1835, December 15,—Phillips Brooks was born at 56 High St., Boston. 1842–46,—Attended Adams School, Boston. 1846–51,—Attended Boston Latin School. 1851,—Entered Harvard College. 1855,—Graduated at Harvard College. 1855–56,—Taught at Boston Latin School. 1856,—Entered Alexandria (Va.) Theological Seminary. 1859,—Graduated at Alexandria. July 1,—Ordained deacon. Became rector of the Church of the Advent, Philadelphia. 1860, May 27,—Ordained priest. 1862,—Became rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia. 1863, November 26,—Delivered “The Mercies of Reoccupation: A Thanksgiving Sermon,” Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia. 1865, April 23,—Delivered “The Life and Death of Abraham Lincoln:” Sermon at Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia. August,—First journey abroad. 1869, November 7,—Became rector of Trinity Church, Boston. 1870, June–September,—Visited the Tyrol and Switzerland. Elected overseer of Harvard College. 1872, June–September,—Visited Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Germany. November 10,—Old Trinity Church, Boston, destroyed by fire. 1873, Present Trinity Church, Boston, begun. 1874,—Spent the summer in Europe. 1876,—Re-elected overseer of Harvard College. 1877, February 11,—Historical sermon, dedication of Trinity Church, Boston. Delivered and published “Lectures on Preaching.” Received Degree of S.T.D., Harvard College. Summer in Europe. 1878,—Published “Sermons.” 1879,—Delivered and Published “The Influence of Jesus” (Bohlen Lectures). 1880,—Spent the summer in Great Britain and France. 1882,—Invited to Plummer Professorship, Harvard College. Published “The Candle of the Lord, and Other Sermons.” June,—Set out on journey to England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, India, and Spain. 1883,—Elected to third term as overseer of Harvard College. Published “Sermons preached in English Churches.” 1885, April 23,—Delivered Address at celebration of two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Public Latin School, Boston. May–September,—Travelled in England, Germany, Italy, and France. 1886,—Elected assistant bishop of Pennsylvania. Declined. May–June,—Made a journey to California, Yosemite, and Vancouver’s Island. Became one of the Board of University Preachers, Harvard College, holding the post till 1891. November,—Delivered the sermon at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Harvard College. December 15,—Delivered Address at two hundredth commemoration of the foundation of King’s Chapel, Boston. 1887,—Published “Twenty Sermons” (Fourth Series). Delivered and published “Tolerance.” Spent the summer in England, and attended the Queen’s Jubilee. 1889, June–September,—Made a journey to Japan. 1890,—Delivered Noonday Lenten lectures to business men in Trinity Church, New York. Spent the summer in Switzerland and England. Published “The Light of the World, and Other Sermons.” 1891, April 30,—Elected bishop of Massachusetts. October 14,—Consecrated bishop of Massachusetts. 1892,—Delivered Noonday Lenten lecture to business men in St. Paul’s Church, Boston. June–September,—Made a journey to England, France, Tyrol, and Switzerland. December 21,—Delivered address at annual celebration of the New England Society, Brooklyn, N. Y. 1893, January 23,—Phillips Brooks died. “Sermons” (Sixth Series), published. 1894,—“Letters of Travel,” published. 1895,—“Sermons for the Principal Festivals and Fasts of the Church Year” (Seventh Series), published. 1896,—“New Starts in Life, and Other Sermons” (Eighth Series), published. 1899,—Phillips Brooks House, Harvard College completed.

Personal

  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 Frederick Robertson’s sermons, with a vigour and force of thought which he has not always. I have never heard preaching like it, and you know how slow I am to praise preachers. So much thought and life combined—such a reach of mind, and such a depth of insight and soul. I was electrified. I could have got up and shouted. I shook hands with the preacher afterwards, who asked me to preach in the afternoon for him; but I would not do this, remembering your caution.

  Phillips Brooks as we behold him moving amongst us to-day, is a representative man in many of the elements that constitute humanity. He is physically well endowed. Tall, and well proportioned, head and shoulders above other men, chest broad and deep, face full-orbed, beaming with health and sympathetic kindness, forehead wide, and deep, large, dark eyes, flashing gleams of intelligence and good nature. The contour of the face is very mobile, since its muscles of expression are flexible and spontaneously adapt the face to express the emotion that is welling up from the heart. His step is firm, carriage of body erect, head thrown well backward denoting vitality. Over six feet in height, his entire bodily make-up constitutes him a physical king of men. The qualities of mind and heart are not less marked, and are even more potential in rendering him successful as a preacher…. On listening for the first time to the enunciation of his discourses, no one would fail to be struck with the wonderful rapidity with which he delivers his words, and would probably be at a loss to discover the cause. Brooks possesses many of the natural gifts of a great orator. His temperament is a harmonious blending of the vital, mental, and motive systems. Such a combination is highly oratorical, possessing many excellent qualities. Some have complained that it was hard to follow Dr. Brooks’ discourse because he spoke so rapidly, not knowing that such rapidity was the effect mainly of his excessive vitality.

  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 religious 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 simplicity of treatment with singular fertility and elevation of thought, no other among the famous preachers of the generation that is now vanishing approached him.

  The intellect of Phillips Brooks was as striking as the man himself. There was in it a platonic subtlety, sweep, and penetration, 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 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.

  I cannot follow into detail that power of personal contact and assistance to which allusion has been made incidentally. It is written in the consciousness of thousands of men and women who delight to think of Phillips Brooks as their friend, just as the summer’s sunbeams lie in the ruddy fruit of harvest. It was a power which shared in the growth and development of his life, it was one which he loved to exercise, and yet which with the most delicate taste he carefully guarded from the danger of undue familiarity and of false expression of friendship. It came from and ever fastened itself more deeply in the conviction of the divine life that belonged to all men.

  I cannot but think that if he had not accepted the call to the Bishopric of Massachusetts he might have lived for many a long and happy year. Assuredly it was not ambition which led him to desire such empty shadows as precedence and a title. I knew him too well to suppose that he would care a broken straw for such gilt fragments of potsherd, such dust in the midnight, as the worldly adjuncts of an inch-high distinction. His heart was too large for so small an ambition. Had he chosen to answer the world according to its idols, to trim his sails to the veering breezes of ecclesiastical opinion, to suppress or tamper with his cherished convictions, and, as Tennyson says, “to creep and crawl in the hedgebottoms,” he, with his rich gifts, might easily have been a Bishop thirty years ago. In ability and every commanding quality he towered head and shoulders above the whole body of American ecclesiastics, only one or two of whom are known outside their own parishes or dioceses. Probably no severer lot could have befallen him than to be made Bishop. For he was a man who had lived a very happy life, and although he was in no sense of the word indolent, he managed to escape the entanglements of work which so disastrously crowd the lives of too many of us, not only with harassing labors, but also with endless worry, fussy littlenesses and an infinite deal of nothing. Wisely and rightly he left a margin to his life and did not crowd its pages to the very edge. He enjoyed his quiet smoke and hour of social geniality in the evenings…. I have known many men—even not a few clergymen—of higher genius, of far wider learning, of far more brilliant gifts. But I never met any man, or any ecclesiastic, half so natural, so manly, so large-hearted, so intensely Catholic in the only real sense, so loyally true in his friendships, so absolutely unselfish, so modest, so unartificial, so self-forgetful. He is gone and I for one never hope to look upon his like again.

  He was a preacher easily and first; nor, to my mind, since Frederick Robertson died thirty-six years ago in Brighton, England, has there been his equal as a preacher across the water. Genius of insight, wonderful power of expression, soul-compelling love—all these elements of power were richly his.

  I have never known any great man—and I think I never knew a greater than he in certain lines of greatness—who had in him, in the first place, the simplicity of a child, and, in the next place, the humility of a saint, and, in the third place, absolute impersonality, in spite of the fact that it was the personal element in him which gave him his marvellous influence. He was supremely above all petty and little things, utterly unmoved by the adulation that was poured out upon him, and lived a life upon the highest possible level of true spirituality. His own unusual purity of nature gave him a thoroughly optimistic view of humanity, which sometimes he seemed to push almost to a denial of the need of grace; and I think he had so little consciousness of sin himself that he left it out too much in dealing with the provisions which are made for its recovery. The atmosphere in which he lived made a sort of glamour through which he looked at other men; and, as one compares him with the great American preachers, one is struck with the entire absence of any factitious elements of influence; indeed, I think the power of his preaching was shown in nothing so much as in the fact that it overcame certain real deficiencies—I mean his great rapidity of speech and consequent indistinctness of utterance.

  One who, while wonderfully beautiful and grand in his own sublime and solitary self in communion with things above, yet was the embodiment of human sympathy, who lived not only for the life of mankind, but in and by that life also, drawing his own ever-fresh life from it, reflecting its joys and sorrows in his own clear depths, and bringing each part of it closer to every other by his many-sidedness and breadth which touched and watered all.

  In conversation he was one of the merriest of entertainers. Sometimes I used to think him almost too ready to let the occasion float away in jest, while I, like so many others, would have chosen to sound with him some theme of height or depth; but of course one can readily understand how weary his nerve might have become of the seriousness of life, and how much it needed “the light touch.”

  As an extemporaneous speaker he was simply matchless. I heard him twice during the war, at public meetings where he was unexpectedly called upon. The effect was such as I have never seen before in any assembly of men…. When Brooks came to Philadelphia he had been long away from the conventional, either in the Divinity School or in his little up-town church. At first he remonstrated with our efforts to make him see the need for much that he found irksome and destructive of time. He soon yielded, and became in the end careful as to ordinary social rules and duties. He was subject to rare moods of utter silence. I have seen him sit through a dinner party and hardly utter a word; usually he was an easy and animated guest. He did not much affect the clerical style or ways, and on our long canoe journeys the guides were three weeks before they found out that he was a clergyman…. I have known a number of the men we call great,—poets, statesmen, soldiers,—but Phillips was the only one I ever knew who seemed to me entirely great. I have seen him in many of the varied relations of life, and always he left with me a sense of the competent largeness of his nature.

  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.”… It was very impressive, impressive beyond measure, to be with him on Sunday and watch him as he prepared 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 concentration of the whole man upon some theme he was inwardly revolving, to whose power he seemed to be submitting himself.

  The affection of Phillips Brooks for his university was continuous and unbounded, and remains a happy reminiscence for those who witnessed his devotion…. His conduct of morning prayers can never be forgotten by those who had the privilege of worshiping with him. He was not infrequently in the pulpit before any of the congregation had arrived, as though he could hardly wait to begin the service. As a rule the first words of his prayer were those of some short collect in the prayer-book, uttered with great rapidity and as though to touch the note of his desire; but after a few sentences his mind, as it were, took wings, and soared away into the region of free prayer, with a fulness, liberty and delight, of amazing richness and power. I have always believed that these unstudied petitions, uttered thus for the sake of young men in the confidential intimacy of college life, disclosed more than any other expression of his mind the interior greatness, sanity, range and elevation of his spiritual life.

General

  Of the style of Mr. Brooks, as seen in these Sermons and Lectures, one can scarcely say too much in praise. His command of the English language is remarkable. Over it his sway is regal. His diction, largely made up of Anglo-Saxon words, is copious and varied, and admirably adapted to the pulpit. He seems never at a loss for the right words with which to set forth a thought, and sometimes does not hesitate to make use of such obsolete and unauthorized words as monotonize, personalness, purposeful, richen, and the like, if he thinks they will best serve his purpose…. Especially in the use of appropriate illustrations we regard Mr. Brooks as well-nigh unsurpassed. Having an affluent imagination, exquisite taste, and a vivid perception of the manifold relations and correspondences of religious truth to man and to nature, he draws from them with remarkable skill, fresh, varied, and apt illustrations with which to make clear, adorn, and enforce Divine truth. But though he has such regal command of appropriate illustrations, he rarely uses them when not needed. He does not overload his sermons with them.

  His illustrations are sometimes over bold; occasionally newly coined words and multiplied adjectives suggest haste; for the preacher is after deeper things than style; he has no time for polish and erasures. Sometimes the preacher is caught and held in the interest of his own thought and imagination; he gives his fancy and sagacity too full play; he talks about the truth too elaborately; he overloads with words and imagery; he does not seem to move as directly as he might; but the work is interesting; the attention is more than held, it is enslaved. Some shrewd remark, some flash of quiet humor, a delightful or suggestive figure snatched from the hillsides of New England, often betokens his heritage; and then an aphorism, a fresh statement of old truth or a side remark throws a flash of light up some path of thought which we fain would follow.

  It is very noticeable in him that, whether writing or speaking, he never seems satisfied till the note struck is the octave-note—that view of the matter in hand which is the highest his thought and life have yielded him—and every subject he handles he seeks to lead up and attach to the loftiest he knows: he is never willing to rest till he has reached that theme. A loyal knight, ever alert to duty. Dr. Lyman Abbott has recently remarked of him that he always preaches: any of his after-dinner speeches he might use the next Sunday in his pulpit. Not only is he complex, and instead of coming down to his readers, invites them to come up to him: he is never afraid of giving full measure, heaped up and running over.

  The subjects of his sermons are greatly diversified, and their treatment is so rich and varied that the thought and illustrations captivate the listener or reader, apart from the purpose of the preacher, and yet the central purpose is always the same. He grasps each one’s points of contact with life and brings him to a personal conception of what it is to be a disciple of Christ. I have never heard him preach a sermon and I have never read a discourse of his where this highest and supreme claim was sacrificed to moral and spiritual entertainment. The very structure of his sermons bears witness to his vitalizing process. Master as he is of literary form and concise expression and the graces of style, he is never able to stop long enough to dally with his gifts. They are consecrated to a purpose, and his aim is so high and earnest that they are mainly used to help him to fulfill the great aim of his preaching. The only volume of his discourses in which this literary gift is allowed any freedom is that which contains his sermons preached in English churches, and even here it finds somewhat scant expression. The same characteristic is found in Robertson’s sermons and in Cardinal Newman’s.

  In his sermons there is almost a total lack of discursiveness. At the beginning of each there may be a few words of introduction, simply to make a connection between the mind of the hearer and the special theme to be considered; but after this, the special theme is never for a moment lost from the mind. You may open one of his volumes anywhere, and a very few words will make clear what the subject is that the sermon before you presents. Even the sermons of Robertson, which Phillips Brooks rightly exalted as at least among the best of our modern world, have often a discursiveness, a temporary absorption in details, of which the sermons of Phillips Brooks show little trace. There are not many popular preachers from whose sermons the hearer would carry away fewer special impressions. He did not deal in epigrams; thus there were few separate sayings to be recalled. He was a perfect master of words, but never their servant. Each word filled its place as perfectly as if it stood in some finished poem, but no one was allowed to claim undue preëminence.

  Vast and unparalleled in volume was the language of his discourse. Sometimes it resembled a coast tide washing over the land to make islets of meadows and lakes of creeks. The feeling swelled out of proportion beyond the thought, and when it subsided left, like the ark of Ararat, but the remnant of a few clear-cut and indispensable though precious periods on the printed page. In the perusal he is less impressive than Channing, while Taylor in letters has no mark.

  No one is less open than he to the charge of formalism, yet no one has made a more earnest plea for the due observance of Lent than that which is chosen for the Ash-Wednesday Reading in this book. It is no narrow asceticism to which he invites us, but a “more abundant life,” not of the flesh but of the spirit, to be lived in loving dependence upon the Saviour, in loving commemoration of the suffering and death which He endured in order that all who believe in Him might have life.

  There is reason to believe that Phillips Brooks might have been a great poet, if he had not preferred to be a great preacher. We all know and love the Bethlehem hymn; but there were other poems. But more important than the writing of poetry is the poetical insight. The poet is the man who sees the soul of things; the secrets of being. The philosopher is supposed to do the same thing; and the psychologist is supposed to do this thing as applied to man. Phillips Brooks had the power of seeing the essence of things. And this power was joined to the element of poetical expression. What fine, carefully adjusted metaphors! What suggestion of beauty! What glimpses of the divine! What happy choice of phrase and word!

  He was the ideal minister of the American gospel, for he gathered into himself the best elements of American manhood, he had the deepest faith in American institutions, he had the energy, the large vision, the persistent hope of the young nation dealing with its problems of government, education, and character. And he was peculiarly the preacher of a gospel. Many of the American clergy have written books on various subjects, been influential in the affairs of state, been professors and heads of colleges, and through these various channels have affected American life, but the power of Phillips Brooks was the power of he preacher, the man who chose to reach the people through the spoken word; and throwing his whole personality into his thought and its expression, he gave them the truth which he had to bring. Instead of writing books on literary subjects, he wrote sermons which in themselves are literature.

  The last commanding spiritual teacher of New England chanced to be of another faith, but what made Phillips Brooks such a power in Boston was the same kind of personality which half a century before him had generally distinguished the Unitarian clergy. Whoever knew the great bishop personally can hardly have failed to observe the trait which was at once his strongest and his weakest: his instinctive nature was so good that he never quite realised the badness and the uncleanness which beset the lives of common men with temptation. In him, just as in the fathers of Unitarianism, the national inexperience of America permitted almost unrestrained the development of a moral purity which to those who possess it makes the grim philosophy of damnation seem an ill-conceived nursery tale.

  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 reappearing. 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 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 all obstacles.

  No one can deny Phillips Brooks’s greatness in almost every field of human endeavour which his life permitted him to enter upon; but we do not remember him,… as a great writer, as a deep thinker, as a man of varied and profound learning, as an investigator, or a philosopher, though he was in some measure all of these things; nor do we even think of him so much as a preacher—though perhaps that is hardly a fair statement—but we do remember him above all as a Personality!

  While we may believe his genius capable of many things which it left unattempted, we must see that its special province was to take great truths out of the rubbish heap of dead phrases, revitalize and freshly illustrate them, and cause them mightily to prevail over the hearts and lives of men. There was power for men to live by, if it could only get at them, in the old theology that in this period of the New Reformation was everywhere finding restatement and elucidation. What had grown obscure and was in danger of becoming obsolete, what had been familiar in words and was in danger of passing into the realm of cant, what was really new in its form and was in peril of becoming a heresy by standing alone, Phillips Brooks seized with a certain swift and fine apprehension and redeemed for the service of life. That was his peculiar province in which he stood peerless, the application of truth to common living, bringing Jesus Christ, with all the glow of divine light upon His face, down among everyday men and things.

  Phillips Brooks was pre-eminently a sane man—rational, calm, self-controlled, with wise practical judgment, which, so far as we know, was never obscured by his enthusiasms. His emotional and visionary temperament he appears to have inherited from his mother; his practical, worldly-wise judgment from his father. The first made him a great preacher, the second made him a wise bishop; the combination made him a teacher able both to inspire with divine ideals and to guide in life with practical counsels…. We regard Phillips Brooks as probably the greatest preacher of the century. He was not comparable as an orator to Henry Ward Beecher, nor as a reformer to John B. Gough, nor as a theologian to Horace Bushnell or Elisha Mulford; but as a preacher he was without a peer. If by preacher we mean the herald and minister of a divine life, if by prophet we mean one who speaks for Another, if by apostle we mean one who is sent forth by Another to bear witness to his presence, Phillips Brooks was pre-eminently a preacher, a prophet, an apostle.

  It should be said that there is much more theological clearness in his addresses to his theological club, the Clericus, and in his letters and journals, than in his sermons. This was because his ideal sermon excluded the concrete and everything that could not be expressed in terms of poetry and the imagination. Even civil service reform he must treat as imaged forth in Hebrew politics, and so obscure it to a degree that made the sermon far less practically effective than it might otherwise have been. The conservatism of his theological temper brings out his liberality into strong relief. This was a grief to his friends of the more churchly kind; but Phillips Brooks was not churchly. If there was one thing that he cordially disliked, in any form, it was clericalism. The clericals will be sorely displeased with many of his references, in the freedom of his correspondence, to their works and ways. They will be shocked at the specific levity with which he treats his episcopal clothes, and the ecclesiastical minutiæ to which he is expected to conform.

  The persuasive, benignant influence of Phillips Brooks, not limited to any religious, sectional, or even national line, was in a degree oratorical. His published essays, both purely religious and relatively secular, are exquisitely literary, often highly poetic in quality. They are full of vitality and force, even for those men who cannot supply from memory the monumental presence, the impetuous rushing tones, of the great preacher. In his optimism, his humanism, his patriotic and philanthropic zeal, Bishop Brooks was a true successor of Channing. Both have relatively humble places in our literature, yet their influence is felt constantly in the air we breathe. That is merely saying that literature, or any fine art, is but a partial expression of life.

  He was, undoubtedly, the greatest American preacher of his generation. Beecher and Moody may have aroused more immediate popular interest; but the great literature that has grown up about Phillips Brooks, the unprecedented circulation of his printed sermons, as well as the immediate response of the thronging congregations that hung upon his words, give ample testimony to his wide-spread influence and fame. The secret of his power was in his vital sympathy, his large humanity…. I do not think that it can be truly said that Phillips Brooks added anything of permanent value to the substance of systematic divinity.

  Phillips Brooks, like most men of genius, was essentially a lonely man. Without the intimacy of the marriage relation, habitually reticent about his own thoughts and feelings, a Puritan by inheritance and by inclination, he needed some form of self-expression and found it, especially in his younger years, in poetry. The mood, the hour of vision, the stress of feeling, called for some outlet and found it in the measured words that sung themselves in his mind. He was a stronger and a happier man, more cheerful and more helpful, because he could give utterance in forms of beauty to the burning thought. With few exceptions, all the verse which has been given to the public falls under one or the other of these conditions. It was written as an exercise in words, or it was the natural expression and relief of intense feeling or vivid impression. This personal factor explains his success as a hymn writer…. It is because Phillips Brooks was so great a man, powerful in intellect, large in view and intense in feeling, that the public has taken for its own a portion of his work in verse. He might have given us still more which the world would have remembered gratefully, but it would have been at the expense of his true message to the world, which he delivered from the pulpit, and this would have been too large a price to pay. As they now are, even the poems which his biographer has shared with us show that they were thrown off at a white heat of feeling and never received that careful revision which often makes the difference between failure and success.

  Phillips Brooks was a prophet of God, a preacher of Christ to men. He is claimed, and by right, as the spiritual guide of people of all churches and of no church. His message and influence passed over all denominational boundaries. Thousands outside of his own church looked to him as their religious interpreter and pastor, and he gratefully accepted the fact. He had, as we have seen, very little interest in efforts for Christian unity by adjustments or ecclesiastical treaties and alliances. His whole temper and his faith in the reality of spiritual powers compelled him to emphasize the unity of the spirit…. He was at home in his church. He was perfectly conscious that he could be at home in no other. His whole temperament, his grasp of the historic significance of the Church, his conceptions of the Christian life and religious culture, his sense of proportion and of spiritual unity, his love of order, his conservative instincts, his artistic and poetic temperament, were satisfied in the Episcopal Church.

  As a religious teacher, what shall we say of him? There is no system of doctrine, there are few attempts to set forth Christian truth in philosophical form. In his Lectures on Preaching, in his Essay on Tolerance, and in his Bohlen Lectures on “The Influence of Jesus,” as well as in his sermons, there are many implications, but the fashioning of dogmatic formulas was not his work. For this reason, some have declared that he was no theologian, but that is a superficial judgment. You might as well say that the elm is no builder because it does not furnish you, before it goes to work, a front and side elevation, and architect’s drawings. Brooks was a teacher whose business it was to organize doctrine into life. He thought, profoundly, upon all the themes with which the theologian deals, but he gave you the results of his thinking, not its processes. It was not the chemist’s method, but the artist’s, that he employed. But just as Michelangelo was a great anatomist, so was Phillips Brooks a great theological thinker.