickeder than they think they are, that they must not value themselves so much, that they must not put so high a worth on their humanity. We want, along with that, another kind of preaching. Men are nobler than they think themselves to be. There is in every man something greater than he has begun to 1 Cf. The Spiritual Man, and other Sermons, London, 1895, for a report of the sermon. ^T. 51] FANEUIL HALL SERMON 655 dream of. When he gives himself to Jesus Christ in consecra- tion, then that begins to come forth. Break through the cross of your despair and ask Christ to let you see yourself as He sees you, all stained with sin but with the Divine image in you all the time. The comments of those present indicate that they had been surprised at the fine congregation of non-churchgoers that had assembled to hear Phillips Brooks. One young man, not in the habit of going to church, said : " These people, and I live among them, have not been approached in the right way, and been made to know the true meaning of religion and its place in their lives and homes. A preacher like Mr. Brooks will inaugurate a new era in their lives." An elderly man, who confessed that he did but "little in wearing out the carpets in church aisles," had gone for the purpose of seeing how Mr. Brooks would take hold of workingmen and their fami- lies. This was his verdict : — He is in no sense a revivalist. He will not excite the emo- tions of people, but gives them a great many sound things to think about. He gives practical religion. That is what every- day men and women want. That was a very beautiful thought of his that men are apt to think that they are worse than they are, and that they should see that the true gauge of their char- acter is the best that is in them. This is what shows a man his own possibilities ; and the way in which Dr. Brooks spoke of the pity of God for those who had fallen short of the glorious possi- bilities of their natures was a helpful lesson ; it kindled ambition, inspired hope, and warmed the heart with the love of God for His children. This is what people ought to hear, and this is what he is telling them. Mr. Brooks was inwardly moved when a man approached him after the service, thanked him for coming, and asked if he could recommend anything for his wife's rheumatism. It was the human side of religion, as the people in the days when Christ was on the earth, after hearing the gospel, brought their sick to Him to be healed. He promised the man to attend to his request. On the 30th of January and on the 6th of February Phil- lips Brooks met the same great audience, with no diminution 656 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 in attendance or interest. He preached great sermons also ; ■one from the text, "He shall drink of the brook in the way; therefore shall he lift up the head" (Ps. ex. 7), where he dwelt on the sense of responsibility and the power of the for- giveness of sins; and another sermon from the text, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean " (Matt. viii. 2), when the familiar words of Evangelical hymns were sung with which both sermons were in deep accord, "Come, ye sinners, poor and needy," and " Just as I am, without one plea." There were other efforts at this time to reach the people, as at the Globe Theatre. To these services Phillips Brooks went with the same message that he had given in Faneuil Hall, and always met the same large concourse of the un- churched classes, anxious and eager to hear him. It seemed as if a strong religious wave were passing over Boston. During the weeks that cover the sermons at Faneuil Hall, Trinity Church and its rector were absorbed in efforts for the extension of the parish life. There had been a mission chapel of Trinity from an early period in Mr. Brooks's min- istry in Boston, situated on Charles Street, called the Chapel of the Evangelists. Municipal improvements in 1886 had required the removal of the building elsewhere, and for a year the Mission had occupied rented rooms on Chambers Street. The Rev. Eeuben Kidner, the assistant minister of Trinity Church, was demonstrating by his successful work the need of a permanent home, adapted to the growing neces- sities and opportunities before him. On Sunday morning, January 9, 1887, in Trinity Church, Mr. Brooks made an appeal for $50,000, to meet the cost of this project. For five successive Sundays he spoke of this subject from the pulpit, mentioning each time the amount to which the subscription had risen. The people entered with enthusiasm into the project, the interest of the whole parish was engaged, and contributions came in in sums varying from one dollar to five thousand. Friendly notes accompanied the gifts, all of which Mr. Brooks answered with his own pen, remarking that it was "rather difficult to find a new form of words for each note." February the 9th that year fell on a Wednesday, and a spe- cial service to commemorate the consecration of Trinity Church ^T. 51] TENTH ANNIVERSARY 657 had been appointed for the evening of that day. The church was crowded. The rector reached the robing-room some time before the service, to learn if the full amount desired had been received. Several hundred dollars were still needed, and some prominent members of the parish came in and expressed their readiness to make up the full amount. But messages and telegrams kept arriving, and before the service began it was found that the $50, 000, with a balance over, had been subscribed. This was one of the occasions in the life of a parish which bring before it the work it is doing, when minister and peo- ple feel more keenly the bond that unites them. It was a moment of enthusiasm when Mr. Brooks announced to his congregation that the amount called for had been subscribed. Just as, ten years before, they had built and paid for the most costly church yet erected in New England, so now, with promptness, they had responded to his wish that the most elaborate mission church yet planned in this part of the country should be their offering of commemoration. He spoke of the work of the parish during the ten years in the new edifice. His pride and joy in Trinity Chiirch were evi- dent as he reviewed its long history tmder former rectors, until the new edifice was built ; or as he described the bright day of consecration, how the long procession of clergy came up the aisles, the eloquent sermon of Dr. Vinton, and how on the Sunday following, when they had the church to them- selves for the first time, it seemed as though they had been worshipping there for years : — I do not come to you to-night with statistics. I have not even counted how many have been baptized in these ten years, how many times the marriage service has been performed, how many times the beautiful burial service has been read over the dead, how many of you have been confirmed. I have not looked to see ; I do not care. I care more for what these services have been to you and to many souls. I do know that some have come in to them and have gone out with no change in their faces ; but there has been a change; there is something which they have got which they did not have before they came. I know that many of you have been helped, that many of you are the better for these years of services in this church. There is one thing which I will tell you of, which has been done in these years. The trea- 658 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 surer of tlie church has given me the amount which has been con- tributed during the past ten years for charitable and missionary- purposes, including the contribution for the new St. Andrew's Church. It is $366,000. It is a large amount, and a small amount, — small when we think of the means which God has given us, and the work to be done. But it has accomplished good in different parts of the world, and from time to time we hear of the good that has been wrought. It has been our grief that the great architect who built our church died before it was completed. The time will come when money will be given to finish the towers of the fajade according to his plan. I am in no hurry for it; other work must be done first, but this, too, will come in time. Far be it from us to boast of what our church has done, but for some things we can be thankful that they have been done right. We welcome all those who come to worship with us. I know how heartily, and often at no little inconvenience to yourselves, this welcome has been given. There has not yet been turned away a person from our doors when there was a seat for him to occupy. And as your minister, may I thank you for your help and sympathy during these years ? You have made my task anything but a burden. As our church has grown and duties have in- creased, it has been impossible to keep up the personal inter- course which we had together in the first years. I appreciate the patience which you have shown to me. When a person gives up his whole life to such work, trying not to refuse to any the aid which he may be able to give, I think he may still ask for continued patience. I ask that you will bear with me in the future. We are thankful for the past years, but we want to make the coming years fuller and better, to consecrate ourselves more fully to God, and do more earnest work for Him. Everything that Phillips Brooks now did or wrote was permeated with an increasing depth of tender feeling. He was illustrating the truth of the remark that no one can think profoundly who does not feel deeply. This was shown alike in his sermons and in his letters. He was still despond- ent about the church, for he had been inwardly hurt by the movement to change its name. This despondency, it will be seen, appears in his letters. When he went to Andover, on January 4, to preach the sermon at the consecration of the new Episcopal Church, he made it an opportunity for assert- ing more positively the faith that was in him. Throughout ^T. 51] SERMON AT ANDOVER 659 the sermon glowed the intensity of his emotions. He spoke of the place of the Episcopal Church in the Puritan town : — Long before our Church came here this was a distinctly reli- gious town. The Church of Christ in other forms, the experience of Christ in other forms, in deep reality was here. ... It is not in arrogant presentation of herself as the only Church of Christ to which this old religiousness must conform before it can be really churehly. God forbid ! It is as one distinct and valu- able form of Christian thought and life — as one contribution to the Church of the future which is to be larger, deeper, wiser, holier, than any Church existing in the land to-day. The subject of the sermon, and the occasion, led to char- acteristic utterances regarding the nature of the Church, its worship and ordinances : — The Church is no exception and afterthought in the world, but is the survival and preservation of the world's first idea, — the anticipation and prophecy of the world's final perfectness. The Church of Christ is the ideal humanity. Say not that it leaves out the superhuman. I know no ideal humanity that is not filled and pervaded with the superhuman. God in man is not unnatural, but the absolutely natural. That is what the Incarnation makes us know. The Church is the most truly human institution in the world, — the Church building is the most human institution in the town. Here in Andover, your shops, your houses, your stables, your taverns, your library, your girls' school, your boys' school, your seminary, — they all mean something human. But the Church has the best reason for being of them all. It means the niost human thing of all, the truest human fact of all facts, that man intrinsically and eternally belongs to God. This strong conception of its life must pervade its architecture. No heavy and oppressive darkness, overwhelming the soul with fear,^ and making it want to lose itself in the unearthly gloom ; but broad simplicity and ample light, and all the freshness and sweetness of the beautiful world, taken up, glorified, and trans- lated. And so of the Church's services. They must be human. They must be uttered in the vernacular, not merely of the local speech, but of the human soul. They must be full of hope, not of dread. They must make man respect and not despise his essential self. They must show him his sin by making him see the glory of his intention and his destiny. They must humiliate his intellect by 66o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 displaying the infiniteness of truth, and not by declaring the sinfulness of error. Whatever mystic richness must belong to the Church's two perpetual sacraments, warm forever with the touch of the very bands of the dear Lord, deepened and filled with the countless holy experiences of countless souls, they must be ever pervaded, not in contradiction or in diminution, but in increase of their sacredness, by the simplicity and humanity which is in their very essence. The elemental substances, — water and bread and wine, — these keep the two sacraments forever broad and true. It is through earth's most common substances that Christ, the Son of man, symbolically gives Himself to man. The stream, the field, the vineyard, have their essential sacredness declared in those deep, venerable words, "Baptize all nations." "This is My Body. " " This is My Blood. " The Church whose fundamental truth is the essential sacred- ness of man must hold its doctrines humanly. ... It will be- lieve that no doctrine has been truly revealed until the human consciousness has recognized its truth. It will have nothing to do with the false awe of the Credo quia impossibile. The truths of heaven and the truths of earth are in perfect sympathy; every revelation of the Bible is clearer the more it is to be found in the speaking conscience, or in the utterance of history, or in the vocal rocks. The real authority of man to speak to brother man must rest in personal qualities and conditions. It is truth which cannot be carried save by the believing soul. It is fire which can only be carried by the lighted torch. It is God who can only shine through a soul luminous and transparent with His own divinity. Behind all other authorities lies forever the first authority of intelligence and sympathy and consecration. Without that all other authorities are worthless. With that, no man may dispar- age any ministry, however simple and unelaborate that ministry may be in other things. To the Kev. W. N. McVickar, who was going abroad, he writes : — 233 Clakendon Stkeet, Boston, January 8, 1887. It is sad enough to think that before another Saturday a big piece of the ocean will be between us, and that for months there will be no chance of setting eyes on you. My heart will be on board the Eider with you next Wednesday. You will not see it, but it will be there. It will climb the Pyramids with you (if you really do go up to the top). It will sit with you on the ^T. 5i] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 66i' Mount of Olives, and wander with you through the bazaars of Damascus. Be kind to the old thing (I mean my heart), and give it now and then a greeting, and tell it sometimes what a. good time you are having. Sometimes upon the ocean think of the happy days in which we stared together at the waste of waters. Let the Servia come up to you out of the dim past, with all its ghosts on board, and say something cheerful to them to show them that they are not forgotten in your present joy. How we shall miss you! When Quinquagesima arrives, re- member Cooper and me, sitting on your doorstep. Good-by, dear fellow, and may the God who has been so good to us keep us both until we meet again. Good-by, good-by. Ever and ever yours, P. B. To the Rev. Arthur Brooks, who was making the tour of Palestine, he writes : — New Toek, Sunday (Sexagesima), February, 1887. When you get this we shall be in the thick of Lent. Where will you be? Perhaps almost ready to keep Easter in Jerusalem when this arrives. It is good indeed to know how much you must be enjoying. Forty centuries are looking down upon you from the Pyramids this blessed Sunday. I wish I were one of them, and then you could come up my pyramid and we could sit and talk it all out, and you could tell me all that you have done. I can imagine something of what has happened since then, but at Cairo I lose you, for I have never been up the Nile, and it is a mysteri- ous jumble of tombs and sphinxes and pyramids to me. If you see the veritable Eameses, with the magnificent head, tell him I salute him, and am quite sure that those Hebrews must have been terribly exasperating and disagreeable people. How strange it does seem that out of them should have come the world's religion! A new pulpit was at this time placed in Trinity Church, in order that Mr. Brooks might be better heard in some parts of the building. He had hitherto preached from a lecturn, the same that he had used in Huntington Hall, originally asso- ciated with Holy Trinity Chapel in Philadelphia, whence it had been sent to him as a gift, at his own suggestion. What importance he attached to the associations connected with it is evident from the circumstance that the upper part of this lecturn was fitted to the new pulpit, for a sermon board. So he preserved the connection of his years. 662 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 To the Eev. Charles D. Cooper he writes with reference to the "Mind Cure," in regard to which his opinion had been misrepresented : — 233 Clabendon Stbebt, Boston, March 25, 1887. My deab Coopeb, — I never heard of these people who are disturbing Albany, and I have no sympathy with their kind. There is a truth in the midst of the fantastic performances and the confused philosophy of the "Mind Cure," but it and the notions which are related to it are capable of vast mischief in the hands of ignorant and self-seeking men and women. Such seem to be the folks of whom you speak. May those for whom you care be saved from them. I assure you they have no right to quote me as their endorser. An incident occurred at the diocesan convention in May which is characteristic. In 1886 it had been voted to change the rule of order requiring a sermon at the opening of the convention. When Mr. Brooks heard of it he was indignant at the idea of taking away the one chance which a man had of preaching to his brethren; it seemed like abolishing the first function of the ministry. At the convention in 1887 he moved that the words be restored calling for a sermon by the appointed preacher. He made a short and vigorous speech in behalf of his motion, and carried the convention with him. A member of the convention writes: "The ease with which he swung the convention back to the sermon was striking. I think no debate followed his speech. We aU let him have his way." On the 8th of June Mr. Brooks sailed in the Adriatic for England, accompanied by his sister-in-law, Mrs. William G. Brooks, and her daughter. Miss Gertrude Brooks. Only in this respect did his visit differ from previous ones, that he was mainly concerned to put himself at the disposal of the ladies, and share in their pleasure at seeing what was now so familiar to him. That there was no abatement of the enthu- siasm among his English friends and admirers was evident from the rush to be early in the field of the candidates claim- ing his services as a preacher. One event in England, the Queen's Jubilee, now eclipsed every other in national interest ^T. 5i] IN ENGLAND 663 and importance, till it seemed almost natural to his English friends that Phillips Brooks should be there as " a loyal sub- ject." Thus a friend writes to him : — The Queen will come in great state to the Abbey. It will be a ceremony such as has only occurred three times in nine hundred years (Henry III., Edward III., George III.), and will be a reminiscence of the coronation. Tickets of admission will be very hard to get. They are given to very few except the Houses of Lords and Commons, courtiers, and the great ones of the earth. But you shall have a seat; I pledge myself to get you one. The promise was kept, and on the 21st of June Mr. Brooks was present in an eligible place in the Abbey to wit- ness the imposing and gorgeous scene. An English lady writes to him this anecdote of childhood which she thought would amuse him : — A little girl, eight years old, where I was staying a short time ago, observed to me one day, — "Nearly all America belongs to England, does n't it, Mrs. W ?" "I am afraid not, dear." "I mean, nearly all the States do. "Well, if they don't, then they ought to." Mr. Brooks preached but a few times, for his stay in England was short, — at St. Margaret's, Westminster, as usual, for Archdeacon Farrar; at St. Mark's, Kennington, for Mr. Montgomery ; at St. Paul's Cathedral, where he met Dean Church. He also preached at Crosthwaite Church, in Keswick, — "the greatest sermon Crosthwaite ever listened to," writes the vicar. He went down to the East End and made a speech to the workingmen. Among the attractive invi- tations he was obliged to decline was one from the chaplain of the Royal Dockyard Church, with its large number of English soldiers and their officers. He met, through the kindness of Archdeacon Farrar, the best men of England, and a large number of the clergy. The Nonconformists gave him a warm welcome, as if he were of their number. But the rector of a large London church also writes to him : " The 664 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 secret by which you make us High Churchmen enthusiastic about you remains unexplained to me." After a few weeks in London, he went with his companions for a journey in rural England, visiting cathedrals and other objects of interest, and on the 19th of July left England, as he writes, "for the old commonplace Continental journey, — Brussels, Cologne, the Ehine, Heidelberg, the Tyrol, Venice, Milan, Switzerland, Paris, — all old and delightful, but no longer with the charm of novelty." He continued to show himself a restless traveller, impatient to be moving, unwilling to be idle when there was anything to be done ; but chiefly anxious for the friends who were with him, giving them no rest in his desire to show them what ought to be seen. Among his few letters, this one to Mr. Robert Treat Paine tells that the new St. Andrew's was uppermost in his mind: — ScHLOSS H0TK1-, Heidbleerg, July 24, 1887. My deae Bob, — Here we are for another Sunday, where the great party spent the larger part of a Sunday now two years ago. Do you remember it ? It all comes back most vividly here, as indeed it has all along the route. I expect to hear scraps of George's Journal lingering among the echoes of the corridors, and to meet Ethel coming out of a mediaeval doorway, and to find Lily wherever there is a stray dog. I wish indeed that I could call you all up in actual presence as well as in imagination. What a Sunday we would have ! For the day is perfection, and the great outlook was never lovelier. Tour letter, which I was very glad indeed to get this week, made me see you all at home, dining on the terrace, and keeping the Fourth of July. It was a pretty picture. I wish I had been there. And then came your very interesting account of the discussions about the new chapel, and your delightful archi- tectural drawings, which gave me such a clear idea of how it ought to be done and how it ought not to be done. It would have made a very interesting summer if I could have been at home and talked all these things over with you all. I need not tell you that I like the largeness of your ideas. Many a time, in these last twenty years, you have saved us from doing things on a small scale, and kept us large. We never shall forget — I hope history will not let it be forgotten — that we owe it to you that Trinity Church is big and dignified, and not a little thing in a side street, which one must hunt to find, and think small things of when he has found it. From Mrs. Whit-mart's Portrait HH 1 IFi I HMj lift .<>>' \ J 1 I^Hj ^H' ■ ^■gd WL ^ "^1 P lii^f ^1^1 ■C 1 ^^H ^^H^^^^^HL'^', . 1 BBlfeaMW|^M[MK^^ J ^^HHH R^B^WP mm H^^HI ^m ^^H 1 \\ •'t^^S^ i -,-^<-/< -7/' JET. 51] CORRESPONDENCE 665 And now, St. Andrew's. Let that be conceived as generously as possible. Let there be nothing mean about it. If we need more money let us get it. Let us make it a home of which neither rich nor poor need be ashamed. Let us anticipate vastly more of work and life than we at present have to put in it. In all this I am with you heartily. The main hall of the parish building, I believe, will be above all our expectations in its use- fulness, — a sort of Palace of Delight, like the one we read about in London four years ago, and which I saw in its partial realization the other day. It may be made the centre of all sorts of good influences for that whole region. Oh, that I could see, on the 18th of September, as I turn into Chambers Street, the chaste and elegant fagade of a finished building all ready for its work, with Kidner waving a St. Andrew's flag upon the doorstep, and the crowd waiting for the blessing at the open win- dows ! I shall not quite see that, but something, I am sure, will have been done, and there is time left yet before we die and other people are to follow us and take up what we leave undone. I only wish I felt more sure about this Church of ours, the Episcopal Church, I mean. I wish it looked more as if it meant to be sensible and simple and rational and ready for the best sort of work. It looks to me now very much as if it meant to go on to stiffer and stronger ecclesiasticism, and might, in time, become a place in which it would be difficult if not impossible to work. Perhaps not; and meanwhile, I see nothing to do except to press on and keep her as good and strong and sensible as we can, but there would be a stronger confidence about it all if she would only behave better. There seemed to me to be very much in England which looked the same way. But, however that may be, there will be some good result somewhere of all good work. That is the comfort which one falls back on more and more, and I begrudge all the time now that I take out of the few years which remain for work at home. Even when it brings one to Heidelberg, which is as beautiful as a dream this hot Sunday afternoon. The music of a profane band comes floating through the trees, and there are those deli- cious old red walls, with the breaks in them just at the right places, and down below the brown-roofed town, and the silver Neckar wandering through it. You know it all, and it is so full of the associations of '85 that I feel as if you all were here. Would that you were ! I hope you all are well and happy. To know that any of your flock were unhappy would make me so, too. I shall track your footprints in the waters of the Grand Canal, and on the rocks of 666 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 "Wengern Alp, and it will be pleasant when I take you by the hand again on your own porch. I send my love to Mrs. Paine and Edith and John and Emily and Robert and Ethel and Georga and Lily, and am, ever and ever, Affectionately yours, P. B. "When the party of travellers reached Geneva, Phillips Brooks was called to know personally what physical suffer- ing meant in one of its most intense forms, in consequence of a felon which had formed on the thumb of his right hand. It indicated some weakness in his constitution, — a physical correspondent, perhaps, to the inward depression which hung about him. From the conscious knowledge of pain he had hitherto been exempt through all his years beyond an occa- sional headache in his youth. To his friends who accompa- nied him he now seemed to bear it with heroic patience. Pain is a great leveller, yet despite well-nigh unendurable agony he preserved his integrity. For weary days and sleepless nights he continued to suffer and endure. He was besought to call in a physician, but he persistently refused, waiting in the vain hope that the throbbing pain would subside, reluctant, indeed, to admit that he could not overcome by strength of will an aberration of nature which by the divine order should be subject to man. At last he had almost waited too long. When the physician, Dr. Binet, of Geneva, was summoned, he was alarmed as he looked at the finger, and at once, exam- ining the arm, found that it contained symptoms of disease so dangerous that he despaired of saving it. Just before the finger was cut open. Dr. Binet advised him to take chloroform ; he declined it ; to his request that he might light a cigar the physician consented, and he held the cigar in his mouth dur- ing the operation: "There was a moment," said Dr. Binet, "when he did n't draw." These incidents were communi- cated to the Kev. Leighton Parks by Dr. Binet himself. When Phillips Brooks was asked afterwards about the extent of his suffering, he would say that he knew of no standard by which the relative degrees of pain could be measured. He only knew that "it throbbed." Hitherto disease had been something so far away that it seemed at times to those ^T. 51] CORRESPONDENCE 667 who heard him refer to the subject as if he scorned it for a personal infirmity. He was quoted as saying that he hated sickness. "All the sickness that I see does not make sick- ness seem a bit easier or more natural, and my wonder at the patience of sick people grows with every day of my life." The injury to his hand prevented Mr. Brooks for some time from the use of his pen, and no letters record his move- ments. On the 18th of September, he was again at his post in Trinity Church, and had resumed his connection with Harvard University. In October he went to the Church Congress at Louisville, Kentucky, where he made a sensa- tion by his speech on the apostolical succession, stating his position with the emphasis and vigor which church congresses are apt to engender. There were hisses in the hall as he spoke. It shows the ecclesiastical ire he aroused, that a prominent layman who heard him remarked it would have been a pleasure to assist in throwing him into the Ohio Eiver. Again the speaker's words were caught up and car- ried throughout the country. No record of the speech remains, however, for the records of this congress perished by some accident in the flames. There is one brief allusion to the subject in a letter written by Mr. Brooks after his return to Boston, October 27, 1887 : — Only last night did I get back from this ecclesiastical junket, which began with the Congress in Louisville, and ended with the ministerial council in Philadelphia. The congress was ugly, but the saints had good rooms at the hotels, and there were enough of them to praise each other's speeches. With one other letter this phase in the life of Mr. Brooks comes to an end, and he no longer felt it incumbent on him to pursue the subject. Three times he had spoken his mind with all the fiery energy of his nature, — at the General Convention in 1886, at Trinity Church, and in the Church Congress. He had made his position known, so that there could be no doubt where he stood. In this letter to Dr. Dyer, for many years the trusted and honored leader of the Evangelical school in the Episcopal Church, he shows him- self still despondent, and expresses his misgivings. The 668 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1887 letter is of further importance because he avows that he no longer holds the dogmatic theology known as Evangelical. 233 CiiABENDON Steeet, Boston, NoTember 19, 1887. Dear Dr. Dyer, — It does me good to hear your blessed voice again. Old scenes come trooping up with the sight of your handwriting, and I am a youngster again, sitting at the feet of my elders and betters. Yes, I will he an ofBcer of the Church Missionary Society if they want me to, — most of all, if you want me to, — but it will not save the Church. Nothing will save it, I fear. It is fast on the way to become a small, fantas- tic sect, aping foreign ways, and getting more and more out of sympathy with the great life of the country. I am sorry indeed, but I cannot think anything else. Look at the West and see what our Church means there. Where are the dioceses that you strove to build a quarter of a century ago ? Well, well, the work will be done by somebody, even if our Church refuses to do it. But what a chance we had! I know no better place to work, and so I work on still in the old Church, growing more and more out of conceit with organi- zations, — more and more sure that the dogmatic theology in which I was brought up was wrong,' but more and more anxious for souls and eager to love God every year. The old days when we haunted Dr. Vinton's study and hammered out Constitutions for the Divinity School in Philadelphia, and took breakfast with the Volanses, look very bright, but far away and very young. Those days were earlier, but these are happier, — and, on the whole, the larger hopes which live on Christ and expect Him to do His work in His own way are more inspiring even than the hopes we used to have for E. K. S. and E. E. S. ' The points on which Mr. Brooks recognized his divergence from the dog- matic theology in which he had been brought up were these : 1. Its view of baptism as a covenant. 2. Its literal theory of inspiration and its conception of Scripture as a whole. 3. Its separation between things secular and sacred ; its failure to recognize truth in other religions and in non-Christian men ; its in- difference to intellectual culture. 4. Its tendency to limit the church to the elect. 5. Its view of salvation as escape from endless punishment. 6. Its in- sistence upon the necessity of acknowledging a theory of the Atonement in order to salvation. 7. Its insufiBcient conception of the Incarnation and of the Person of Christ. 8. Its tendency to regard religion too much as a matter of the emotions rather than of character and will. And yet he regarded these divergences aa the accidents of the Evangelical theology, not its essence, which lay in devotion to the Person of Christ. In his deep harmony with this feature of Evangelical teaching, he seemed to remain at heart an Evangelical to the end. ^T. 5i] CORRESPONDENCE 669 I am glad, indeed, to know you are so strong and well. How I would like to see you again. God help you always. Affectionately yours, Phillips Bkooks. To the Et. Kev. Henry C. Potter lie writes, expressing his dislike in a satirical way for the over-valuation of ecclesiasti- cal domesticities : — 233 Claeendon Street, Boston, November 26, 1887. No, my dear Henry, I will not go back on what I wrote, or what the "Evening Post" says that I wrote, which is the same thing. I conceive the trimming of the altar, the cleaning of the can- dlesticks, the cutting out of artificial flowers, and the darning of the sacramental linen to be, on the whole, the noblest occupation of the female mind, the very crown and glory of the parish work of women. They correspond exactly to the sublime work of showing strangers to seats and playing checkers with loafers at the reading room, which is what we have canonized as men's work in the same parish. How beautiful they both are ! How worthy of the male and female topstones of Creation ! And will you stay with me when you come on January 22, to preach for Parks and at Cambridge ? I shall be very glad and grateful if you will. Ever faithfully yours, Phillips Bkooks. On November 26 Mr. Brooks laid the corner stone of the new St. Andrew's Church, in the presence of a large number of people. He followed at this time with deep interest the task of Kamabai, then in this country, in behalf of her Hindu sisters. He had the pleasure of welcoming as his guest Professor James Bryce, for whose work he had great admiration. On his fifty-second birthday he wrote this let- ter to Mrs. Kobert Treat Paine : — 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, December 13, 1887. Deae Mes. Paine, — I want to write a word before the birthday closes, to thank you for your kind word and the bright flowers which made the birthday possible to bear. You and yours will, I know, stand by me to the end, and give me your friend- ship till I get safely through. God bless you for all you have been to me all these years. Affectionately yours, Phillips Brooks. CHAPTER XX 1888 EAILWAT ACCIDENT IN PHILADELPHIA. INCIDENTS OP PARISH LIFE. LENTEN SERVICES. COEEESPONDENCE. SENTIMENT AND SENTIMENTALITY. COMMENTS ON "ROB- ERT ELSMEEE." THANKSGIVING SERMON In the summer of the previous year Phillips Brooks had experienced the intensity of physical pain. In the first month of this new year he encountered the vision of sudden death. This was the report which startled Boston on the morning of January 27, as it was read in the newspapers: — The Rev. Phillips Brooks, of Boston, the Eev. William N. McVickar, rector of Holy Trinity Church, the Eev. C. D. Cooper, rector of the Church of the Holy Apostles, and Misa McVickar, sister of Dr. McVickar, narrowly escaped being killed last evening. Dr. Brooks had come on from Boston to visit his many friends in this city [Philadelphia], aad to assist at the opening of the new chapel of the Holy Communion, at Twenty- seventh and Wharton streets. He was at the residence of Rev. Dr. Cooper, No. 2026 Spruce Street, during the afternoon, and later In the evening Rev. Dr. McVickar, with his sister, called in a carriage for the reverend gentlemen to convey them to the chapel. So bad was the condition of the icy streets that the driver had difficulty in keeping his horses on their feet. It was just 7.45 o'clock when they got to Greenwich Street, and the driver turned his horses' heads to cross the Pennsylvania Railroad. The spot is one of the most dangerous in the city, the high walls of the Arsenal building almost shutting the trains from the view of drivers of vehicles. The safety gate was not shut in consequence of its being so encrusted with ice that it could not be worked. The driver, seeing that the gate was open, and not seeing or hearing an approaching train, drove upon the tracks. Hardly had those in the carriage seen the dazzling headlight of the engine before it was upon them, catching up the heavy carriage like an ^T. 52] RAILWAY ACCIDENT 671 eggshell, overturning it in the twinkling of an eye, and crushing a great hole in the side where it had struck. The occupants were thrown headlong to one side of the car- riage. Dr. Brooks was partly covered by the debris. Along the track for fifty yards the engine pushed the cab and its af- frighted occupants before it could be stopped. The engineer had seen the carriage before the locomotive struck it, and he at once reversed the lever. Had not this been done it is probable that some if not all of the occupants would have been killed. Ready hands came to the rescue and helped the members of the party out of their perilous position. Rev. Dr. Cooper and Miss McVickar had been thrown violently against the side of the cab. Dr. McVickar was covered with broken glass and wood, and across Dr. Brooks's breast rested a heavy axletree. All considered their escape from instant death as marvellous. The driver fared worst. He was hurled from his box to the ground, and lay last night in a semi-conscious condition. The delay in the arrival of the party at the chapel caused some alarm, and a carriage was sent in search of them. The searchers found the clergymen by the railroad tracks, and conveyed them to the chapel, where the services proceeded as if nothing had happened. A lady in Philadelphia, upon whom Mr. Brooks was call- ing the day after the accident, took down the words in which he referred to it. He rose from his chair, paced the floor, and, with his face aglow with deep emotion, said : " I was not the least afraid to go ; I know there are beautiful things God has to show us in the other world; but, I want to live to see what He has to show us that is beautiful and wonderful in the coming century in this world." The following letters of Mr. Brooks relate to the accident, written to his friends McVickar, Cooper, and Strong : — 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, January 31, 1888. Oh, my dear William, you do not know the good which your letter has done me. If you did, you would be glad all your life for the blessed hour in which you wrote it. I have had all my share of happiness, and more. I have had friends such as are given to few men, and they have been constant and faithful to me in a way that fills me with gratitude and wonder when I think of it ; but life is pretty lonely, after all, and so, when one of the oldest of the oldest of one's friends says kind, good things like 67a PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 this, it sort of breaks me down, and I am glad, like a true a,wk- ward Bostonian, that you are not here to see how much I feel it; but YOU must know how much you have been to me all these long years, and how much it is to me, even although I see you so seldom, to know that you give me a thought sometmies, and care how I am faring. 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, February 1, 1888. Deab Coopeb, —I got to New York safe, and fomid Arthur interested in the accident and told the story there, and the next morning took the train here, and arrived home last mght, or rather in the afternoon at three o'clock. James Franks was wait- ing at the train, and he and Sallie and I dined at William s, where we told the tale again, and gave thanksgiving round the family table. This morning lots of people called, and J. telt amazed and overcome to find how much people cared whether i lived or died. And so the thing goes into history, and we are safe for some years more of work. God knows how many! The more the whole event takes possession of me, the more I am willing to leave it all to Him, sure that it would have been all right if He had called us then, and sure, too, that every week of work He still allows us is a privilege. I think of you constantly ; may you be richly helped and sup- ported in your loneliness. Let me hear from you when you can. God keep you safe. Tours lovingly, P. B. 233 Clabendon Steeet, Boston, February 2, 1888. Deae George, — A thousand thanks for your good letter. I knew you would be glad I was not dead, but yet it was a joy to hear you say so, and I read your kind words more than once, and found great pleasure in them. Think of poor Cooper, with his seventy-four years' old bones and muscles, getting turned over and over by a locomotive and coming out marvellously safe and well, and going on and making his little speech just as if nothing had happened ! Awful as it was, I think the accident will serve for a diversion which will distract his thoughts. But no more such diversions for me in this short life, please God ! This marvellous escape left its uneffaceable impression upon Phillips Brooks. An era in his life seemed to date from this moment, as he gave himself, even more unre- servedly, to the demands of the people. The Kev. Leighton Parks, who spent several weeks with him at the rectory in ^T. 52] PARISH INCIDENTS 673 1888, relates, that, astonished at the frequency with which the door bell rang, from an early hour in the morning, he determined to keep a record, and found that it averaged once for every five minutes. But Mr. Brooks steadfastly declined to seclude himself, or appoint hours when he would be at home to caUers. They wanted to see him, he would answer, and it might not be possible or convenient for them to come at the hours which he might fix. Any one who went to call upon him at this time would be apt to find such a situation as this, — some one waiting for him in the reception room, another in the dining room, while he was closeted with a third in the study. There were fears lest his health would suffer ; indeed there were symptoms that it had already been impaired, but he continued to give himself, as if with the desperation of a man who felt that his time was short, that he must work while the day lasted. And there was nothing that was so much wanted of him now as the man himself. The Rev. Leighton Parks further relates that he had an appointment to meet him at the rectory at eight o'clock one evening, whence they were to go to a reception at the house of Mr. Robert C. Winthrop. Not till nearly eleven o'clock did Mr. Brooks return to his house to keep the appointment. He had been detained at a hospital by a colored man who had been in- jured in some affray and had sent for him. A physician whom they met at Mr. Winthrop's expressed some surprise that Mr. Brooks should not have sent his assistant, as any physician would have done. But in spiritual things it must be otherwise, and Mr. Brooks's reply was that the man had sent for him. Another incident is told by the Eev. Roland Cotton Smith. A colored girl who was dying sent for him with a verbal message through her sister. It was Sunday morning, just as the service at Trinity was beginning. In this case Mr. Brooks sent his assistant, explaining why he was unable to come. But the assistant returned with the message that the girl had declared she would not die until he came. When the service was over Mr. Brooks himself went accord- VOL. II 674 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 ing to the request, with the intention of administering the Communion. The sequel of the story was this, — he found that the two sisters, fearing he might not come, had con- cluded to keep the Communion for themselves, imitating the sacred rite, as far as they could, with bread and water. Still another incident is communicated by Rev. E. W. Donald, the present rector of Trinity, which also belongs to these years. A workingman, living in one of the suburbs of Boston, was told at the hospital that he must undergo a dangerous surgical operation ; that he could not live unless it were performed; that it was doubtful even then if his life could be saved, but there might be a chance. He returned with the information to his home and his wife. The opera- tion was to take place the next day. They had the evening before them, and they proposed to spend it in a call on Phillips Brooks whom neither of them knew, or had the slightest claim on his interest or attention. Only, as they faced the crisis, it seemed as if a call on Phillips Brooks was adequate to its portentousness for them both. Mr. Brooks received them as they had expected he must, talked with them and soothed them, and promised to be with them at the hospital on the following day. All which their imagination had conceived of what he might be to them in their emer- gency was fulfilled to the letter. There are many other instances of a similar kind to be told of Mr. Brooks at this stage of his life, upon which he was now entering. Some of them are known in all the fulness of their pathos, others are unknown because he kept the details of his kindness to himself. It is not that inci- dents of this kind are peculiar in his experience as a pastor, though there is this peculiarity, that they are calls from out- side his parish, unless we take his parish to be Boston and its vicinity. But what strikes the imagination in them is the contrast they suggest, that the preacher who moved the admiration of the world and had received its honors, the scholar who could have done so much in theology and in literature if his time had been at his disposal, the man of cultured artistic sense, with social gifts, sought for every- MT. 52] PARISH INCIDENTS 675 where as the ornament of social functions, where society put on its beauty and its glory, — that such a man should have been claimed as their own and as if existing for them- selves alone, by the poorest, the humblest, the lowest, the outcast, and the sinner. He evidently was moved to the lowest depths of his being by these appeals, allowing nothing to interfere with these demands, which rested upon the claim of a simple humanity. It would have been easy enough, if he had been so minded, to have withdrawn himself, pleading before his own conscience — and who could have said he would have been wrong had he done so ? — that he was en- gaged in a higher work, imperatively demanding his time if it were to be successfully done; that he had no right to be giving his days to such ministrations which others could per- form as well, while no one could do the greater work he was accomplishing ; that in this effort to minister to one soul in trouble he might diminish his power of ministering to the thousands who flocked to hear him. He might, at any rate, have laid down the limits to Trinity Parish, or tried to do so, — for Trinity now almost seemed to have no limits, — beyond which he would not go. It must have been that out of these things there came a yet more powerful motive to feed his soul for its greater utterances. He might not have time to read learned books any longer, but he was reading more closely than ever the book of life. Some might have gone to the opposite extreme of asceticism and have reasoned that the joy of social life was incompatible with daily minis- trations to human sorrow and sufferings. But he did not. Life in itself was never richer or more attractive to him; culture and wealth and refinement, a social function, still had for him a charm. And yet even, in the midst of many engagements, and when life was at its fullest, we begin to have occasional com- plaints from him that he is lonely. It may be owing to some consciousness of isolation, or lack of complete sympathy; or may come from the unique position he occupied. It may have been that his large nature made demands for human love which no friendships could satisfy. Certainly he now became 676 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 more than ever dependent upon his friends. He grew hungry for their companionship, entreating them to come to see him. It was strange that with a world full of friends he should ever find himself alone. What he suffered from and even dreaded at times was the return to the house, where there was no one to welcome him. His face would light up in the evenings if fortunately, at ten o'clock, he found some friend awaiting in the study his return. But the dominant note of his life was one of hope and cheer for the world. " The richest gifts of God cannot be imparted at once, and man must wait in patience until the inward preparation to receive them is completed." "Life in the individual or the race foUows the analogy of education where the best is held in reserve." About this time was written the sermon en- titled "The Good Wine at the Eeast's End." It was born of an inward conflict in the adjustment of the changes of life. Christianity is full of hope. It looks for the ever richer com- ing of the Son of Man. It lives in sight of the towers of the New Jerusalem which fill the western sky. Therefore it has been the religion of energy and progress always and everywhere. There are ways in which the world grows richer to the grow- ing man, and so the earliest years cannot be meant to be the full- est or the most glorious, but that privilege must belong rather to the ripest and the last. When what we vaguely call this life is done, there is to come the fulfilment of those things of which we have here witnessed the beginnings. This is the sublime revelation of the Christian faith. The words of Christ reach forward. They all own pre- sent incompleteness. The soul which uses them is discontented and lives upon its hope. Christ will take you, if you let Him, into his calm, strong power, and lead you on to ever richer capacity and et^er richer blessing, till at last only at the end of eternity shall your soul be satisfied and be sure that it has touched the height and depth of His great grace and say, "Now I know Thy goodness wholly. Thou hast kept the good wine until now. " ' The accident at Philadelphia left no visible traces on his 1 Cf. The Good Wine at the Feast's End, New York, 1893. The sermon was preached in May, 1888, at the Church of the Incarnation in New York. ^T. 52] LENTEN SERVICES 677 physical system. He took up his work as if nothing had happened. In the early part of the year he was making many addresses outside of his parish : at the Groton School, the Boston Latin School, the Little Wanderers' Home, the Harvard Vespers, the Workingmen's Club, and St. Mary's Church for Sailors, in East Boston, — a diversified list of calls upon his sympathy. Lent came in on February 15. He commented, as it be- gan, on "the change to the great shadow." "There is much foolish talk about optimism and pessimism, but the highest and deepest, the brightest and darkest thoughts of life must go together." His sermon for Ash Wednesday was on the "Sin that doth so easily beset us." Another sermon is re- membered on "David and the Shewbread," where he dwelt on the freedom of the Bible, the freedom of great men like David. "The needs of human nature are supreme, and have a right to the divinest help. The little tasks need divinest impulses. The secular woes are only to be relieved by God. Li this use the shewbread is most honored." In a sermon at Harvard Vespers, March 8, he spoke on the text, "God's judgments are far above out of his sight." "There are judgments of our lives of which we are unaware, which we are not fine enough to feel. But the order of the universe feels the judgment as a jar between its wheels. Essential righteousness is busy condemning us and setting right the wrong which we are doing. It is awful to be thus judged at judgment seats too high for us to know. Our brother beside us is being judged at them and knows it; therefore the restless disturbance of his life. As we grow stronger we come into ever higher and higher judgments. Christ judged by them all : ' This is My beloved Son.' " In his Bible class on Saturday evenings, he commented on the Psalms. He preferred those which he could associate with the experience of David, for David was to him one of the few to be accounted great in the world, and the Psalms gained in vividness when associated with a great personality. "Only the experiences of a great soul accounted for such great utterances." 678 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 Very faithful and searching were the sermons dwelling on human sinfulness; one from the text, "He putteth his mouth in the dust, if so be there may be hope; " another, on the words of Jesus, "Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more," where he dwelt on the dilemma in which sin places those who would fain dwell with it. "How difficult it is to meet it rightly! The fear of cruelty and fear of feebleness; the sense of one's own sinfulness; the danger of being supe- rior and patronizing; the fear of exasperating and condon- ing. So we keep out of the way. The first thing about Christ is that He never kept out of the way." The prominence of Christ in these Lenten services over- shadows all the utterances. It seemed as if the speaker had known Him in the flesh, or had other conversations with Him in the spirit, enlightening him as to the deeper mean- ing of the Saviour's words. Two sermons were given to the "loneliness of Christ." On Wednesday evenings he took up the relations of Jesus to some of the problems of society and life. Of special interest were the lectures on the Litany given on Friday afternoons. He analyzed its structure and the significance of its various divisions, the variety of its appeal, the value of its emphasis in repetitions, its unvary- ing uniform cry for deliverance. The invocation of the Trinity in its opening clauses was not intended to shut out and restrict its use, but rather to expand the grounds and motives of the infinite appeal. He dwelt especially on the phrase "miserable sinners," as representing the human soul standing in its emptiness and waiting to be filled with the profusion of God. On the threshold of the Litany sinfulness is encountered, as in actual life, — the hindrance of sin. Its sources, — the very sub- stance of our own nature ; the remoter sources, — the offences of our forefathers. The double cry to escape the punishment and to be delivered from these palsying consequences, the guilt and power of sin. (1) The sense of a universe against us, of external foes, the assaults of the devil, and the feeling of the wrath of God; (2) the defects within the soul, the passions and mean- nesses, the spites and hatreds, — the soul deceitful and corrupt ; (3) the triple agency of evil, — the world, the flesh, and the ^T. 5a] LENTEN SERVICES 679 devil; (4) the dangers of the physical life, — the cry to be spared from " sudden death ; " (5) the evils of corporate life, heresy and schism. One lecture was devoted to "The Great Appeals of the Litany," — "by the mystery of Thy Holy Incarnation, Thy passion, Thy resurrection, and ascension." Then he turned to the public means of grace, the Church, the Ministry, the Sacraments, the State also, and suggested a new petition for "the world of nations." He closed with an impressive sum- mary : " We sinners, what right — and yet what a right we have to pray!" The Good Friday sermon was from Hebrews x. 20. "By a new and living way which He hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say. His flesh." It is strange how the great critical event of the world's life is a Death ; not a battle, nor a coronation, nor a new institution, nor a birth, but yet all these summed up in this dying. Obedience unto death. This the only real approach to God. You may crowd upon Him any other way and you do not reach Him. Only the great submission of the will blends our life with His. The great silent bliss as soul joins soul, — the Son and the Father ! But surely also those whose life He had gathered up into His own! He carried them through and in His obedience. Can we understand that ? The human flesh has been always an obstacle ; Christ made it a channel between God and man. The sermon for Palm Sunday was on the cry of the multi- tudes that went before and followed after Christ as He en- tered Jerusalem. "The great future for the world and for the personal life" was the subject: "Up the broad pathway, lo. He comes rejoicing in the solemn crisis and the awful acquisition of life." On Easter Even was revealed " the history that pauses. Here and there it seems to wait a moment. So with the world's history; so with a life's. There are moments when greater powers are more forceful than we can feel; greater truths are true for us than we can know." Exhausting as the Lenten services might be, Mr. Brooks came to Easter Day with the culmination of his powers. The 68o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 morning service at Trinity, said the newspaper reporter, was attended by the largest congregation ever gathered within its walls. The sermon was only another variation of the endless theme, — the value and sacredness of life, the impossibility of man's cre- ating it, the tremendous power with which man clings to life, and the imperishable hope with which man looks forward to the perpetuation of life. No matter what crazy sorrow saith, No soul that breathes with human breath, Has ever truly longed for death. In Christ there came rolling back the great flood' of life, and into the harbor of life a flood of vitality. The thought of Easter is the Sea of Life, the ocean without bounds, flowing all ways and overflowing all, the Divine existence in its ocean-like exten- sion. In the correspondence of Mr. Brooks there is to be ob- served a change in his mode of reference to the Lenten sea- son. Hardly a year had passed since his ordination when he does not refer with some misgivings to the multiplication. Thus, in 1882, he had written : — I can't help doubting whether it is an unmixed good, though I know there is a great deal of good about it, this sudden and tremendous access of churchgoing. There is no way of drawing back and retrenching the multitude of services without seeming to discourage people's worshipping. But I think the old Lents of my earlier ministry, with two or tliree good solid services in a week, were probably quite as blessed as these with their services every day, and sometimes twice a day. So you see, here I am, at forty-six, already Laudator temporis acti. But the scene at Trinity Church during Lent, beginning with this year, 1888, was one never to be forgotten. The newspapers called attention to the services. It seemed as if the only parallels were "in the flood of fiery eloquence poured forth by Savonarola, or the matchless eloquence of Lacordaire." As evidence of the change the note-books may be mentioned for the year 1888, and the following years to 1891. Each year he filled a large note-book with his plans of daily addresses, or of Wednesday or Friday evening ^T. 52] LENTEN SERVICES 681 lectures, or of Bible class studies. The people went to these services in constantly increasing numbers and with an ever deepening interest. A new phase of his ministry seemed to have begun, marked by deeper solemnity and an ineffable tenderness of spirit, as though his heart alone were speaking, and every one in the congregation were his dearest friend. The expansion of the man and the fuller revelation of his soul made every service deeply impressive. The Lenten lectures, delivered from year to year in Trinity Church, Boston, are made so interesting, so helpful, so memor- able, that vast throngs are always in attendance at their delivery, that whenever reported and published they are eagerly read in all parts of the country, and that their influence outreaches and out- lasts the immediate occasion. The lectures are full of both doc- trinal and practical theology, but always of the kind that springs with seeming spontaneity out of the theme and out of living present human interests.^ The writer of the above paragraph was struck with one statement of Mr. Brooks's when speaking of the Litany: "It is significant that not in her creeds, but in her prayers, the Church most clearly states her dogmas." The remark is, indeed, significant as showing how far Phillips Brooks had departed from the spirit and method of the New England theology, which had terminated in a scholasticism like that of the Middle Ages, built upon dialectic, glorying in its in- tellectual supremacy, in the victory it had achieved over the theology of the feelings. Phillips Brooks had gone back to the theology of life. He accepted the feeling as the charac- teristic and decisive element in religious faith. There was an intellectual element in the process of faith; but it was not that which constituted its foundation. In the feeling for the worth of things, reason possesses as true a revelation as experience has in the principles of scientific investigation. In a passage in one of his sermons, written about this time (1889), he took occasion to refer to the New England theol- ogy and to the arrested development of religious life out of which it had sprung : — 1 Cf . Phillips Brooks in Boston, by M. C. Ayer, editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, p. 26. 682 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 You all know something of what a confusion of intricate, com- plicated, and practically incomprehensible dogma the New Eng- land theology became. The endless discussion of fantastic ques- tions occupied a large part of the people's thoughts. The minute and morbid study of their spiritual conditions distorted and tor- mented anxious souls. Strange theories of the atonement grew like weeds. . . . Heresies sprang out of the soul where ortho- doxy lay corrupt and almost dead. It was the sad fate of a religious life denied its due development and shut in on itself. "■ In a letter to Mr. Cooper there is an allusion to the season of Lent, showing the pleasure he took in the frequent ser- vices. But he bemoans the changes which life is bringing. In the midst of his engagements he had been shocked and saddened by the death of Mrs. Leighton Parks in Italy. She had entered with her husband into the circle of his more intimate friends, — a woman who possessed a beautiful and stately presence, combining with it a gracious charm of man- ner and power of pleasing, but also strength of character, self-possession, devotion, and a true woman's insight and wis- dom. In her youth she was suddenly called, leaving sorrow and mourning behind her. 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, March 7, 1888. My deae Coopee, — It seems to me as if Lent had lasted six months, and had had ten thousand services already, but I never liked it so much, I think, and the habits which it makes of going to the church and thinking and talking about the best things were never so welcome. I hope it does the people as much good as it does the minister. It has been saddened for us here by the melancholy tidings from Parks of Emmanuel Church. He is abroad for a winter's rest, and has been for weeks at death's door in an hotel at Pisa. And in the midst of his illness, his wife, who was with him, died. He is going to get well, but what a dreary life he will come back to. He has three little children. It is the breaking up of one of the happiest and brightest homes I ever knew. And is the shoulder all right ? And have you got your sleep- ing powders yet ? And has "William Bembo got his head again ? And has the railroad given him a thousand dollars ? How long ago it all seems, and yet what a shudder it sends through one's bones to think of it ! Mr. Morrill sent to New York and got 1 Sermons, vol. vi. p. 352. ^T. 52] CORRESPONDENCE 683 me a magnificent and mighty stick to replace the one that van- ished on that awful night, so that I carry a memorial of the great accident on all my walks. The following letters belong to this period : — 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, March 9, 1888. Oh, if things would not so he breaking to pieces all the while ! Nothing stays put. Here is our little ecclesiastical teapot all in a bubble. Courtney goes this way and Greer goes that, and who knows what will happen to Percy or whether Father Hall will be spared! The Bishop looks very ill. It must all be that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. Good-by. Bless God you are safe and well. 233 Clabendon Stkeet, Boston, March 13, 1888. Dbae Arthub, — Now in these idle days of Lent it is a good time for a small piece of extra work. Professor Jacks, of Lon- don, has sent me these copies of the addresses to be made to James Martineau, and asked whether a few of the representative men of our church would like to sign it. I think that some of them would. Certainly I shall sign it. Will you .? And will you ask four or five others of the New York men ? You will know whom it is best to ask. But I wish you would ask Bishop Potter, and I would venture to name Huntington, Tiffany, Don- ald, and Heber Newton. Surely this is a proper chance to do one of these natural and pleasant things which make us feel the unity of the search for truth under all our divisions. I thought of sending it to Har- wood, and Bishop Harris, and Professor Allen. Do you think of any one besides, whose name would be desirable? The blessed Lenten days are fast slipping away from us, and before we know it we shall come out of the golden gate of Easter into that bewildering world where we do not go to church every day. How strange it will all be ! But to-day. Winter is in our faces, and Lent is in our hearts. Ever affectionately yours, P. B. P. S. There can be no harm in a lay signature or two, if the right men occur to you. How about President Barnard ? 233 Clabendon Street, Boston, March 22, 1888. My dear W., — On the morning of the 23d I start for Hali- fax, that is, if I go to Courtney's consecration, as he has asked me to do, and as it seems to me that somebody from his old home here, where he has been for so long, ought to do, but you shall 684 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 have the welcomest of welcomes, and I -will do all that it Is in my power to do for your blessed Baptist. This shifting from denomination to denomination, either of lay folk or of clergy, has little in it to stir one's soul, but let us take the little Baptist in and teach him all our beautiful ways, and he, too, will soon be prating about unity. How the parsons are jumping about ! What a dance it is, — A and B , and now there are faint signs of agitation in C . May they all find the peace they seek. Your old friend and brother, Phillips Beooks. Mr. Brooks was projecting a larger work for Trinity, and seems to have felt the necessity also of arranging that some share in the preaching should be borne by his assistants. The vestry of Trinity responded to his request for relief, instructing the clerk of the vestry "to communicate to our beloved rector the grateful acknowledgments of the Pro- prietors for his untiring and devoted services during the past autumn and winter, and to make arrangements with him for his relief from labor and care during the proposed absence of the assistant minister." At this time he re- signed his position as trustee on the Slater Foundation, which he had held since 1882, having been appointed by Mr. John F. Slater when he made his gift of one million dollars for Christian education in the Southern States. To Kt. Kev. H. C. Potter, he wrote: — 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, June 5, 1888. Deak Henet, — I did not read Dr. Harris's excellent pam- phlet. Can you really care about the infinitesimal question of "non-communicating attendance"? It seems to me to be the very end and exhaustion of religion, a toy for the intel- lect to play with, but profoundly unworthy the consideration of any reasonable man. And then the way the Disputants deal with it ! The appeals to authority! The eager interest in the question whether the Early Fathers "stayed to Communion " ! Who cares? ^ Are all the hard questions answered and the great wrongs set right that men are able to find time for things like these ? I hope that you are well and idle. Affectionately yours, P. B. ^T. 52] MEMORIAL SERMON 685 At Trinity Church, on Sunday, the 10th of June, Phillips Brooks, in the course of his sermon, spoke of the death of Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a Unitarian minister who for many years had been held in the highest respect and rever- ence in Boston, for his intellectual and moral force and his saintly character : — I cannot stand here to-day without a tribute of affectionate and reverent remembrance to Dr. James Freeman Clarke, the minister of the Church of the Disciples, the friend and helper of souls. How much that name has meant in Boston these last forty years ! When I think of his long life ; when I remember what identification he has had with all that has been noblest in every movement of the public conscience and the public soul; when I see how in the days of the great national struggle, from first to last, he was not only true to Freedom, but a very captain in her armies and a power of wisdom and inspiration in her coun- cils ; when I think what words of liberty the slave and the bigot have heard from his lips; when I think how his studies have illuminated not merely our own faith, but all the great religions ; when I see how much of Christ was in his daily walk among us, in his unswerving truthfulness, his quiet independence, his ten- derness and strength, his pity for the sinner, and his hatred of the sin ; when I think how he loved Christ, — when all this gathers in my memory at the tidings of his death, the city, the country, the Church, the world, seem emptier and poorer. He belonged to the whole Church of Christ. Through him his Master spoke to all who had ears to hear. Especially he was a living epistle to the Church of Christ which is in Boston. It is a beautiful, a solemn moment when the city, the Church, the world, gather up the completeness of a finished life like his, and thank God for it, and place it in the shrine of memory to be a power and a revelation thenceforth so long as city and Church and world shall last. It is not the losing, it is rather the gaining, the assuring of his life. Whatever he has gone to in the great mys- tery beyond, he remains a word of God here in the world he loved. Let us thank our Heavenly Father for the life, the work, the inspiration, of his true servant, his true saint, James Free- man Clarke. Part of this tribute, beginning with the words "He belonged to the whole Church of Christ," is now an autograph beneath the portrait of James Freeman Clarke in the church where he ministered. 686 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 Letters were constantly sent to Phillips Brooks, telling him what his published sermons were doing to strengthen faith and inspire hope. This letter is from a person in Eng- land unknown to him, and represents the feeling, almost the expressions, of the many others who wrote to him : — May 14, 1888. For the last five years I may say that I have read one of your sermons every Sunday, and the help and spiritual nourishment I get from them has been a very real source of strength and happiness in my life. . . . Often and often have I opened a volume of your sermons in hours of despondency and gloom, when the Unseen has seemed to be the non-existent, when all high ideals were slipping away, and the actual was pressing out faith and courage; and never did the reading of your words fail to encourage and strengthen me and send me back to suffering or action with fresh force and energy. I have been through the various phases of intellectual doubt and skepticism, and you have helped me out on the right side. The absence of all dogmatism and sectarian narrowness, combined with so inspiring a belief in God's revelation of Himself to us and of the Divine in us, is what I find so helpful in your books; and the large views you take of life are to me most educative and elevating. There is a letter from Dr. Holmes,^ which, although it has been published, is so interesting and representative that an extract from it may be given here : — 296 Beaooh Sxbeet, May 23, 1888. Mt dear Me. Beooks, — I had the privilege of listening to your sermon last Sunday forenoon. I was greatly moved and impressed by it, and I came away very thankful that so divine a gift of thought and feeling had been bestowed upon one who was born and moves among us. My daughter would be glad to have me as her constant com- panion, and of course it would be a delight to listen to such persuasive and inspiring exhortations as those which held your great audience last Sunday. . . . I am ashamed to ask you to pardon this letter. Tou know the language of sincerity from that of flattery, and will accept this heartfelt tribute in the spirit in which it is given. Sincerely and respectfully yours, O. "W. Holmes. Mr. Brooks was to spend the summer at home preaching 1 Cf. Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, vol. I p. 280. ^T. 52] CORRESPONDENCE 687 at Trinity and at St. Andrew's (when it should be ready). Nominally he was residing on his ancestral acres in North Andover, but he made many visits. One was to Pittsfield, where he spent a week with Kev. W. W. Newton, from whence he visited Williamstown to preach before the stu- dents in the Congregational Church, He writes to Mr. Newton after his return, and speaks of Commencement at Harvard : — July 4, 1888. The Commencement went off bravely. President Eliot gave us a fine panegyric on Democracy, and the boys will talk and behave better for it in the future, and we of '55 played the old graduate with dignity and credit, so I hope, but the youngsters were too busy admiring themselves to care how we played it. Never mind, we have each other, and the world is rich in recol- lections. There came letters to him from India, from the Eev. G. A. Lefroy, of the Delhi Mission, and from Mr. Robert Macona- chie, of the Indian Civil Service, showing that he was still held in affectionate remembrance after the lapse of five years. To these letters in his leisure at North Andover he re- sponded : — July 5, 1888. Mt deak Mk. Lefeot, — It made me glad and proud to get your letter, now a long time ago. To be remembered for five years by one whose life is as full as yours is indeed something to be proud of, and to have the pleasant days which we spent at Delhi so pleasantly recalled is truly a delight. How long ago it seems, and what a host of things have hap- pened since, and yet how clear it all is. I had a delightful let- ter from Maconachie the other day, which was like the thinning of a cloud which was very thin already. I saw the old scene perfectly, and could hear the tones of voices which I have not heard for five busy years. And that you and the friends I saw with you have been bravely and patiently going on at the good work ever since fills me with admiration. Do you still have your noon service in your chapel-room as you used to? That seemed to me always beautiful. And do the brown boys play cricket ? And do you have school feasts and prizes ? And is that region of the Kuttab as fascinating as it was when we drove out there one bright morning? I can hear the cool splash of that 688 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 boy now, as he jumps down into the pool. It is a picture which never grows dim, and only needs the touch of a letter's wing to scatter the dust which lay collected on it. That you in your good work should care anything about my books touches me very much indeed. They were written for my people here, and nothing was farther from my thought than that they should be read by the Jamna and the Ganges. But how simple it all grows as we get older! The whole of what we per- sonally have to live and what we go out to preach is loyalty to Christ. It is nothing but that. All truth regarding Christ and all duty towards His brethren is involved in that and flows out from it. To teach Him to any one who never heard of Him is to bring a soul into the sight of Him and His unspeakable friend- ship. To grow stronger and better and braver ourselves is to draw nearer to Him and to be more absolutely His. And this seems to take off the burden of life without lessening the impulse of its duties. He is behind all our work. It is all His before it is ours and after it is ours. We have only to do our duty in our little place, and leave the great results to Him. "We are neither impatient nor reluctant at the thought of the day when we shall have finished here and go to higher work. But, dear me ! what right have I to say all this to you, who know it so much better, who are putting it so constantly and richly into your life and work? I grow stronger for Boston when I think of Delhi. I hope that Allnut will come back to you mightily refreshed. Give my best love to Carlyon, and tell him how well I remember all his kindness. Your other mates I do not know, but venture to send them my greeting as their brother in the work. Be sure that I shall always delight to hear from you. How hot you must be to-day ! Would that you were here in our New England coolness. God bless you always ! Tour friend, Phillips Brooks. July 6, 1888. Dbak Mr. Maoonachie, — It is long since anything has made me so glad as your letter. That you, with all your busy life, should think still of those two weeks which are an unfading picture in my memory is indeed wonderful to me. I greet you and your wife as if it were only yesterday instead of five long years since we parted. What a life God has given you ! To be His minister to millions of His children, to touch their lives with the new sense of justice and mercy which must bring them some revelation of Him, and at the same time to care for the real life which is the spiritual life of some of your fellow workers, who is ^T. 52] CORRESPONDENCE 689 there that has greater privilege? All that you say about your friend touches me deeply. God help him! The great assuring certainty is that God is helping him. I think we should all of us long ago have given up trying to do anything for our friends if we had not been spiritually sure of that. The things we do are so out of proportion to what is to be done. But he is doing it, and our work may well be content to be a bit. Since I saw you life has gone on with me in very pleasant monotony. I came back to my work in the autumn of 1883. Twice since then I have made summer visits to England and the Continent. The winters have been given to preaching and work- ing. I hope it has not been without result. But I grow less and less inclined to ask. The work itself is delightful, and, if it is faithfully done, it must do good. That is enough. Every year it seems to me as if not merely the quantity but the quality of Christian life grew better. Never was there an age when so many men had so high thoughts of God as now. And this I say in clear sight of the perplexing problems and discouraging spec- tacles to which no man can shut his eyes. We see dimly what your anxieties are. We, with our country swarming with the disturbed elements of all the world, have our anxieties and mis- givings, which are yet not too much for faith. Is it not just in our two countries, yours and mine, India and America, that the meeting of strange races with one another is taking place, and so that the issues of the greater day of Christ are being mysteriously made ready ? Would that we could sit either in your bungalow or in my study and talk of all these things! But this letter- writing is poor work. It is only like ships hailing each other at sea. But it is better than nothing. Your letter brought me the Indian sunshine and color and strength, and Boston for a moment seemed the unreal thing. Now I am reading it again, and answering it under my ancestral trees in the country, twenty- five miles from Boston, where my forefathers have lived for a century, and where I retreat for summers. It is the very glory of a summer day. The trees are chattering Puritan theology, and I am rejoicing that the world is larger than they know, and that afar off in the Punjab there is some one who cares how it fares with me. May God bless him and his wife and his boys, — so prays his friend, Phillips Brooks. On Sunday, the 15th of July, Dr. Brooks preached at Trinity Church before the National Prison Congress. The sermon was noteworthy apart from its eloquence, for it con- voL. n 690 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 tained the assertion of profound theological and humanita- rian principles, and as such was immediately published by the National Prison Association for gratuitous distribution. The text, "I was in prison and ye came unto me," led him to take up the deeper meaning of the words of Christ, who had suffered no imprisonment and yet had been in prison. " It must have been the deeper Christ, ■ — - the Christ which the theologies have tried to express when they have made Jesus the head of humanity, — Christ the typical manhood, Christ the divine and universal man, — this was the Christ who had lain in the prison awaiting the visitation of pitiful and sympathetic hearts." The great human sympathy of the preacher flowed through the sermon like a river. It closed with a fine passage drawing sharply the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality. I know how weak, in many people's minds, are my positions, because they rest on sentiment. I know how weak, in many minds, seems the whole cause of prison improvement, because of the element of sentiment which is in it. But there is nothing stronger than a true sentiment for any policy or plan of action to start from and to rest upon. The great human sentiments are the only universal and perpetual powers. Creeds, schemes of government, political economies, philosophies, are local, are tem- porary; but the great human sentiments are universal and per- petual. Upon them rests religion. In their broadening move- ment moves the progress of mankind. It is not sentiment, but sentimentality, which is weak and rotten. Sentiment is alive, and tense, and solid; sentimentality is dead, and flaccid, and corrupt. Sentiment is just ; sentimentality has the very soul of injustice. Sentiment is kind; sentimentality is cruel. Senti- ment is intelligent; sentimentality is senseless. Sentiment is fed straight out of the heart of truth ; sentimentality is distorted with the personal whims and preferences. Sentiment is active; sentimentality is lazy. Sentiment is self-sacrificing; sentimen- tality is self-indulgent. Sentiment loves facts; sentimentality hates them. Sentiment is quick of sight ; sentimentality is blind. In a word, sentiment is the health of human nature, and senti- mentality is its disease. Disease and health often look strangely alike, but they are always different. He who would escape sen- timentality must live in sentiment. He who would keep senti- ment true and strong must fight against sentimentality, and never ^T. 52] CORRESPONDENCE 691 let himself accept it for his ally. In these days, when many men are disowning sentiment because they confound it with sen- timentality, and many other men are abandoning themselves to sentimentality because they confound it with sentiment, do not all men need to learn, and never to forget, their difference ? Do any men need more to learn, and to remember it than they who have to deal with prisoners and prisons ? To the Eev. George A. Strong he writes in response to an invitation that he would deliver a lecture : — Tbbnton Falls, July 22, 1888. Dear Geobge, — Your letter of last Wednesday has found me at this pleasant place, where I am spending a peaceful Sun- day without preaching or any other clerical performance, only looking at the pretty falls, and going this morning to a little village Methodist meeting, where the sermon was very good in- deed. And here comes your request to lecture in your course next winter! Dear George, if it were only anything but lectur- ing! If you had only asked me to give a concert, or a ballet, or any of those things which are quite in my line ! But I have never lectured, and don't believe I can. I have not a rag of preparation to cover the nakedness of my incompetence. Will it not be enough if I come to hear Charles ? He never thought the rest of us had any manners. How he will give them to us when he gets us in his helpless audience ! As to lecturing after him, I am hopeless, — but I will do it for you, George. I will do anything for you. I will disgrace myself to any extent, if only I don't disgrace you! So, if I may come and talk extempora- neously, out of an idle brain, and do not have to write a beautiful lecture on paper to be read with feeling and expression, I will come, — that is, if you and M will come and see me at North Andover some time between the 15th and the 30th of Au- gust, and tell me all about it. Do not deny me this. But send me word immediately to Boston, will you ? when it shall be. I shall go up each Monday afternoon, and you will come from New Bedford in the morning and go up with me. Say you will do this, and I will be most happy. Tell M to tell you to say "Yes " for yourself and her. I hope to hear this week. Good-by. I think I shall lecture on "Matters." Ever yours, P. B. St. Andrew's Church was opened for worship on Sunday, July 29, 1888, and in the evening Mr. Brooks preached to an overflowing congregation on the fatherly care of God for 692 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 all his universe, and showed that the church was established to set forth that divine love and care. He continued to preach at St. Andrew's every Sunday evening for the rest of the summer. To the Rev. W. Dewees Roberts, he wrote asking him to be one of the assistant ministers at Trinity Church. How he regarded the work of an assistant, or, in other words, how he administered the affairs of a large par- ish, is evident from the following passage : — I cannot specify in detail what would be your duties in the parish. In general, I should like to have you help at the Parish Church and at St. Andrew's, as it might be required; and I should be glad of every effort of your own enterprise and origi- nality, in devising new work, and extending the good influence of the Church in every direction. An English novel, "Robert Elsmere," was the chief sen- sation of the summer. Mr. Brooks alludes to it in the fol- lowing letter : — 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, September 1, 1888. Mt deak Miss Meredith, — I must beg you to excuse my delay in sending you these Literatures and Lives which I now most gladly enclose. I was absent when your note arrived, and when I did receive it, it was in the country where I could not lay my hand at once upon the interesting documents. But here they are, and I am very glad to send them. I have finished "Robert Elsmere," and found it very interest- ing, mainly, however, with that secondary interest which belongs to the circumstances of a book and its relation to its time, rather than to its substance and absolute contents. It is a curious mix- ture of strength and weakness. It has the sharp definitions of spiritual things, the fabrication of unreal dilemmas and alterna- tives in which the English mind, and especially the English cleri- cal mind, delights. It is as unintentionally unfair as a parson, only on the other side. It seems, as Matthew Arnold used to seem, to be entirely unaware of the deeper meanings of Broad Churchmanship, and to think of it only as an e£Eort to believe contradictions, or as a trick by which to hold a living which one ought honestly to resign. It is not good to name a doctrine by a man's name, but there is no sign that this writer has ever heard of the theology of Maurice. But how interesting it is ! what charming pictures of English life ! and what description of mental conditions and evo- ^T. 52] CORRESPONDENCE 693 lutions, whose real source and true issue we must still feel that she misses ! I am very glad indeed to know that your anxiety is in some degree relieved regarding Mrs. Norris. Ever faithfully yours, Phillips Bkooks. Among the papers of Mr. Brooks there are rough notes which seem to indicate that he had been asked for some more formal expression of his opinion. For the book had been so real in its portraiture that it had thrown people into mental and religious confusion. This was his more complete judg- ment : — Thoroughly English. "Weakness of the orthodox people. Preconceived idea that they must not think. Perhaps a return to the human Christ from which the disciples began. Thence to be led on through the mystery of manhood into His complete life. The whole question what is to become of his Brotherhood. Not be contemptuous about the new, extemporized, experimental character of it. By such experiments the great eternal stream of efEort is constantly reinforced. The Christ-miracle; and then all else believable. Broad Churchmanship is not explaining away, but going deeper, embracing all nature. This is Matthew Arnold turned to prose. The incomplete story of the reasons of the change in Elsmere. The nineteenth century in the book. Elsmere between the Squire and Catharine. The necessary struggle of the new coming forth from the old, its exaggerations and distortions. The attitude of Phillips Brooks in rejecting the tenet of apostolical succession, and his bold insistence on recogniz- ing the Christian character and work of Unitarian ministers such as his friend the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, was followed by hostile criticism in Episcopal Church news- papers, which continued through the summer, and indeed from this time was never intermitted. He had evidently counted the cost when he took his ground, discounting the ecclesiastical criticism which was sure to follow. The sum- mer, on the whole, had been an agreeable one, broken up 694 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 with short visits, but with no intermission of preaching. He started into the work of the fall with his usual apparent vigor. To the proposal of some of his friends to nominate him for the presidency of Columbia University, in New York, he refuses to listen. To Eev. W. R. Huntington he writes: — 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, October 29, 1888. Deab Hxjntington, — I thank you heartily for your friendly note sustaining Tiffany's kind but somewhat wild suggestion. I have had to write him that it must not be. My only ambition is to be a "Parish Priest." I am not much of a P. P., but as a College President I should be still less. It would be good to be where I should see you all, and run perpetually in and out as seems to be you New York men's way. But it would not be Boston, and I should be lost in your vast town. So leave me here, and let another hold the college sceptre. Both you and Tiffany are only too good to think the nomination would not be absurd. The cards which came to-day tell me how near draws the change in your household which will make life different to you. I am rejoiced to know that it will only make it happier and richer. I wish I knew your daughter well enough to send her word by you how truly she has the best of good wishes from her father's friend. May the marriage bells and skies overrun with bless- ings. Ever faithfully yours, Phillips Brooks. There was a short visit to Philadelphia in the latter part of October, and then this letter to the Rev. W. N. Mc- Vickar : — 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, November 6, 1888. Mv DEAR William, — It was a bold thing for me to ask you for the " Vade Mecum, " but I wanted it, and I thought you would give it to me, and you did. Now I shall have associations with it every time I take it up to go on one of those official duties which we know so well. The first one I had was given me by Marshall Smith when we left the Seminary. The second was given me by George Strong while I was at Holy Trinity. And now you fit me out for the home stretch, and give me the book which will see me through all the services until my journey's end. Would that I were where I might take your hand and thank you. You will be sure that I am grateful, won't you? ^T. 52] THANKSGIVING SERMON 695 We have seen that Phillips Brooks reserved for his ser- mons on Thanksgiving Days topics of general interest, polit- ical or religious, which afforded the opportunity to summarize the world's outlook in each successive year. In the preamble of one of these sermons, 1881, he thus alludes to this usage and justifies it, although aware of its dangers : — Thanksgiving Day has fallen naturally into the habit of trying to estimate the tendencies and the present conditions of our cur- rent life. Such efBorts have made a great literature which I think is almost peculiar to our time, the literature of an age's introspection ; of the inquiry by living men into the nature and worth of the life of their own time. The Thanksgiving Day sermons taken together present not only a picture of the time through which he lived, but of his own life also, — the individual moods reflecting the mood of the common humanity. In 1888 he considered that passing mood of sadness, which seems to have been widespread, when for a moment the world had grown subdued and thoughtful, when the joy of living had given place to a more sombre estimate of the future. Taking for his text Psalm Ixxxix. 15, "Blessed is the people that hear the joyful sound," he began his sermon with this tribute to the forefathers of New England : — "With all the hardness of their Puritanism they were not so grim as they sometimes seem, since it was in their hearts to in- stitute a day of joy. It may be they were of those who rather accepted joy as a duty than yielded to it as an instinct; but at least they saw how true and necessary a part of life it was. The gratitude and thankfulness called for by the national festival were in contrast with the prevailing mood of the hour. Let us think for a few moments about the tendency of the world with reference to this whole matter of joyfulness. Some- times we hear, sometimes certainly we fear, that the world we live in is growing to be a sadder world, that happiness is less spontaneous and abundant as the years go by. Is that the truth, or is it a delusion ? His method of meeting the inquiry is to reduce it to more 696 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 exact terms. The world of realism is just as joyous as it ever was. The world of childhood knows no difference. The children have not found out that the world is old. Each new generation is still born into a garden. The world also of uncivilized, barbaric life keeps all the joy and freshness it ever had. It is only of the comparatively small world of adult human civilization of which it may be said that its sadness deepens its joy. And of this world it may be asked whether its growing sadness is a real decline and loss of that robustness and primitive simplicity of life, or whether the great world, like every man, is simply for the moment moody, and the stage of sadness is a temporary thing, not to be made too much of, sure to pass away, having no reasons which are deep, best treated, as the moods of a great healthy man are often best treated, by ignoring it. He turns to the reasons which may account for this existing mood : — (1) The larger view of the world, the clearer atmosphere, so that we hear the groans of misery in Mexico or Turkey. The curtain has fallen between the rich and the poor; the poor look into our luxurious homes with their haggard faces, and we eat and talk and sleep in the unceasing sound of their temptation and distress. There has been nothing like it in any other day. No wonder the world grows sad. (2) The universal ambition; all who feel the spirit of the time are struggling for the unattainable. The mountains and the rivers, once climbed or followed only by a few, now fling their challenge or the invitation to all. There is discontent every- where, and discontent means sadness. (3) The vague way in which our complicated life puts us in one another's power. The strings of a man's destiny are held by a thousand hands, most of them unknown to him, — his fortune at the mercy of brokers plotting on the other side of the wall, his character at the mercy of gossips talking in the next room, his life at the mercy of anarchists raving in some cellar underground. Hence the burden of a conscious helplessness, — a nightmare which will not let him stir. He is sad with the vague loss of personal life. (4) Another reason for the sadness of which all are more or less aware is the presence of fear as an element in our life. Other ages knew at least what perils they were threatened with. The consciousness of our time is that it does not know. Vast, ^T. 52] THANKSGIVING SERMON 697 unmeasured forces hold us in their hands. Great, bleak, uncer- tain vistas open and appall us. We are like children in the waste of a great prairie. The mere vastness scares us. We fear we know not what. We only know we fear. And fear like that does not inspire definite and concentrated energy. It only breeds pervading and pathetic sadness. (5) The man on whom these causes of sadness act. Our modern human nature is sensitive as in no other time to such a degree. Things hurt more than they used to hurt. Once no one cared how much the beasts suffered by the driver's lash or the surgeon's knife. Once men went home from an auto da f^ and slept with- out uncomfortable dreams. The atmosphere has grown clearer and the perceptions within us finer. He who had foreseen it all years ago might have said prophetically, "What a terrible capa- city of sadness man is growing into and will reach! " From this summary of the causes producing sadness, the preacher turned to the reassuring prospects in life, to show how in each one of these motives he had enumerated there was the possibility of contributing to joy, that indeed they are the very elements and motives that must be mingled in the deepest joy. The large view of the world, the eager ambitions, the close complications of life with life, the out- look into future mystery, and the quickened sensitiveness, — these are essential to the final perfect happiness ; they are permanent forces which have come to remain ; it is only the first influence of them which is temporary ; as the time goes on the first confusion and depression will pass away. " The life and character of Jesus is a perpetual illumination of the hopes of man. In Him behind the superficial and tempo- rary sadness is revealed a profound and ultimate joy. No restless and impatient pessimist knows the deep tragedy of life as the Divine Sufferer knew it. All that lies undi- gested, unassimilated in the present condition of the world lay harmonized and peaceful in the soul of Christ." I have talked idly, almost wickedly, upon Thanksgiving morn- ing, unless I have succeeded in making you see light shine out of the darkness, in making you hear a "joyful sound" piercing through the complaints and wailings which besiege our ears. We take too little views. It is not the events of life, nor its emo- tions, or this or that experience, but life, in itself which is good. 698 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1888 The great joy is just to be alive. The fact of life is greater than what is done with it. So I answer confidently the question which I asked. No period of sadness can be other than tempo- rary. The nature of the world is not changed. Nothing has happened to make it different from what it has always been. The essential tendency of life is towards happiness. Therefore we may wait confidently till the morning. Optimism tempered and sobered, nay, saddened, if you will, but optimism still is the only true condition for a reasonable man. I seem to see Christ stand over all making the world into His likeness. The promise issues fresh from the divine lips of the great Saviour, the great Sufferer, the Son of Man, the Son of God, that the pure in heart shall see God, and that He will lead all men to the Father. On his fifty-third birthday he wrote to Mrs. Eobert Treat Paine : — December 13, 1888. Dear Mrs. Paine, — I thank you again, as I have thanked you many times before, and always with a fuller and fuller heart. Few men have had such happy years and such kind friends as have been given me. I wish I had been more worthy of them, but at any rate I am grateful for them, most of all for you and yours. I dare to believe it will keep on until I am a hundred. At present, however, I am looking forward to next Saturday, when I shall thank you again. Gratefully, Your friend, Phillips Brooks. CHAPTEK XXI 1889 WATCH NIGHT. OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES. LENT SERVICES AT TEINITT CHURCH. ILLNESS. SUMMER IN JAPAN. EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOKS. THE GENERAL CONVEN- TION. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL REFORMS. THE EVANGELI- CAL ALLIANCE. CORRESPONDENCE Watch night at Trinity had always been an impressive service, but the impression deepened with the passing years. There was something almost weird in seeing the church at midnight with a congregation coming from every direction, quietly pouring into all the vacant spaces, on the floor or in the galleries. Mr. Brooks always made it a point to have his friends in the chancel in order to more sympathetic utter- ance. A description of the service is here given, as it was reported in a Boston paper : — Everybody has heard of Methodist and Second Adventist watch-night meetings; of the prayers, of the songs, the testimo- nies, the audible manifestations of religious enthusiasm with which members of these communions are accustomed in certain localities, and especially were accustomed in former times, "to watch the old year out and the new year in." The impression derived from witnessing or reading accounts of such gatherings naturally is that a watch-night service is peculiarly adapted to places and people where and among whom religious fervor is more highly esteemed than the graces of culture. Accordingly the public devotional observance of the midnight hour between December 31 and January 1 is not extensively practised in New England. But, year after year, the wealthiest church in Boston, connected with that denomination which, of all Protestant com- munions, has the stateliest ceremonial of worship, celebrates "watch night " with services so impressive, so solemn, so deeply spiritual, that the memory of them remains indelibly stamped upon the minds of many participants. yoo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 Last night, when the hour of eleven opened, Trinity Church appeared to be filled in every part ; yet for some time afterward there was a constant stream of people entering and following the ushers, who kept on providing seats in all possible places until not another seat could be found; and then a multitude remained standing, until the last hour of 1888 was ended, and the first hour of 1889 had come. After an address by Rev. Leighton Parks, Rev. Phillips Brooks spoke three or four minutes, urging home the thought that during every moment of the closing year God's hand has held and guided us, and that during the coming year we rest still more completely in His love, not because He loves us more, but because we may open our hearts wider to receive His love. Then, as the hands of the clock that stood within the chancel railing pointed to one minute of midnight, the great congregation bowed in silent prayer until twelve strokes had been sounded forth, and 1889 had begun. The united repetition of the Lord's Prayer aloud ended this solemn stage of the service, after which Dr. Brooks again spoke a few earnest words, expressing the hope that all present might live stronger, purer, more manly, more womanly, more Christlike lives in the year that had begun than in the year that had closed. An incident occurred in the early part of the year which illustrates the tolerance of Phillips Brooks, not only in thought, but in action. As a member of the Standing Com- mittee of the Diocese, he labored for the confirmation of Eev. C. C. Grafton, who had been elected bishop of Fond du Lac, in Wisconsin, writing letters also in his behalf to other dioceses which were hesitating, urging that the comprehen- siveness of the church should not be restricted by any per- sonal or doctrinal prejudices. In a letter he remarks that he is surprised to find how earnest he has become in advo- cating the cause of one " for whom nothing in the world would have induced me to vote." 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, January 7, 1889. Dear Arthur, — You really ought to read "Ilian, or the Curse of the Old South Church." It is the most preposterous novel that any author ever wrote, and any publisher ever pub- lished. I have read it from beginning to end, and thanked you for It at every absurd page. I did not dream a book could be so bad. Therefore I bless you for a new sensation. ... I went ^T. 53] CORRESPONDENCE 701 to St. Paul's Church and preached there morning and evening the other Sunday, and had the usual curious and mixed sensations. I couldn't help feeling as if Father and Mother were sitting over in Pew No. 60, and as if I were both the preaching minister and the tall boy in the congregation. During January and February Mr. Brooks went again to Faneuil Hall for four successive Sunday evenings. He gave also one Sunday evening to a service in the Globe Theatre. There is the usual record of sermons at Appleton Chapel and of addresses at the Harvard Vespers. He was getting some relief under the burden he was carrying, for Trinity had called another assistant minister, — Rev. Roland Cotton Smith, in whose cooperation Mr. Brooks took hope and com- fort. How full his days were is evident from this letter to Eev. W. N. McVickar: — 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, Jannary 14, 1889. Dear William, — Is it indeed possible that a week from to- morrow evening you will indeed be here? 'Tis true! And I am all expectation. You and your sister will arrive, I hope, as early in the evening as you can. I am to be out of town all day, but shall be back by six o'clock, and dinner shall wait you at whatever hour after that you will come. About Sunday, the 27th, you are to preach at Cambridge in the evening. Alas that I must not hear you, but I must be at Faneuil Hall, where I am holding four Sunday evening services, but we will meet later and you shall tell me how the students liked your talk. You will preach for me, I hope, in the morning, and then we will make Koland Cotton Smith preach in the afternoon, so that neither of us shall be overworked. Cotton Smith is preaching excellently, and fast taking the work out of the hands of the old Eector. I hope now to get away from here on the evening of February 6, and spending a day in New York, to be in Philadelphia some time on Friday, the 8th. There I can stay, I hope, about a week, and it will be a delightful frolic. The sermons which Mr. Brooks delivered at Faneuil Hall or at the Globe Theatre differed in some respects from his ordinary preaching. In his note-books we see him in the process of preparation for what is requiring a greater effort of his strength than his ordinary sermon. He was not pro- 702 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 posing to preach down to these congregations, but to lift himself above even his highest level. He took for one of his texts the words of Christ, "I am among you as he that serveth." He did not urge upon his hearers the importance of goodness or righteousness in themselves, for some might have lent a deaf ear to his entreaty. He struck a deeper note, one that must resound in every soul, when he summed up practical religion in the effort to make others good. "Christ in the gospel never appears so much as one who is cultivating righteousness in Himself, but as one seeking to cultivate it in others." In his sermon at the Globe Theatre he dwelt on the neces- sity of a feeling of "need" as lying beneath the world's life and the history of its civilization. No discovery was made or work done without it; imagine it removed and there would be a vast stoppage. "In the spiritual life the absence of the sense of imperious need is the great cause of sluggish- ness, — the dulness of the churches compared with the vital- ity of the streets." He wrestled like a giant with his theme, till it seemed as if every soul must have felt the need which he portrayed. His text was the words of the centurion to Christ, "Sir, come down, ere my child die." Turning from these sermons we find him on the 15th of January at the dinner given to Professor Levering on the completion of fifty years' service at Harvard, where he spoke for the ministry, as bringing their tribute to the man of science. For himself, as he remarked, he had not been while in college or since a student who excelled in the natural sciences, and for mathematics which Professor Lovering represented he had shown no aptitude. And yet there re- mained "the value of forgotten knowledge, which has some- how passed into the blood. It was better to have known and lost than never to have known at all. At least the sense of the value of the sciences was something gained. It was all like forgotten but effectual periods in the world's history." He recognized "the debt which we all owe to a man who has made any department of life more complete, the power of scientific study to enrich life and make it more youthful, — ^T. ssl, A HARVARD ANNIVERSARY 703 the proud consciousness of a man who knows the world through which he is passing." 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, January 17, 1889. Deab Arthur, — ... How the familiar mill grinds on through these mid-winter months ! I hope the world is better for its gi'inding, and I believe it is. "We varied it the other night by a great dinner in honor of Joe Lovering and his com- pleted fifty years of professorship. Eliot and Peabody and Good- win and a lot of others loaded him with praise, and he himself looked happy and young and wonderfully as if he would like to begin again. To think that I myself remembered Cambridge for almost thirty-eight of those fifty years was solemn. There is no other news except that I have written half a ser- mon and hope to get the other half done by Sunday. And last night there was a Wednesday evening lecture, and William and Mary came in afterwards, and Parks turned up quite late. I wish that you were here this rainy afternoon. We would neglect our duty and talk. Now I will neglect mine and read. Ever affectionately, P. On the 21st of January he made the address on the occasion of the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Young Men's Chris- tian Association, when they were taking possession of their huilding on Boylston Street. His subject was the value of the institution, and the significance it had for human life. But as he went on he broadened his thought, as he did on every such occasion, till it included religion and the changes which it had undergone ; he spoke of this organization as one of the necessary forms which the changed form of religion was demanding. He had no fear of its interference with the churches of Christ, for it is the Church of Christ. Liberty, he impressed upon the young men, had been the character- istic word of the last hundred years, but it was a negative term, the removal of obstacles in order that a higher order might come in, the reign of human sympathy under the re- cognition of human brotherhood. "Cultivate the power of sympathy because it is the spirit of your age and the coming age." Sympathy "is curing more and more the evils of social life, making harmonious the differences of our com- 704 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 mercial life, entering more and more into the obstructed ways of secular life." ^ This varied picture of the active life of Mr. Brooks during the month of January is not exceptional, but may be taken as a type of all his months in every year. We follow him now into another Lenten season, where we can only pause to note the topics with which he was concerned. Friday evenings he devoted to the versicles in the Prayer Book, and as he expounded them the words, which had become so fa- miliar as to have almost lost their force, were seen to be full of unsuspected depths of meaning. He dwelt on the "effect of a largely constructed liturgy like ours, constantly used, upon the progress of religious thought in an individual and in a church." Because he kept himself alive to the deeper meanings of familiar words, he gave them force when he read them in the daily services. They were mistaken who thought that he slurred the service in order to get to the sermon. The service took on new beauty and impressiveness when he read it. "He puts into his utterance of creed and litany and prescribed forms of prayer," said a writer not of his own communion, "such wealth of personal consecration that a person who should hear that and nothing more would remem- ber the thrilling experience aU his days." On Wednesday evenings he dwelt on the "appeals to Christ" as given in the Evangelical narrative: "Come down ere my child die; " "Speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me;" "Give me this water that I thirst not, neither come hither again to draw;" "Remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom." There was one course of lectures that he was giving during Lent in this year, which deserves a special mention. He took up with his Bible class the evidences of Christianity, — what some have thought to be the most formal and perfunctory subject in the whole range of systematic theology. His natural utterance on these subjects was in his sermons in such a living way that Christianity became its own evidence, — and Christianity was Christ. It is evident from the preparation he made that he 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, pp. 170 ff. ^T. 53] CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 705 was doing his best to reach the minds of the young men before him in ways that they would appreciate. The distinc- tive features of his theology appear at every turn, and the thoroughness of his mind, as he takes up in succession, (1) Christianity, (2) Christ and the Trinity, (3) The Bible, (4) Miracles, (5) The Kesurrection, (6) The Church, (7) Per- sonal Experience, (8) Prayer. Although he did not value this kind of work as his best, yet if his notes of these lectures could be published, they would form a valuable manual for Christian instruction. As an instance of his method and in justification of these comments, an extract is here given from the last of these lectures, entitled "Personal Experience: " — What is the Christian religion for? The salvation of the world. But that must be by the salvation of men. And so we ask whether it has saved men. When we ask what it is to save a man, we remember what are a man's enemies. His sins, his discouragements, his sloths, his temptations. All of these keep man from the fulness of his life, from what God made him to become. Now the religion of Christ undertakes to rescue man from these evils, and to let him complete himself. Has it done that ? Who shall answer? Only they who have submitted themselves to its power. The difference of this proof from all others: danger of reasoning in a circle. The soul must stand in the sun- light to bear witness to the sun. The claim of the Christian faith is that there is a Divine Pre- sence among men, by whose agency Christ is forever present in the world and does in richer way that which He did during His incarnation, — the truth of the Holy Spirit. What did Christ do ? 1. He forgave men's sins, and so set them free for a new life. 2. He declared such a doctrine of humanity as made that new life seem to be the natural life of man. 3. He put the power of that new life into men, and made them strong with a power which they knew was not their own. 4. He comforted men for their sorrows with a positive consola- tion which made even their sorrows a source of strength. 5. He glorified life ; filling it with joy and making it seem a beautiful and noble thing to live. 6. He adjusted men's relations to each other by making them have common love for himself. VOL. n 7o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 7. He set unselfishness as the law of men's lives. Making them first devoted to Him and then, for His sake, to one another. 8. He made life spiritual, making the soul more than the body. 9. He declared immortality to the soul, making it know itself stronger than death. Now all these could only be known to the souls in which they existed, and to those whom they told of their experience. But that souls did know those experiences we cannot doubt. Look at St. John's Epistles, — "Beloved, now are we the sons of God," etc. And all of these are the experiences of men to-day. We can- not doubt their word. Then why not of all men ? Either : — 1. They are meant for a few and all are not capable of them. Show that this cannot be true. The essentially human char- acter of the experience. Only understand the need of difEerent types and properties of their elements. Or else : — 2. Men put some hindrance in the way. How unconscious this may be. The need of close self -inquiry as to the condition of mind. Need of asking what are the ways of openness. Those ways are : — 1. Prayer. The whole appeal of the nature to the Infinite. The asking of God to show Himself. The objective and sub- jective thoughts of prayer. The meaning of God's "hearing prayer " and doing things because we pray to Him. 2. Reading the Bible. The need of knowing the historic Christ. The hope that in Him we may find the help we seek. The strange neglect of and lack of acquaintance with the Gospels. 3. The readiness to give reality and value to the experiences of others. 4. The sense of our own incompleteness. Not to be satisfied, but always conscious of the prophecy of larger things. To count the highest experiences not impossible, that is the condition for the highest life. One may detect a somewhat unusual tone in the Sunday morning sermons delivered during this season of Lent. At least the texts imply a certain pathos in the mood which chose them, stealing over the preacher, as he sought in new ways to enforce the truth within him. Thus the sermon for Ash Wednesday was from the text, "Who knoweth if He will return and repent and leave a blessing behind him." ^T. 53] LENTEN SERVICES 707 The picture is of a departing God, once very near, now going away and going further. To some it is very real as a fact of experience. They did once have God nearer to them. The days of communion and obedience and realized love ; the definite stan- dards. And now the far-awayness of it all. Or to take the com- parison, not of past and of present, but of idea and realization. God is close to us in His own revelation, but far from us in our actualization of Him. This the deeper historic meaning. Either way the withdrawing God and the soul crying after Him. Strange situation! Driving Him away and yet calling on Him to stay. The mixed mystery of our inner life. . . . He certainly will return, else what mean these promises? He is not going willingly, nor angrily, nor carelessly. He is going because He rmLSt, because you will not have Him. He will return if you seek Him rightly. The gift He will bring back with Him is an offering to Himself. Restoration to be sought that we may have a life to give Him. This puts a motive into our repentance. Repentance for safety, even for cleanness, is not complete. The true motive that God may be glorified in us. This implies a certain essence of the misery of sin. It is that our sinful lives do not belong to and redound unto Him. That is the felt misery of the best lives when they fall into sin. They have dishonored God. They have nothing to render Him. Then the delight of His return, that once more they may do Him honor. The sense of exhilaration which thus enters into repentance. One of the sermons was on the text in the Prayer Book version, "He brought down my strength in my journey and shortened my days." Another sermon was on a verse from a Psalm: "I shall find trouble and heaviness, and I will call upon the name of the Lord." And still another from the •words of Christ: "It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." In this sermon he dwelt on the expenditure of energy for personal power and wealth and lower ends, — the giving of life for most unworthy things. The life must be given. Tou must expend it. You cannot keep it. It is going. What is there to show for it at the end? Is there the result of enlarged spiritual conditions in the world, so that first we and then our brethren are better for our having lived? He who perishes in Jerusalem claims Jerusalem for God. There are but few letters belonging to this moment. One 7o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 of them is important as giving Lis opinion on the various expositions appearing from time to time regarding the Epis- copal Church, its claims and their grounds. It was written to the Kev. George H. Buck : — 233 Clarendon Street, Boston, March 16, 1889. My deae Mr. Buck, — I do not know a single book about our Church which does not mingle with its exposition of what the Church is some notions, more or less erroneous, but certainly- private and personal, of the author. Therefore, I am quite out of the habit of asking any one who is at all interested in our Church to study anything but the Prayer Book. The Prayer Book, without note or comment, interpreting itself to the intelli- gent reader, — that is the best thing. And histories of our Church also are written with a purpose. There is not one which is not colored with the intention of its writer. Bishop White's "History" is the best, and some of Frederick D. Maurice's " Lectures on the Prayer Book " have much light in them. Let your friends know that the only real "claim " of the Church is the power with which it claims their souls and makes them better men. Then offer them its privileges if they are humble and ear- nest enough to know their need. I hope that you are well and happy, and I am Ever faithfully yours, Phillips Beooks. To the Kev. H. H. Montgomery, on the news of his ap- pointment as Bishop of Tasmania : — April 13, 1889. My deae Feiend, — This is indeed a startling letter. One cannot hear of such a great change in a dear friend's life without a moment's something which is almost like dismay before he lets himself go freely into the congratulations which are the true re- sponse to such intelligence. But I do congratulate you with all my heart. The great fresh world which you will go to will make all things new to you, and you will have the splendid sense of building for vast futures, and of touching the springs of great hopes. It is just what one has longed for a thousand times, who has worked in a world as old as yours, or even as old as ours. If I were an Englishman, I would beg you to take me with you, and make me a humble canon or something else which could give me a bit of share in the work which you will do. May God bless that work, and make you very happy in it. Those who followed the preaching of Phillips Brooks and ^T. 53] CORRESPONDENCE 709 contrasted his later with his earlier method were aware of a change, not only in the form of the sermons, but in the manner of their delivery. Instead of standing unmoved and apparently impassive, as he has been described while in Philadelphia or during his first years in Boston, he appeared to be profoundly moved, his physical system even to be shaken by the severe effort. Whether it was that preaching now exhausted his nervous force, or whether some other cause must be assigned, it was becoming evident that he was not well. His friends noticed the change in his looks with alarm. The Proprietors of Trinity Church sent to him this resolution passed on Easter Monday : — The Proprietors would respectfully recommend to the Rector, in view of the length of time that has elapsed since he has been away from us, and the amount of work that has fallen upon him, that he take a liberal vacation, and, if possible, go abroad. The late Colonel Henry Lee spoke what many were feeling when he wrote to Mr. Brooks : — Boston, May 3, 1889. I was shocked, as I have been several times of late, at your appearance. Who am I, to meddle in your affairs? Only one of many more thousands than you will ever know, to whom your existence is all important ; and as one of them I beg you earnestly to cease your incessant work this very day and depart, going by sea or land where you can find rest and recreation. I wish I knew who was your physician. I would urge him to order you off at once. If you knew of what importance, not only to your Church, but to the college, to our city, to all of us, is your life, you would do what you can to preserve it. As for Mr. Brooks himself, while he refused to admit that he was not as well as ever, yet there is evidence that he was aware of the need of some greater change and of absolute cessation from work. It had been a mistake, his plan of tak- ing rest only in alternate years. Perhaps it had worked well enough in earlier life, but it was trespassing on his strength, or his supposed strength, to keep up the practice longer. He realized that the time had come to lay aside work, to find some new country where all was fresh and strange, and 7IO PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 where for a while he might forget himself. So he had turned to Japan. He held long conversations with Kev. W. E. GrifBs, author of the "Mikado and his Empire," who encouraged him to make the venture. He read with great zest "The Soul of the Far East," by Mr. Percival Lowell. As the scheme took possession of his mind he grew enthusiastic about its possibilities. It added to his pleasure in contemplating the journey that he had secured his friend McVickar for a travelling companion. If he had misgivings about his health, they do not appear in his letters, which seem to overflow with a new buoyancy of spirits. To Mr, McVickar he writes : — 233 Clakbndon Street, Boston, March 20, 1889. My deak William, — I went down to Salem and lunched with the blessed Frankses. Then, after luncheon, I went over and saw Professor Morse, who is the biggest authority on Japan to be found anywhere. And such a collection of bowls and basins, of cups and candlesticks, of jars and jimcracks as he has ! My mouth is watering and my eyes are sparkling even now, in spite of several Lent services which have come in between. But what he says is this: that Japan is perfectly possible in summer; that it is very hot, but that the heat is not felt as much as it is here ; that you must wear the thinnest of clothing and the straw- iest of hats, and that it is as healthy as you please. He makes little or nothing of the rainy season. Says it rains worst in June and September, but declares that if we reach there about mid- July, and leave to come home about September 1, we shall have royal weather. It would seem, too, as if Japan were a rather singularly easy country to see. There is a central core of it which apparently contains most all which we shall care to see. Yokohama, Tokio, Nikko, Osaka, Kioto, and perhaps the inland sea of Nagasaki. These, with the country and the sights which lie between them, are enough to make us feel always that we know Japan, and these can easily be compassed in six weeks. In the afternoon there came to Jim Franks's study a certain Captain H , who has commanded steamships all about in the Chinese and Japanese seas, and he had many interesting things to say. But the main thing was that he, too, said there was no trouble about going there in the summer, and raved, as they all do, about the wonderful beauty of it all. And now, dear WiUiam, the middle of June is just upon us. ^T. S3'] VISIT TO JAPAN 711 It will come jiki-jiki, which, being interpreted, is "toute de suite, " and then we will say to the train at New York some fine morning, Peggi, which means "Go along," and before we know it we are there. Jim thinks he cannot go, which is so much the worse for him. But we will go, and all the parish apparatus and routine shall be for three good months as if it were not. Won't it be fine? Isn't it sad about ? Dear me, if that splendid fellow has indeed given way, who of us is there that can be sure of him- self for an hour? And yet there are encouragements as well. Here is getting engaged and starting out on a new life when it seems as if he would think things were about through with him. He 's like the fellow who lights up a new cigar just when it seems as if bedtime had really come. But there is a splendid courage about it, and it almost makes one ready to fling prudence to the winds and go in for it himself. But I guess I won't, on the whole. I can hear the chatter of Japanese tongues and the clatter of Japanese crockery in the distance, but just now I must get ready for service, and so must you. Affectionately yours, P. B. Mr. Brooks left Boston on the 10th of June for the ride across the continent, breaking the journey at Salt Lake City, where he spent a Sunday, and visited the Mormon Tabernacle. He does not seem to have been impressed by the appearance of the people, or by the features of their civi- lization. On the 20th of June he sailed from San Francisco for Yokohama in the steamship City of Sydney. There were but two passengers on board besides himself and Dr. Mc- Viekar. The eighteen days passed quietly, for the ocean was calm, and the only event which appealed to his imagina- tion was the dropping of one day from the record of time, Monday, July the 1st. " The lost day ! Think what might have come of it! The undone deeds! The unsaid words! " These are extracts from his note-book written on ship- board : — Difference between "a good fellow " and a good man. Preach on the tone of life, high or low, apart from special acts. Over the prairies racing the moon. Wednesday, June 12. Text, "God hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." The 712 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 way men bear each other's sins. The great sinful world on men's shoulders. Ah! there 's the key! Imagine that complete. Those wise blinds, through which you can see out, but cannot see in. "Thou hast wrestled and prevailed." The deeper life. The only question left, How to do one's duty. "I will not do this wicked thing and sin against God." The special definite resolve. "Unless the Lord build the house, their labor is but vain that build it." The inner spiritual building of everything. "Then would I flee away and be at rest." The deep impulse of escape and retirement. I would like to do one thing perfectly, and do only that the rest of my life. Yet, no ! A "spent sea" in history; e. g., the ages following the seven- teenth century. "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." What! a cliild's paradise? No! the eternal childlike, The Child in all great, simple actions. Like the captain's view of things at sea, so different from the landsman passenger's. The question whether all life is to be drawn in, — its great expansion into the supernatural denied it. Intention for exten- sion. The world it would make. Try to depict. "And the land tad rest fourscore years." The worth and dangers of rest. Awful the convulsion that does nothing. The beauty of our wax. It killed Slavery. What is the greatest, noblest, finest deed ever done on this earth ? What if we could put our finger on it ! Jehoram "reigned in Jerusalem eight years and departed with- out being desired." The being missed and its natural desire. The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do. Christianity all in the line of God's great first pur- poses. Coming in sight of a new land (Japan), with its mysterious multitudinous history, set in the ancient halls, like coming in sight of another man's life with its mystery. July 8, 1889. That Mr. Brooks was in the happiest of moods during the long idle days of the ocean journey is shown by his rever- sion to poetry. He was writing Christmas and Easter ^T. 53] CHRISTMAS CAROLS 713 carols, for which he had a peculiar gift or combination of gifts, — his grasp upon the large primitive instincts of life, and the child's gladness and simplicity of nature. The joy of many Easter and Christmas festivals wherein he had rejoiced as if a child himself with the children, keeping his faith the stronger because of his sympathy with childhood, — all this comes out in these carols, which he seems to have written with great ease, as if they had long been singing in his heart. But beneath them is the vivid consciousness of the possible perversion of theology. Thus among his notes he speaks of the expression the "visitation of God," which in mediaeval theology stood for the inexplicable calamities of life, and the higher idea of God's visitation of the world at Christmas tide. The silent stars are full of speech For who hath ears to hear ; The winds are whispering each to each, And stars their sacred lessons teach Of faith and hope and fear. But once the sky its silence hroke, And song o'erflowed the earth; And Angels mortal language spoke, When God our human utterance took. In Christ the Saviour's birth. This was the first rapid sketch of one of the Christmas carols. Another begins with the lines : — The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young. And a third : — Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas to-night ! This Easter carol also, which has become widely popular : — Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer! Death is strong, but life is stronger. In the letters from Japan, Mr. Brooks speaks of his jour- ney as a great success. The weather was unusually fine. I do not think there can be a place anywhere in the world more suitable for pure relaxation. ... Of all bright, pretty 714 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 places, it is the prettiest and the brightest. ... It is very fas- cinating, the merriest, kindest, and most graceful people, who seem as glad to see you as if they had been waiting for you all their years, and make you feel as if their houses were yours the mo- ment you cross the threshold, . . . as if good manners and civ- ility were the only ends in life. I never saw anything like it, and the fascination grows with every new street picture that one sees. We have had most hospitable welcome from American and English people ; almost every night in Yokohama we dined out, and here we have been given rooms at the club, which is a Gov- ernment affair and most comfortable. To-morrow night we are to dine with the English Bishop of Japan, and there is more of courtesy and kindness than we can accept. While most of the time was spent in travelling, and get- ting acquainted with what was most distinctive of the coun- try, no opportunities were lost of meeting the missionaries, and learning of their work. He was greatly impressed with Bishop Williams, of the American Mission. He came across one of the missionaries engaged in translating into Japanese "Pearson on the Creed," an elaborate and learned work of Anglican theology in the seventeenth century, and thought it unwise to confuse the minds of the Japanese with the technicalities and processes through which the Western mind had passed. Once only did he preach. In his letters home he speaks of the impression which he and Dr. McVickar made upon the Japanese by their unusual size. He was afraid that the jinrikisha men would rebel at the burden, but that happened only once. The Japanese were curious to get the measurements of the head and hands and feet of their extraordinary guest. The children called out, Daibutsu, which means the image of the great Buddha. Kioto, August 1, 1889. Mt dear Bob, — I am anxious to send you all at least one greeting from this queer and interesting land, and I must do it quick or not at all, for our short time here is half exhausted and the next steamer but one will carry us to San Francisco. The journey has been a great success thus far, and here we are perched on a breezy hill just outside of the brightest and gayest of Japa- nese cities with such a view of the confused and jumbled town ^T. 53] VISIT TO JAPAN 715 and the high hills beyond as not many city suburbs can furnish. It is a hot, sweltering afternoon. All the morning we have been looking at Mikado's Palaces and Buddhist Temples, dragged in jinrikishas through picturesque and crowded streets by trotting coolies who must remember us and hate us all the rest of their miserable lives. Now in the quiet afternoon there is a pleasant wind blowing across the hotel veranda, and all the time there comes the monotonous and soothing music of a Buddhist drum which a poor priest is beating at the Temple close to us, and which never seems to pause an instant from the sun's rising to its setting. It is all as calm and beautiful and difEerent from Bos- ton as anything can be. The bamboos are waving gracefully in the foreground and the pines are standing majestically behind. Japan is rich in both, and they are pictures of the way in which strength and grace meet in her history remarkably. "We are now in our fourth week on shore, and indeed I do not know how any one could make for himself a more delightful sum- mer than by doing just what we have done. A swift run across the continent, a slow and peaceful sail on the Pacific, and then this phantasmagoria of color and life and movement for six de- lightful weeks. And then the return over the familiar ways with much to think about and one's brain full of pictures. What could be better than that ? Do you remember our meeting Harleston Deacon long ago up among the barren heights of Auk ? I found him this year among the temples of NIkko, the sacredest of Japanese sacred places, and the deep thunder of his voice mingled beautifully with the chanting of the priest. There, also, were Bigelow and FenoUosa, both very interesting men. Besides them we have seen our missiona- ries and something of their work, though the schools are mostly now in summer vacation. They are good strong men, and the work which they are doing will be a true contribution to the du- bious future of Japan. But I wish I knew just how it is faring with you all. An afternoon on the terrace at Waltham would even more than repay the loss even of this pretty scene, and the strange sights which we shall see when we go out as it gets cooler. Better still, if you were all here ! But we will meet soon, and meanwhile be sure that I am thinking of you and wishing you all good. My best of love to Mrs. Paine and all the children and the grandchil- dren, and I am, dear Bob, Ever affectionately yours, P. B. On the return voyage he resumes his note-book : — 7i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 The strange personalness of a new land; becoming "ac- quainted " with it. As the Japanese build their houses to suit their mats. The Japanese smiling as he tells of his mother's death. Japan strangely self-conscious. Lack of sense of individuality in the East. "Why pluckest thou not thy right hand out of thy bosom to consume the enemy ? " The apparent indifference of God. What is God's enemy? The thing which is done upon earth, He doeth it Himself. Both engine and brake. Conservatism and radicalism parts of the same machine. Sermon on a man's discovering a meanness in himself from which he thought he was free (coming from new circumstances, e. g., travelling). Sermon on outgrowing temptations, falsely made cause for complacency. Like passing railway stations; the new ones are the old ones under new forms. The ultimate mystery of life is personality. All which stops short of that is partial. The impressions of nature, the truths of science, aU less than personal relations. The only final means of revelation. Recon- ciliation. The secret of Christ. God sent forth His Son. Two kinds of religion, — truth and person. All religions develop both. Love and faith are the powers. Houses for earthquake, built either very slight or very solid. E. S. V. P. So says nature with her invitations. A man behind whose closed eyelids light and darkness show their difference, though he can distinctly see no object. The latitude and longitude of life. "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." Christ the key of existence, not Buddha, nor any other. The Japanese giving a new name at the time of death. The new name of the new life kept hung up in the sacred place of the house. "While I am coming another steppeth in before me." Com- petition, — its naturalness and unnaturalness ; its advantages and horrors. Sure to be some day outgrown. As a method so often used for other things. Mark iii. 21. Christ's friends, not His enemies, said. He is beside Himself, and wanted to restrain Him. The limitations that Christians put to Christ. Mark V. 7. The demoniac crying out, "What have I to do with thee, Jesus ? " But Jesus shows that He has something to do with the Son of God. ^T. S3'] EXTRACTS FROM JOURNAL 717 "That the things which cannot be shaken may remain." The spider spins his web in the rice-pot. Japanese phrase for poverty. You might as well think to help the moon fighting its battle with the clouds. The balance and cooperation of content and discontent. A law, a truth, an institution, a Person. Which is Christian- ity ? There can be no doubt. The East haunted by the problems of reality and apparition, as well as by that of personality and impersonality. The present with the future on its back, like a Japanese mother and her child. Shakespeare's true apology for art: — Tet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean. Sermon on the variety of aspect of religion in the various ages of life, — youth's activity and middle age. The rising tide catching one against a precipitous wall. Es- cape impossible. If we hope for that we have not, then we work for it. The whole meaning of Reconciliation. "My people." God's word for the Jews. Its larger equiva- lent. The pastor and his parish. "Get thee behind me." The everlasting word to the tempter. Who cannot say it, dies. "A dislike in the mass Is a prejudice." Victor Hugo, "Toilers of the Sea," p. 61. Lives haunted like houses. A Tuan who is a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The Shinto (ancestor-worship) of Boston. Losing a Tuesday going over and picking up a Thursday com- ing back. August 28, 1889, lived twice on the Pacific. Pride before destruction. The great danger of boasting. Our liability to the sins from which we think ourselves most secure. A man's sufEerlng till the consequences of his sin are exhausted. Japanese preserving political traditions in the manner of mak- ing or serving tea. "There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known." The kind of world that perfect light shall make, and the kind of life in waiting for it. 71 8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 He shall save his soul alive. Ashamed of himself. Filled with all the fulness of God. Evening and morning were the first day. Ending and begin- ning everywhere. A man in Christ. By the middle of September Mr. Brooks was again in Boston, and had resumed his work. While he was in Japan he had not been well, and his enjoyment of what he saw, or of the hospitalities extended to him, had in consequence been diminished. He was the better, however, for the change, better than if he had tried to spend "a lazy summer " at home, as he at one time proposed to do. To the world he seemed vigorous and strong, or, as one of his friends abroad wrote to him, "the happiest and hopefuUest man I know." At Trinity Church, the first Sunday after his return, he spoke of God's ownership of the world, as giving it beauty and value: "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein." With what interest he was followed is shown in this extract from a daily paper : — As he passed quietly in to begin the service he looked and moved with all his old-time vigor, although some might fancy that his massive frame betrayed an appreciable loss of flesh. A slight cough, too, was also noticed during the reciting of a por- tion of the service. To the friends who embraced an opportunity to greet him, he manifested his unvarying cheerfulness and vi- vacity. It was in the pulpit, as always, that he appeared with all the fulness of his personality and mental powers, and when he spoke, it was with a torrent of language and abounding imagery that seemed to have gathered even more than the customary mo- mentum from contact with the Oriental glow of life and scenes. Whether from association with these, or from the feelings evoked by return to the family of his congregation, he supplemented his unsurpassed rapidity of thought and utterance with more than his usual emotional quality. On the second Sunday after his return he went to Cam- bridge to address the students at the opening of a new year of college life. He spoke of the new system of voluntary prayers as no longer an experiment. "Hitherto there had ^T. 53] GENERAL CONVENTION 719 been a certain self -consciousness about it which it was now time to drop. It was the legitimate successor of all the best religious influence." He urged upon the students to give their best to the college if they would get its best in return, " treat it not as a playground or living shop, but as a living being with a soul caring for spiritual nature, and it will bestow its riches, for indeed it has them.^^ The address was noticeable for its intense earnestness. His love for Harvard came out in a few sentences at its close. "Many noble men have rejoiced to live for the College, asking nothing as they grew old but to do something more for her before they died. "Will you join their army? What she asks of you is to be as full men as you can, for so her life grows fuller." The General Convention met in New York in October, when he was the guest of his brother Arthur. It was quiet compared with that in Chicago, three years before, and the proposal to change the name of the Church was not renewed, as he had wrongly prophesied. He took part in the discus- sions on the revision of the Prayer Book, urging the substi- tution of Psalm Ixiv for Psalm Ixix in the Evening Prayer for Good Priday. "We listen to Jesus crying, 'Father, for- give them, for they know not what they do, ' and then pro- ceed at once to say, ' Let their table be made a snare, to take themselves withal, ' " etc. In the debate on recommitting the Prayer Book for further revision, he expressed the hope that the task would be continued for three years longer, for many points needed further consideration. He spoke against introducing the versicles, "O God, make speed to save us," "O Lord, make haste to help us," on the ground that it seemed as if the purpose was to seek uniformity with the English book even in small details, rather than to meet any great demand for new forms of devout expression in view of the changed conditions which prevail in our great and new Western land. In a proposed canon on marriage and divorce Mr. Brooks objected to a phrase forbidding "clandestine marriages:" "If we are to forbid a thing, we must have some penalty for its disobedience, which in this case would obviously be exclusion 720 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 from Holy Communion." He sLouH feel himself unable to deny the sacrament to people who in their youth had been indiscreet enough to make a clandestine marriage. "There is a danger of making marriage too difficult." The subject of "divorce" had been in his mind as he was returning home from Japan. In his note-book he expresses hints of hia opinion. The "putting away," which Christ condemned, was not the equivalent of our present divorce system ; it was purely arbitrary, with no trial or opportunity of defence, the man's right only, while the woman had no corresponding power; it was originally for some cause which includes more than adultery, and it allowed remarriage (Deut. xxiv. 2). Our divorce is a different matter, involving different necessities. The Mosaic institution which Christ modified had reference to inheritance and preservation of purity of descent. There are strong objections to using the Holy Communion for enforcing a position on this subject, espe- cially in the matter of its administration to the dying, in view of the perfect conscience with which divorces are obtained. It would be more consistent to deny divorce altogether. But the whole question is not a clear one in view of the fact that Christian nations have so differed regarding it and so differ still. Circumstances have changed since the time of Christ. The spirit is more than the letter. On his return from the General Convention, Mr. Brooks preached a sermon at Trinity Church more hopeful in Its tone than his sermon in 1886. He reviewed the results the convention had accomplished in a kindly way, declaring himself not altogether in sympathy with the changes made in the Prayer Book, but speaking of the convention as an inspiring one in its manifestation of high moral purpose, in its desire for Christian unity, and in its zeal for missionary work. He went to the Episcopalian Club, where the con- vention was passed in review, making a speech which pleased and satisfied its members and was pronounced by some to be "churchly." He was apparently forgiven for what he had said of the convention of 1886. But he was so genuine, so rational, so human, that forgiveness was not difficult to grant. ^T. 53] PROHIBITION 721 Two sermons of Phillips Brooks are notable for his advo- cacy in his own way of causes of social and political reform. On Fast Day he discussed "the public schools" and "pro- hibition." In regard to the first he maintained that the state has incorporated its best ideas in the public schools, the three essentials of character without which a state cannot ex- ist — freedom, intelligence, and responsibility. Not only the right of the state, but its duty in this matter of primary education must be boldly maintained. If scholars were to be withdrawn from the public schools into private institutions, the state must assert its prerogative and enforce on them its principles, insisting that they shall be the equals of the pub- lic schools in cultivating freedom, intelligence, and responsi- bility. On the subject of prohibition he declared his preference for restrictive legislation as the true policy, on the ground that it gave the opportunity for self-control. But, on the other hand, his interest in the end to be attained was so real and absorbing that he could say : — ■ I have no charge or reproach to make against the most extrav- agant temperance reformer. I can understand the intensity of his feeling, which urges the most sweeping laws which he can secure. But, it seems to me that instead of legal restriction, the great advance in this direction is to arouse the conscience of the people to live for the State and for their fellow men, and not for themselves; to let no selfish desire stand in the way of any rea- sonable measure which shall help to overcome this evil. It does no good to champion this or that public measure, while as yet our own hearts and consciences are untouched. In this as in similar matters it is very easy for intense earnestness to develop into mere partisanship, in which condition we oppose all plans which do not harmonize with our own, even though they may con- tain much good. Kather let us keep ourselves pure and broad, ready to accept any truest and best method by which at the time our purpose may be achieved. He preached a sermon on Civil Service Eeform, in re- sponse to a request that the clergy would treat the subject from their pulpits on Thanksgiving Day. The sermon was, however, given the following Sunday, with this preface : — VOL. n 722 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 When Thanksgiving morning came, it seemed impossible to preach it, with a furious fire raging in the city, awakening awful memories of the old conflagration and baffling all prediction as to where it would be stopped. With everybody anxious and excited, it seemed quite impossible to ask those who came to church to sit quietly and listen to a discussion on the meaning and duty of Civil Service Reform. The interest of the sermon lies in revealing his devotion to the Idea of nationality, and to the underlying principles of a republican form of government. The text was from the Old Testament, "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that thou shalt speak unto the kingdom of Israel" (Exodus xix. 6). That one should take a text from the Old Testament for Civil Service Reform might appear to some, he said, as evidence of the incompetence of the clergy to deal with living political issues. The old reproach of ministers that they lived in the Old Testa- ment and preached about the sins and virtues of the Patriarchs, and not about the sins and virtues of the modern world, is perhaps obsolete. It is hardly worth while to ask how far it was ever deserved. That which it most concerns us to observe about it is the misconception which it indicated, on the part both of preach- ers and of hearers, of the true place and use of that wonderful portion of the word of God in which the story of God's dealings with his chosen people is related. The history of the Jews ap- peared to some men to be an utterly outgrown, uninteresting record of a people who perished as a nation centuries ago, and the constant recurrence to it seemed to be a hopeless effort arti- ficially to keep alive the dead. To other men it seemed as if many, at least, if not all, of the details of Jewish life were of perpetual obligation, patterns to be mechanically copied and re- peated to the end of time. He commented on the Old Testament as still the " au- thoritative text-book of nationality," despite the manifest failures to enforce its teaching in Christian history, as in the notion of the divine right of kings, or in Puritan attempts to make the law of Moses the law of God for modern life. "God, may we not say, was too present with His modern world to let them treat Him as if He had died two thousand M-v. 53] CIVIL SERVICE REFORM 723 years ago." But the thought of the Old Testament lives on. The nation is sacred and struggles to assert its sacredness. "At the moment when it almost seemed as if the notion of the sanctity of the state had perished, and nations were com- ing to be regarded as only joint stock companies for mutual advantage, — there has come this wonderful thing, the sa- credness of human life, standing up and demanding recog- nition : " — Kepublican government is open to the influx of the essential sacredness of human life itself. The essential nature of humanity is so divine that every effort of man after self-government is a true echo of the life of God. The simplest republic is sacred as no most splendid monarchy could ever be. The divinity which used to hedge a king fills all the sacred life of a free people. Not down from above by arbitrary decree, but up from below, out from within by essential necessity, proceeds the warrant of authority. The sacredness of man, of the individual man ; the cultivation, not the repression, of his personality; individualism not institu- tionalism; institutions only for the free characteristic develop- ment of the individual, — those are the tokens of healthy life, the watchwords of true progress. A state in which the people rule themselves is able to realize the sacredness of the nation more profoundly than any other. Popular government is not the last desperate hope of man, un- dertaken because everything else has failed. It is the consum- mation toward which every previous experiment of man has strug- gled. It is no reckless slipping down into the depth of anarchy. It is a climbing to the mountain top of legitimate authority. The public ofiBcer embodies the nation's character, expresses its spirit and its sanctity. The public servant is not simply a man hired by the State to do a certain work. He is the State itself doing that work and so making manifest at one point its intrinsic life and character. Is popular government naturally disposed to corruption and misrule, and so must you force upon it against its nature an in- tegrity and unselfishness which it instinctively hates and despises, or is it the constant struggle of popular government to bring its best men to power, and have you only to work in confederation with that struggle and against the enemies which hinder its success ? 724 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 To make America to be more truly American, -wltli a pro- founder faith in and loyalty to herself, to resist any attempt to impose the will of a man or a party on the free action of Ameri- cans, this sums up the duty of every reformer who believes that thus strengthened and set free, America will of her own nature send forth her own true governors. That he shared in the prevailing sense of anxiety about the country which was prevalent at the time is evident from this passage : — We cannot forget the stress and strain to which, as all men feel, the whole system of human government, popular government like every other, is evidently in the near future of the world to be subjected. We believe in our institutions as we believe in a strong ship in which we sail out upon the sea. But we cannot look forth upon the sea on which we are to sail and not behold it black with threatening storms. We are full of faith that the good ship will weather them, but what fools we are unless we look not merely to the soundness of the timbers which compose her structure, but also to the character of her officers and crew! In the great trial of popular institutions which is coming, the most critical of all questions concerning them will be as to their power to control their own leadership and to express the better and stronger, and not the worse and weaker, portions of their life through those whom the nation calls from the mass of her citizens and sets in public stations. During the month of November Mr. Brooks was conduct- ing prayers at Harvard, as he had also given his quota of Sunday evenings to Appleton Chapel from time to time throughout the year. But for some reason, probably the ill health which had been so visible in his face and in the shrinkage of his form in the spring as to induce much com- ment, he had not enjoyed the work at Harvard as in pre- vious years. He spoke of his period of service there as "distinctly an off term," intimating that the sound of his voice had grown familiar and tiresome. For whatever reason he seemed disappointed, and at moments inclined to dreary forebodings about the future. To an invitation from Eev. Lyman Abbott to take part in the services of his installation as pastor of Plymouth Church, Mr. Brooks wrote the following letter: — ^T. S3l EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE 725 Wadsworth House, Cambbidge, December 2, 1889. Deab Db. Abbott, — ... I thank you for the friendly im- pulse which made you wish that I should come and take any part in the most interesting service of your installation. I value that impulse of yours very deeply, and I always shall. I may most frankly say that there is no man from whom I should more joy- fully receive such a token of confidence and affection. I should like exceedingly to come. I would make every effort to do so. There is nothing, I am sure, in any canon or rubric which would prevent my coming. I am not very wise in rubrics or canons, but I do not remember one which says a word about our ministers sitting in Congregational councils. ... As to the function of a member of an ordaining council, I am disgrace- fully ignorant. I have been nothing but an Episcopalian all my life. What does an installer do, I wonder. And what would the Congregationalists say when they saw me there ? "Would it not be better that I should come, if possible, and utter the interest which I really deeply feel by giving out a hymn or reading a lesson from Scripture at the installation service? And then, if at the last moment, something here made it impos- sible for me to come, perhaps another man might do my impor- tant duty in my place, and I should be with you in spirit and bid you godspeed all the same. These are my questions. In view of them, do with me what you think best. I hope I have written intelligently, but since I began to write, several of these boys have been in with their big questions which they ask with as much apparent expectation of an immediate and satisfactory answer as if they were inquiring the way to Boston. How delightful they are ! We are all re- joicing in the good which you did here and left behind you. It was a distinct refreshment and enlargement of all that had been done before. We will do our best to keep the fire from going out until you come again. Meanwhile, I hope I have not written too vaguely about the council, and I am Ever faithfully yours, Phillips Bkooks. In the first week of December he took part in the meetings of the Evangelical Alliance, which held its session in Boston. One evening was assigned to him, when he made an address occupying nearly an hour in its delivery. His speech has been published in the proceedings of the society, where, in its intensity and tumultuousness, it still excites the reader. 7^6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 One can understand his rapidity of utterance in reading it, for the excitement may be felt in every sentence. He threw all considerations of form to the winds, apparently anxious to make a fuU utterance of his convictions. He travelled over the whole field of theology, coordinating all his beliefs with the central truth that every man is the child of God. He was careful to have it understood in his opening remarks that he had not chosen his subject ; it had been assigned to him, — "The Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity;" but if he could have chosen, there was no subject upon which he would have desired more to speak. He recalled the origin of the expression by the author of "Ecce Homo." After more than a quarter of a century he took up the phrase and gave it his own interpretation. It had originally been de- fined as "the love of humanity grounded in the conviction that Christ is the type and ideal of every man." This he had believed and preached; but according to his own definition, "the enthusiasm for humanity is based upon the conviction which Christ implanted, that every man is the child of God." He seemed to go beyond himself in the fiery zeal of his earnestness as he enforced this principle in all its impli- cations. The address cannot be analyzed here or even its synopsis attempted. But one passage may be cited : — Do I believe that Jonathan Edwards, when he has told me about the power and the majesty of the divine will, has told me the whole truth? Do I believe, on the other hand, that Chan- ning, when he has told me of the purity and dignity of human nature, has told me the whole truth ? God, revealed to me by the deepest thoughts of those who have lost themselves in His existence ; man, revealed to me by the deep and tender utterances of those who have lived in supreme sympathy with him ! God and man, shall they stand separate ? It is the Christ, the God- man that I see. The great Christ-truth of the Sonship of man to God takes possession of these things which have been frag- ments, as we have heard this afternoon, and blends them in their glorious whole. We have feared that man should be a traitor to God. There is great danger also, — who shall measure dangers where they are all so tremendous? — there is vast danger lest man be a traitor to man. It is thirty years, I suppose, since Mrs. Browning sang, in one of her characters: — Rev. Arthur Brooks ^T. S3'] A CHRISTMAS SERMON 727 This age shows, to my thinking, still more infidels to Adam Thau directly, by profession, simple infidels to God.' A letter to the Eev. Arthur Brooks, which, like so many of his letters, seems to say but little and yet reveals so much of the man in his most characteristic mood, closes the record for the year : — 233 Clabkndon Street, Boston, December 26, 1889. Deab Aethxjk, — When we came home from Jim's, where we had eaten our Christmas dinner last night, I found the big box in my front entry, and I slowly extricated from it the delightful lamp, with all the world upon its globe. Indeed, I never thought that I should own a globe like that of yours which had excited my youthful wonder. And here it is, all my own, and with a lovely lamp to set it on, and I can hardly wait for the evening shades to prevail that it may take up its wondrous tale. I think of giving a party to let people see it, and at the same time im- prove their geography by study of its globe. I cannot do that for a week or two, but meanwhile. Bishop Clark is coming to spend two or three days, and preach for me on Sunday. He in- vited himself, saying that he would like to preach in Trinity Church once more. He shall see the lamp, and I am sure it will brighten him up. ... I am hoping to look in upon you on the 16th of January, when I am coming on to help install Lyman Abbott at the Plymouth Church. Then you shall tell me all about Hart- ford and the good things which you did there, and I will tell you all about the Evangelical Alliance and Greer's speech. And we will mingle our tears in memory of Browning and Lightfoot, and altogether it seems as if it would be very pleasant. Until that time you must think of me as sitting gratefully in the warm light of the new lamp, very calm and very happy. We trace the working of his mind in some brief hints of his Christmas sermon on the text, " Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding." The greatest is the kindest and the dearest. Tendency to run 1 Cf. for the Address in fuU, National Needs and Remedies. The Discussions of the General Christian Conference held in Boston, Mass., December 4, 5, and 6, 1889, under the Auspices and Direction of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States. New York : The Baker and Taylor Co. 1890. 728 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1889 to the little in our religion. The great landscapes, the great thoughts suitable for Christmas time. Their belonging to all men makes them more and not less truly ours. The dear earth and dear sky. Dear humanity. It is not relative size, but true relationship that makes the grip. Ask yourself if your largest were not most sympathetic. CHAPTER XXII 1890 SPEECH AT THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. LENTEN AD- DRESSES IN TRINITY CHURCH, NEW TORK. CHANGE IN MANNER OF PREACHING. CORRESPONDENCE. ADDRESS AT THE CHURCH CONGRESS. THANKSGIVING SERMON "Regret at leaving any past; but quick! seize what is precious before it is too late; then go! Seize Wisdom, Faith, Hope; then forward!" These were the words ad- dressed to the congregation at Trinity Church after the bell had struck which announced the death of the old year and the coming of the new. With the coming of 1890 we enter upon the last year in the parish ministry of Phillips Brooks. All his years seem great, yet this stands out with a distinct character of its own, in some respects the greatest of them all. It was not that the incidents of his life were more striking than in pre- vious years, but the life itself seems greater and more im- pressive. He had now reached the age of fifty-four, and had kept the thirtieth anniversary of his ordination. Twenty- one years had gone by since he became the rector of Trinity Church. There was no outward sign of weariness or exhaus- tion as he entered the fifty-fifth year of his life, for on the contrary he summoned the energies of his being to make more effective the utterance God had given him. He had attained the simplicity for which he had aspired and strug- gled. Intellectual difficulties about religion or the world process had long ceased to embarrass him. His philosophy of life was the same with which he started, only it had now become part of his being, identified with his inmost person- ality. He had this one theme, the saoreduess, the beauty, 730 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 the glory of life, and that because all men were the children of God, and Christ was the eternal Son. This one theme ramified into a thousand variations, always new, always dif- ferent, and rich beyond measure, as the theme in nature is simple, but inexhaustible in the beauty and variety of its manifestations. Whenever he spoke, the subject was to him as if it were new, and this sense of freshness and novelty was contagious. Wherever he went, whatever might be the occasion, he lifted his banner whereon was written the sacred- ness and the possibilities of life. As some were blind to the beauty of outward nature, others, the greater part of men, were blind to the wealth and the splendor of the spiritual world, and yet ready to recognize it when pointed out to them. This was his work, to recall men to their spiritual environment, to remind them of their spiritual heritage, and show them its content. He quotes in his note-book the words of Schleiermacher as though he were applying them to himself: "Now this is just my vocation, — to represent more clearly that which dwells in all true human beings, and to bring it home to their consciousness." But what seemed to rise above every other characteristic of his preaching or his conversation was the inextinguishable and boundless hope. He would not allow himself to be daunted by any circum- stances of life in proclaiming the salvation by hope. Amidst countless voices of despair, or the wailings of misery, or the manifestations of indifference which surged about him like a chorus striving to silence or drown his utterance, his voice rose above them all, proclaiming hope and the blessedness of life in itself, the sacredness of humanity and all its legiti- mate interests. Nor was it that he did not see the evil, the misery, and the sin. More than most men was he called into contact with suffering and with sorrow in their pathetic and tragic forms. Constant ministrations to the sick and dying, to those in deepest mourning, filled up his days. His gift of consolation was so marvellous that it must needs be in perpetual exercise. The more hideous forms of evil, the evidences of vice, lives from which almost all the light had gone out, — these things were familiar. Then there were his ^T. 54] PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS 731 own personal sorrows and disappointments, the growing lone- liness, "If any man knows what loneliness is, I do," he once said of himself; possible misgivings about his health, of which he spoke to no one ; the feeling, an awful one to him, that youth was departing and with it might be lost the fresh- ness of his outlook on life ; the possibility that he might not live to see what life would soon reveal, — all these combined to raise their varying strains of hopelessness and sadness, and still the voice that was in him soared above the discord- ance and confusion, proclaiming hope, and joy, and always cheerfulness as the word of God to man. He had to fight harder, it may be, to retain his faith, but for this very rea- son his faith grew stronger and more secure. However it may be explained, so it was that he gained an ever deepen- ing conviction that the world, whether of nature or of human- ity, had been redeemed and glorified in Christ. In the light of this redemption the world never looked fairer or richer, or life more attractive than now, till it almost pained him to address young men with the prospect before them of a vision which he could not live to see. He resented every attitude or criticism which implied that there might be anything fun- damentally wrong where men were using their God-given fac- ulties to open up the meaning of man's environment. Let us take one more and a final glance at the equipment which made possible this outlook on the world, — so rich, so comprehensive, so generous and rare. He was not a philos- opher in the conventional meaning of the term, but in its larger and truer sense he had gained what philosophy could give. In the working of his mind we may trace the results of the long history of philosophy, from the time of Plato to his own age. There was nothing in the line of philosophical development beyond the range of his endeavor to comprehend and to adjust in a large scheme of the world's order. He had this peculiarity, when compared with others engaged in the task of explaining the world, that what they were think- ing he was not only thinking, but feeling and living. He was not a professed student of philosophy or the systems of great thinkers, yet he inquired of them, and he seemed to know, as 732 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 if he had made their search the object of his life, what it was that they stood for in relation to the world problem. He was an idealist with Plato. With Kant he lived in the human consciousness. He felt the force of the transcen- dental philosophy. There are hints of the Berkeleian princi- ple, as well as reminders of Hegel's ruling idea. Yet on the other hand he retained his youthful devotion to Bacon in the idealization of the world of outward nature, while in Lotze he found a healthful check for the extravagance or one-sidedness of a transcendental idealism, — the purely intellectual esti- mate of things. He still retained the vision of his youth, when he saw the world transfigured as in ancient Neoplatonic reverie ; but he overcame its error and weakness by giving the central place in thought and life to the Incarnation, thus gaining unity and simplicity, the power of the personal Christ as the bond of union with God. He held the truth of the immanence of God, in nature and in humanity, uniting with it the personality of God in His distinctness from both, whose personal will was the final explanation of all the issues of life and thought. In the various addresses he now made, or in the sermons preached, we may see some of these points illustrated. Thus, in January, he spoke to the merchants of Boston at a ban- quet of the Chamber of Commerce, when his speech was the amplification of the words of Bacon: "Not for gold, or sil- ver, or precious stones was commerce instituted, not for silks or spices, nor for any other of those crude ends at which thou aimest, but first and only for the child of God, that is to say, for light." 1 He began his address by remarking that it was a privilege "to sit in the midst of a multitude of merchants and see the modern look in their faces and catch the modern tone in their voices ; it is the merchant to-day who holds the reins and bears the responsibility of life." This was the report of his speech : — Let it be our place to rejoice that the world had not fulfilled itself, — that man, so marvellously mysterious as he was, evidently was beginning to realize that he had not begun to display the power 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. i. p. 226. JET. 54] NATURE AND MAN 733 that was in him. And let ua take up holdly the responsibility which belonged to his enlarged outlook. The one thing that grew upon him as he grew older, he said, was the mysteriousness of human life and the absolutely unfulfilled powers that were in humankind. His one great assurance was that the world was bound to press onward and find an escape from the things that terrified it, not by retreat, but by a perpetual progress into the large calm that lay beyond. The very things that made men hesitate, fear, and dread were the things in which we most re- joiced, and which we could not possibly surrender. The things that made it beautiful to live to-day were the enlarged opportu- nity, the enlarged intelligence, the enlarged communication, the magnificent freedom, and the increased conveniences of human life. These were the things that made the enormous and fierce competition of mankind; but these also were the things which mankind, having once tasted, never could surrender, and so it must be through progress and not retreat, through greater en- largement of human life and not restraint in its regions of thought or action, that the future of mankind was going to realize itself. Let us look forward and believe in men. Let us believe that every power of man put forth to its best activity must ulti- mately lead to the large consummation of the complete life to all the sons of men. To be in the thick of that seemed to be the glory of a single human life. It was for us to rejoice in the richness of the life in which we were placed, — the richness of thought and the richness of action, — to believe in it with all out hearts, to hesitate at nothing. But it seemed to him the very newness of our life, the very newness of business life and of schol- arly life, compelled a complete loyalty to those great fundamental things which never changed. The more change came, the more absolutely we were bound to hold fast to those things which must be the strength of every changing civilization, every activity of men's thought or nature. Those things were integrity and public spirit. Let those be alive among our thinkers and merchants, and the thinkers and merchants needed them equally, and then we might welcome whatever great changes had to come in the future. It was because those were being preserved, as he be- lieved, most earnestly, most religiously, that we were able to look forward into the future without a fear. There never was a time for men to live like this time. His imagination was working in the same line as he went in January to the Leather Trade dinner, noting down this point to be made in his speech : — 734 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 Each business touches the imagination. It stands between nature and man and turns the wonderful world to human use. Behind the carpenter, the waving forest. Behind the factory the sunny cotton field, and before both m/in, human life, made stronger, happier by the transformation which they work. These the two great things of the earth, nature and man. Behind your business is the world of cattle on a thousand hills, the lowing herd in the pasture, the rush of buffaloes across the prairie, the bleating of flocks in the fold, — these bright and airy pictures ; and in front of it man, with this tough element in his civilization which you bring there for his comfort. He had taken offence at something which lie had heard uttered in disparagement of nature and of its study, as if the love of nature stood in the way of the spiritual life. His answer to it was a sermon at Trinity Church to "a great gathering," when his text was the words of St. Paul: "For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the reveal- ing of the sons of God," and his subject the relations of nature and humanity, — the waiting attitude of nature for the perfect man : — How full were Paul's words of the spirit of our time! For what was Science doing to-day? Was she not building up and completing man so that he might be more and more able to ask of Nature what she means, and call forth from her the great forces of the world? The thing men were looking for was not that Nature should become more and more rich or full, but that man should become more worthy of the answers and the revelations which Nature could make to him of herself. This was also true of the poetry of the time, for it was a char- acteristic of the verse of the nineteenth century that it felt a soul in Nature. And it was the pain at the great soul of Nature that she could not do for man what she could do were he worthy as a son of God. The world was waiting to-day to do the things for man that it could not do so long as he had not in himself the son of God. Well, man had declared himself the son of God, and that was the lesson of those wondrous pages, yet men stumbled over them with little conception of what they meant, and spoke of miracles as incredible simply because they never happened before or since. Why, the Son of God never manifested Himself before or since, MT. 54] THE MIRACLE 735 and that was the true philosophy of miracles. It might be that Christ did things which had in them only the ordinary forces of nature, but He gave liberty to the soul of the world, and gave it power to manifest itself. The question of the miracle, its actuality or its possibility, was at this time one of the disturbing issues in the churches. Phillips Brooks encountered it in his preaching, receiving sharp protests from those Vfho dissented, urging him to aban- don what was unprofitable and men no longer believed. His answer to such protests was the mild reply that the pulpit should be free, or that if all lived up to the truth they did believe, it would be well. There are many of his letters, many reports of conversations with him, turning on this point. Young men came to him with the difficulty. It was keeping them out of the church, or preventing their whole- souled allegiance to Christ. He did what he could to help them by argument or by statement of the question in a new light. He was troubled by an attitude in which he did not sympathize, and he seems to have kept his deeper conviction in the background as something they could not share. But in a sermon preached in 1889 — one of the most characteris- tic sermons he ever wrote — he gave full scope to his devo- tion. The text indicates his attitude toward this and every other conviction he held, "Eejoicing in the truth." It was one thing to helieve, and another to rejoice. He enumerates the points of belief wherein he rejoiced, and in doing so comes to the miracle : — There is the man who rejoiceth in the truth of the miracle, and for whom the earth he treads is always less hard, more soft and buoyant, because it has once trembled under the feet of Christ. He is glad through all his soul that the hard-seeming order of things has once and again felt the immediate compulsion of the Master soul. Critical as he may be in his judgment of evidence, he does not grudge assent because of any previous con- viction of impossibility. He is glad to believe. Belief to him is better than unbelief. Every sunrise is more splendid, every sunset is more tender, every landscape has new meanings; the great sea is mightier and more gracious ; life has more fascina- tion, death has more mystery, because Jesus Christ spoke to the 736 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 waters, and shone in the transfiguration glory, and called Laz- arus out of the tomb, and stood himself in the bright morning outside his own tomb door at Jerusalem. Mr. Brooks seems at this time to have been making more occasional addresses than usual. Thus, in addition to those already mentioned in this first month of the year, he went to a Browning service and spoke; twice to the Harvard Ves- pers ; to the Grand Opera House, where he preached on a Sunday evening ; to Cambridge to talk on Foreign Missions to theological students, and to a meeting of the Yale alumni. He went out to Cambridge again as Lent approached, Feb- ruary 17, to meet the alumni of the Episcopal Theological School, who were holding a "retreat" in preparation for their work. He did not like the word, but he went deter- mined to do all that was asked of him, giving three "medi- tations " on the words of the great Intercessory Prayer, and rising early on the morning of the second day of the meeting in order to administer the Holy Communion. In his parish during Lent he was making three addresses every week. On Wednesdays his subject was the Joys of Christ: His incar- nation, — obedience, consciousness of brotherhood, transfigu- ration, resurrection. On Fridays, the Sufferings of Christ: His incarnation, — persecution, disappointments in friends, the mystery of Gethsemane, the crucifixion. With his Bible class he took up the church as it was in the mind of Christ, following its presentation in history, ancient and mediseval, and closing with the modern church and the church of the future. He was preaching on Sundays in Lent at Trinity, and his record shows him going to other places, — to the Old South Church, to Winchester, to Springfield, to Eoxbury, to Newton Lower Falls, to Providence. As if this were not enough, he gave an address lasting for an hour every Mon- day noon at St. Paul's Church, in Boston. These services were intended for business men, but long before twelve o'clock the church was filled with women, with the clergy of Boston and of the surrounding towns, as well as students of theology, so that business men were crowded out. A letter of remonstrance was sent to Mr. Brooks : — ^T. 54] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 737 Boston, March 13, 1890. Dear Sir, — Will you inform me whether the Monday noon services at St. Paul's during Lent are intended to be "Business Men's Meetings," or not? There is a general impression on the street that they are, and the lectures would seem to strengthen the impression. Yet the preponderance of women in the audi- ence would seem to belie the impression. If the meetings are intended particularly for business men, would it be unjust to others to reserve the central aisle for business men only until 12.05, for instance? That such a step would be approved I am sure from conversations both at the church and on the street. Business men feel, as far as my knowledge goes, that if it is their service, it is keeping them out to have nine tenths of those in the pews women, who can get there before twelve, and the majority of whom can, and probably do, hear you on Sunday. The business men from the suburbs or distant cities cannot hear you on Sundays, we will assume, but can on Monday noon. I know of many men who would attend the noonday service on the Mondays in Lent but for the fact that they cannot get to St. Paul's before twelve, and at that hour the seats are taken and the aisles crowded, so they remain away. If the service is pri- marily for business men, they are at a great disadvantage at pre- sent ; if not primarily for them, of course they must take their chances with the rest. A line will be appreciated by many friends, etc. A similar experience awaited him at Trinity Church, New York, where he went during Lent to give a course of ad- dresses to business men on six consecutive days. The invi- tation came from the rector of Trinity, the Eev. Morgan Dix, for whose courtesy and ability as the honored president of the House of Deputies in the General Convention Mr. Brooks had often expressed the highest admiration. The event was one of peculiar interest and significance in the life of Phillips Brooks. He had been in the habit for many years of preaching at the Church of the Incarnation on the Sunday after Easter, and occasionally at Grace Church. But at Trinity he spoke to representative New York in the larg- est possible way. If it was an event for Phillips Brooks, it seems to have been still more an event for the city of New York. No missioner ever achieved a greater conquest. And what was most remarkable, no effort whatever was made to VOL. n 738 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 call attention to the services, no announcement in other churches, no advertisement in the newspapers. A simple placard was suspended to the iron fence on the day when the services were to begin, announcing that Rev. Phillips Brooks, of Boston, would speak to men at twelve o'clock each day of the week. The difficulty which had been experi- enced in Boston was not to be repeated. It had been pro- posed at first that one half of the church, divided by the middle aisle, should be assigned to women, and the other half to men. Mr. Brooks decided that the services should be confined to men. The followingereports of these services are taken from the New York "Sun : " — At 11.30 this morning [Monday, February 24], busy men began to file into Trinity Church. The great interior was dim by reason of the heavy rain outside, and the business men who entered carried umbrellas dripping wet, or shook the water from their gossamers as they stood in the entry. The seats were rapidly filled, and before twelve o'clock the benches in the aisles were occupied, so that, after that hour, the men who entered were obliged to stand in the broad space far in the rear Before the lecture was completed a throng of men, whose busi- ness made it inconvenient for them to come at the beginning of the address, had pressed down the aisle at the end of which the pulpit stands, so that, when the lecture was half completed, there stood beneath the pulpit a great throng of men looking with the earnestness and steadiness which true eloquence begets up at the great preacher who was uttering simple words of Christian wisdom. It was an impressive sight to see this vast church filled to over- flowing with a body of New York men, representatives of the professions, trades, commerce, and the financial energies of Wall Street. For here were men who directed affairs involving mil- lions, others who represent vast litigations, seated side by side with clerks and older men, who were employed, many of them, in subordinate capacities by the men beside whom they sat. The chimes in Trinity steeple, whose echoes were heard with dim resonance in the church, had scarcely ceased ringing for the hour of twelve when the door of the vestry room opened and the choir boys, with Dr. Brooks and Dr. Morgan Dix following, en- tered the chancel. Dr. Brooks wore the conventional surplice, while Dr. Dix wore no vestments. Dr. Brooks at once mounted MT. 54] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 739 the pulpit, ■where, as he stood, his giant stature was revealed to the great throng before him. In a low voice, which could be heard scarcely twenty feet away, he read the opening hymn, beginning, "A charge to keep I have." The great congregation rose, and it was a sight to see these busy men as they stood there singing the hymn to the familiar tune written for it. There were men who, a few moments before, had been plunged into the intricacies of trade and finance, now singing with devout manner the hymn, and the volume of music which arose from this great throng must have sounded sweetly to the ear of Dr. Brooks, for he paused in his own singing that he might listen to the glorious music made by this congregation of male voices. After a Collect and the repetition of the Lord's Prayer, which must have been pronounced by every member in the church, so great and distinct was the volume of sound. Dr. Brooks began the address. He started without a preliminary utterance right into the heart of the sermon, and his very first sentence was ut- tered with that mighty impetuosity of thought and speech which distinguishes him among American clergymen, which makes it im- possible for the swiftest stenographer completely to report him, and which is a Niagara of thoughts and words maintained from the beginning to the end of the discourse. His voice is peculiarly sympathetic and sweet, even in his most impassioned utterances. His tones are mellow and a delight to the ear, and when he utters a sentence with the utmost speed of thought, and of great length, but with perfect symmetry and lucidity, his tones are so melodious that they seem almost like the intoning of his discourse. The first few sentences, however, were spoken in so low a tone that they were inaudible, and a silent gesture of protest went up all over the church, manifested by the holding of one hand to the ear that his words might be the better distinguished. He seemed to take the hint, and to have tested the acoustics of the church, for a moment later his voice was distinct and clear, and heard in the remotest corners. . . . As he finished his address he stopped for a moment and looked over the pulpit at that vast throng crowding the aisle beneath with upturned faces, listening for every word which came from his lips. When he turned to descend from the pulpit, the throng still stood there as though controlled by his presence and power, even after he had departed from the place where he had uttered these words of wisdom in a manner which seemed almost inspired. On the second day, Tuesday, the hymn was "Kock of Ages, cleft for me," followed by the saying of the Lord's 740 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 Prayer. These sentences indicate that the interest was growing : — The heavy mist which palled the city this morning concealed the steeple which surmounts Trinity Church, and almost hid the clock at noon to-day, while the chimes rang out the mid-day hour in tones which seemed to he almost muffled. Yet a steady throng of men had been filing into the church for half an hour, ready to meet with the discomfort occasioned by the packing together of a throng whose clothing was damp, and every one of whom car- ried a dripping umbrella. When the noon hour was reached, the great interior contained as dense a throng as were ever within its walls. After all the seats were taken, the crowd pressed down the aisles, and stood in a great mass of men in the passage- way at the rear of the church. So dense was the throng that, after the exercises which called it together began, it was impos- sible for any to get in, and almost impossible for any to get out. Yesterday the church was comfortably filled, but the throng that gathered then was moderate in comparison with that which as- sembled to-day. In the aisles, too, there stood with perfect patience for nearly an hour men who command millions of money, and who direct affairs of colossal importance. Not one of these turned and left the building, although the discomfort was great by reason of the close packing of the throng and the dampness which was encountered on every side. Very many in the audience had never heard him before, and it was evident that they were, at the begimiing, astonished at the rapidity of his utterance. He spoke with a voice better modu- lated to the acoustics of the church than was the case yesterday, and after the first sentence or two, his words were heard with perfect distinctness all over the church. But, though he had increased the volume of his tone, and the distinctness of his utter- ance was evidently in his mind, yet the exquisite modulation of his tone was even more apparent than yesterday. The service closed with the hymn, "Arise, my soul, and with the sun. " The impressiveness of this hymn as sung by the great body of men was very great, and not a few of those there as- sembled, who heard the volume of song, were so impressed that tears rolled down their cheeks. As the days went on the interest continued to grow deeper, as the following comment shows : — The services suggest none of the familiar scenes of the revival meeting. There is no excitement, but there is a majestic revela- ^T. 54] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 741 tion of the power of eloquence used to illustrate the sublimest of all truths upon a vast body of business men. Each succeeding day has witnessed an increase in the attend- ance, till the chancel has been occupied, the preacher has found difficulty in wending his way to the pulpit, and hundreds have been turned away unable to gain admittance. There have been clergymen present, a large number of young men, lawyers also, and the great throng of business men, till Wall Street and its vicinity seemed deserted. The women have pleaded to be ad- mitted but have been refused, for if women were admitted they would fill the church to the exclusion of those for whom the ser- vice is intended. Whatever the reason, the throng that has been drawn from the offices and stores in the lower part of the city to Trinity Church at the noontide has been something unprecedented. The wonderful success of the Lenten season at Trinity Church is an event about which merchants, bankers, and lawyers are talking. It is important to preserve the contemporaneous comment, the description of the effect produced, the efforts to explain it. The above comment is taken from the "Sun." The following is from the "World: " — There is a bewitchery of eloquence which has descended upon lower New York. A Demosthenes has appeared in the modern metropolitan market-place. There are people who argue that a "revival" is in progress in "Old Trinity," but it would be ex- tremely difficult to substantiate this claim. Certainly Dr. Brooks has not as yet called for volunteers to the "anxious seats," nor even requested an uplifting of hands among those who desire to be saved. On the contrary, he studiously avoids all incentives to religious excitement. The unusual spectacle of a big church filled, as seldom is any theatre, with the leading business men and capitalists of New York, must be explained on natural grounds. No Moody, no Sankey, no timbrel-playing of the Salvation Army, could have held this audience. The secret of this success is elo- quence. Phillips Brooks, in his splendid personality, — for he is a commanding figure, — is awe-inspiring of himself. He is like a vessel which, having been filled by nature to the brim, simply overflows. His congregation yesterday, representing all that is eminent in business circles, or rather in that greatest of all busi- ness circles which spreads its brilliant circumference south of Ful- ton Street, practically consisted of so many human fishes. These 742 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 money-getters, these prosperous and for the most part, douht- less, churchgoing men, sat under the rainfall of his eloquence as though they had for months been famished. It was a marvellous spectacle. He told them nothing which they might not have heard, and probably had heard over and over, from the honest lips of less gifted preachers, but it all seemed to have a new sound. He held his hearers spellbound. We are not concerned so much with what Phillips Brooks said as with the fact that in these days, when men are accused of such a general disregard of churchgoing, business and professional men on a week day should crowd a church to listen to what a preacher has to say of God and of man's duty to Him. There is in such a service conducted by Phillips Brooks nothing that approaches the sensational. Nobody goes to hear him to be amused or star- tled. None of the pulpit tricks some "drawing" preachers re- sort to, none of the paradoxical rhetoric or novel illustrations others seek out, are ever used by Phillips Brooks. "Were he that kind of a preacher he might possibly fill Old Trinity once or twice with the kind of an audience that is crowding it this week, but then the crowding would stop. Busy men at a busy hour of the business day have no time to spare for such amusements. These men crowd to hear Phillips Brooks because he is an earnest and powerful talker with a sincere message. His eloquence is so sim- ple that at the time one hardly recognizes it as eloquence. It is what he says and the man who says it, not his manner of saying it, which attract and win. Phillips Brooks appeals to men as one of themselves, who has himself found a great secret, — the secret of faith in the unknown God. He is in touch with the modem world in all its science, and luxury, and progress. He knows its thinking and its philosophy. He is a part of it. His is not the narrow, literal belief of an earnest good man, whose outlook is bounded by the horizon of his creed. He is as great a contrast to a Moody as Colonel Ingersoll himself. And yet there is in Phillips Brooks's every utterance the same ring of absolute sin- cerity that charms in Moody. But about his sincerity and his views of life there are, besides an absence of the conventional, a Christ-like directness and simplicity in reaching the heart of the matter, and a Christ-like recognition of the wideness of the spir- itual nature, which appeal to the thoughtful in the same way as the words of Jesus himself. Men are not nearly as indifferent to religion as many of the signs of the times seem to indicate. For its conventionalities they care little. They have lost faith in the virtue of mere dog- matism. But when the opportunity is given them to hear a true ^T. 54] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 743 "message, " — the message of a man in whose breadth of view and sincerity of conviction they have confidence, — they are ready, even eager listeners. The crowds that throng Old Trinity are typical of the attitude of thinking men to-day. They are sieeking to strengthen a faith that finds much to shake it, and that cannot be regained by words of professional religion. Words that count must be words spoken by a man to men. Another most intelligent observer seeking at a later time to give a calm estimate of the man who had produced such " a marvellous effect," writes : — One of the most potent secrets of Phillips Brooks's power was unquestionably his complete and rounded knowledge of all the forces amidst which he lived. His large work and immense influence outside his parish amply prove this. "With a type of genius that linked him largely with the outreaching faith and Self-denial of an age of greater faith than this, he had all the practical keenness of vision that linked him to the present. He was a progressionist to the letter. Without this trait he could not have wielded the influence he did over the business men of Wall Street in New York, or of State Street in Boston. A man of mere faith, without insight into all their methods and springs of action, could not have held those men day after day during their busy hours of dollar-hunting. Before dismissing the subject, we turn for a moment to the preacher himself, as he is preparing for utterance. As soon as' he accepted the invitation, several months before the time fixed upon, he decided upon his subject, and made a synopsis of each address. First he had taken rough notes in pencil, and then in ink drawn up the more matured plan. During the intervening time he was revolving the topics and their method of treatment in his mind. He spoke extempo- raneously without the assistance of notes, but each address meant an immense amount of preparation. Again, judging from the appearance of these analyses, it was no cahn prepa- ration that he made, but his soul was heaving with excite- ment and emotion, as he dug deep into the recesses of his theme. After he had made the final analyses he went over them in review with interlineations in almost every line. But all this only prepared the way, for in the presence of his 744 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 audience lie was set free and lifted up to say things with startling power, which are not mentioned in his plan. He never was more free, and therefore more himself, than when he stood in the pulpit of Trinity Church, New York. What he was endeavoring to do was only in more intense and thor- ough fashion that which he sought for in every sermon. But the occasion stimulated him with the possibility of pre- senting in complete and condensed form the total picture of life and of man in relation to the gospel of Christ. He appears determined that nothing which he esteemed of vital importance should be lost. He spoke as if all the world were listening. He chose "Freedom" for his subject, — the one word most revealing men to themselves, in the presence and under the influence of an enfeebling fatalism, which had come in consequence of the decline of individualism, of the rise of socialism, of theories about heredity, and of the reign of universal law. Here are a few detached sentences from his note -book : — It Is not by going aside from life but by going deeper into it. The full understanding of life is the renewal of life. This the old Bible idea of wisdom and folly. There are two kinds of living, one to be given up, the other to be assumed. The need of going from one to the other haunts every man. But how.' One says in reply, "From freedom to imprisonment." The constant presentation of this view. Its truth, as shown also in civilization. But there is another method. It is an entrance in a new region where new powers awake. Without rejecting the other method, this must be the best. Liberty is the full opportunity to be one's best. Take the matter of belief, as an illustration. The question, Must I be- lieve so and so ? A liberal faith ought to believe more, not less. There is the other question, — May I believe ? The enlarged creed is an enlarged life. Faith in the Incarnation, — the open field of a new truth. So of the resolution of a new life. Think of purity ; which is negative, and which is positive ? It is not that the pure man is losing something, but the impure. The glorious self-indulgence at the end of all self-denials. And so of the total Christian life. The dominion of words, ^T. 54] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 745 it is not an initiation, it is life. It is consecration to a Master to whom you belong. Is all this an everlasting disappointment and degradation of the nature? No! but its true satisfaction. The liberty to be good; the liberty of life with Him. What value does this give to sin? It takes all its glory and glamour away from it. The awful spell of that. The sense of its disgrace and meanness. It is a self-imposed and treasured slavery. And yet it gives sin its full value of awfulness. It is you, the man, the true son of God, that is sinning. The awfulness of the chains which bind a king. Here is the chance for every man. The impulse of freedom in every soul. The nature's homesickness. In his second address he took for the subject "Christ the Liberator." Christ had shown how a man might be perfectly pure and yet manly; how a man might defy conventionalities in the name of truth; He had set before men the glory of character. Christ was free, and says of His freedom that it belonged to Him as the Son of God. That does not separate us from Him, but brings us closer together. Are not we the sons of God ? Jesus was full of the mystery of human life. This, too, is freedom. No doc- trine could do all this. Our religion is a personal religion. It is following Christ. The third address, "The Process of the Liberation," was interesting as showing how he treated the endless contro- versy, as old in Christian history as the time of Pelagius and Augustine, — the question of the .relation of God's grace to human freedom. He combats lingering notions about election which still hamper men. He refers the whole work of salvation to God alone, as Augustine had done, and the freedom is God's gift. God is working on His side for you with His instruments. What are they ? All your experiences. He is really the worker and He uses them all ; the sunshine melting and the iron smiting. You cry out to Him, "Use that other," but He uses what He wills. So you work, and at last the wall is broken down and you are with God. And then comes a surprise to learn how long He has been seeking you, even when you were a boy. At last you stand in His freedom, doing His will for His love. 746 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 The subject of the fourth address had a distinct theological interest, for it concerned the " Freedom of Christian Thought." It stood out among all the addresses as having made the most profound impression, and was referred to as having given character to them all. It cleared the intellec- tual horizon. Phillips Brooks was sensitive to a widely pre- vailing impression that the clergy were not free to speak the full truth, or even to think freely, because they were bound by subscription to theological tenets which were irrational, whatever their denomination or sect. This deep and wide- spread conviction was acting as a subtle barrier against the appeal of the Christian faith. Then there was the large body of Christian tenets or doctrines, unintelligible to most men, which hung like a dead weight upon even the religious mind. Intelligent laymen even, who went to church or recited the creeds, would in confidential moments admit that they did not know anything about it, whether they believed or did not believe. To teach men the meaning of dogmas, or the dis- crimination of theological refinements, was too vast a task for a course of addresses. But the preacher had this advantage, that he had gained his own freedom, and knew that he was free, not by denying dogmas, but by entering into their spirit and discerning their relation of life. This part of the sub- ject he touched only indirectly, devoting his time to the estab- lishment of one supreme presupposition, which, if it were admitted, covered the whole ground. During all these days one thought must have arisen in many minds: "All very well, but your boasted freedom stops with activity; it cannot reach to thought ; that is all enslaved." Such thought is common. It is sometimes assumed by churches and religious books that it is true. If true, the religion could not hold us by any means, and it could not really be an active force. Christ claims that it is not true: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." It is the truth itself that is to bring freedom. Let us talk of this to-day. I think I know something of what it means. It is the diffi- culty of realizing a life not our own ; partly also the sense that it is too good and great to be true. I know the worse side. I ^T. 54] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 747 will not think of that. Rather let me think of the doubter who would fain believe the Christian faith. What is the Christian faith? The need of definitions. It is Christ the Leader. A thousand things besides attached to it. But that is it. It is the Being standing there in history and attaining the power of God to lead men into new life, so that the desires of richer life find fulfilment in Him, Am I hamper- ing myself in that ? Not unless electricity hampers itself when it gathers in lightning. But how do I get at Him ? Just as the people in Jerusalem got at Him. Christ Himself, in His personal character, then faith in His words and their acceptance, the opening up of their possibility in life. Is a man not free with his world enlarged? Miracle, yes ! That means that the world has larger answers to make to the greater power, as it says more to the civilized than to the savage. It bursts to larger music and diviner land- scape. Miracle does happen when the miracle man appears. And how for me? Why, that Being claiming my confidence says He will be always here and will always lead. He promises the great extension of Himself, — the Holy Spirit. He gives one divine commandment. That is the Christian faith. The other things connected with it, character of books, forms of government, interpretation of His words, special injunctions, aye. His own nature. His scheme of penalties, — all of these are interesting, but Christianity be- hind them all. Let us not exclude Christians from Christianity. Whoever is His disciple and calls Him Master is a Christian. What does Christ do ? He makes God real. The two reasons for believing God's existence, — t?ie world is intelligible with Him, and a great puzzle without Him ; and Jesus believed Him. I think He knew. I honor the skeptic. He will not enter this region uncon- vinced. Perhaps he is demanding conviction, which can only come when he is inside. Still, honor to him. Truthfulness is more than truth. But his is not a larger, 't is a smaller life. The fifth address was entitled "The Christian is the True Man." The sight of men coming to these services raises the question, "Have they left one world for another, or have they mounted to the highest conception of their whole world? " The way people keep their religion; there is a loss of conti- nuity ; once in a while a run across from one world to the other ; then back to the old life. 748 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 The Christian life is the human life. The same, only filled out entirely. Do I say only ? What can he more ? The abso- lute way in which Christ is recognized as the truest man, — man forever and forever, — and all the more as God. The noble value of human life is the first truth of religion. The truth of the Incarnation, the truth of the Cross. Along these lines to God. Christ is nearer to us than most great and good men. The dreadfulness of cynicism. Its ineffable selfish- ness. The duty and privilege of living. The dreadfulness of suicide; its horrible cowardice. The simple first emotions, how they are at the root of every- thing! Men advance only as these advance. Delusion of scien- tific advance. Talk from here to Calcutta, or journey to Cali- fornia. What to say? what for? Christ knew none of these things. The nobility of man, that is g-reater. Character at the centre of all. The strong sense of the need of character in special acts. No special skill makes up for its absence. The great victories, — justice, love, sympathy. Over all is the Christian life. The elevation of these human goodnesses to their completeness, but the same things still, — love to man and to God, gratitude, truth, the service rendered for Christ's sake to fellow men. When I say this, then the whole essentialness of Christian life opens; the great charge against it of arbitrariness disappears. Hell and heaven, what shall they be? their sorrow and their joy? The suffering is in the sin, the joy is in the holiness. Heaven and hell are here. Spiritual revealment. The naturalization which this gives to our best moments. They are not glimpses of another world. They are liftings of this world into the light of God. The easy way in which we expect our lowest to repeat itself, but not our highest. Your best moments are your truest. The great conception of doing things fen- God. How it trans- figures and glorifies duty and makes the most familiar splendid. The great secret is to insist on doing such things as shall Tieed God. You are doing too small things. Do larger, and you will be on your knees calling for God. The two great rites of the Christian church. Their narrowness now, but how great as sacraments in their splendid universal humanness: (1) Consecration (baptism), or the life put in God's hands. (2) Dependence (the Lord's Supper), the life fed on God. In the last address, when the interest which had been daily increasing culminated, he began by expressing the JET. Si] NEW YORK ADDRESSES 749 sense and fear of too much talk lest he should have compli- cated what is simple, but also the rejoicing confidence that "when we plead with one another, there is forever the great pleading power of God " standing behind the appeal, as the power of nature with the physician or the law of gravitation with the mechanic. I could never get hold of the theology of those who stand in perpetual amazement before the spectacle of God's love to his children. That love seems to me more and more natural. What I have tried to do is to make the whole seem natural. You know a little more truth ; then a little more obedience, then more truth; forever so. But all depends on being in earnest. Assume earnestness. De you say. What can I do? As your brother, let me try to tell you. (1) Leave off your sin. (2) Do your personal duty. (3) Pray, simply, passionately, earnestly. (4) The Bible ; read it till that Christ figure is before you. (5) The Church, which is the embodi- ment of all. If it is weak, make it strong. Unless you do these things you have no right to complain that the new life does not come in and you are not free. These are not a set of rules. They are the windows of the soul. These are the great religious words ever deepening : — (1) Separation from the world ; not the desert or cell, but in- dependence by service. (2) Salvation of the soul, not from pain, but from sin. (3) Prepare to meet thy God, with glorious and glad welcome. He is always here. Be such a man that if all men were like you the world would be saved. Farewell, my friends. It is not for long, and yet it is so long. For the world will be here after we are gone, and after the world is gone we shall live forever. Whatever may come hereafter, not this particular opportunity to serve God will come again. Catch to-day. Be men; be men. Love God. Be brave. Be true. And at last, may we say as He said, "Father, I have glorified Thee on the earth." Those who were following Phillips Brooks at this time, as he pursued his wonderful career, felt that some mysterious change was passing over him, intensifying his power, pro- ducing effects upon his congregation which no words are ade- 750 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 qnate to represent. Here is an extract from a Boston paper, important because it records what many were thinking, writ- ten just after his return from New York, and referring to his work there : — According to all accounts that quality which has entered into Dr. Brooks's sermons, especially of late, was felt in a marked degree by his New York audience. Always strong, earnest, and filled with the dignity of his words and work, it has been a matter for comment in Boston that since his return from his last journey [the visit to Japan] he has brought to bear a deeper force than ever, a more impassioned delivery of thought, and an apparent burning conviction of the necessity of impressing upon the people the truth of which he is convinced. The repressed but tremendous effect of yesterday's sermon in New York confirms the belief that there is new power in his utterance, a sense of having been touched by the coal that the world's prophets have felt when they have spoken enduring words to those who "hear indeed but under- stand not." This "new power of utterance " was now increasingly manifest in every sermon, but it cannot be described. One thing was apparent, however, that the whole man was visibly affected when he preached. It was not so in his earlier min- istry, when he stood unimpassioned and unmoved, thrilling his audience till it took them long to recover their normal mood, but himself calm in the inner recesses of his spirit, and maintaining his self -composure. What struck his hear- ers now was the torrent of feeling within him, as he poured forth his burning words. He was preaching as if under the stress of anxiety that the whole truth should be said before it was too late, that not one particle of the power which God had given him should be wasted or lost. He had mastered the rules of rhetoric and studied the art of composition, and accumulated from life the similes it could offer ; but all this only to gain his freedom in the pulpit, where he rose above all artificial restrictions and appeared in his real greatness, a man addressing his fellows with a gift of penetrating every heart. It was the culmination of the process by which the simple manhood in him had become a stronger appeal than any intellectual endowment. ^T. 54] THE NEW UTTERANCE 751 One would like to linger over many of the sermons preached in a year which seems to have been among the most prolific in his ministry. Especially was the Lenten season rich in these impressive sermons. And what was noticeable was his inclination to dwell more on the passive side of the life of Christ, His sufferings and cross in their deeper relations to Christian experience. He saw the Atonement in the light of the Divine Fatherhood, as that for which the long process of thought and inquiry into the meaning of Christ's death had been preparing the way. He seemed also to be review- ing his deeper theological convictions, and giving them a firmer expression. He had refused to dogmatize upon the subject of the duration of future punishment, but in a sermon on the text "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord," he speaks of the "blessedness" of "Eternal Hope" and of "our right to keep it." How the mind of Phillips Brooks was working in other directions at this time may be seen in an essay entitled "Orthodoxy," read before the Clericus Club, June 2, 1890. The essay has been already referred to in a previous chapter, but a few words may be added here regarding the time and the motive which led him to write. He saw the symptom, as he believed, of an ecclesiastical reaction, waving this word on its banner. He seems to challenge the coming storm in his own person. He denounces orthodoxy as "born of fear, and as having no natural heritage either from hope or love." He admitted that orthodoxy had a place and an importance, but they were both inferior. It is an arrogant, pushing thing, crowding itself into thrones where it has no right. ... Is not the whole sum of the matter this, that orthodoxy as a principle of action or a standard of helief is obsolete and dead ? It is not that the substance of orthodoxy has been altered, but that the very principle of orthodoxy has been essentially disowned. It is not conceivable now that any council, however oecumenically constituted, should so pronounce on truth that its decrees should have any weight with thinking men, save what might seem legitimately to belong to the character and wis- dom of the persons who composed the council. Personal judg- ment is on the throne, and will remain there, — personal judg- 752 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 ment, enlightened by all the wisdom, past or present, which it can summon to its aid, but forming finally its own conclusions and standing by them in the sight of God, whether it stands in a great company or stands alone. Mr. Brooks preached the Baccalaureate Sermon at Harvard before the class of 1890, and performed the same service for the graduating class of the Institute of Technology. In the year's record of preaching, two sermons stand out with pecul- iar vividness, where he seized the allegories of history and brought them home to the individual soul. They are both of them poems, where the tragic element is supreme: "The Egyptians dead upon the Seashore" and the "Feast of Bel- shazzar." These were written sermons, while for the most part his preaching was extempore. In the year 1890 he wrote but six sermons. He was not satisfied with himself, and bemoaned the days when the sermon was the event of the week. He told one of his friends at this time that he intended to give up extempore preaching and go back again to the written sermon. From this account of his preaching we turn to his letters, which cover the year. To Dr. Farrar he writes : — 233 Clabkndon Street, Boston, January 12, 1890. Mt veet dear Archdeacon, — This New Tear . . . starts well, I think, in spite of a thousand perverse things and people which one would like to rectify or obliterate, and cannot. The thing which grows on me most is the splendid sense of liberty which is everywhere, which no sight of the extravagances and enormities to which it gives place can make to seem anything but splendid. I rather think that there has never been a time to which, if we were suddenly transferred, we should not feel as if we woke up in a sti- fling dungeon with chains at hand and heel. So let us rejoice and hope great things of 1890. I cannot picture your house with the changed look that it must have now that your children have, so many of them, gone. But be thankful that you are not a miser- able celibate, whose being is bounded by the ground his two feet stand on. Browning and Lightfoot both are gone, and the world IS vastly poorer. I think of both of them as you gave me the privilege of seeing them at your house, and their great work is nearer and more real to me because of your kindness. I will not believe that the new great Poet is not near at hand. I thought I MT. 54] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 753 met him in the street yesterday, but perhaps I was mistaken. But he will come soon ! Keferring to the death of Professor Bowen, who had been his instructor at Harvard, he says in a letter to Eev. Arthur Brooks : — 233 Clakekdon Street, Boston, January 23, 1890. Professor Bowen is dead. The old Cambridge is fast disap- pearing. Childs and Lane and Cooke are the veterans now. There was a great deal of humanity in Bowen; at least he knew what it was to be a philosopher if he was not one himself, and he was, and dared to call himself, a Christian. While staying in New York at the time when he was giving his addresses at Trinity Church, a gentleman called upon him for the purpose of interviewing him and of pub- lishing the results of the interview in a Philadelphia paper. When the article appeared headed "Phillips Brooks's Broad Views about Modern Christianity — Truth, not Dogmas, Wanted," Mr. Cooper was disturbed at the unqualified, al- most excited tone of the remarks reported by the inter- viewer, and wrote to know if he had been reported correctly. 233 Clakendon Street, Boston, March 5, 1890. Mt deae Coopek, — One day last week, when I was staying with Arthur in New York, a most respectable man called on me and introduced a friend whose name I did not catch. We talked for about half an hour. In the course of conversation he said that he had something to do with the New York "Sun." I have not the slightest recollection of his mentioning any Philadelphia paper, or of his saying anything about reporting our conversation. If he had asked my consent I should certainly have refused it. This is the report which you have sent me in " The Press." As to the matter of it, it follows the general line of our conversa- tion, and I recognize a remark of mine here and there. I hope I do not wholly talk like that. The whole thing teaches me again not to talk freely with any living fellow creature, unless you want to see what he thinks you said, or thinks that you ought to have said, in the next newspaper. Of course there is nothing to be done about it. It will die the quiet death which comes to rub- bish, and the world will go on very much the same. The report presents him as a radical reformer, eagerly VOL. n 754 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 awaiting some great religious revolution in the near future. But it should be said, in justice to the interviewer, that it was a very difficult thing to give Phillips Brooks either in preaching or in conversation. He once delivered an impor- tant address, when two stenographers took down his words, but their reports when written out differed so greatly that it was impossible to determine which was correct, and the pro- posal to publish his speech was in consequence abandoned. Many reports of interviews with Mr. Brooks have found their way into print, which must be read with allowance for the personal equation of those who talked with him. He had a way of making those with whom he talked feel that he agreed with them, for he was quick to recognize the many aspects of truth and the many attitudes of men in regard to it. His sympathy, his carelessness about qualification of his remarks, led to misapprehension. He was more comprehen- sive, and also more conservative, than reports of his conver- sations would imply. Among the letters he wrote to those who thanked him for his services in New York is one to Bishop Potter, who had also enclosed to him a newspaper cutting containing his por- trait : — ' 233 CiiAKENDON Street, Boston, March 6, 1890. My dear Henry, — I thank you truly for your most kind letter, and for what you say about my visit to New York. It was full of interest to me, and did me good. If it did anybody else good, and the Bishop of the diocese is satisfied that it did nobody harm, I am devoutly grateful and glad. I was deeply impressed and touched by Dr. Dix's courtesy and generous spirit, first, in inviting me, and then, in the welcome which he gave me when I came. I am sorry that I did not get sight of you; but they were not very happy days for social pleasures. And Smedley says I looked like this! I hope that you are well and happy, and I am Ever faithfully yours, P. B. On May 14 Mr. Brooks was in Pittsfield, visiting the Eev. William Wilberforce Newton, and preaching the ser- mon on the occasion of the opening of the new church. ^T. 54] EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 755 Many of the clergy of the diocese were present, and also the pastors of the various churches in Pittsfield. One of the interesting events of the morning service was the baptism by Mr. Brooks of the infant daughter of the rector. A photo- graph was afterwards taken of Mr. Brooks holding the child in his arms, which has caught a characteristic expression given in no other portrait.^ People from far and near had come to Pittsfield attracted by the occasion of the opening of the church and by the reputation of Phillips Brooks. Among others was a Shaker brother, from a neighboring settlement, who was anxious to show him that his tenets were in sym- pathy with the Shaker creed. Failing to reach him, he wrote a long letter, expounding the faith as held by the Shaker community. The letter was addressed to "Pastor Phillips Brooks, the Celebrated Preacher." In a letter to Eev. C. A. L. Richards he says: — Boston, May 24, 1890. Thank you for sending me the Martineau article [a notice of the Seat of Authority in Religion]. How much better and de- vouter such books are than all the "Lux Mundi " sort of thing which is pulling and hauling at systems and truths to make them fit one another, which they don't and won't. It had been Mr. Brooks's intention to spend the summer at North Andover, and he had so informed his friends ; but he seems to have suddenly changed his mind and decided upon a summer in Europe. From Switzerland he writes to Eev. Eeuben Kidner, and speaks his mind on surpliced female choirs : — Hotel Clkec, Mabtignt, Au^st 17, 1890. Dear Kidnek, — Thank you for your letter, and here I send you greeting of the kindest kind. Not a surpliced female choir, my dear friend ! Almost any- thing but that ! But let us set ourselves against that most fan- tastic and frivolous afEectation which has turned up in these days, when surely the Church is young-ladyish enough without putting young-ladyism decorated for a spectacle in the seat of prominence and honor. Surely it is amazing how much attention clothes en- list in all the operations of our great Communion. Let us keep 1 The portrait is published in The Child and the Bishop : Memorabilia of Bt. Bev. Phillips Brooks, by an Old Friend. Boston, 1894. 756 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 our simplicity, and so, no vested female choirs! Almost any- thing but that! I hope you and Roland Cotton Smith and the others are work- ing out the question of the Vincent Hospital, and that I shall find it all arranged on my return. It is a pretty problem with difficulties of its own, but I am sure that it is capable of being worked out into a beautiful and unique institution. Pray use all your ingenuity and get it done. In a letter to Rev. John C. Brooks he speaks of a visit to Tennyson : — Lucerot;, August 25, 1890. I had a delightful little visit to Tennyson at his house at All- worth. He has grown very old, but is bright and clear-headed, and may give us some new verses yet. Just after I left England Newman died, and all the pulpit and press have been full of the laudation and discussion of him ever since. He was a remark- able man, by no means of the first class, for he never got a final principle nor showed a truly brave mind; but there was great beauty in his character, and his intellect was very subtle. This summer in Europe was a happy one. Mr. Brooks was furnished with letters of introduction by his English friends, which enabled him to see what he wished in places not hitherto visited. He wandered through Devonshire and Cornwall, going also to the English Andover out of respect for its associations. While he was in London he was moved once more to the writing of sonnets. It was now many years since his poetic mood had tempted him in this direction. One of these sonnets was entitled HAPPINESS AND CONTENT Now will I find the traitor where he hides, The culprit. Happiness, who did me wrong. He came to me with trumpet and with song. Even as he comes to Victory and to brides. With rich delights he hung my sombre walls, And taught gay dances to the serious hours. His footsteps thronged the vacant mead with flowers. His breath with music filled the silent halls. And then he vanished. But, the day he went, The central jewel of my house he stole. The precious jewel which is called Content, ^T. 54] SONNETS 757 Without which no man keeps a living soul. The thief I '11 find. The theft he shall restore, Then he may go. I covet him no more. Another sonnet was inspired by Titian's Madonna and Child in the National Gallery : — MADONNA AND CHILD He 's hers! He 's all the world's, yet still he 's hers! The Christ-child smiling upon Mary's knee! 'Mid the world's worship still her heart avers, "The child divine helongeth unto me." So kneel, sweet Catherine, and tell thy love ; Haste, John, thy flowery tribute to present ; A holier heaven is beaming from above In the young mother's face of calm content. AU else are restless; she alone is still; In pure devotion all desire doth cease ; There is no tide of thought or wind of will On the broad ocean of her perfect peace. No fear of pain to come her spirit stirs. Handmaid and mother she ! And he is hers ! Immediately on his return to Boston he wrote to Professor F. G. Peabody that he was ready to take up his work at Harvard : — Boston, September 13, 1890. Deab Dr. Peabody, — I have landed to-day and found your note of the 29th of August. It is good to get tidings of the chief, and to know that he is well and eager for the fray. . . . Yes, I will do what you want of me as far as ever I can. I will come on the evening of September 28 and speak my little piece. I will take morning chapel from Monday, October 13, to Satur- day, November 1, inclusive, and Sunday evening, November 19 and 26. Anything else that you want me to do and that I can do, I will do gladly, and I am ever Faithfully yours, Phillips Brooks. In letters to his friends he makes allusion to the summer wanderings in Europe : — I have had a bright, pleasant summer of the kind which makes no history, but leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth. And now 758 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 even the door bell has a pleasant sound, because it means the old familiar life and work. It was a quiet little thing, the journey was, but very pleasant. Two placid voyages with interesting people enough on board; three weeks in England and three weeks in Switzerland; the old places which we knew so well, — Chamouni and Interlaken, and Lucerne, Paris, and London, all very delightful and refresh- ing. It went without an accident or disappointment, and when we stepped ashore on Saturday, it seemed easy enough to be thankful. The burden of the familiar letters from 233 Clarendon Street, which went forth at once to his friends, was an ur- gent invitation to come and see him. He should be expect- ing them at every ring of the door bell. "Come at once." "I will put prohibitory marks against the calendar." Even the "precious fragments" of their time were besought amid many engagements, some of them "vexatious." The Church Congress was to meet in Philadelphia in November, when he was to read a paper entitled "The Conditions of Church Growth in Missionary Lands." ^ But the prospect of a visit to Philadelphia seemed to loom up more largely to his im- agination than the subject of his paper. How he looked for- ward to the visit is shown by this letter to McVickar : — 233 Clarendon Stkeet, Boston, November 8, 1890. Dear William, — You do not know how I am counting on next week ; it is gilding everything and making the roughest sur- faces run smoothly. I don't care what happens to-day or to- morrow, for to-morrow night I take the train for New York. I shall arrive there early on Monday morning, and break my fast with Arthur. Then I have one or two errands to do in the great city, and in the afternoon I shall get aboard a train and come to you. I will not be later than five o'clock in presenting myself at your hospitable door, and then a good long week of brotherly intercourse and mutual improvement, and a high old time ! Ah, it is these oases that make the desert of my life worth travelling, but how thirsty one's lips do get for them, sometimes, and when they seem to be close at hand how hard it is to wait until day after to-morrow ! It was good of you to want to keep me over 1 Cf. Essays and Addresses, pp. 198 fP. ^T. 54] SERMONS 759 the following Sunday ; I will stay with delight. Early on Mon- day morning, the 17th, I must be o£B and reach Boston that night, because on Tuesday, the 18th, ten million women are to hold an assembly in Trinity Church, and I am to preside over what they are pleased to call their deliberations. But how far off that seems, and not till it is many days nearer than it seems now will I give myself the least particle of trouble concerning it. Somehow I find myself thinking very little about the Congress, even about "the conditions of church growth in foreign lands," and very much about you and the happy idle days ! But no doubt the Congress will be interesting enough when one gets into it. Only there must be hours when we forget it all and simply revel in idleness and friendship. Good-by. Soon after you get this you will see me. AfEectionately yours, P. B. Late in the fall Mr. Brooks published his fifth and last volume of sermons, dedicating it, " To the memory of my brother, George Brooks, who died in the great war." Many sermons are here which must be counted among his best, such, for example, as "Backgrounds and Foregrounds" and "The Planter and the Rain," both written in 1889. An important sermon is "The Seriousness of Life," from the text, "Let not God speak to us lest we die," which has been mentioned in a previous chapter, where the impression it made was described. Another sermon, written from the depths of his own experience, is the "Silence of Christ," — "But He answered her not a word." "The Priority of God " was a sermon whose idea was long in his mind before he wrote, where the God-consciousness is presented in which he lived and moved and had his being. He here contrasts the phrase "the religious world" as employed in the news- papers with the reality, the religious world as it should be : — What a poor, petty, vulgar thing that old phrase, "the reli- gious world, " has often been made to mean, — a little section of humanity claiming monopoly of divine influences, and making the whole thought of man's intercourse with God cheap and irreverent by vicious quarrels and mercenary selfishness; the world of eccle- siastical machinery and conventions and arrangements. But look ! See what the religious world really is in its idea, and shall be when it shall finally be realized' A world everywhere aware of 76o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1890 and rejoicing in the priority of God, feeling all power flow out from Him, and sending all action back to report itself to Him for judgment, — a world where goodness means obedience to God, and sin means disloyalty to God, and progress means growth in the power to utter God, and knowledge means the understanding of God's thought, and happiness means the peace of God's ap- proval. That is the religious world. The sermon is also here which Principal Tulloch pro- nounced the finest he had ever heard, "The Opening of the Eyes," where Christ seems to stand forth in visible pre- sence so vivid is the insight into His personality. But Mr. Brooks gave the precedence in his own judgment to the ser- mon "The Light of the World," whence the volume takes its title. There is here also what seems like prophetic intima- tion, in the sermon which closes the book, "The Certain End." These are some of the titles; one would like to give them all, for every sermon has its peculiar beauty and sig- nificance. And yet the volume fails to represent him in the fulness of his power, in these last years, when in extempora- neous utterances, whose inspiration was in the passing mo- ment, he seemed to transcend himself and to produce effects ever to be remembered, but impossible to describe. To the Eev. C. A. L. Richards, who had called attention to an obscure sentence in the sermon "The Light of the World," he wrote: — Boston, December 18, 1890. Thank you for what you kindly say about the sermons. I have looked at the particularly bad slough on p. 14, and I am ashamed to say that it is just as I wrote it, and just as I read it in the proof. There is no misprint, no stupid compositor to hide be- hind. I did it. It is very bad. All I can think is that, in delivery, it was made a bit less meaningless than it appears in print ; and that when I read it in the proof the sound of its deliv- ery was still in my ears. Sermons ought not to be printed, any- how. What the sentence needs is a plentiful interspersing of the words "He is " in various places, and then I think it would mean something, whether it meant right or wrong. I thank you for telling me of it. On December 4 he went to Philadelphia to preach the ^T. 54] CHURCH OF THE ADVENT 761 sermon at the Church of the Advent, where he began his ministry over thirty years before. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the church. His text, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me," had long been in his mind, as suggestive of the mystery of the spirit- ual life, — the mystery of the withholding of spiritual gifts, when God is willing to give and man is desirous to receive, and yet the blessing does not come. "The meaning of it must be that there is some inability to take the gift." From the subject of his sermon he turned to the occasion, recalling to the congregation how he had kept the twentieth anniver- sary with them in 1860. He dwelt lovingly on the "little church," the "simple service," the "voluntary choir," the "great Sunday-school," the "people's love for the church," all still fresh in his memory. He enumerated the names of those with whom he had been associated. He touched on the war and its experiences. Then he reviewed the years that had passed since he left them, the new congregation, the more elaborate service, the freer thought, the new sense of God, personal liberty, greater work, and the truer mission- ary spirit. " And so, let the future come. It is better than the past, by the past." So the year 1890 came to an end. He kept his twenty- first anniversary as rector of Trinity Church, which was to be also his last. His fifty-fifth birthday was commemorated as usual by some of his more intimate friends who met him at luncheon. He came to Christmas with its festivities, the last he should celebrate in the dear, familiar way, for a change was impending in his life, and "new experiences," of which he often spoke, were to open before him. CHAPTEK XXIII CHABACTEBISTICS. REMINISCENCES. ANECDOTES. PARISH MINISTRY. ESTIMATES 1859-1893 In the following chapter, reminiscences of Phillips Brooks are brought together from many sources, including reports of conversations and extracts from private letters. It has not been thought necessary in every case to give the names of the contributors, but it may be said of them all that they stood close to Phillips Brooks, and of some that they had been admitted to his more intimate friendship. Among his personal characteristics, as Bishop McVickar has remarked, was the power of making his residence home- like. This had been true of his rooms in the Hotel Kempton, and of the house he rented for a few years, 175 Marlborough Street. It appeared more clearly in the house on Clarendon Street, built as the rectory of Trinity Church, but designed by Richardson primarily to suit the purposes of Mr. Brooks. Its personal adaptedness appeared at once on entering it ; it had no drawing-room, but in its place on the first floor was the large study. He did not throw open his house for recep- tions of a general character, whether social or parochial. But the study was the home of the Clericus Club, so ample in its accommodation that the twenty-five or thirty members who assembled there never gave it the look of being crowded. Here also once a year he invited the members of the Trinity Club. It was a most attractive and beautiful room, luxurious even in its appointments, reflecting everywhere his culture and refinement. The massive fireplace built of large blocks of unhewn stone was the central feature, at once arresting the attention as characteristic and appropriate. The walls were ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 763 lined with books on all sides of the room, halfway to the ceil- ing, and above the bookcases every available space was de- voted to pictures. It was the same in the small reception room next the study, where the books overflowed and where pictures abounded. Mr. Brooks was particularly fond of por- traits : whether of his friends or of the great men whom he admired. Prominent in his study was the portrait of Maurice. On one of his visits to London he had bought the copies re- maining of this engraved portrait of Maurice, presenting them to his friends when he returned. There were also marble busts of Coleridge and Kingsley, replicas of those in West- minster Abbey, and a smaller bust of Stanley. Of one of the ornaments in his study he was specially proud, — the image of Pico of Mirandola carved in wood. From India he had brought the image of Buddha. There was a cast of Crom- well's face and another of Lincoln's. Many interesting and beautiful objects the room contained, wherever the eye might turn. And all, books and pictures, were closely associated with the deeper experiences of his life ; so that the room became the reflex of the man. There was his working table, carefully constructed for him- self, large and inconveniently high for any one else ; the writ- ing table of Dean Stanley, sent to Mr. Brooks after Stanley's death, on which, according to tradition, had been written the " History of the Jewish Church." On another table, movable at pleasure, often drawn up in front of the fireplace, lay the latest books and magazines. This was to many the most attractive feature of the room. It was a source of wonder how he seemed to secure in advance whatever was valuable in recent literature, and to have read it before others were aware of its appearance. The study never gave the appearance of a working room, or depressed one with a sense of the strenuous- ness of its owner, — but as rather devoted to leisure and social converse. Much of his work was done in a large alcove on the second story, above the front door, where the walls were lined with books of reference. His bedroom was over the study, corresponding to it in size, and opposite was the guest room, often occupied. He slept on his mother's bed, which had been enlarged to suit his convenience. 764 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 Those who enjoyed his hospitality know how rich and abounding it was, what power of welcome he could offer. His letters already given show how he was constantly beseeching his friends for visits, or the short notes he was constantly writing: "Come, won't you? The years are not so many as they were." He had the capacity for mental concentra- tion, so that the presence of others or the talk going on around him, even an interruption from a caller, was no dis- turbance or injury to his work. He rather looked down on ordinary mortals who were obliged to shut themselves up to their task. It was very impressive, impressive beyond mea- sure, to be with him on Sunday and watch him as he pre- pared himself to preach at the afternoon service. There was no appearance of nervous anxiety, no exigency in the manner, but a calmness and serenity that went deeper than words can describe, his face aglow with spiritual beauty. He would answer questions with a gentle refinement and sweetness of tone, but beneath the appearance there was the intense con- centration of the whole man upon some theme he was in- wardly revolving, to whose power he seemed to be submitting himself. He held a scrap of paper which he would glance at quickly for a moment, — the only apparent aid in his pre- paration. I recall an incident [says a friend of Phillips Brooks] which happened on some occasion when he had invited a number of young men to his house. Among them was a theological student, whom I observed to be moving about in the study in a wild, dis- tracted manner, scanning the books, even getting down on his hands and knees in order to read the titles in the lower book- shelves. As Mr. Brooks was not in the room at the time, I took the liberty of asking him if there was anything he was searching for. He replied, "I am trying to find out where he gets it from." When I asked of him if he had found the source, he replied, tap- ping his forehead, "He gets it here." Among the relics in the study was the sermon of Dean Stanley preached at Trinity Church, whose chirography it was impossible to decipher ; the last sermon preached by Dr. Vinton ; a sermon by Dr. Sears, of "Weston, and another by ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 765 Dean Farrar. When he was visiting Tennyson, he asked for the clay pipe just finished, and about to be thrown into the fireplace. Tennyson had hesitated a moment, and saying, " Do you want it, mon ? " had handed it to him. He called upon the widow of Kev. F. D. Maurice in London, and re- ceived from her a manuscript of one of Maurice's sermons. So highly did he value the gift that he had it bound up with " Maurice's Life and Letters," in the richest of red morocco. Eed was his favorite color. In ordering prayer books and hymnals for Trinity Church, he specified that they must be bound in red. He liked to collect autographs, pasting the autograph letters of authors in their books. He had the gift of home-making, and he had also the gift of housekeeping. His house was in scrupulous order. He was annoyed by the signs of shiftlessness, when there was no necessity for it, on account of straitened income. He ordered the meals himself every morning, regulating in a few words the household affairs for the day. He was careful in little things, in his dress observing grpat neatness, not growing careless with the years, but avoiding, on principle, every badge of clerical dress. A Scotch clergyman, who wrote under the initials A. K. H. B., was surprised when he met him travelling abroad in the garb of what seemed like a well- to-do gamekeeper. Great conscientiousness marked his conduct, not only in dealing with others, but with himself. When he returned to his house, after an absence or journey, to find many invitations awaiting him, he followed the rule to accept them in the order in which he opened the letters, not allowing himself to choose which he would prefer. It was a principle with him never to decline an invitation to preach unless prevented by some previous engagement. He was particular in the matter of correspondence, in the later years always answering letters so promptly that one hesitated to write to him for fear of increasing his burden. It was of no avail to tell him that a letter required no answer. He wrote his letters with his own hand, and in his most beautiful handwriting, seeming to take pride in their appearance. He was severe in his strictures upon illegible or even ungraceful handwriting, think- ing there was no necessity for it. He became very skilful in turning out letters. In the case of his call to Harvard he wrote 766 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 two hundred. But he repeated himself and did not seek to vary his responses. He had a large number of formulas for difEerent occasions, which made it easy for him to meet them, and this ex- plains his boast that he could write a letter in three minutes. But this was not the case with letters of friendship. He liked to have things beautiful around him ; he enjoyed a woman's beautiful dress as he did a poem. He hesitated about buying for his study some convenient arrangement for holding books, on the ground that as a piece of furniture it was ugly. His admiration for precious stones was noticeable, as shown in his sermons, where the simile of the jewel often occurs, and becomes the occasion of beautiful description. The ground of his admira- tion was the intrinsic beauty of the precious stone, which no com- monness would reduce. I was impressed with the circumstance [says one who often stayed at his house overnight] that from the earliest moment when I heard him stirring in the morning, he was singing to him- self, not exactly a tune, but the effort at one ; he continued it during his bath, and until the breakfast hour. His hours were regular in the later years ; he rose at seven, and breakfasted at eight ; then followed a short interval of work be- fore the crowd of callers came. He would have no office hours, nor would he refuse to see any one who called. Lunch was at one. In later years he might fall asleep afterwards for a moment over his cigar, but quickly recovered. After lunch came calls on the sick, or meetings of various kinds. He made few parochial calls. Six was the dinner hour. He sometimes found it hard to go out in the evening. Often there were callers. At ten o'clock the house was shut, and at eleven he was in bed. He worked hard in the mornings and seemed to be wonderfully free from moods or depression. He could drop his work and take it up again, without suffering from any interruption. He la- bored most diligently on his sermons, and on every address he was to make. In the evenings, when he did not go out, and there were no callers, he was most delightful. He used me as a sort of con- science, taking the opportunity of any casual remarks I made to deliver his thoughts at some length. He would lecture me on my delinquencies; he was not in the habit of paying compliments to any one. It was easy to rouse him to tremendous explosions of wrath. Once as he sat taking a survey of the things in his study, he said they didn't amount to much, or were of no great value, but he should miss them if they were not there. The portrait which he liked most was the drawing of the head ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 767 of Christ, by Leonardo. William Blake's pictures he admired. He greatly liked Kipling, especially the India stories. Talking once about Bryce's "American Commonwealth, " he admitted that the republican form of government could not produce the highest result, but that it had, on the other hand, great advantages. He had no exalted opinion of the Mugwump movement in politics, and refused to follow it. The best Englishmen, he said, were better than the best in any other country, and the rest were poorer than the poorest elsewhere. He was very loyal to his friends. One of them said to him once, "Phillips, if you like a man you swallow him whole." He advised me never to go to the theatre. In speaking of the histrionic art, he said that it demanded for success weakness rather than strength of character. The occasion which led him to speak on the subject was an effort he was making to prevent a young girl from going on the stage. He preached a sermon at Trinity Church one Sunday, in which he guardedly intimated that prohibition might not be the best way of dealing with intemperance. Then there came at once sev- eral letters on the subject, from good men who complained of his attitude. In one of the letters the writer said, "You have sold yourself to a rich congregation. Your Christianity is spurious." "They won't allow me," he said, "the courtesies of ordinary politeness. It is a matter of indifference to Trinity Church which attitude I took." He was very generous in his Christmas presents, spending much time and thought over what he was to give, and careful that no one should be omitted whom he wished to remember. The career of Phillips Brooks always looked to those about him as one line of unbroken prosperity. There had been no check to his success, no halt in his triumphs. " Perennial sunniness," says one who crossed the ocean with him, was his characteristic. He was accustomed to say of himself that his life had been one of the happiest. In the later years, and after the death of his mother, the sense of loneliness in- creased. He began to realize how the course of his life con- demned him to increasing loneliness for the remainder of his days. He yearned and hungered for human affection. This was the royal avenue to his soul for those who knew how to take it. To Bishop McVickar he admitted that it had been the mistake of his life not to have married. Sometimes, in 768 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 the happy homes of his younger friends, he seemed to resent their happiness, as though they taunted him in his greatness with the inability he had shown for human love. More than once he is known to have said, " The trouble with you mar- ried men is that you think no one has been in love but your- selves ; I know what love is ; I have been in love myself." He wanted to enter every great human experience. Life grew sad in the retrospect when he thought that he had been shut out from the greatest of all experiences, — marriage and wife and children. But he forced himself to look upon the brighter side of things. Out of his loneliness there came con- solation to himself and others. Thus in one of his sermons he says : — Sometimes life grows so lonely. The strongest men crave a relationship to things more deep than ordinary intercourse in- volves. They want something profound er to rest upon, — some- thing which they can reverence as well as love ; and then comes God. Call ye life lonely ? Oh, the myriad sounds Which haunt it, proving how its outer hounds Join "with eternity, where God abounds I Then the sense of something which they cannot know, of some one greater, infinitely greater than themselves, surrounds their life, and there is strength and peace, as when the ocean takes the ship in its embrace, as when the rich, warm atmosphere enfolds the earth. A statement regarding the name of Phillips Brooks, that he was called after his uncle John Phillips, may be corrected on his father's authority, who writes in his journal : " Phil- lips was born in High Street, December 13, 1835, — a stormy, cold, icy night. His name was taken from the surname of his mother's family." His love of clear and simple humor was marked and emphatic, and he had a rippling way of describing ludicrous scenes which was like nothing so much as a bubbling, gurgling brook, laughing its way over rock and stone and moss.^ When I think of Phillips Brooks, I recall the remark of Dr. Johnson, that "the size of a man's understanding may be justly 1 Cf. The Child and the Bishop, by Key. W. W. Newton. ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 769 measured by his mirth. " Mr. Brooks seemed to me to have what has been called "the deep wisdom of fine fooling;" he had attained what so few possess, — the dignity of joyousness. These are some of the stories told by those who knew him personally : — Once, at a marriage service at Trinity Church, the gentleman who was to give away the bride became confused, and asked what he should do. "Anything you please; nobody will care." He had his version of the "Jonah " narrative, but whether it is original I do not know. When some one was wondering at the possibility of Jonah being swallowed by the whale, he said, "There was no difficulty. Jonah was one of the Minor Prophets." A poor woman, whose business was to scrub the floors of Trin- ity Church, came to him about the marriage of her daughter, ask- ing the use of the chapel. "Why not take the church? " "But that is not for the likes of me." "Oh yes, it is, for the likes of you, and the likes of me, and the likes of every one. The rich people, when they get married, want to fling their money about; but that is not necessary in order to be married at Trinity Church." And so the marriage took place in Trinity Church, and the great organ was played as if it were the wedding of a daughter of the rich. His reticence about his methods of work is shown by this anec- dote. A clerical friend entering his study took up from the table the plan of a sermon just finished. "Oh, is this the way you do it?" "Put that paper down," said Mr. Brooks sternly. "No, I've got the chance and I'm going to know how it's done." "Fut that down or leave the room." To a young man in his congregation who, out of awkwardness, had got into the habit of saying to him, "Mr. Brooks, that was a fine sermon you gave us this morning, " he replied, after endur- ing it as long as he could, "Young man, if you say that again to me, I '11 slap your face." "Why is it," said a friend to him, "that some of these men who call themselves atheists seem to lead such moral lives ? " "They have to; they have no God to forgive them if they don't." His power of repartee was great, but it would be difficult to illustrate. Here, however, is an instance which may bear relating : — A clergyman who was going abroad to study said in jest that when he came back he might bring a new religion with him. A VOL. n 770 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 person who was present said, "You may have some difficulty in getting it through the custom house." "No," said Mr. Brooks, "we may take it for granted that a new religion will have no duties attached." He once contrasted the ancient church with the modern to the effect that then they tried to save their young men from heing thrown to the lions; now we are glad if we can save them from going to the dogs. One element of his humor consisted in assuming that he was identified with the world and carried it with him, so that all the world must he aware of his environment, and be thinking of the things which he was thinking about. From this point of view, it was possible to express surprise and to call things " queer " which differed from what he was ac- customed to. Thus on revisiting a place in Europe, where he had once passed some delightful days with friends, he writes : " It seemed so strange to find the people doing the same things, the same guides and porters and landlords that we left. I kind of felt they must have stopped it all when we came away." The use of the word " queer " is common in his " Letters of Travel." He is astonished, on reaching Berlin, that he hears nothing ahout the squabbles of a certain church at home. When he was asked what the Queen of England said to him in the in- terview she granted, he replied that her first remark was, "How is Toody? " [his little niece]. "Not that she said it in so many words, but that was what was in her mind." He represents the letter-carrier approaching him when he was abroad and shouting so that all could hear, awakening the interest of everybody on the street, "A letter from Tood! A letter from Tood! " The hu- mor of his letters to children is something rare and exquisite. It consisted in putting himself in their place and talking as if he were one of them, using their language, keeping within the circle of their ideas. ^ Many of his references to smoking should be humorously con- strued. He was not a great smoker, although this impression might be gained from his allusions to the subject. The cigar was a symbol of social enjoyment ; he did not smoke when he was alone. 1 Cf . The Century, August, 1893, for an article entitled " Phillips Brooks and his Letters to Children." ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 771 Phillips Brooks always retained a vivid impression of the call he made on Dr. Vinton, just after his failure in the Boston Latin School, and when in doubt as to what should be his work in life. He and Dr. Vinton would occasionally revert to the subject in later years, trying to straighten out each other's recol- lections. Dr. Vinton would insist that Brooks while in college had avoided him, in order to prevent any conversation on the sub- ject of personal religion. When, therefore. Dr. Vinton got the chance he improved it to the utmost. Brooks had resented at the time this attempt to introduce religion as if it were an affront, and, grateful as he was for what Dr. Vinton had done for him, could never recall the circumstance without the memory of that sense of injury done to his personality. He would say to Dr. Vinton whenever the subject came up, "All the same, it was mean in you to get a fellow in a corner and throw his soul at him." Dr. Vinton was fond of recalling that when he tried to get from Brooks some idea of what he would like to do in life. Brooks had replied, "I cannot express myself very clearly about it, but I feel as if I should like to talk." Dr. Vinton was not afraid of his young protdgd, and did not hesitate, if occasion demanded, to rebuke him. Once, when Brooks had been talking with a lady at an evening party in Dr. Vinton's house, he turned his chair around and sat with his back to her. Dr. Vinton, seeing the situation, came up to him. "Brooks, get up a moment." Then, turning the chair around, "Now, sit down again. That is the proper position." Brooks was very much at home at Dr. Vinton's house. Some- times he displayed strange moods. He had remained talking with the doctor in his study one night till it got to be twelve o'clock, when he displayed an unaccountable aversion to going back to his house. Dr. Vinton at once proposed that he should spend the night, and a room was made ready for him. But after waiting for some two hours longer, he rose, and saying he would n't make a fool of himself he went home. Dr. Vinton did not understand Brooks's rapidity of utterance, and once asked him to preach slowly, that he might form some judgment of the efBect. His advice, after hearing this attempt, was, "You had better go it your own gait, two-forty, or what- ever it may be." I took Mr. Gardner, the head master of the Latin School, to hear Mr. Brooks preach at Trinity Church. He made no comment on the sermon, but called attention to the ungrammati- cal construction of a sentence. While Mr. Brooks was in Philadelphia, at the Church of the 772 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 Holy Trinity, a study of his character was made from his hand. These were some of the inferences: "The line of heart shows a nature more susceptible through the imagination than through sentiment. . . . The line of life is steady and unbroken, but does not indicate longevity. . . . The balance between the mate- rial and the spiritual is remarkably even. The man is devotional from principle rather than from sentiment; but is of a pure and truthful nature, honest and generous, and kindly in all his in- stincts." As illustrating his preference for city over country life, I am particularly fond of this : " The Bible shows how the world pro- gresses. It begins with a garden, but ends with a holy city." To a lady on shipboard who was nervous in a storm, he said there was no better way of dying than to go down in a shipwreck. Commenting upon a meeting of the Church Congress, from which he had just returned, he said the speeches were like towing ideas out to sea and then escaping by small boats in the fog. Talking with an American gentleman one clear evening in Japan, about some late discoveries in astronomy and the enor- mous number of the stars, the gentleman, who was engaged in a study of Buddhism, said, "If we have a life to live in each one of the three hundred and fifty millions we have quite a row to hoe." "Ah, well," said Mr. Brooks, "if they are as beautiful as this I am willing." One of his closest and oldest friends, when explaining to some one how he should ever have been admitted to his friendship, said, "He allowed us to crawl up on him a little way, where we might better look up to see him." You felt you did not get into the inner citadel of his soul in any conversation, said one who knew him better than most. But you got there when you made no efBort, and were there some- times when you did not realize it. It was because he felt it to be great to live, and had such an abounding sense of life, that he walked the earth like a king and seemed to fill every day with the grandeur and fulness of eter- nity. In the words of Shelley : — All familiar tbingfs he touched, AU common words he spoke, became Like forms and sounds of a diviner world. The same charm which he exerted in the pulpit was felt in the consciousness of his presence in social festivities, or in the private room. No one else seemed to be present when he was there. He filled the room. ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 773 I can remember (writes an English bishop) with highest plea- sure a visit with which he honored me in my room at the Divinity School, Cambridge. His genial presence seemed to fill it, and spread around an atmosphere of energetic life. An English lady, an authoress and highly cultivated, spoke of him as the " enchanter of souls." He possessed that "mysterious gift of charm which, like magic, gives to some men and women a wholly unexplained influence and ascendency over their kind. We now and again come across some persons to whom all things are forgiven because they possess this extraordinary charm. No one can say in what it consists. It neither belongs especially to beauty, nor yet to talent, nor to goodness in life. It is impossible to get behind the secret of charm." Mr. Brooks would have nothing to do with so-called psycho- logical investigations, whose object was to communicate with the departed. "Why is it," he once said to me, "that mediums always live at the South End ? " A lady told him that her grandfather said that Bishop Bass, who was an ancestor, looked in his picture like a judge who had just given a wrong decision. "He is the first person," said Mr. Brooks, "that found any expression whatever in Bishop Bass's face." Speaking once of High Churchmen, he remarked, "What they lack is a sense of humor." He walked across Green Park behind three English bishops, and was inwardly chuckling over their gestures. When they came to a fence, they put their hands on the top and jumped over, while he meekly went roimd, not despising the aprons so much. He burst out once when we talked of a person with rather affected manners, "If only people would be simple! " Very reserved people he did not get on well with, — he was too reserved himself at once, and too sensitive to atmosphere. "If they would only once express themselves," he said. He loved people as people, and always wanted to "hear about folks." In one of his sermons he speaks of what I know he felt about the city streets. "To prosperous men, full of activity, full of life, the city streets, overrunning with human vitality, are full of a sympathy, a sense of human fellowship, a comforting companion- ship in all that mass of unknown and, as it were, generic men and women, which no utterance of special friendship or pity from the best known lips can bring. The live and active man takes his 774 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 trouble out on the crowded streets, and finds it comforted by the mysterious consolation of his race. He takes his perplexity out there, and its darkness grows bright in the diffused, unconscious light of human life. " Did you ever hear how his carriage failed to come one day till it was too late to get him to a meeting, that he expressed him- self with considerable impatience, and then the next morning went over to the livery stable office at the Brunswick and apolo- gized for his hastiness ? His impatience was sometimes quite evident in the way he touched the bell in the Sunday-school if there was n't silence at the first ring. He was sometimes bitterly deceived in people, but it was not from lack of discernment, — he was very discerning, I think, — but because, like that old friend of God, "through grace he re- garded them not as they now were, but as they might well be- come." When he finally made up his mind, he was capable of much righteous indignation. Besides, every one showed him their "star side." Some one accused him once of always addressing men in his sermons, and adding women and mothers and girls as an after- thought ; and I remember our laughing at him once because, after admiring the beauty of a fancy ball, he added that "ordinary parties were all black." It was evident whaX part of the party he was thinking of. Once here at tea, where he was the only man, he spoke of the strange willingness Englishmen showed to change their names, forgetting, as some one told him, that "all the ladies present either had or intended to change theirs." Little children turned to him like flowers to sunshine, and I think his expression when he looked down at them, or held a baby in his arms, was the most tender thing I ever saw. And manhood fnsed -with female grace In such a sort, a child would twine A trustful hand, unmasked in thine, And find his comfort in thy face. "In Memoriam " is full of him, and how fond he was of it! He used to talk to us a great deal about Tennyson, and about "our set," as we called them,- — ^ Maurice, and Stanley, and Kingsley. I remember his saying Coleridge was one of the most interesting and puzzling of men, but Newman, "after all, was only a second-class mind." He agreed with Lowell's remark that Newman made the great mistake of thinking that God was ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 775 the great "I Was " rather than the great "I Am." He laughed over a photograph in which Maurice, in an ill-fitting coat, hangs on big Tom Hughes's arm: "No matter how spiritual a man is if his coat sleeves are too long ! " On hearing that Esther Maurice was accused of destroying some of the Hare family letters, he said, "If even more had been lost to the world, I think I could have forgiven her." He impressed me as having the gift for administration. He was to Trinity Church what a good housekeeper is in a family. He had his eye on everything, knew all that was going on, and seemed to be everywhere. He was very positive, but the people liked it. When anybody wanted to do anything, he would make himself master of the situation in five minutes. Any one could get hold of him, if only there was earnestness and he saw that he was really wanted and needed. But he dreaded machinery in a parish, and was fearful that organization might tyrannize over parishes. He did not at first welcome the St. Andrew's Brother- hood. He had already his Bible class, and thought that was enough. It was the same with the Woman's Auxiliary. Some thought he was opposed to "churchly" ways; but that was not the reason. He was the most sensitive of men if he was not approached in the right way. He told me once that he didn't like being fifty. He said he did n't want to be left behind. Some one had re- marked to him, "Your generation was occupied with slavery; ours has taken up sociology." "And so," he remarked, "the inference is that I am to be thrown out." He never could be alone except when he was travelling. "Travelling is the only place on this footstool where I can be by myself." "Why don't you have a prophet's chamber?" He said he did want one sometimes, but that his mission was to see people. That was what he was here for. After he had been two weeks by himself, he hungered for people. It was the possibilities in people that made them interesting. He was always reading while he was travelling. The others might be looking out of the windows, the days might be hot and dusty, but he continued to read. He threw the books out of the window when he had finished them. You might trace him in his journeys by the trail of books. He used to talk to me of himself and about his preaching. I asked him once whether it was easier to preach extempore or written sermons. "In preparation there should be no difference. But extempore preaching depends on moods. " In his preaching he was always gathering hints from those who had talked with 776 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 him. He would take up their remarks in an impersonal way. It was always so in every sermon. He preached a sermon in Huntington Hall on the " Martyrs beneath the Throne, " and was depressed because he had failed: "I haven't told the people what was in that text." In his morning sermons he was more formal, and at times seemed to be disturbed and even violent, but as the day went on he came to himself and was more calm. There was a tone of sadness occasionally in the later sermons. He told me once that he did not come of a long-lived race. When he was in Germany he had tried going to the German churches in order to get religion and German at the same time; but he discovered he was not good enough to do without going to his own church twice every Sunday. He said this to a young married woman who told him she only went to church once on Sundays. When people were in trouble he would go and sit with them without saying anything, and let them talk. He once said to me that he felt this burden of souls. He would say that he did n't know anything about music, but if you assumed that he didn't know anything about it he was indignant. He wanted to be thought to know about music. He wanted to enter into every experience, and fretted that he could not. He liked a great congregation singing, or a musical band, — anything that was big. The stricter Unitarians, I know, could n't go to hear him. They admired him, but they couldn't take the truth as he pre- sented it. Once, after he had preached in the Hollis Street Church, I heard these two reports: "I think it was an insult for him to preach that sermon in this church; " and the other, "That was a good Unitarian sermon." His tendency to stumble in preaching, till sometimes it seemed doubtful whether he would extricate himself from the snarl of words in which he had become entangled, was owing to his habit of using a lead pencil to make corrections, interlining words and phrases, while he was reading his sermon over before preaching, and especially before preaching a sermon a second time. These intercalated words and phrases were written in a fine handwrit- ing, and looked somewhat dim compared with the bold man- ner of his manuscript. When he came to them in preaching they were like obstructions thrown across the track of the rushing engine. When he preached extemporaneously, he reminded me of a hound who does not at once catch the scent, but having caught it, goes ofE with a rush at his highest speed. ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 777 " Phillips always hated," says his brother John, " to have people remark that he could n't help being good." A friend of Mr. Brooks calls attention to this passage in Caird's " Philosophy of Eeligion " (p. 289) as bearing on the sub- ject : — The moral life is not a passionless life. Benevolence, patriot- ism, heroism, philanthropy, are not the unemotional pursuit of abstractions, virtues which live in a vacuum. The noblest moral natures, the men who live most and do most for mankind, are not strangers to feeling, untouched by the desires and passions of the common heart. On the contrary their very greatness is often due, in part at least, to the keenness and quickness of their sensibilities, to the intensity of that original impulse and feeling which is the natural basis of their spiritual life. But still more to the point is an extract from a sermon of Phillips Brooks, "The Sea of Glass:" — You may go on through the crowded streets of heaven, asking each saint how he came there, and you will look in vain every- where for a man morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. Will you take the man who never had a disappointment, who never knew a want, whose friends all love him, whose health never knew a suspicion of its perfectness, on whom every sun shines, and against whose sails all winds, as if by special commission, are sent to blow, who still is great and good and true and unselfish and holy, as happy in his inner as in his outer life. Was there no struggle there ? Do you suppose that man has never wrestled with his own success and happiness, that he has never prayed and emphasized his prayer with labor, "In all time of my prosperity. Good Lord, de- liver me ! " " Deliver me ! " That is the cry of a man in danger, of a man with an antagonist. For years that man and his pro- sperity have been looking each other in the face and grappling one another, — and that is a supremacy that was not won without a struggle, than which there is no harder on the earth. ^ The moral character of Phillips Brooks stands out clearly in his sermons. Only the man who realized in himself the ideal he was perpetually holding up to his hearers could have dared to enforce it as he did. He left the impression, by his appearance and his speech, of absolute goodness and of 1 Cf. Sermons, vol. iv. p. 119 ; see, also, vol. v. p. 155. 778 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 inward purity. The world was right in fastening upon his true and genuine manhood as his predominant characteristic. Every sign by which we judge of life would fail us if in this case the reality did not correspond with the appearance. One might illustrate in many ways how he seemed to carry virtue to its highest point. He was like Luther — a com- parison which is constantly recurring — in his tender con- science, which inclined him to regard the slightest fault as a great sin. He once said to Bishop Clark with great solemnity, "How wretched I should be if I felt that I was carrying about with me any secret which I should not be willing that all the world should know. " By nature he was quick-tempered, given to forming hasty and sometimes severe judgments, and it was hard for him to over- come prejudices. But if he had wronged any one, or said any- thing which seemed incompatible with the relations of friendship, he would put himself to much trouble to make amends. "You will not think for a moment, will you, that I could have meant to say anything which I thought could hurt your feelings, or that I could have been willing to do so ? " was the apology he went some distance to make when he heard he had been misunderstood. However it may be with the transmission of moral qualities by descent, there is no doubt regarding the reappearance of physical peculiarities after the lapse of generations. Let any one compare the photographs of Phillips Brooks with the portraits of his ancestors and the resemblance is apparent. His great stature and the large dark eye came from Phoebe Foxcroft, his great-grandmother. He most resembled his mother in his features, a resemblance which became more marked in his later years. The face of Phillips Brooks is to be classed among the few beautiful faces which the world cherishes. " He was the most beautiful man I ever saw," said Justice Harlan of the Supreme Court of the United States ; " I sat opposite to him once at dinner, and could not take my eyes off him." His photographs, after he allowed them to be published, were to be found in every household. A commercial traveller, who had gone into almost every town in the State of Massachusetts, was struck with the fact that ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 779 everywhere he found the portrait of Phillips Brooks, without regard to difference of race or of religion. A Roman Catho- lic Sister of Charity writes on receiving his photograph : — I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am for that lovely picture of one of the loveliest men this world has ever known. ... I like any one who likes Phillips Brooks. What a hand- some face ! His eyes seem to be looking for what has been much sought, but looking still, searching patiently, satisfied that be- yond these "mists and vapors" and "darkened glasses" all is clear. I can never say exactly what an impression Phillips Brooks has always made on me. I feel a queer sort of soul kin- dred with him. I should like to have known and talked with him. Though we would not have agreed on all points, I am sure we would have been friends, — queer presumption, but you know what I mean. I 'm not speaking of the intellectual, the scholarly, the official Phillips Brooks, but of the natural man, that looks out of those honest eyes. I like the mouth, too, expressive of the firmness and fulness and compassion and truth of him. The picture now hangs alongside of a beautiful photograph copy of Hofman's famous Christ, and seems at home there. At times he appeared to rejoice in his large stature, as when on coming into a friend's house he would easily place his hat on some tall bookcase or other object where any one else would have to mount on steps to reach it; or would light his cigar from a street lamp. Yet at times, also, he felt his height as an annoy- ance, saying that it made him feel awkward to be looking down on every one in the room. But the worst of it was that it made others feel and act awkwardly in his presence. It was difficult for some people to know how to approach him. Very much as when Heine had prepared himself to meet Goethe for the first time, and when he stood before him only managed to stammer something to the effect that the day was fine. Those who were not afraid of him had no trouble. He would talk freely enough with his friends, always within certain limits, and at times even about himself. He was more communicative with women than with men, as indeed he was dependent on their friendship. With young men he would be quite unreserved, even singularly gracious and kind, saying things about himself and his experiences, — intimate avowals which surprised those who had known him long. When he did talk, it was often so freely that the wonder was he did not get himself into trouble. He put restraint on his humor and his power of satire, but it was withering when he gave it full 78o PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 scope. Of some one whose folly or perversity provoked him, he remarked, "I suppose there must be something good in that man." When children were present, he became almost oblivious of the presence of others. It was sometimes annoying that he would not talk when he was expected to do so, maintaining his silence when people had been invited to meet him. On one of his visits to England, the American minister, Mr. Lowell, gave him a dinner, to which among others he had invited Mr. Huxley, under the supposition that the two men would enjoy meeting each other. Mr. Huxley talked, and Mr. Brooks was silent, till Mr. Lowell feared he had made a mistake; but Mr. Brooks afterwards ex- pressed himself as having found great pleasure in Huxley's con- versation. Mr. Brooks was not given to telling stories, though no one liked more to hear them from others. He did not culti- vate the art of conversation. He sometimes appeared to eschew the formalities and conventionalities of social life, and yet no one could be more formal when he chose to be. A great part of con- versation consists in turning over lightly ideas and opinions. There was what amounted to positive disability in Brooks to take part in such talk. Ideas aroused him. He kept them sacred, to be used only for moral ends. Perhaps there is here an explanation in some part of that jovial, boisterous manner, which treated all things in humorous fashion. It was his way of staving off serious conversation and saving himself from its effects. He is remembered once, in his capacity as a visitor of some theological institution, sitting through the hour while the lecture was given, but after it was over breaking out into indig- nation at the students that they could remain passive in seeming indifference to what was being said. A clergyman for whom he felt a strong liking, although promi- nent in what was known as the "ritualistic " party, undertook to deiine his views on all the points of difference which separated them. After listening to him patiently until the exposition was finished, Mr. Brooks gave this response: "It has all been very interesting, and I have n't understood a word of what you have been saying." The following reminiscence is by a member of the Clericus Club; its truth all the members of the club will recog- nize : — Through all those years what he was to us I cannot find words to say. It would be to tell the story of evenings that burn in memory now, — evenings, so many of them, made memorable and ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 781 sacred by the recollection of his -welcome, which seemed to draw us into his great soul; his brilliant essay read faithfully when his turn came ; his talk when taking part in the discussion, — talk never abundant, but even in its great brevity illuminating the subject so that none of us felt that we could add a ray of light, although some of us would pretend to do so. He was so determined to get at the central truth of whatever topic might be under discussion that his words always had that tone of genuine- ness, of reality, which never seemed like argument, but rather like the movement of his mind in quick recognition of some deeper truth which we all had missed, and which, when indicated by him, seemed to close the whole question then and there. Sometimes when one or other of us would be tempted to talk for the sake of talk, or merely to make a point, his silence was an eloquent admonition. And the quick glance of intelligent sympathy which he always turned toward any speaker in whom he recognized something of his own sincerity of mind was like an encouraging cheer from a hero to a struggling companion in arms. The intellectual constitution of Phillips Brooks puzzled some of his contemporaries. The intellect was so permeated with the power of feeling and the moral sense that its sepa- rate action could not always be traced. The following pas- sage is from a sermon by Rev. George A. Gordon, who after he became pastor of the Old South Church entered into the circle of Phillips Brooks's friends : — The intellect of Phillips Brooks was as striking as the man himself. There was in it a platonic subtlety, sweep, and pene- tration, a native capacity for the highest speculations, — a capacity that did not always become apparent, because he passed at once, like a flash of lightning to the substance of things, and because he believed that the forms of the understanding, into which the highest in man throws its findings, are at best only inadequate symbols. He could not endure the men who say that nothing can be known, nor could he abide those who say that everything can be known. . . . There was in his mind a Hindu swiftness, mobility, penetrativeness, and mysticism. . . . Had he chosen, he could have been one of the subtlest metaphysicians, or one of the most successful analysts of the human heart, throwing upon his screen the disentangled and accurately classified contents of the soul. But he chose, as indispensable for his calling, to let the artist in him prevail, to do all his thinking through the forms of 782 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 the imagination, and to give truth a body corresponding, as far as possible, to its own ineffable beauty. Thus it happens that the sermons with the noblest form, with the greatest completeness, and the finest artistic quality have come from his mind.-' The Rev. William R. Huntington, rector of Grace Church, New York, bears similar testimony : — Some intellects enjoy parcelling out truth into its component parts, just as a botanist pulls a flower to pieces that he may the better understand it ; others would rather contemplate the object of their study in its wholeness, eager most of all to catch and to appreciate the total effect. The one temper is that of the meta- physician, the other that of the poet and the artist. Each type of mind has its value in connection with religion, but it is hard for the men of the one make to do justice to the men of the other. The powerful intellect of Phillips Brooks was not of the dogmatic bent. Had it been, he never could have done the work he did, for religion in Boston had suffered in times past from overmuch dogmatizing, and men were weary of that vein; they thought of it as worked out. But this new teacher, himself es- sentially a poet, came to them holding up splendid pictures of truth. "I do not care to argue it out with you," he seemed to say, "only look and see! " In the constitution of every man of genius there is perpet- uated the heart of childhood ; in the words of Balzac, " Dans tout I'homme de genie, il y a un enfant." In one of his pocket note-books, Phillips Brooks has pencilled these words : "The need of something childlike in the fullest character. A man wholly manlike is only half a man." There is no bet- ter authority for the definition of genius than Coleridge, and it gives new force to his words as we apply them to Phillips Brooks : " Every man of genius possesses deep feeling." And again to quote from Coleridge : — I define genius as originality in intellectual construction; the moral accompaniment and actuating principle of which consists perhaps in the carrying on the freshness and feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. ... To combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius and one of the marks which distinguish 1 Cf. Phillips Brooks ; a Memorial Sermon, pp. 15, 16. ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 783 genius from talent. And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others like freshness of sensation concern- ing them is the prime merit of genius and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation.* In the light of these passages, the meaning of that deep re- serve which characterized Phillips Brooks from his young manhood becomes more clear. Its secret vi^as the child heart that survived in him till his latest years. For very shame he must conceal it, so exquisitely simple was it, so transparent and pure when it should be known. Upon this subject there are sentences in a sermon from the text, " The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him," which are worth recall- ing:— Every living thing which is really worth the knowing has a secret in it which can only be known to a few. The essential lives of things are hidden away where some special sympathy must find them. There is something that every man holds back from us ; and the more of a man he is, the more conscious we are of this reserve. The more of a man a man is, the more secret is the secret of his life, and the more plain and frank are its external workings. Anybody may know what he does and where he goes, yet all the while every one who looks at him will see that there is something behind all which escapes the closest observation. We all know how little other people know about us. The common saying that other people know us better than we know ourselves is only very superficially true. They do see certain tricks in us which we are not aware of; but if we are at all thoughtful and self-observant they do not get at the secret of our life as we know it. What is necessary before one can read another's secret? It is not mere curiosity, — we know how that shuts up the nature which it tries to read. It is not mere awkward good will; that, too, crushes the flower which it tries to examine. A man comes with impertinent curiosity and looks into your window, and you shut it in his face indignantly. A friend comes strolling by and gazes in with easy carelessness, not making much of what you may be doing, not thinking it of much importance, and before him you cover up instinctively the work which was serious to you and make believe you were playing games. I Cf . The Friend, vol. ii. pp. 104, 384. 784 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 When men try to get hold of the secret of your life, no friend- ship, no kindliness, can make you show it to them unless they evidently really feel as you feel that it is a serious and sacred thing. There must be something like reverence or awe about the way that they approach you. It is the way in which children shut themselves up before their elders, because they know their elders'have no such sense as they have of the importance of their childish thoughts and feelings.* In regard to his intellectual habits and methods, one thing is clear, that Phillips Brooks worked through the poetic im- agination rather than by the process of dialectics, although he could show great dialectic subtlety when occasion demanded. When we conjoin this power of the poetic imagination and his other gifts, the " unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judg- ment," we can understand how he could quickly penetrate to the heart of intellectual systems, how a hint to his mind was like a volume to others, and he preferred to work out the hint in his own way. He left the impression of a man versed in the best literature, who could have won high distinction as a literary artist; he seemed familiar with the recondite bear- ings of philosophical thought or at home in the philosophy of history. He had the gift of speaking to specialists in their lines, and showing them the relations and significance of their work, and could bring inspiration to all. He made no mistakes or blunders through ignorance of the field where he was travelling. There was one other estimate which deserves brief notice as connected with his intellectual habits. It was often said that he was no controversialist, and lived above the atmosphere of controversy. This indeed was in general the impression he made in his preaching. There was truth in it to a certain degree ; he did seek to lift men out of the straitened ruts of theological controversy, but in order to that end he passed through it before he rose above it. One reason why he kept out of ecclesiastical controversy may have been his dread of a certain aptness for it. His first impulse was to rush into it. I Cf. Sermons, vol. Tiii. pp. 272-275. ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 785 He had an instinctive tendency to oppose any formal utter- ance which assumed to be the whole truth, or any dogmatic assertion of opinion. His own experience had taught him that all such assertions were one-sided, containing at best only one aspect of the truth. His mind at once began to look for other aspects, — the neglected, obscure intimations of truth on the other side. He was ready to challenge any state- ment in the interest of the other side. He had a natural sympathy for the " under dog " in the fight. All this points to a controversial habit of mind. But the process did not stop here. The next step was to bring these opposite or con- trasted aspects of truth together and from them to deduce some higher truth. It was not until he had accomplished this result in his own mind that he was ready to speak. There were occasions, some of which have been mentioned, when he acted and spoke under the controversial impulse of contradicting some half-true assertion. But these were rare. When he was prepared to speak, it was as one who stood above the conflicts of opinion, taking some larger ground where opponents could meet in harmony. There are many illustrations of this to be seen in his sermons. A sermon was born when he had heard or read some statement which roused an inward antagonism. Thus he listened once, and this is a typical case, to some lecturer who was pointing out how the natural sciences had hurt the aptitude for spiritual things. That might be true, but if so it did not prove that the pursuit of the natural sciences was responsible for this result. There was some defect in the spiritual attitude or it could not have been hurt by an inquiry into the mind of God in the natural order. The conclusion was that when the right kind of spiritual men appeared they would be able to appro- priate without injury all that science could reveal. So deep was the inward contradiction in the man that there were moments when it might seem as if the two sides of his being were not thoroughly fused together. To the last he remained jealous of religion lest it should be treacherous to humanity. He seemed like a humanist trying to restore to man the blessings of which he had been robbed in the name 786 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 of religion. He loved with a passionate devotion this pre- sent world and the good and beautiful things which human life yields with its seed in itself after its kind. But if he were tempted on the one side to overvalue them, and to love them for their own sake, yet he could not accept the alter- native of renouncing them altogether for the love of God. That method had been tried and had failed. The deepest in- stincts of his nature rebelled against it ; he dreaded it for himself and for those whom he loved. There was only one way of escape from the dilemma, and into that he entered by continued struggle, — to love life, and the beautiful gifts of life, in God, as having His consecration, as revealing His goodness and love. There were some contradictory aspects of truth which he made no attempt to reconcile, unless it were that he did not allow them to appear in the same sermon. Thus at one time he sympathized with the Credo quia impossihile of TertuUian and at another time condemned it. How his mood about life could vary is shown in these two extracts from his sermons : — Once or twice in our lives we have stood hy the grave-sides of young men which were too solenrn for regret. We complain that life is short. It is not time you want, but fire. The cloud lies on the mountain top all day, and leaves it at last just as it found it in the morning, only wet and cold. The lightning touches the mountain for an instant, and the very rocks are melted, and the whole shape of the great mass is changed. Who would not cry out to God: "Oh, make my life how short I care not, so that it can have the fire in it for an hour. If only it can have inten- sity, let it but touch the tumult of this world for an instant. Then let it go and leave its power behind." ^ But now on the other side : — To lose any of the legitimate experiences of a full human career is a loss for which one will be poorer forever. This is the reason of the sadness, which no faith in immortality can dissipate, belonging to the death of those who die in youth, the sense of untimeliness which we cannot reason down.^ It would be unjust to Phillips Brooks to class him either as a radical or a conservative. He clung to old ways, held 1 Cf. The Spiritual Man, etc., p. 85. 2 Cf. Sermons, vol. vi. p. 333. MT. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 787 the past in profound reverence, and at the same time had a strange liking for new things and new ways, till it was almost a presumption in favor of any movement that it had the charm of novelty. This was his feeling about many of the movements of his time. Thus he sympathized with the cause of Woman Suffrage, though he never publicly advocated it ; he accepted the principle of " cremation," giving the use of his name to further its adoption. He thought there was some truth in the modern theory of the power of mind in healing disease, and welcomed it as a protest against the current long- established methods of medical practice. But he condemned as irrational the so-called metaphysical or scientific principles by which it was explained or vindicated. He did not commit himself to any methods of sociological reform, dreading in this line of work, as in ecclesiastical affairs, the danger of relying on machinery, of treating men as a class, rather than as individuals. Thus he speaks of the subject in his charac- teristic way in a private letter : — How good it is when the gospel and the ministers get at work at these questions which the business folks are muddling so, and let them see how simple they really are. They are really simple if only the business folks would go at them gospel-fashion. I delight in your picture of the workmen's heads out one window, and the capitalists' heads out the other, and the big jaw going on between them. It will get settled somehow, and things will be juster than they are to-day. He was conscious of the bitter mood engendered by the long strife. He was sensitive as to what people might be thinking of him. As he stepped upon a street car he wondered what the conduc- tor's feeling toward him might be; or on shipboard he was uneasy as he thought of the steerage passengers in their discomfort, and of the social usage which enforced such a distinction. I was sitting with Mr. Brooks in the study of his house on Clarendon Street. In the course of some remarks upon the work of the Christian ministry he said, "I suppose that there are men passing this house every day, wearing overalls and carrying their dinner in tin pails, who, if they happen to know where I live, look up at this house and say with a sneer, ' There is that grand 788 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 house, and a clergyman lives there, — a teacher of the religion of Jesus Christ. A fine sort of Christian teacher he must be to live in a grand house like that.' But I believe that I have a right to live here, with this beauty and luxury about me. I enjoy it all, and I do my work as a Christian minister better for having these surroundings. A man is no better Christian for wearing overalls than for working in a beautifully furnished study. He can be one in either situation, if only he have the spirit of Christ." Yet Phillips Brooks had won the affection and the con- fidence of the poor in an extraordinary degree. They re- cognized his genuineness and sincerity, even those who had become disaffected toward church and religion. His method was simple, — he let his heart go out toward them, not merely as to a class, but to individuals, and on the ground of their divine humanity. He put himself to much trouble to wait upon any one who called for his aid. He interested himself in special cases, — and there were many of them, — not only making contributions of money, but going in person. And wherever he went his personality carried power, courage, and hopefulness. He watched by their bedside when sick and dying. How wonderful, how glorious it was, the way he talked to that audience at Faneuil Hall! These were some of his sentences as he closed his sermon: "Try to go to church. Not that there is any charm in going to church, but it is the place where every one is praying and worshipping God, where we all feel how great it is to be good. I invite you to Trinity Church. I know that every church will welcome you. The days are past when the church did not welcome every one. Come to the evening services at Trinity, which begin in March! Come to the morning ser- vices now ! Come ! I feel as if I knew you after these four meetings, and as if you knew me. "You must remember what I have said to you. Do not only try to be good yourselves, but try to help others. Ton all have a chance, I am sure, to say a kind word or do a kind deed. Try! Try to live nobler, higher lives; do not yield to your temptations, but struggle against them, and remember that the strength of Almighty God is behind you. Trust in Him, pray to Him, and He will uphold you." Then he made an extempore prayer, and closed by saying, "Now let us all stand up and sing together ' Just as I am, without one plea. ' " ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 789 As a parish minister Phillips Brooks retained the ideal of -his youth, when the organization of a parish was simple, when the duty of a pastor was to preach, to administer the sacra- ments, to visit the sick and the dying, and to comfort those in affliction. To the end of his rectorship of Trinity Church he was inwardly critical of what seemed to him the feverish activity which found vent in a complex organization of varied interests, societies, and guilds for every conceivable philan- thropic or charitable work. Yet under his ministry. Trinity Church was changing as the age was changing, and he recog- nized the obligations it imposed on him. When he assumed the rectorship, he found what would be called a church rela- tively small in the number of its communicants, estimated at 400, with a depleted congregation, worshipping in a building left stranded in the business part of the city. After a minis- try of twenty-two years, when he resigned from its rectorship he left it with the grandest church edifice in New England, if not in the country ; its communicants increased more than fourfold, and its activities multiplied till it had become the strongest church in Boston in its contributions to charitable work of every kind ; with its host of workers under his super- vision, zealous in promoting every agency for good which ingenuity, combined with Christian sympathy, could devise. He stood at the head of an institutional church, whose suc- cessful administration alone commanded respect and admira- tion. So natural and inevitable had been the growth that when people paused to consider the work he was carrying on through these diverse agencies, they began to wonder at the administrative power which seemed to match the greatness revealed in the pulpit. But whatever may have been Phillips Brooks's natural capacity for the work of administration, it must be admitted that he took but little interest in the details of what is called working a parish. He kept his eye on every agency at work, he scrutinized plans projected, he knew what each helper or each society was doing, or was capable of doing; where it was strong or where it was weak ; he encouraged and stim- ulated every enterprise of which he approved. His mind 790 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 was so comprehensive that he easily carried the work that was done under him in whole or in part; but there his apparent interest and activity ended. It was not he that pro- jected the plans or sought to enlarge the range of activities by schemes of his own. That was done for him by others, who saw the opportunities and brought them to him for approval. Whatever may have been his own latent capacity for creating openings or originating methods, he did not avail himself of it; he preferred to stimulate others, and profit by their creative enterprise. If we may call him suc- cessful as an administrator, it was because he knew how to concentrate his strength on what was essential, and disem- barrass himself of the detail and labor necessary for its accomplishment. He was accustomed to allude to these things in a humorous way. Thus on one occasion, at the beginning of Lent, he issued a pastoral letter, calling upon the men in the congregation to make more use of the fre- quent services. Sending a copy to his brother Arthur he wrote on the back of it, " I want you to see what a tremen- dous pastor I am getting to be. I hope to be famous yet for ' executive ability ' and ' administrative talent.' " It is an instance of his lack of interest in the detail of administration that he kept no list of the communicants of Trinity Church, and had no conception of their actual num- ber. Nor had he any basis for computation, except to add each year the number of those confirmed to the original number reported when he came to Trinity. From 1869 to 1870 his report reads "about 450;" in 1871 "about 480;" for the next four years successively he added 50 for each year, and in 1875 and 1876 he reports " about 600 ; " in 1878 "about 700;" in 1879 "about 750;" in 1880 "about 900." He seems to have been afraid of overstating the number, preferring to err in the opposite direction. But in 1880 he was seriously remonstrated with for placing the number of communicants far below what it was evident they were by actual count at the monthly communions. He then seems to have determined upon forming a complete list, and in 1881 issued a printed card, which was distributed widely, ^T. 23-57] TRINITY CHURCH 791 calling on each communicant for signature of name with the time and place of confirmation. While the effort was not successful in obtaining the desired information, it led him to report the number of communicants in 1881 as "about 1000." At this figure he allowed it to remain for the next seven years, making no further effort to be exact. But what mental process allowed him to keep the figures stationary for seven years, when each year there were large accessions by confirmation, does not appear, unless it were an unwillingness to seem to be magnifying the growth of his work. Once more, after another remonstrance, he concluded to report an increase, and in the year 1888 he gave the number as " about 1200." His report in 1889 was " about 1250," and in his annual statements for the following years beyond that figure he did not go. The probability is that the actual number of those who regularly communed at Trinity Church was larger by several hundreds. The wisdom and the power of Phillips Brooks as the ad- ministrator of a large parish lay in giving freedom to his assistant ministers and other helpers to seek and find opportu- nities for beneficent work. And for the rest he so stimu- lated the energies of his people that we do not wonder at the variety of the activities and the vitality which pervaded the parish. This would have been his method of promoting the growth of any of the higher institutions of learning to which he was called, had he accepted such a position. He would have made an ideal provost of the University of Pennsylvania, or president of Columbia University, to both of which posts he was invited, for he had the power to infuse life and enthu- siasm and to inspire confidence. Because he was abounding in vitality he could not but communicate his gift, till the things about him grew and thrived. It might not be called administrative ability or executive talent, but it produced the same if not a higher result. The list is a long one of the societies and organizations in Trinity Church which alike looked to the rector for sup- port and inspiration. In the Industrial Society, the Em- ployment Society, the Visiting Society, work was done for the 792 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 poor. The Indian Mission Association had for its object to aid those who sought to protect the American Indians in the far West from political and mercenary adventurers, and to promote their spiritual interests. There was a woman's Bible class largely attended and under most efficient instruc- tion which combined instruction with missionary zeal. The Zenana Mission supported a missionary at Calcutta, and the Zenana Band was allied with it in promoting the better con- dition of women in India. The Trinity Club was a social organization of the young men of the parish, but efforts were expected from it, and were always in process for the exten- sion of the religious influence in the city of Boston. There was a Home for Aged Women primarily for the needs of Trinity Church, but open, when there was room, for those outside of its fold. Trinity House, situated at 13 Burroughs Place, was fruitful in beneficent charities with its Laundry and its Day Nursery. In the Girls' Industrial Classes, for a long time associated with Trinity House, instruction was given in cooking, laundry work, housekeeping and domestic service, sewing, mending, and dressmaking. All of these agencies needed money for their establishment and success- ful prosecution of their work. During the years that Mr. Brooks was the rector of Trinity, the annual contributions for charitable purposes averaged some $50,000 a year. To this list must be added the organized charities con- nected with St. Andrew's, the mission church of Trinity, un- der the charge of Rev. Reuben Kidner. Here, in addition to societies of a similar nature to those above mentioned, there was a mission for deaf mutes; in the Trinity Dispensary four physicians gave their services gratuitously, — advice and treatment for the sick, with a mere nominal charge for medicine and hygienic instruction in order to the best health standards for workers and breadwinners. Connected with the dispensary was the Vincent Memorial Hospital. Regarding these various organizations Mr. Kidner writes : — Brooks encouraged and cheered us, as was his wont, but did not take the initiative. So far as my experience goes, he never initi- ated or suggested anything. He never came to any of us and ^T. 23-57] TRINITY CHURCH 793. said, "I should like you to try this or that." Not one single, method or plan of parish work was original with him. When- ever we wanted to do anything, if it commended itself to him, he was enthusiastic, and gave us the warmest support. But he would not give his sanction to any scheme based on the recogni- tion of divisions or classes among men. After Trinity Church had been completed, an important work still remained to be done in its interior decoration, and in this Phillips Brooks had his share. Many of his letters written while abroad are occupied with commissions he had undertaken for the perfecting of the decorations with its am- ple opportunities for memorial . windows. During the years that he remained as rector, its interior continued to grow richer as window after window was added, till it became, in the estimate of competent judges, " the most important build- ing in the history of art in this country, or anywhere in the present century." ^ He loved the church, and was proud of it with all his heart ; he gave his attention to every detail of its enrichment. It was he who caused the ivy to be planted which now covers a large part of its walls. While in India he thought of its care, and wrote requesting that its roots should be protected during the winter, — a task which he had al- ways superintended. Among other things which to his mind added distinction and historical interest to the church was the bust of Dean Stanley. Its donor was Lady Frances Baillie, who took a special interest in Trinity Church because in years gone by the funeral services had been read there over the body of her brother. Sir Frederick Bruce, then the British minister at Washington. To Mr. Brooks she wrote, making the inquiry whether the gift would be acceptable, only requesting that the name of the giver should be with- held. The Proprietors of Trinity Church having at Mr. Brooks's suggestion accepted the gift, he wrote, on the ar- rival of the bust, to the donor : — 233 Clabeitdon Stbbet, Boston, NoTember 20, 1883. Dear Lady Frances, — The bust has come, and this after- noon it has been carefully unpacked and now stands in my study, 1 Among the many articles written describing the interior decoration of Trin- ity Church, cf. The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1879. 794 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 ■where it will await its formal acceptance and the preparation of a fit place for it in the church, of which it will he always one of the very chiefest treasures. I need not try to tell you with what true reverence I took it in my hands and set it up. It was almost as if he had really come to us himself. His inspiration and, I hope, something of his spirit have heen with us ever since his never-forgotten visit. Indeed, they had been with us long before he visited us. Now, in the setting up of his almost speak- ing face, where ministers and people will always see it, it seems as if the seal was set upon our possession of him, so that he can never be taken from us. I love to think how the preachers who will come after me will treasure this memorial of him, and how it may have some power to purify and enlarge and enlighten the teaching of the church which I love very dearly, long after I am gone. I must not attempt to thank you, my dear friend, but I know you will be glad to think how much joy and help your noble gift will be the means of bringing to this far-away church, and minis- ter, and congregation. It shall be very sacredly honored and preserved. By and by I will tell you of the final installation of the bust in its permanent place. But I could not help sending you this little word of gratitude at once. I hope that you are very well and very happy, as you ought to be. Pray let me count myself, Ever sincerely your friend, Phillips Bkooks. The inscription beneath the bust was written by the late Mr. Eobert C. Winthrop. There was a memorial window to Frederick Brooks, erected by the generous kindness of Mr. C. J. Morrill, between whom and Phillips Brooks was a beautiful friendship, dating from the early years of his ministry. Another historical feature added to Trinity Church in 1890 were the stones from St. Botolph's Church in the English Boston, which now form an arched opening in the side of the cloister leading from the eastern entrance of the church to Clarendon Street. It had been the original intention to send the stones from the central doorway in the great tower. Had this plan been carried out, it would have perpetuated an in- teresting memorial of Rev. John Cotton, for beneath those stones he had gone in and out twenty years while vicar ^T. 23-57] PARISH MINISTRY 795 of St. Botolph's, and a minister of the Church of Eng- land. At this point we pause for a moment to call attention to an important feature of the parish ministry. Enough has already been said regarding the primary conviction of Phillips Brooks, which underlay his life and preaching, that all men were by nature and by grace the children of God. He held that this truth found emphatic expression in the Book of Common Prayer, that it was not hidden in a corner, but assigned a place of honor and prominence in the Church Catechism, to be taught to every child. It constituted the fundamental dif- ference between the Anglican and the Roman communions, — a truth from which the Puritan churches of the seventeenth century had departed, — the sonship of all humanity and the universal redemption. Phillips Brooks gave to this conviction such prominence, such force, as to make it seem like some new discovery. To him also it seemed an inevitable inference from the truth of the Incarnation. That doctrine lost its full mean- ing and became something accidental or exceptional instead of essential, unless humanity as a whole were conceived as the body of Christ. But now we turn to another aspect of the subject. It was the strict and uniform usage of Phillips Brooks to require from those coming to confirmation unmistakable evidence that they were actuated by the motive of conscious love toward God and the purpose to devote themselves to His service. So insistent was he upon this requirement that to some, even in his own congregation, it looked as if he were adopting the Puritan stringency, departing from the Anglican position which called only for the ability to "say the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and to an- swer to such other questions as in the Short Catechism are contained." Thus he received a remonstrance from one of his parishioners, the late Mr. John C. Ropes, who, in addition to his ability as a military critic, was also versed in theology. In a letter dated March 6, 1899, shortly before his death, Mr. Ropes in reverting to the subject wrote : — 796 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 The attitude of Phillips Brooks was calculated to deter all who had not gone through a real "religious experience" in the Evan- gelical sense of that expression, no matter how innocent, how manly, womanly, sound, affectionate, true-hearted boys and girls they might be, no matter how unreservedly they were willing to make their vows "to renounce the devil and all his works," etc. This it was which awakened my opposition, for I had been brought up in an Orthodox [Congregational] church, and had been (in my junior year) received into one on "Profession of Faith." I revere the Orthodox Congregational churches, but I must say that they lose a great many young men and women who are per- fectly willing and serious to come into full communion with the church of Christ, but who cannot meet these requirements. On this point Mr. Brooks never changed his attitude. He called for no conventional tests as evidence of such a love, but in conversation with the candidate he satisfied himself of the beginning of a new life. In these personal interviews he was gentle and tender, yet searching, appreciative always of the faintest signs of the awakening spiritual life. He never forgot that it was God's own child with whom he was convers- ing, or whom he was examining, in order to know if the rela- tionship to the Eternal Father were consciously felt and acknowledged. He preserved in a separate package the let- ters written to him by young boys and girls, where with im- perfect, inadequate language was expressed the desire to live for God ; he kept them as if he attached some special value or saw some special beauty in the way these souls were open- ing toward the great reality. But that much he insisted on, — some evidence of a beginning of a conscious sense of love toward God. Whether this were the attitude of the Anglican Church may perhaps be an open question. But it must be remembered that he had been brought up from his childhood on the Church Catechism, as well as learned religion from his mother's teaching. And in the Catechism it is said that two things are to be learned from the Ten Commandments, " My duty toward God and my duty toward my neighbor." And further in the reply to the question, " What is thy duty toward God?" the child is taught to answer: " My duty toward God is to believe in Him, to fear Him, and to love Him with /ET. 23-57] PARISH MINISTRY 797 all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength." Words like these to a sensitive child with the aptitude for spiritual things, such as Phillips Brooks possessed, are apt to bury themselves deep in the heart, con- stituting a deterrent from lightly assuming the vows of con- firmation. This must be taken into consideration in deter- mining the attitude of the Anglican Church. To the communion of the Lord's Supper, Phillips Brooks attached the highest importance, seeking to make it impres- sive and memorable to every recipient. It was in order that its full significance as the rite of Christian fellowship might not be obscured, that he steadfastly refused to multiply com- munion services and kept the feast only on one Sunday in the month, and then at the mid-day service. When, however, the number of communicants became inconveniently large, he made one concession, and on the first Sunday in the month allowed an earlier communion. A communion service at Trinity Church became one of the most impressive of reli- gious spectacles anywhere to be witnessed, when the congrega- tion seemed to rise as a whole and press forward to surround the Lord's Table. To the influence of this service, a young Japanese student confessed that he owed his conversion to Christianity. Another feature of the parish ministry of Phillips Brooks was his desire, to use his own words, that " Trinity Church should be the most hospitable church in Boston." The effort no doubt had its inconveniences, but the parishioners sup- ported the rector and allowed his wish to prevail. This was an expansion of the parish ministry, for the number of those who sought access to Trinity was large and always increas- ing, till the pastor seemed to stand in pastoral relations to all Boston and its suburbs. This open-hearted hospitality, which refused to draw any limits to its exercise, extended still further. Not only did the young men and young women in Boston feel a special relationship with Phillips Brooks, but from every part of the country they came to Boston, and from England also, with letters entrusting them to his care, opening with the familiar formula, " May I introduce and commend to 798 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 your confidence as if he were my own son, my young friend," etc. His correspondence abounds with appeals from anxious parents whose children were going out into the world, from the ministers of churches of every denomination, concerned for the welfare of their young people, all alike earnestly requesting his interest, from his personal friends also who entrusted their sons and daughters to his solicitude. The burden was immense, but he appeared to carry it easily, knowing how to utilize agencies of every sort to his purpose. He did not neglect these commissions, for he knew how much they meant to those who sent them. There were cases when all the other interests of his life were placed aside, in order that he might devote himself to one single case of need where his personal supervision and sense of responsibility had be- come to him the one absorbing duty of the moment. The exacting requirements of such a pastorate, as thus far described, would seem a sufficient task for any man, quite as much as the strongest man could carry. We must recall his literary work also, costing no slight effort, surely, and the range of his philanthropic efforts and sympathies. But even with all this, we have far from exhausted the list of efforts put forth by Phillips Brooks in his beneficent work. It is in his relations with schools and colleges, and the higher institu- tions of learning, that we discern another and most important phase of his pastoral activity and influence. He was called upon constantly and from far and near to preach and to make addresses to young men in the centres of education, whether secular or religious. The list is a long one, and it would be wearisome to attempt it, of institutions which asked for his presence. He had his preferences, we may suppose, among the schools and colleges, but he had the gift of making it appear that each one was his special favorite and came closest to his heart. Yale University came among the first in the order of discovery of his efficiency. He went there often to lecture, at the request of President Porter. Although he had delivered a course of lectures on Preaching on the Sage Foun- dation in 1877, yet he was invited to deliver a second course on the same foundation in 1885. "Among all the inhabitants ^T. 23-57] SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES 799 of the globe," so runs the invitation, " you are our first choice ; if you cannot write lectures, bring any of your old sermons." To Cornell University he went as early as 1875, initiating an annual course of sermons to become a fixed feature of the institution, of which President White says to him : " I do not suppose that any college chapel ever before exhibited, Sunday after Sunday, so many attractive faces. The new organ in the chapel is one of the tangible monuments of your success here." The Institute of Technology in Boston was certainly one of the institutions whose well-being he cherished deeply, and so often was he there on representative occasions that he seemed to be in some official relationship. He went often to Williams College at the request of President Carter, who writes to him in 1882, " I have long felt that your influence as a preacher of the manliness of Christ ought not to be con- fined to the young men of Boston." In 1884 he was elected president of the Harvard Alumni Association. He was in- vited to the opening of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1885, where the President of the United States was to be present, the governor of the state, the various medical faculties, and representatives of philanthropic institutions, when from every point of view the occasion would be one of mark. The invi- tation to make the address was very urgent, "the wish to have you is unanimous." In 1886 Dr. McCosh invited him to Princeton to give the address on Graduates' Day. He went to Washington and Lee University in Virginia in 1888. He was asked to give a course of lectures before the students of Johns Hopkins University in 1890: "You, better than any one else that we can think of, can reach the minds of those who will be here assembled." In the same year he had two other similar invitations, one to give the Baldwin Lec- tures, at Ann Arbor, where he was assured of " a throng of students;" and another to the Ohio Wesleyan University, where a new lecture foundation had just been established by ex-President Herrick, who had named Phillips Brooks as his first choice. He was one of the trustees of Groton School, of which Eev. 8oo PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 Endicott Peabody was head master, having taken the deepest interest in the inception of the school, and visiting it often, not only in his official capacity, but as a friend of the boys, who felt that in some peculiar way he belonged to them. In 1887 he wrote the Groton School Hymn, which ever since has been sung on the greater days in the school life. Theological seminaries seemed to be placed under his spe- cial charge, always standing open to him with a peculiar welcome. This was true of Andover and of Cambridge, and appears to have been more emphatically true of the Metho- dist Divinity School connected with Boston University, where he made his influence felt for twenty years upon every class going forth from its walls. His interest in young men while in college, says Bishop Lawrence, surpassed the interest he felt in them after they had entered upon their course of professional study. So long as there was the open possibility his interest was at the height, for his imagination was touched at the prospect. In his conversation with young men he was remarkably frank, drawing out their best as he gave of his best in return. He would reveal his inmost experience, or relate his history, placing the accumulated wealth of his inner life at their disposal. In the reports of conversations with them, of which there are many, we see almost a different man, so fully does he speak of himself, and unbosom his deepest, most sacred hopes and aspirations. But the story of the relation of Phillips Brooks to young men must be supplemented with the record of his relations to young women to whom the college had thrown open simi- lar opportunities. The relation was as influential as with young men. Thus he was elected as an honorary member of the class of 1889 at Wellesley College, of the class of 1890 at Mt. Holyoke College, and of the class of 1891 at Whea- ton Seminary. One of the members of the class of 1889 at Wellesley writes : — His association with the class was highly prized by all of us, and none but members of '89 can know what inspiration his con- nection with us was. We were privileged to know something of ^T. 23-57] WELLESLEY COLLEGE 801 the tender thoughtfulness and eager sympathy with which he could enter into our plans and pleasures. We shall never forget the fine courtesy with which he wore the tassel of his Oxford cap on the B. A. side on our Senior Tree Day because he belonged to '89. The eagerness with which he demanded a class pin, and the faithfulness with which he wore it on subsequent visits to the college, the glee with which he shouldered our poor dead class tree and bore it away that we might have our picture taken with it, — these and many more instances are cherished by us. When we first asked him to be an honorary member of our class, and he had actually said that he would be, we were in- clined to be a little shy, for we had been told that "he was very fond of boys, but didn't like girls." But the first time we met him socially, all that fear vanished, either because the hearsay was false, or because of the great-souled humanity that loved all. There were times at Wellesley, as the students were gathered around him asking questions, when there came a strange solemnity upon him, and he was moved as he spoke. One of these times was when the talk turned upon immortality. There would be moments also when the students were loath to leave him, keeping up the talk, or the merriment it might be, until the bell rang for the chapel service. Then he would take his place and preach to the students as no one else could do. That was a charmed circle, of which Dr. Brooks made the centre, and truly, the hearts of those girls burned within them as they talked with him. How full of questions those hours were! As if a group of college girls were the one element in which he. found himself most at home, Dr. Brooks would turn from one to another of his listeners, now sportively laying claim to some class, or college privilege, then joining in a hearty laugh at the difficul- ties in his way. Again the conversation would take a serious turn. The heart' of a new book would be laid bare, the progress of some social movement in all its vital relations to life. Perhaps the question' turned on the subject of a preceding talk or sermon, and then, in a simple way, the spiritual life of each was quickened and stirred by the pure fire of the soul which touched it in an answer. And always with the thought of Dr. Brooks will rise to mind the evening chapel hour, — a room crowded to overflowing, the Swaying of that majestic form behind the desk, the full torrent of words, the breathless hush, and last of all, the heart of the listener glowing from the warm touch of Divine love through God's inspired prophet.^ ^ Cf . The Wellesley Magazine, March, 1893, for these and other reminiscences. VOL. II 8o2 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 What Phillips Brooks was to Harvard has been made apparent to some extent in the foregoing chapters. In his relation to its students he has been compared to Dr. Arnold at Rugby. " His influence," writes a Harvard student, " 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 endure the presence and inspiration of a man like Phil- lips Brooks. One of his last efforts was an appeal to educate young men to do something. He lamented that so many delayed entering upon the fight of life until they had passed the first flush of youthful ardor. "Do something," he adjured them, "do some- thing, do something. " It was his last appeal to young men. It has often been the complaint in these later years that the Christian ministry has ceased to be an attractive profes- sion to young men, in comparison with other callings, as in- stanced by the relatively small number of graduates from Harvard and other large colleges whom it enlists in its ranks. But when Phillips Brooks spoke of the ministry as a profes- sion to Harvard students, it seemed as if no other calling could for a moment compete with it in its human attractive- ness and importance. It was in 1886 that a course of lectures was projected on the different professions, each to be given by one who occupied the foremost rank, Richardson giving the lecture on architecture as a profession, and Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes on law. Phillips Brooks was to speak for the ministry. Each lecturer was to deal with the practical side of the subject, the qualifications needed, the difficulties to be surmounted, the emolument, in a word all that might be necessary to enable the student to make an intelligent choice. One who was present when Phillips Brooks talked on the ministry writes : — I was there in Sever 11, and it was an occasion in the life of Brooks, — a great opportunity, and he realized it. The hall was never more crowded. Students stood and sat on the window- seats ; they seemed to be on each other's shoulders. He tried to he cool and philosophical, and tell them what the ministry was like, as previous speakers had told of the other professions, — he started in that way, but the mass of the young men and the ^T. 23-57] HARVARD UNIVERSITY 803 upturned faces and the subject got the better of him, till, throwing philosophy and cool statement to the winds, he broke out, "I can't come here and talk to you of the ministry as one of the professions. I must tell you that it is the noblest and most glo- rious calling to which a man can give himself." The torrent once loose, it did not cease till it reached the deep calm of his closing words. One was almost afraid that the whole body of young men would rise on the impulse and cry, "Here am I, send me ! " That was a great speech, for its feeling and its thought. Another lecture, "The Minister and his People," given before the students of the Divinity School, has been ever since remembered, often spoken of as one of his most charac- teristic and powerful speeches, and deserving a permanent place among his writings.-' There was an amusing incident in connection with it, — his surprise and embarrassment at finding a large audience when he had expected a small one, an audience in which the women seemed to predominate. He was a stalwart defender of Harvard against any hostile criticism which might be made on the score of religious dangers to be encountered there. To a young man asking his advice, where he should go to college, he wrote : — 233 Clakbndon Stkeet, Boston, March 28, 1887. Mt dbae Feiend, — I am glad that you are thinking of com- ing to Harvard College, and hope that you will do so. I think that it was never so good a place for the life and study of a young man as it is to-day. I have known it for the last thirty- six years, and watched it closely all that time. It has improved and ripened steadily, until it may be said to-day, with no dispar- agement to other colleges, that nowhere can a better education be obtained than at Harvard. There are young men there of every form of religious faith, and many who have no faith. There are scoffers, perhaps there are blasphemers. There are also earnest, noble, consecrated Christian men, and many souls seeking a light and truth which they have not yet found. You will meet in the college what you will meet in the world. You will have to choose what you will be, as you will have to choose all your life. You will find all the help which Christian friends and Christian services can give to a young man whose real reliance must be on God and his own soul. I hope that you will come and be the better and not the 1 A full report was puTjlished in The Christian Begister, February 28, 1884. 8o4 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 worse Christian for your four years' course. If you do come and I can serve you, I shall be very glad. Pray come and see me as soon as you are settled here, and let me know how the questions which are now very rightly on your mind find their solution. I hope you will write to me again if there are any special ques- tions which you wish to ask me, and I am, with all best wishes, Yours most sincerely, Phillips Bkooks. In 1892 he was present in New York at the annual dinner of the Harvard Club, where he was greeted when he rose to speak with prolonged applause and cheers, every one rising to his feet to do him honor. What was an unusual thing with him, he continued to talk for half an hour in a half-serious, half -jocular vein. He defended the change to voluntary prayers at Harvard : — I trust there are colleges more religious than Harvard. It is possible. But I will say this of Harvard, — I do not know any other community in Christendom where one third of the popula- tion, without the slightest compulsion of law or public opinion, deliberately attends religious service. The interest of Phillips Brooks in Harvard, as in other institutions with which he was connected, was not merely a philanthropic one, in some vague and general way, leading him to the utterance of fine sentiments, but it was a concrete, personal relation, where he carried the needs of many indi- vidual students. He was aiding young men with money as well as with advice, — young men with their pathetic stories and their failures, brought to him in the conviction that he could help, if any mortal could, in their restoration. Harvard students became familiar with the sight of Phil- lips Brooks both in the chapel pulpit and upon the college campus. Here is a description of his appearance : — Many a morning, after chapel, one might see President Eliot and the great divine crossing the quadrangle together, or coming down the avenue in front of Gore Hall. President Eliot is him- self a tall and stalwart figure; but he was completely dwarfed by the great bulk and towering height of his companion. Clad in a voluminous 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 ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 805 ease, looking like a walking tower. His face in repose suggested benevolence and placidity rather than power, and irreverent col- lege younglings used to comment wittily on his habit of keeping his mouth ajar as he walked along. He was usually wrapped in profound abstraction. Any sketch of the characteristics or of the pastoral activity of Phillips Brooks which omitted his relation to children would indeed be deficient. He read children by the power of his imagination, but not without close experience of child life. One of the most beautiful as well as practical sermons he ever preached was on the education of children.^ Beneath it lay the love and devotion which had gone forth from their infancy to Agnes, Gertrude, and Susan, the children of his brother WiUiam. Not only was he their frequent visitor, but he made it a rule to go to his brother's house whenever he was free on Sunday evenings. He had the children learn the poems which he liked, and preserving the tradition of his father's household, he called for their repetition, as a sacred task. He took the children with him when lie went to buy the Christmas presents, enjoining them to forget aU they knew about them until Christmas came. It was a rule, and a trying one for the children, that no presents were to be looked at until Uncle Phillips came to dinner on Christmas Day, after his service in church was over, in order that they might be opened in his presence and he might share in the joy. He preserved their letters, filing them in the order of their dates. When Gertrude was old enough, he made her his companion, taking her with him on his journeys or when going to Cambridge, and often insisting on her being at the rectory for breakfast. When Susan was old enough she was to share in the privilege. In these little things he was exi- gent, out of the abundance of his heart concentrating his affection. To be with children seemed to give him more pleasure than anything else in life. He was much in demand for children's 1 Cf. "The Education of Children," in the Boston Transcript for April 26, 1890. The text of the sermon was Luke ix. 48 : " Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me." 8o6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 schools. There were homes for poor children where he visited regularly, going quite as much apparently for his own pleasure as for the children's profit. He is recalled on one occasion as bitterly disappointed, and showing that he was so, when he went to one of these homes in the suburbs of Boston one Sunday afternoon, expecting a good time in playing and even romping with them, to find that advantage had been taken of his coming to invite an audience of adults to meet him, whose contribution to the support of the home it was desirable to obtain. When he realized the situation he went to the window and stood there in silence, after having made his remonstrance. There were not only the children in vari- ous institutions whom he carried in his heart, but there were the children in hundreds of households where he visited, who rejoiced at his coming and claimed him as a friend. Number- less are the anecdotes which illustrate this mutual devotion and friendship. The story of Helen Keller may be recalled as a beautiful instance of the extraordinary character as well as range of his parish ministry.^ She was entrusted to his care by her father, who was anxious that her first religious instruc- tion should come from Phillips Brooks. The story need not be repeated here, for it has had wide circulation, how he sounded the depths of that young soul, shut out from access to the ordi- nary methods of acquiring knowledge, of sight and of hear- ing, and gave to her the idea of God. He was profoundly impressed with the remark she made after the first conversa- tion, that she had always known there was a God, but had not before known His name. She continued to write letters to him as long as he lived, telling him about herself, her thoughts, her experiences. In one of his letters in reply he makes one of those profound remarks which put to shame the attempted philosophy of life, yet so simple that a child could understand it, and so true that it called for no evidence, " The reason why we love our friends is because God loves us." Still another sphere into which the ministry of Phillips Brooks expanded was the number of those to be counted by the thousands who had never seen or heard him but knew ^ Cf . Letters of Phillips Brooks to Helen Keller, Boston, 1893. JET. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 807 him by the reading of his books. To illustrate the nature and extent of this service, it would be necessary to reproduce the letters of those whose gratitude for the aid and comfort he had given demanded expression, — letters constantly coming to him, telling him, it almost seems in exaggerated strain, how he had been the means of imparting faith and hope. He needed these letters for his own encouragement ; they were to him like the staying up of Moses' arms when engaged in prayer. A friend of his recalls his words : " Do not be chary of appreciation. Hearts are unconsciously hungry for it. There is little danger, especially with us in this cold New Eng- land region, that appreciation shall be given too abundantly." The power of Phillips Brooks in the sick room was recog- nized as something wonderful and rare. A mysterious influ- ence seemed to go forth from him for good, for strength and life, even when he sat down in silence by the bedside and no need was felt for words. He had a great gift for inspiriting people who were depressed or had lost heart for their work. A word from him would send them back to their tasks again, with renewed energy. What he said to a young woman tired out with the care of an invalid mother may illustrate, even without his voice and presence, how he dealt with the disheartened, " You go on taking care of your mother, and when she is gone, God wiU take care of you." The letters he wrote to people in affliction, if gathered to- gether, would form a considerable volume. He seemed to attract them, as he did the poor, the sick, the outcast, by some force which he did not consciously exercise, and yet of whose existence he was aware. He had made, as we have seen, a study of the art of consolation. It was not only by imagina- tion that he entered into the woes of others, though imagina- tion helped him and was alert on the slightest appeal to his sympathy, and he could not have been so successful without its aid. But he was applying the consolation to himself in the first instance, and testing on himself its power before he carried it to others. The flight of time, the departure of youth, the loss of friends, the changing world kept his mind and heart absorbed with the problem of the meaning of life, 8o8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 — the purpose of God in giving or withholding or withdraw- ing his gifts. The strange mystery of it all was a burden he could not throw off ; but amidst the complications of life one truth stood out clearly before him, — we find it in his letters of condolence as early as 1883, when he was writing to a friend on the loss of two children who died together in infancy, — and this truth he formulated as the essence and final result of his observation of life, " God never takes away any gift which He has once given to His children." Out of these many letters of consolation, one is here given as a type of all : — 233 CiiAKEKnoN Stkeet, Boston, NoTember 19, 1891. Deae Me. , I have thought much about our meeting last Sunday, and the few words we had together. May I try to tell you again where your only comfort lies ? It is not in for- getting the happy past. People bring us well-meant but miser- able consolation when they tell what tiine will do to help our grief. We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections. But if you know, as you do know, that the great and awful change which has come into your life and wrought you such dis- tress has brought your dear wife the joy of heaven, can you not, in the midst of all your suffering, rejoice for her ? And if, knowing that she is with God, you can be with God too, and every day claim his protection, and try to do his will, may you not still in spirit be very near to her? She is not dead, but living, and if you are sure of what care is holding her and educating her, you can be very constantly with her in spirit, and look forward confidently to the day when you shall also go to God and he with her. I know this does not take away your pain, — no one can do that, you do not want any one to do that, not even God ; but it can help you to bear it, to be brave and cheerful, to do your duty, and to live the pure, earnest, spiritual life which she, in heaven, wishes you to live. It is the last effort of unselfishness, the last token which you can give her of the love you bear her, that you can let her pass out of your sight to go to God. My dear friend, she is yours forever. God never takes away what He has once given. May He make you worthy of her ! May He comfort you and make you strong! Your friend sincerely, Phillips Bkooks. MT. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 809 Many were the attempts to fathom the secret of Phillips Brooks's power in the pulpit. And of them all it may be said that they were so many contributions to the solution of the problem, while yet in the last analysis the secret re- mained, mysterious, inexplicable. Thus was he placed in comparison with famous preachers whose reputation is cher- ished in the church's tradition; but no standard of judgment could be found, and in the comparison the difference stood forth more prominent than the resemblance. No one was a closer student of Phillips Brooks in the pulpit than his Eng- lish friend. Professor James Bryce. After speaking of other preachers whom he had heard, — Bishop Wilberforce, Dr. Candlish, Mr. Spurgeon, Dr. Liddon, and Henry Ward Beecher, — Mr. Bryce continues : — All these famous men were, in a sense, more brilliant, that is to say, more rhetorically effective, than Dr. Brooks, yet none of them seemed to speak so directly to the soul. With all of them it was impossible to forget the speaker in the words spoken, because the speaker did not seem to have quite forgotten himself, but to have studied the effect he sought to produce. With him it was otherwise. What amount of preparation he may have given to his discourses I do not know. But there was no sign of art about them, no touch of self-consciousness. He spoke to his audience as a man might speak to his friend, pouring forth with swift, yet quiet and seldom impassioned earnestness the thoughts and feelings of a singularly pure and lofty spirit. The listeners never thought of style or manner, but only of the substance of the thoughts. They were entranced and carried out of themselves by the strength and sweetness and beauty of the aspects of reli- gious truth and its helpfulness to weak human nature which he presented. Dr. Brooks was the best because the most edifying of preachers. . . . There was a wealth of keen observation, fine reflection, and insight both subtle and imaginative, all touched with a warmth and tenderness which seemed to transfuse and irradiate the thought itself. In this blending of perfect simpli- city of treatment with singular fertility and elevation of thought, no other among the famous preachers of the generation that is now vanishing approached him.* Professor A. B. Bruce, of Glasgow University, the author of important books, — "The Kingdom of God," "The i Cf. The Westminster Gazette, February 6, 1893. 8io PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 Humiliation of Christ," "The Training of the Twelve," "Apologetics," etc., — a man with "strong, clear, Scotch intellect," when he was in this country delivering a course of lectures in Union Theological Seminary, took the opportunity to hear Phillips Brooks. He came down to my house one evening [says Rev. E. W. Donald], full of enthusiasm that could not be repressed, because he had heard, on the previous Simday, three sermons by Phillips Brooks. He had gone to the Church of the Incarnation in the morning out of a mild curiosity; had broken an engagement with a friend to hear a minister of his own church in the afternoon, that he might again hear Mr. Brooks; and he had broken still another engagement in the evening also to listen to a clergyman of his own church, that he might hear Mr. Brooks preach once more. When I asked him, "How does he compare with your great preachers in Scotland and England ? " he said, with a homely and yet a very striking figure, " It is this way : our great preachers take into the pulpit a bucket full or half full of the Word of God, and then, by the force of personal mechanism, they attempt to convey it to the congregation. But this man is just a great water main, attached to the everlasting reservoir of God's truth and grace and love, and streams of life, by a hea- venly gravitation, pour through him to refresh every weary soul." From an article by Rev. H. G. Spaulding, entitled "The Preaching of Phillips Brooks,"^ a few extracts are taken bearing upon his power and the secret of his strength : — Of Phillips Brooks a brother clergyman has said, "He had but to stand up before an audience and let himself be seen, and the day was won." But that which won the day was the rare combi- nation of qualities, — the magnificent presence, the commanding stature, the flashing eye, the sympathetic voice vibrant with emo- tion, the swift imagination, and the wonderful faculty of massing words till their very volume became the fit vehicle of the rushing thoughts. To all these qualities were superadded the thorough manliness, the transparent simplicity, the complete Christlikeness, of the preacher's character. The exhortation to diviner living derived its potency from the actual divineness of the life from which the message came. . . . "By common consent," as Presi- dent Tucker, of Dartmouth, well says, "no one has translated so much of the Christian religion into current thought and life." 1 Cf. The New World, March, 1895. ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 8ii Of Phillips Brooks we may say, as was said of Plato: "Because he was also an artist, he immersed his thought in the warm atmosphere of human life, and at every stage gave it the dramatic interest of intimate human association." In tlie comparison with other preachers, Barrow, Jeremy Taylor, Fenelon, and Taiiler are mentioned : — We miss in their works the blood-veined humanity, the spirit of sonship, and the broad and manly sympathies of Phillips Brooks. . . . These flush his eloquent periods with a fervor that Barrow altogether lacked. These make his figures of speech — many of which are as beautiful as any that 'Jeremy Taylor used — resemble flowers freshly plucked, glittering with the yet un- wasted dew, and clothe his mysticism with a lifelikeness and reality for want of which the discourses of the earlier mystics seem but pallid ghosts and empty semblances of truth. The late Rev. R. S. Storrs, of Brooklyn, himself an eminent preacher, enumerates the gifts of Phillips Brooks which con- stituted his power : — Thus there was in him a majesty and strength of spirit, as of person, which all had to recognize, and were glad to recognize; but with this was the utmost, loveliest gentleness and tenderness which made a sunshine in the shadiest places, among the humblest families whom he visited. There was that unsurpassed affluence of nature and of culture, but with it there was the beautiful sim- plicity of spirit, as of the vital air, as of the sunshine which irradiates and bathes the earth, — a simplicity as childlike as one ever saw in a human soul. There was his utter devotion to the highest ideals of duty and of truth, and his keenest apprehension of the beauty and authority of these ideals ; and yet there was with this the most sympathetic interest, habitual and spontaneous, in humble persons, and in the common affairs of life, his own or others. There was that marvellous eloquence, yet consecrated always, in its utmost reach and rush, to the service of the Master, to the giving of the message which the Master had given him for the souls of men. And with all the self-respecting consciousness which he could not but possess, and with all the admiration and love and honor which have surrounded him as almost no other of his time, there was that marvellous modesty, which shrank from anything of self-assertion or assumption over others, and which showed to the last no more of either of these than when he had been a boy in school, or a freshman in college. It was this com- 8i2 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 bination of qualities, interblending with each other, representing the golden hemispheres of the perfect globe, which gave a some- thing unique and mystical to the spirit of Phillips Brooks. The Kev. J. K. Day, a distinguished Methodist clergyman, was impressed by the universal sympathy of Phillips Brooks, his power to enter into the lives of men of every class, and make them his own : — Marvellously did he bring out of that wonderful gospel teach- ings which appeal to the profound and the learned, and plain lessons which also help the unlettered ; so that the deep- thinking were introduced to the profoundest philosophy, and the hurried man felt that somehow the hour and the lesson were for him, and that he could go out and work noble manhood out of the common- est callings of life. The scholar said, "He is of us," and the unlettered said, "He is of us." The poor said, "He is of us," and the rich said, "He is of us." To the young he was full of mirth and buoyancy; to the troubled he was a man deeply ac- quainted with grief. All men, of all classes and conditions, claimed him, because in his magnificent heart and sympathy he seemed to be all men, and to enter into their disappointments and into their successes, and to make them his own. This was rare genius. This was large capacity. Others who were studying Phillips Brooks found his power to lie in the essential nature of what is called genius, and carried the examination no further. He had "the genius for religion and for preaching." He was to the pulpit what great poets are who have given the highest and fullest ex- pression to life. Bishop Clark took the boldest comparison, calling him "the Shakespeare of the pulpit." In the preach- ing of Phillips Brooks there was, as with Shakespeare, the absence of personal peculiarities. If he is nearly as impersonal as Shakespeare [says Rev. H. G. Spaulding], it is because, when he preaches, he becomes almost as completely the voice of the spirit as Shakespeare is the voice of nature. He draws his illustrations not from his religious autobiography, but from the spiritual biography of the race. In an admirable study of Phillips Brooks as a preacher, by the late Professor Everett, of Harvard, the same compari- son is employed and expanded : — ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 813 We have, then, to recognize that Phillips Brooks was a man of genius. He was as truly such as any of our great poets. It is not important, nor, indeed, would it be possible, to make a com- parative estimate of his genius with that of any specified poet or artist. All that is to our purpose is to notice the fact of his wonderful genius, and to illustrate, as may be possible, its nature and its methods. The genius that Phillips Brooks possessed was that of the preacher as truly as that of Longfellow or of Tennyson was that of the poet. I cannot say under what other forms this genius might have manifested itself. What was ac- tually displayed in his life was the genius of the preacher. Some preachers do helpful service by their reasoning. Some inspire by the power of their imagination. There are comparatively few in whom the special genius which marks the truest preacher as such makes itself felt. This genius was preeminently the gift of Phillips Brooks. The genius of the preacher, I need hardly say, consists in the power of so uttering spiritual truth that it shall be effective in influencing the hearts of men. This implies a profound insight into religious truth, — an insight that shall reveal implications and applications of which the ordinary mind is not conscious. It implies also a gift for the presentation of what is thus beheld in an attractive and effective form. It is thus a genius of expres- sion, which is something very different from a genius for expres- sions. Shakespeare had a genius for expressing the passions of the human heart. This implied an insight into the depths of human life, a power of creation by which what he perceived was embodied in living forms, and a power of presentation by which these forms that lived for him should live also for the world. ^ There was one characteristic of Phillips Brooks regarding which the verdict was unanimous, — his power of excitation over an audience. How it was done no one could explain. Yet it was clearly enough apparent that, in preaching, he was making some mighty effort of the will to lift his hearers to his own high altitude, even while he resorted to no sensa- tional efforts, and seemed to trust entirely to the power of the spoken word of truth. He knew that he had the power; he knew that he could exert it with success, though now and then he admitted failure. But while he could arouse the inner mood of a congregation to the highest pitch of excite- 1 Cf. The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, April, 1893, p. 339. 8i4 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 ment, yet also his appeal was not to the sensuous emotion. It was no luxury to hear him preach, but it strained the tension of the hearer beyond any other experience of the art of oratory. He went beneath the feelings and moved the mysterious centre of one's being. He played upon the will like some subtle, accomplished musician. The remark of an English bishop, Et. Eev. James Frazer, of Manchester, was the universal comment, "He makes one feel so strong." He rose in his first few sentences [says Mr. Bryce] lite a strong-winged bird, into a serene atmosphere of meditation, still- ing and thrilling the crowd that filled the chapel like a strain of solemn music. Few have possessed in equal measure the power of touching what is best in men, and lifting them suddenly by sympathetic words to the elevation of high-strung feeling and purpose which they cannot reach of themselves, save under some wave of emotion due to some personal crisis in life. It was in the afternoon sermons at Trinity Church that Phillips Brooks was at his greatest. These were the times [says Mr. Eobert Treat Paine] when the glory of his preaching culminated. In words blazing with fire, or melted in exquisite tenderness, or radiant with hope, and changing quickly from one emotion to another, often with his head thrown back and eyes on high as piercing through the veil, his great figure would rise and dilate to its utmost majesty, as he threw his arms wide open with that mighty gesture of loving invitation, and then his face would melt into that angel smile of tenderness, never seen by some of us on any other mortal face. A lady once heard him in the afternoon at Trinity, and when asked about the sermon, remarked that it was not so good as some she had heard from him, but that she carried away from it one impression, — his deep, overpowering love for his congregation. On hearing this, he was aifected to tears, and remarked that he would rather that should be said of him than anything else. We have the description of one of these afternoon services by Phillips Brooks himself : — I always remember one special afternoon years ago, when the light faded from the room where I was preaching, and the faces melted together into a unit, as of one impressive, pleading man, and I felt them listening when I could hardly see them. I ^T. 23-57] CHARACTERISTICS 815 remember this accidental day as one of the times when the sense of the privilege of having to do with people as their preacher came out almost overpoweringly.^ It may have been this same day, but it was not an "acci- dental day," when Mr. Horace E. Scudder was present, wit- nessing from the pew what Mr. Brooks experienced in the pulpit: — The solitary pulpit light became the sole illumination of the church. Its whole flame was cast upon the red cushion and the side of Mr. Brooks's half figure and face. There was a glow of color upon the speaker's enkindled visage. All the church was dark. I could see a head here and there in the murkiness, but that intense light glowed more and more intensely. The dark- ness deepened the stillness, and the voice of the preacher, grow- ing more fervid and passionate, came full and strong from that central glory in the gloom. It was the apotheosis of the pulpit.'' Phillips Brooks would occasionally make a remark in con- versation which told more about himself than others could tell. Thus he said to his friend, Mr. Deland, who treasured the words in his memory as full of meaning, " I say many things in the afternoon which I should never think of saying in the morning." In this incomplete sketch of the characteristics of Phillips Brooks, one feature of the man is left to be described in his own language, with this brief word of preface, that from his youth he had kept himself in close association with the lives of great men. The following extract is from his note-book, as he was preparing to speak in Trinity Church on Washing- ton's Birthday, which in 1891 fell on Sunday. He took for his text, "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister : " — It is the day of a great man to-day. This kind of festival nobler than the festival of an event. The latter is the presence of God's power, the former a presence of God himself. Great men are the treasures and inspirations of the nation. Let us think this morning of Great Men ! The vague yet certain process of their discrimination. Let us 1 Lectures on Preaching, p. 83. 2 Cf. The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1877. 8i6 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1859-93 admire the human instinct ! No one can tell why this or that one stands out, but he does. The others fade away. Luther, Cromwell, Washington : the estimates vary, but the conclusion is clear. The sense of accident and circumstance comes in; the "mute, inglorious Milton" theory; the subtle proof that the other man Is greater. Yet still the element of timeliness to be regarded. There are men who are out of time ; the need of get- ting a little distance ofB to see the prominence of some, to catch up with others. But the few great men stand. Others sometimes added, but almost never is one extinguished. Position cannot make or disguise. The question whether they are different in kind or in degree from other men. Both. Difference of degree becomes difference in kind. It is an affair of proportion of the elements of life. The simplicity of greatness; more elemental, more free, holding larger conditions in harmony. Comparison of a great city ; how different its life ! So of a great man. While greatness is ordinarily associated with prominence, we recognize its quality often in obscurity. There we see a person who has these two conditions: (1) He is at once exceptional and representative. He is unlike other men, and at the same time makes a revelation of them. Thus he haunts and fascinates. The moral and mental united. (2) He is not a mere expert, but a man ; great, not in some special skill, but as a being. But enough of the effort to define greatness. We all know it. The real question whence it comes. Once great men were looked upon like meteors dropped out of the sky; now as if they grew out of the ground, expressing its fertility. The significance of the change. The greatest men make greatness possible to all. In a mysterious way it is we who did these things. Vicarious- ness. Personality is universal. Shall there come a time of high average with no great men ? Surely not. They shall always be. Great men of the future. The world shall choose them better. They shall better know their places. Great men have not found their place, though they are always feeling after it. It is ser- vice. The conceit and jealousy of dignity must pass away. Who is greatest ? He that sitteth at meat or he that serveth ? Christ's appeal. Cultivate reverence for Greatness. Teach it to your children. Cultivate perception of it. The double blessing of pattern and power. CHAPTER XXIV 1891 LENT AT TEINITY CHURCH. NOON LECTURES AT ST. PAUL's. ELECTION TO THE EPISCOPATE. THE CONTROVERSY FOL- LOWING THE ELECTION. EXTRACTS EROM CORRESPOND- ENCE The last of the Lenten ministrations of Phillips Brooks was the most impressive of all. If he had known that it was the last Lent he was to keep at Trinity, he could not have better expressed the mood appropriate to such a moment. The change in his appearance, indicated in one of his photographs, where humility of spirit and a brooding tenderness and solici- tude look out from his dark and somewhat saddened eyes, corresponds with a certain indescribable quality, which per- vaded all his utterances. A brief allusion to some of these Lenten addresses will be sufficient. The subjects of the lectures to the Bible class on Saturday evenings were the larger words of Scripture and of life, Creation, Preservation, Inspiration, Incarnation, Redemp- tion, Sanctification, Resurrection. On Friday afternoons he commented on the Te Deum, bringing out the sublime mean- ing of the church's greatest hymn till the grandeur, and at the same time the deeper truth of the poetic interpretation of life, was felt by all who listened. On Wednesday evenings his subjects were personal utterances of Christ, which ex- pressed the essential meaning of life. Thus he took up the words, "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter;" "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul." With these words of Christ he associated the utterances of VOL. n 8i8 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 great men in Scripture : the words of David, " All thy works praise thee, O Lord, and thy saints give thanks unto Thee." "The only real praise is the extension of the glory of a thing. Obedience is praise." For the distinctive words of St. Paul he took the passage in Eomans v. 10, 11 : " For if when we were enemies we were reconciled unto God by the death of His Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by His life. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom we have received the Atonement." These were representative words of John the Baptist, "He must increase, but I must decrease." The inevitable sadness of such words, and yet an element of gladness in them. There must be both, because they are great life-words. Sadness and gladness in all life. There is here the relief of pressure, which, however the pressure has been rejoiced in, is welcome. Another takes the burden. This word of Moses is different from the words of Jesus, of Paul, John, or David : "And he said unto him, If thy pre- sence go not with me, carry us not up hence." It has the strange Covenant figure in it. It makes terms with God, but it is the full tone of the Old Testament which craves God's presence. It is manly and vigorous. If it sins it will face its sin in the full light. Life shall mean its fullest. The Lenten sermons, like the addresses, dealt profoundly with the consciousness of sin. On Ash Wednesday, the text was, "God be merciful to me a sinner; " on Good Friday the text was this: "And the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." Blood is life. But, as always used, it is given life, — life made manifest in being given. The mystery of blood, even seen in these veins. It is freely shed that another may have the life I have. And life is cleansing. There is no other cleansing than that which comes by life. The flowing stream grows pure. Serious and solemn, searching to the last degree, were these Lenten addresses, but never depressing, and every Friday afternoon came the elevating, inspiring tones of JET. s si ST. PAUL'S CHURCH 819 the comments on the Te Deum. On Fast Day (April 2) the duty was urged of mingling praise and hope with peni- tence. "They cannot stand alone, they make one man." The sense of evil in life does not deny but implies the noblest capacities in man. It is because he is great and strong that he is wretched. All satire must keep sight of man's greatness. This, then, is the order: a glow of man's greatness, a chafing at man's failure, and then a sweep towards man's possibility. On Easter Day this was the text : " That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death." He was born that he might die. The old sad story. Can anything be sadder? So we talk to each other in our darkest moods. But the glory of Jesus is that He takes our old despair- ing speeches and makes them glow. The dirge becomes a psean. "I am born that I may die," becomes a cry of victory. In the course of this Lenten season he made an address every Monday at twelve o'clock in St. Paul's Church on Tremont Street. A placard affixed to the gate of the church, announcing that the services were "For Men Only," kept the women away, and the men took possession. Those lectures were a new revelation of the power of Phillips Brooks to the men of Boston, and its suburbs. They are still talked about when people are recalling his memory. He was at his great- est when preaching to men, young men, but men also of every age and calling. He could by his imagination take the out- look upon life of the average man, and using that as his lev- erage he addressed them with a tremendous power, such as they had not dreamed of as in the possession of any man. In Boston, as in New York, it was the man whose spirit was stirred within him as he thought of the danger of lost oppor- tunities. He had once written — it was in his "Lectures on Preaching" — that "the thought of rescue has monopolized our religion and often crowded out the thought of culture." But he would not have written that sentence now. Every man had his opportunity to develop himself to the utmost as God meant him to be. To rouse men to the danger of losing that opportunity was his motive; to bring them to the recog- nition of their possibilities, all this was "rescue work." He 820 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 did not preach the penalties of hell as the alternative, but he made men feel the alternative to be a loss unspeakably sad and fearful. This is a report from one of the daily news- papers which will apply alike to each one of those memorable services : — It was a large and thoroughly interested audience that con- fronted the Rev. Phillips Brooks in St. Paul's Church to-day at noon. All the seats were early filled, and the aisles were occu- pied with eager listeners to the eloquent words that fell with marvellous rapidity from the lips of Boston's great pulpit orator. The men who thronged the church, — for it was an exclusively male audience; the imgallant placard outside, "For Men Only, " effectually keeping away the gentler sex, — the men were evi- dently from the business walks of life, little accustomed to giving the best hours of the day to religious services, and the preacher's remarks were addressed to just that class. Nor were they appar- ently accustomed to such a torrent of words driven home with the power and fervor of a man thoroughly in earnest. Many seemed almost bewildered and dazed at what must have appeared to be directed at themselves as individuals, while others watched the speaker with eyes of expectancy, wondering what would come next. All were swept along, forgetful of their surroundings, by the grandeur of his presence, the impressive sweep of his hand, and the tremendous power of his utterance. At times he would straighten himself up, throw back his head, and in the most dra- matic manner picture the terrible consequences of sin, appealing to his hearers, if they had no concern for themselves, to think of those who might be looking to them as examples. Then their gaze would be fixed upon him as though magnetized, and the intensity of their faces would be almost startling. The addresses of Phillips Brooks during Lent at St. Paul's had aroused so much attention that the secular newspapers in Boston made the effort to report them in full. The "Churchman," of New York, also sent its special reporter, assuming that it might have the same privilege as the secular press. There were various reasons why Mr. Brooks should object to the publication of these reports. He had learned by sore experience that what he said was one thing, what others thought he meant might be quite a different thing. Each one understood him according to personal presupposi- ^T. ss'] UNION SERVICE 821 tions with which he might or might not be in sympathy. The refinement and subtlety of his mind, working in con- junction with his large spiritual sympathies, removed him far from the conventionalities and commonplaces of religious utterance, and yet these were employed almost of necessity in making a report for others of what he had said. The case was a difficult one. He not only had no time to spend in revising his addresses for publication, but such a task would have been very distasteful. It hampered him in the freedom of the pulpit to know that reporters were present who were not sure to represent his thought. For these reasons he was moved to make another vigorous protest : — March 21, 1891. Editor of the "Churchman," — I wish it to be distinctly known, and I beg yoil to state in your paper, that the publication of the addresses which I have delivered in Boston has been made by you without any revision of your reports by me, and against my wish distinctly and repeatedly expressed. Phillips Brooks. There was an event connected with this season of Lent which it is important to chronicle, — a union service, held on the evening of Good Friday, at the Old South Church. Mr. Brooks had contemplated such a service in the year 1890, but for some reason the plan was postponed. In this year, when the plan was again proposed, he acquiesced, sug- gesting that the names of those to be invited should repre- sent the churches in the immediate vicinity of Copley Square,- — Kev. Samuel Herrick (Congregational), Rev. Brooke Har- ford (Unitarian), Eev. Leighton Parks (Episcopal), Eev. P. S. Moxom (Baptist), together with the pastor of the Old South Church, Eev. George A. Gordon. Mr. Moxom was unable to be present, but, with this exception, the above- mentioned clergymen united with Phillips Brooks in a service to commemorate the death of the Saviour of the world. The following interesting letter to Mr. Eobert Treat Paine in Europe will serve to continue the narration for the earlier months of the year : — 822 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 233 Clabendon Stbebt, Boston, March 26, 1891. Mt deak Bob, — Don't you want to hear a word from me at Easter time ? To-morrow is Good Friday, and this week is slip- ping away as you have so often seen it go. And Sunday will be Easter Day, with all its strange uplifting and exhilaration. It has been a long, hard spring, with much of sickness and distress. In the middle of Lent [March 9] died Bishop Paddock, after a long winter of bitter suffering and patient resignation. It has been good to see how cordially every one has recognized the good- ness which was in him, and how the praise of faithfulness has come at once to everybody's lips. He did try to do his duty, and he wore himself out in doing it, and he will be remembered gratefully. There is not much talk yet about his successor, but the Convention meets about five weeks from now, and then he must be chosen. I have no idea who he will be, perhaps William Huntington, perhaps William Lawrence. Then one day this week I buried Mrs. William Lyman, who died suddenly. I re- member the old days in Philadelphia, when we lived in the same boarding-house, and the world looked very large ahead. It looks large still, but the going on of one after another whom one has been accustomed to see reminds us all the while that we shall not see the drama of the world played out, and that the end of our share in it all cannot be very far away. I suppose that it is some impression of this kind that has worked our good old class up to the desire to see more of itself, and has led Tileston and Willard and Jim Reed to arrange that we should dine together once a month at Parker's. It has been twice that we have done it now; on the first occasion there were twenty of us there, and on the second occasion fourteen. Sanborn did most of the talk- ing. Barlow was present the last time, and did his share. There is some wonder about how long the thing will last. I think it will probably settle into a semi-annual dinner, or some- thing of that sort. But at any rate it shows how young we are, and how fresh still are the bright days of our youth. I saw Edith and John the other day, — dined with them in the old room where I used to dine with you. The children had disap- peared for the night, but I had a delightful evening with their parents, and heard the last news from Bome as it was seen through Ethel's bright eyes. By this time you are deep in Italy, and must be much delighted in it. Do all you can to improve the temper and habits of the fiery folk, and if they will not pro- mise to behave themselves keep them at home, and do not let them come to murder and be murdered at New Orleans. ... In other things Trinity Church is much the same as always. Only ^T. 55] THE EPISCOPATE 823 our music goes to pieces at Easter. Mr. Parker has resigned, and the choir goes out with him, so that the western end of the church is all to be supplied anew. And Heaven knows what may- come to us ! If ever anybody was a baby in matters where he ought to be a man, 't is I! . . . P. B. On the Sunday after Bishop Paddock died, Phillips Brooks preached a memorial sermon at Trinity Church: "Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily and justly and unblameably we behaved ourselves among you that believe." With these words for his text, he drew the portrait of the deceased bishop, narrating the simple facts of his life, the excitement at his election, his previous good repute, espe- cially his generous attitude shown by his speech at General Convention when party spirit was running high. "He came here a stranger in these parts. Bass, Parker, Griswold, and Eastburn were his predecessors. This patient, faithful person differed from all. He was not so much a leader as the creator of conditions of advance. These were some of his characteristics: " — His simplicity. Nothing could be further from the old mighty prelate. His domestic life. His personal unobtrusiveness. His absolute Americanism. His genuine goodness. His absolute faithfulness ; patience in details. Minute care was his delight. But it was unsparing. It haunted all his work. His fairness. He was Just, trying to give everybody his rights; not stepping beyond his powers. This was the secret and power of his tolerance. It was not so much sympathy as respect for right. And here came in his wisdom. It was the desire to do right. His personal advice. His preaching. You know his sermons: no restlessness of intellect, no seeking for conceits ; a clear, fixed path, with clear, fixed use of it to the glory of God. This brings us to his simple piety. Directness of that ; con- stant refinement of life. The soberness of it. What it has opened to now. The testimony which he bore to a great city : to his clergy a faithful friend ; to the Church a solid life to build on ; to the world a pressure against evil. The nomination of Phillips Brooks for the vacant episco- pate was immediate and spontaneous. But it differed from 824 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 the ordinary nomination in that it came first from the peo- ple. The friends of Mr. Brooks, those who stood in closest relation to him, had no part or lot in the original sugges- tion, or its furtherance. To this remark there is one excep- tion, — this letter sent to him as soon as the vacancy was known : — Mt deae Beooks, — A very serious word this time, and no answer required. Just think of what you are doing! Just think of your amaz- ing, overpowering, ever growing, ever widening influence! Such a gift, so Heaven sent, and so discouraging to those of us who have only the fractional part of a talent to spend for the Master! You must leave yourself in your friends' hands now about this vacant diocese, and not seek to anticipate Providence, or to set it aside, as if it did not know what was best. "It shall be given to those of whom it is prepared by my Father." Leadership is prepared: to sit on the throne is not ours to give or to refuse. Heed this lesson and just be silent for a little space. Your old friend From the time that Bishop Paddock died there was fre- quent reference in the Boston newspapers to Phillips Brooks as the most fitting candidate for the vacant office. Two of the leading papers, the "Advertiser" and the "Herald," advocated his election. The diocesan convention did not meet until April 29, and in the intervening weeks there were constant communications from those who were interested, the tenor of which varied : some maintaining that he would not accept the office, others that it would not be right to take him from Trinity Church, where his influence was al- ready greater than it would be in the episcopate ; and there were those who thought that he lacked the executive capacity needed for the administration of a large diocese. But now also began to be heard insinuations that he was not loyal to the Episcopal Church, that he did not believe its doctrines, that he rejected the miraculous element in creeds and Scrip- ture, and that at heart he was a Unitarian. The prevailing opinion grew rapidly stronger that he was the natural candi- date, and among those who knew him the insinuation against ^T. 55] THE EPISCOPATE 825 his honor and his honesty was met with indignant denial. But during these weeks there was no such process as "elec- tioneering" in his behalf. His friends had agreed not to mention the matter to him until the spontaneous movement in his favor should have gained momentum. So many let- ters, however, were published opposing his election on the assumption that he would not accept the office, that his friends felt it necessary to get from him an authoritative statement. On April 2 [writes one who stood closest to him], a few weeks before the meeting of the diocesan convention, it was my privi- lege to learn his views in a conversation which he himself opened by saying: "Why have none of you spoken to me about the Bish- opric? The newspapers are full of it; why are all my friends so silent ? " I replied that it was because in our ignorance of his wishes, we thought it wiser to allow the matter to come before him for his decision when he should be elected, as we hoped he would be by a large majority. He answered, "Why should I decline? Who would not accept such a great opportunity for usefulness, such an enlargement of his ministry ? " At my re- quest he then authorized all who desired his election to say that he would accept the office if offered to him. This, I think, was the first time that he had an opportunity for making such a state- ment. On April 5 the Boston "Transcript" published a letter of mine, in which some absurd objections to his election were met, and which closed with these words: "Those of Dr. Brooks's friends who now know his views on the matter feel certain that he will accept the office of Bishop if elected to it, not because he seeks its honors, but because his loyalty to the diocese will not permit him to refuse its call to so enlarged an opportunity for serving Christ and the Church." The Boston "Transcript," which had hitherto opposed the movement on the ground that it would be "unwise to take him out of his present commanding position, and make him simply a public functionary," now advocated his election : — The position which he holds at Trinity Church is unique, and the feeling which we have expressed respecting his giving up the rectorship of Trinity is deep and strong, and is almost universal in this community. But if Dr. Brooks thinks that the Episcopal office will not restrain him in his work, and the people of Trinity 826 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 are willing to give him up, we are free to say that he will carry into the office of a bishop important qualities which are too often lacking in our American bishops. ... If Phillips Brooks is elevated to this position, we shall certainly have a leader in the Episcopal Church who is not more in union with his own people than he is in touch with other Christian families, and who is in sympathy with the whole range of our public life. . . . What is needed in this commimity, if the Episcopal Church is to be- come thoroughly assimilated to our New England life, is that somebody shall lift up the Episcopal office, so that if there is any virtue in a bishop, our citizens may be able to discover it. . . . We are not, of course, in the counsels of churchmen, nor practi- cally concerned with questions of high or broad church, and we have no right to go further than the friendly discussion of the matter; but we are ready to agree that the election of Dr. Brooks, although as we have said a certain loss to the general community and a certain sacrifice for himself, would be the means of putting the Episcopal Church in a more favorable and influen- tial position than it has hitherto occupied in New England ; and that as a matter of large-minded policy and Christian statesman- ship his election ought to be favored by all churchmen, no matter what their special opinions may be. There is evident in the foregoing extract that sense of public proprietorship in Phillips Brooks which had appeared so strongly when he was called to Harvard, and had only- increased with the years that had since elapsed. This feel- ing was apparent in editorial remarks in the "Advertiser" and the "Herald," and was rapidly extending outside of New England. There were some in the Episcopal Church who resented it as an intrusion, as though outside influences were brought to bear upon a question which it concerned only the Episcopal Church to determine. But it was natu- ral, it was spontaneous and inevitable. It was the case of a man whom no ecclesiastical body could appropriate as exclusively its own. As Phillips Brooks had risen above denominational and religious barriers, by the force of his religious genius, so, too, had he transcended the barriers which separate church and state, until they seemed to flow together in one organic life, as in the days of the ancient theocracy in New England, when every Christian man was a ^T. 55] CONGRATULATIONS 827 freeman, and entitled to be heard on questions of the com- mon weal. The world within or without the church was recognizing the time of its visitation. It was wisdom to ac- cept the situation. So it was, then, that the secular press seemed to have become religious, the gulf between the secu- lar and the religious was bridged. If one now wished to address the religious world, it could be done most effectively by the secular newspaper. This became more apparent in the weeks that followed. The diocesan convention met on the 29th of April, and on the following day Phillips Brooks was elected bishop on the first ballot by a large majority of the clergy and a still larger majority of the laity. It was a personal election, where party lines ceased to be closely drawn. There were those who voted for him who were not in sympathy with his ecclesiastical atti- tude, and others voted against him, who were at one with his purpose, but did not wish that he should be taken from Trinity Church, where his fame had been won. But however it was, the enthusiasm over the election was unbounded. If the vote had been taken again, it would have been well-nigh unanimous, for many of those who had voted adversely were rejoiced at the result. It was a strange scene. Dr. Brooks was not present at the convention, remaining at home in the house on Clarendon Street. As soon as the result of the election was known, there was a rush from the hall where the convention was sitting, an eager rivalry to be the first in con- veying to him congratulations. He is remembered as he stood in his study to receive those who came, sharing somewhat in the excitement, it must have been, yet not showing it, tender- ness inexhaustible written in his face, the large eyes filled with emotion, and not without a plaintive sadness, with a welcome extended to all alike, knowing no discrimination, a prophecy of the bishop he was to be. It seemed as if the convention had transferred itself to the rectory of Trinity Church, there were so many who wished him well. The rejoicing in the land was so deep, so widespread, so universal, that the occasion seemed like some high festival whose octave was prolonged in order that the full harvest of 828 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 congratulations might be gathered in. The multitude of his friends wrote to him, and their name was legion, expressing their joy. All took it for granted that the event meant the expansion of his influence to imperial proportions. It was assumed that the great day of Christian unity was to be ushered in by the enlargement of his power. It was " a per- fect storm of congratulations," said one who was watching the scene. There had been other events in the life of Phillips Brooks which had called out the popular applause, but this excelled them all. It was a day of personal rejoicing, as though each individual friend or admirer had been honored in the honor which had come to him. There was a strange disclosure here of his hold upon human souls, as well as upon the community at large. We may look for a moment at a few of the more repre- sentative expressions of the moment. They are a handful selected from a thousand similar ones. " I have just heard the glorious news of your election." " It is one of the most encouraging events that has happened in the church for years." " I cannot but feel," wrote one of his early parish- ioners in the Church of the Advent, Philadelphia, " a sort of reflected honor on our own little Advent, and my heart is full of eager joy." They recalled also at the Church of the Advent, where the first discovery of his power had been made, that one of the vestry had prophesied that he would be a bishop. From a friend in Philadelphia came these words : — The gratification felt here over your election is unparalleled. I never saw anything like it. And those who knew you best have no words to express their joy. All our newspapers have had editorials on your election. The colored people, who had never ceased to remember his interest in their behalf, spoke through one of their represent- atives : " The negroes of the South rejoice with me in wish- ing you joy." A citizen of Boston who knew the city well •writes: "Beautiful thoughts are thought of you in Boston, glorious things are said of you, and the noblest expectations cherished." " Since your election my heart has been singing ^T. 55] CHRISTIAN UNITY 829 the 'Nunc Dimittis' and the ' Benedictus.' " Those who differed from him theologically told him of the benefit they had received, how " his words had been good and true and wise." Into the great flood of congratulations there poured the streams from tributaries so numerous that all cannot be men- tioned. Some of the letters from the bishops who congratu- lated him, and it was relatively a large number of them who hastened to express their gratification, recognize the unique element in the situation : " No bishop of the American Church was ever called to his high office with such acclaim." Heads of universities and colleges, the most important and representative, wrote as if they were included in the universal benediction. Resolutions were sent from the students of the- ological seminaries of every name, from the institutions of learning with which he had been connected. The friends of early years and of later took advantage of their privilege. If we attempt to generalize on this amazing display of per- sonal devotion, it might be said that all were inspired by a feeling that the moment had come when those who recog- nized his work, whether they knew him or not, had the right for once to speak, and express their deepest feeling to Phillips Brooks. There was abundant recognition from his own household of faith, vastly more than he could have imagined was pos- sible. But what came to him from the most representa- tive men in other religious communions was significant and impressive. A distinguished Congregational clergy- man wrote: "The event means a great deal for all our churches;" and another reminded him of the many thou- sands whom he did not know, who were praying for him, and asking for him "life and health in order to do some great work." A prominent layman of the Congregational Church wrote : — I want to add my voice to the general Laus Deo, Deus vobis- cum. I am so thankful you are elected bishop, not of Massachu- setts, but of the Church Universal. All of us who share in your scholarly liberality, of all denominations, will call you our 830 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 bishop. May God make you Bishop of all souls, and may all humble and good men love and honor you more and more ! A representative Methodist clergyman writes to him, " I am now ready to intone ' Te Deum Laudamus.' " An emi- nent lawyer, Unitarian in his religious faith writes : " It is, indeed, a fine thing when a great body of Christians puts at its head one whom all Christians wiU gladly foUow." A Uni- versalist divine and prominent educator : — I do not so much rejoice in the immense forward movement that Episcopalianism has made in your election, though I trust I am broad enough not to be indifEerent to that, as I do in the gain that has come, and that is sure to come more and more, to our common Christianity? In this feeling I know that I voice the general sentiment of clergy and laity alike of the entire Univer- salist Church. To the letters must be added the well-nigh universal tribute from the newspapers throughout the country. The editorial tone is one of rejoicing because in some way he will now be a " universal bishop." We get here a strange light upon the process by which in the ancient church the claims of a bishop, whether of Constantinople or of Rome, to universal supremacy found an echo in the popular heart. There was some vast mysterious yearning in the soul of the common hu- manity for leadership, and this instinct had fastened upon Phillips Brooks as adequate to the demand. These are the words of the Boston " Daily Advertiser," but they were repre- sentative words of the American press : — The election of Bishop Brooks means, first of all, a new inspi- ration in every parish in the State. Next, it means an upward and onward movement in living faith throughout the length and breadth of the land. It means that people of all religions and of no religion, within the boundaries of this diocese, will especially share in the blessings of this glad event, the former as feeling an influence too large for narrow limits, the latter as persuasively drawn by golden cords of eloquence and example toward better things than they have known. The election of Bishop Brooks means that there is to be not only a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, but, in some genuine and complete sense, a Bishop of Massachusetts. ^T. 55] CONGRATULATIONS 831 The late James Kussell Lowell gave brief but emphatic utterance to the same feeling : — EiiMwooD, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 1, 1891. Dear Doctor Bkooks, — Though I do not belong to the flock which will be guided with your crook, I cannot help writing a line to say how proud I am of our bishop. Faithfully yours, J. R. Lowell. The vote of Trinity Church had been cast by Mr. Martin Brimmer, representing the delegation in the convention, who also wrote to Dr. Brooks on the day of the election : — It fell to me this morning to put into the ballot box the vote of Trinity Church for you as Bishop. I am sure that in doing this I represented the feeling of the Parish, — the feeling, on the one hand, of deep regret that your election must sever, not, we hope, all connection between you and Trinity, but certainly the close and continuous connection which has been of such unspeak- able value to all of us ; the feeling, on the other hand, that this regret must give way before the assurance that you are now to move forward into a service which those qualified to judge deem more important as well as of wider range. ... I think your parishioners fully recognize the great significance and value of this act of the diocese to the whole Church in America. This letter may be taken as representing the feeling of Trinity Church expressed in the many letters from its parish- ioners. From the moment of the election, there had sprung up a hope that he might yet in some way be retained in offi- cial relationship to his old parish, possibly make the church his cathedral, or be the nominal rector, with an assistant minister, as in the case of Bishop Eastburn. But he was not to be allowed to sever his relationship with the parish, in any degree, without another confession to him, in the unveil- ing of sacred experiences, of all that he had been to bis people. There were other important interests from whose point of view his election carried a mingled feeling of regret. Presi- dent Eliot wrote : — We owe you more than I can tell for your constant support of the new methods of Chapel administration. . . . Voluntary prayers would not have come when they did in 1886 if you had not ex- erted your influence in the Overseers in favor of the change. 832 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 Without you the plan of having five preachers to the University- would not have looked so promising in anticipation, and would not have succeeded so well in actual use. . . . Your prayers and addresses in the Chapel have been of infinite use, not only ip. the hearts and lives of the listeners, but also in establishing the Uni- versity religious services on a broad and firm foundation. . . . I shall certainly count on your continued interest in all our work and particularly in the Chapel work. I hope that you will be this year reelected to the Board of Overseers, so that you may again have a voice in all University affairs. President Warren, of Boston University, sent congratula- tions, but as he reviewed the services of Phillips Brooks to the institution over which he presided, he knew that they could not in the future be rendered so fully. He could only acquiesce, and say, " The Lord's will be done." There were many other institutions, also, whose representatives realized and expressed a sense of loss in the impending change. There were a few who still thought and said that the place of Phillips Brooks was in his metropolitan church, " in the pul- pit as the presbyter's throne," expressing their misgivings lest he " sacrifice the larger for the less ; " but the almost uniform conviction in this " avalanche of letters " was the greater work to which he had been called, and the duty in- cumbent on him to accept it. This account of how the election of Phillips Brooks to the episcopate was received represents the situation imperfectly. The whole story of the surprise and the joy cannot be told. The amount of the material is too vast to do more than give its salient features. The event corresponds to the process of a people's canonization of some heaven-sent man. But when the honors of canonization were in question, it was customary to hear the other side, in order that all which might be said against a man should be considered. That moment had now come, and come for the first time, in a public way in the life of Phillips Brooks. The process of making a bishop in the American Episcopal Church is more complicated than in the Church of England. After the election has taken place the secretary of the diocese sends word of the election to the standing committee in each ^T. ssl THE CONTROVERSY 833 diocese in the United States, and also to the presiding bishop. As soon as the presiding bishop has received a reply from the majority of the standing committees in the affirmative, he communicates the fact to the bishops and calls for their vote. When he has received a majority of favorable replies from the bishops, the bishop-elect has been confirmed and the order is given for his consecration. The process is generally a formal one, occupying a month or six weeks before the an- nouncement of the result. In the case of Phillips Brooks ten weeks elapsed before the confirmation of his election was made known. From one point of view the controversy which now took place over his election was not important, nor were the sources influential or representative from which it pro- ceeded ; but their importance was rather a reflected one, gaining significance from the unique greatness of the man. So sensitive was the public mind in everything relating to him that the slightest hint of opposition was magnified till it assumed unnatural proportions. From another point of view it appeared to some as if the Episcopal Church had been called to go through a crisis in its history. What the nature of that crisis was will appear as the features of the opposition to his election are described. In order to the intelligent action of the standing commit- tees and bishops of the various dioceses, the canons of the Episcopal Church require that testimonials shall be laid before them, certifying to the fitness and character of the bishop-elect. In this case the following statement was signed by more than one hundred of the clergy of the diocese of Massachusetts, and by a large number of the laity, more than two hundred names in all : — We, whose names are underwritten, fully sensible how impor- tant it is that the sacred oflBce of a Bishop should not be unwor- thily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion, without partiality or affection, do, in the presence of Almighty God, testify that Phillips Brooks is not, so far as we are informed, justly liable to evil report, either for error in religion, or for viciousness in life ; and that we do not know or believe there is any impediment on account of VOL. n 834 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 which he ought not to be consecrated to that Holy Office. We do, moreover, jointly and severally declare that we do, in our con- science, believe him to be of such sufficiency in good learning, such soundness in the faith, and of such virtuous and pure man- ners, and godly conversation, that he is apt and meet to exercise the office of a Bishop to the honor of God and the edifying of His Church, and to be a wholesome example to the flock of Christ. The natural presumption would be that those who appended their names to such a testimonial were conyersant with the situation and knew whereof they affirmed. To counterbal- ance or overthrow such testimony would require evidence of a positive character, well substantiated, that the bishop-elect was not fitted for the office. What should be the nature of such evidence and how should it be obtained ? There was an anomaly revealed at this point in the organization of the Episcopal Church. Was it the function of a standing com- mittee to receive and register such a testimonial and give their approval as a matter of form, or was it incumbent on them to act as judges in the matter, reopen the question, and decide for themselves on some extra information they could obtain ? The first alternative seemed to make their action a perfunc- tory mechanical one, but the second carried the implication that the clergy and laity of the diocese most interested were incapable, for whatever reason, to form a right and trust- worthy judgment. If the latter interpretation were to pre- vail, there was danger of grave disturbance, imperilling the constitution of the church. The older and larger dioceses, where traditions were well established, followed the latter alternative. As to the final result, those who knew best the Episcopal Church had no misgivings. Their faith in its re- served wisdom, its justice, its comprehensiveness, and its free- dom from doctrinaire tendencies gave them absolute confi- dence. Such also was the conviction of Dr. Brooks, — there was no doubt whatever of the confirmation of his election. To the efforts made to defeat it we now turn. Hardly then had the election been made when a statement appeared in the newspapers gaining wide circulation, that there was likely to be opposition among the bishops. Dr. MT. 55] THE CONTROVERSY 835 Brooks, it was said, had expressed his disbelief in the historic episcopate, and as the bishops held strong convictions on that point they could not admit to their number one who differed from them. This statement in the newspapers was soon fol- lowed by a leaflet with the headline, " Ought Dr. Brooks to be Confirmed ? " which was sent to bishops and standing com- mittees, containing quotations from his sermons to the effect that he denied the doctrine of apostolical succession. An- other leaflet was issued, also for the benefit of those who were to vote intelligently on the question, giving the opinion of a Roman Catholic priest, formerly a Baptist minister, who, being " interviewed " on the subject, had spoken of Dr. Brooks as " One of Nature's Noblemen," but when asked his opinion in regard to the propriety of his becoming a bishop, shook his head and seemed quite disheartened about the Episcopal Church. His words were quoted in the leaflet as follows : — I regret to say they [the present movements in the Episcopal Church] indicate that the Episcopal Church is yielding to the rationalistic and agnostic tendencies of the age to a deplorable extent. ... If its creeds and articles of faith no longer bind its clergy and people, the surging tide of infidelity will soon de- stroy its distinctive character as an organized and conservative form of Christianity. A circular was sent to bishops and standing committees, addressed " To Whom it May Concern," containing an ex- tract from a letter the name of whose writer was suppressed. In this letter there was given the report of a conversation with Dr. Brooks, — a report from memory with no vouchers beyond the presumed respectability of the anonymous writer, — and the impression made by the conversation had con- vinced the writer that Dr. Brooks was a most unfit man to be a bishop as he deemed the miracle to be unimportant and in the life of Christ unessential. " He will let everybody stand on their head if they want to, and avow that no doc- trme is essential, not even the essential one of the Trinity and the divine Incarnation." This circular, sent forth by a presbyter of New York, who signed his name, but with- held that of the vrater of the letter, produced as its chief 836 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 result eagerness to know the name of the person who had borne such astounding testimony. With the facilities pos- sessed by the modern newspaper it could not be long before the information was obtained. The unknown writer was finally discovered in seclusion in the remote West, in " my solitary and supposed to be inaccessible mountain home, where I am seeking retirement in mystic study and divine commun- ion." This person, when discovered, admitted full knowledge of the effects of the communication to the public made in the circular, and was inclined to regret " the possible epoch- making consequences " of " a personal letter," though in- clined to acquiesce, should the Divine Will choose the " weak things of the world to confound the mighty." But after re- flection there had been some change of mind, and in another letter addressed to the public, the same person, while reaf- firming the correctness of the report of the conversation with Dr. Brooks, now withdrew the charge that he was unfit to be made a bishop, and urged upon the Episcopal Church his confirmation, expressing the hope that the Church would be " large enough and Christly enough to welcome him to her highest office." A rumor also gained wide circulation among the bishops and standing committees that the Nicene Creed was not re- cited at Trinity Church. It was easy to follow it with a denial without asking the aid of Dr. Brooks. These were among the influences brought to bear upon those who were seeking the additional light needed in weighing the question of the confirmation of the bishop-elect. They became familiar also to the public who were watching the issue. Another phase of the movement to defeat the election was the effort to induce Dr. Brooks to explain or to apologize for his attitude. Thus one of the bishops sent to him an " open let- ter," saying that the participation " in the so-called ordination services of Mr. Beecher's successor in Brooklyn required In the judgment of many honest minds an explanation or expression of regret, . . . assurances that what has pained so many of his brethren will not occur again." Another bishop wrote to him after receiving these various communications, leaflets, etc. : — MT.ssl THE CONTROVERSY 837 Before you were admitted to Deacons' Orders, you subscribed the following declaration: "I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to con- tain all things necessary to salvation, and I do solemnly engage to conform to the Doctrines and Worship of the Protestant Epis- copal Church in the United States." Do you stand to that sub- scription, and are you willing to make the same subscription now?" Is it true that on the last, or on any Good Friday, you united with a Unitarian minister in conducting public religious services ? ... On the absurd subject of apostolic succession, I entirely agree with you. Representatives of a large number of dioceses wrote to Dr. Brooks, expressing their contempt at the course adopted to defeat him. But from a few dioceses came letters indicating that reports and circulars had not been without their influence. Thus a clergyman writes to him asking for answers to the following questions, in order to an intelligent Yote : — (1) Do you believe in the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, Begotten not made. Being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made ; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man ? (2) Do you believe that an Unitarian who denies all this, dying as an Unitarian, could be consistently with the above belief char- acterized as God's true saint and one of the best and noblest Christians ? (3) Please state what is necessary to make a true Christian. (4) Do you believe that the Protestant Episcopal Church alone represents, in its integrity and purity in the United States of America, Christ's Holy Catholic Church? (5) Do you believe that the Apostolic Succession is an essential and exclusive element to Christ's ministry? (6) Do you believe that episcopally ordained clergy alone have the right to exercise Christ's ministry, — to Baptize, to admin- ister the Holy Communion, to Pronounce God's declaration of absolution over repentant sinners, and to preach the Gospel? (7) Do you believe that the Protestant sects in the United States constitute the American Church, and that the Protestant Episcopal Church is no more a Church than any of these sects and has no more right to that title than any of them ? 838 PHILLIPS BROOKS [1891 These questions were evidently intended to be exhaustive and to leave no loophole of escape. Beneath all other ques- tions or doubts lay the issue of apostolic succession. Thus a layman, who represents also a standing committee, writes, " My questions are these : " — Do you consider that Apostolic Succession is indispensably neces- sary to the existence of Christ's Chiu-ch? In your opinion, have the faithful followers of a Protestant creed which ignores the Succession an equal warrant with faithful Episcopalians in expecting, in the future life, the reward promised to the righteous ? There appeared in the New York " Tribune," on June 1, a letter from the Rev. John Henry Hopkins, which gave ex- pression to the growing feeling of indignation. The letter was specially significant as coming from Dr. Hopkins. A few extracts from it follow : — Our Church is a comprehensive Church; and that means that there is room in her communion for a great variety of opinions on religious matters. We have three well-known parties, High, Low, and Broad. I am a High Churchman, — about as high as they make them. Had I been a member of the Massachusetts convention, I should never, under any circumstances, have voted for Dr. Brooks. But when he had been elected I should have signed his testimonials with pleasure, rejoicing in the elevation of one who is recognized on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as a preacher now without a living superior, and whose high-toned, stainless life is acknowledged by all. As long as any one of our dioceses wants a Broad Church bishop or a Low Church bishop, it has a right to him ; and the requiring of the consents of the standing committees and a majority of the bishops was never meant to give power to a majority to squeeze out a minority by refusing to let them have the kind of bishop they wanted. . . . To try now to return to a narrower basis in order to worry the niost distinguished bishop-elect whom the American Church has ever known is all nonsense. "When asked for "explanations," etc., I am delighted that Dr. Brooks had none to give. No bishop-elect ought ever to give any. If he can honestly make the answers put in his mouth at the time of his consecration, it is enough. The Church gives to no man the right to put to him any question beyond that. Espe- cially is it uncalled for in a case like that of Dr. Brooks, volumes ^T. 55] THE CONTROVERSY 839 of whose sermons are in print. Anonymous letters should he treated, in such a matter as this, with perfect contempt, — and all are anonymous whose writers are not named and known. Especially is this the case when these anonymous writers display such abysmal ignorance of the very points in theology which they try to handle. Many other similar protests were published. The " Church- man," the largest and most influential paper in the Episcopal Church, devoted its editorial columns each week to making the issue clear, that standing committees and bishops, admit- ting that they are without intimate knowledge of the man against whom they are such swift witnesses, are yet practi- cally asking the Church to take their la