ART. III.—PHILLIPS BROOKS.*

"EVERY man's power is his idea multiplied by and projected through his personality." This is Phillips Brooks's statement of the law of influence. A still better statement of a preacher's power is found in the three divisions which Dr. Brooks makes in his Lectures upon Preaching. In that volume he advances the idea that a preacher's power consists in the truth which he gives to the world, in the art with which he adapts the truth to the audience and to the age in which he lives, and in the personality which lies back of his truth and wings it with the power of conviction. Let us see how these three principles are illustrated in this prince of modern preachers.

1. Let us learn, if possible, what was the fundamental idea which molded his character and projected itself through his personality. The inspiring thought of his life was, in his own words, "the fatherhood of God and the childhood of every man to him." Dr. Brooks gladly acknowledged his indebtedness for this idea to Frederick William Robertson, who presented it with perhaps even greater distinctness than did his American brother. But plainly both Brooks and Robertson owed their inspiration upon this theme to St. John, and through St. John to Christ.

Although not a theologian in the ordinary sense of that word, Dr. Brooks might be said to be in hearty sympathy with evangelical theology, especially of the broad Arminian type. While a hundred preachers worked in conjunction with Mr. Moody in Boston, in 1877, Dr. Brooks was the only one who could hold the immense audiences and continue the work on Monday evenings, while Mr. Moody was resting. But even on such occasions his conception of man differed slightly from Mr. Moody's. We well remember his marvelous sermon on one such Monday evening from the text, "I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." Mr. Moody had presented man as the prodigal and Christ as the Saviour. Dr. Brooks presented man as primarily, or by creation, a child of God, and Christ as the "firstborn among many brethren," whom he must bring to perfection. The preacher produced all the more

The substance of this article was delivered as an address at Chautauqua, N. Y., July, 1893. 3-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. X.

pungent conviction in sinners through his conception that originally they were not sinners, but children of God. The substance of his reasoning was:

If God had made you to be a sinner, if by some shameful decree he had made you for punishment or had left you helpless, there would be some apology for evil; and the responsibility might at least be divided with your Creator. But God made you to be his child; he constituted you a member of the divine family. God so loved you that he sent his only begotten Son into the world to save you after you had fallen into sin. Hence your sin is without excuse, and becomes a thousandfold worse because it brings disgrace to the heavenly family and is a stab at the very heart of God. The very height for which God destined you only emphasizes the distance of the fall.

Dr. Brooks knew how to appeal to sinners, but the appeal was based upon the essential nobility of man. Man's original sonship to God and the necessity for his return to the Father in order to realize the highest possibilities of manhood were the ideas which inspired Phillips Brooks's utterances and made him the prophet of a new humanity.

It must be admitted that Dr. Brooks did not carefully elaborate and present in a systematic form the truths which seemed to him vital. He was preeminently a discoverer rather than a scientist, a voyager upon the ocean of life rather than a maker of charts or a classifier of specimens. He was to the end of his life a great reader of good books. At college, notwithstanding his magnificent physical proportions, he was not fond of athletic sports, but was called an omnivorous reader. His library, as we recall it between 1880-84, impressed us as the largest pastor's library we had ever seen. But he was never content to read and to elaborate truth at second hand. Most persons will remember that he was a great traveler. For the last thirty years of his life he was accustomed to spend a summer vacation every other year in Europe. This love of travel grew upon him, and he spent an entire year in the Old World, chiefly in Asia, not long ago. The trip was significant for two reasons: (1) it enabled him to reaffirm from observation his lifelong conviction that, while God has not left himself without witness among the nations, yet that Christianity is the absolute religion; (2) it illustrated the growing habit of his mind to gather materials for his thinking from life at first hand rather than from

books. In this regard he resembled Darwin. In fact, he seems to the writer to have been gathering materials for a great spiritual science, but never to have elaborated them. So his sermons impressed hearers with their originality rather than with their scholarship or art. Those who stood close to him felt, not simply that there was more in his character, but that there was more in his mind, than his sermons revealed. Professor A. V. G. Allen says that Brooks has contributed more material than any other man of his age to what, for lack of a better name, we may call the new field of spiritual psychology. Had Darwin died when he had amassed all of his materials, but before he had fully elaborated the doctrine of evolution, Brooks might be compared with the great scientist and called the spiritual Darwin.

2. Let us learn, if possible, the art with which Dr. Brooks adapted his truth to his audiences and presented it to the age in which he lived. In one sense Phillips Brooks was entirely devoid of art. Certainly he never cultivated art for its own sake. He had none of the studied graces of his noble kinsman, Wendell Phillips, the prince of the American platform. Born and bred in New England, a child of Harvard University, he was apparently uninfluenced by the studied eloquence of Sumner or the polished periods of Harvard's most cultivated president, Edward Everett. He did not live in the senses or in practical affairs. This was a partial advantage and a partial defect. It was one source of the rare strength of his sermons; yet it gave rise to limitations in his church activity. He believed so strongly in character and so little in environment that he thought the former would always shape the latter. In this regard he followed Christ's example, but followed it perhaps too literally. Dr. Brooks thus describes the Master's method:

The Master never cared to reshape circumstances until he had regenerated men. He let the shell stand as he found it until the new life within could burst it for itself. Almost instantly, as soon as the disciples began their work, they seemed to have been filled with a true conception of the divine message-that, not from outside, but from inside, not by the remodeling 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.

So Dr. Brooks chose the spiritual, to the neglect of the materialistic, view of man. Modern science lays stress upon envi

ronment. M. Taine attempts to rewrite the history of literature by making environment explain Milton and Shakespeare and account for the writings of Pascal and Corneille. Upon the other hand, Brooks's life, hid with Christ in God, led him to pay too little attention to surroundings and institutions. He had not the constructive ability of Spurgeon, who established a newspaper, an orphanage, and a college. He had not Chalmers's talent for organization, or Beecher's talent for agitation, or the intuitive power of reading human nature and of adapting means to ends which made Bishop Simpson the greatest administrator, as well as the greatest preacher, of his Church for the generation in which he lived. Nor did he feel that interest in public problems which made Wendell Phillips a reformer and swayed Whittier and Beecher and Lowell from their chosen fields in order that they might mold public opinion upon the slavery question. The period in which his activity fell was slightly unfavorable to the development of a talent for public affairs, provided it existed in him. He was not quite old enough to take part in the antislavery contest, and he died too early to become a leader in the coming battle of the home against the saloon. But his instinct and his philosophy alike made him a preacher to individuals, and not a reformer of society.

In a word, Dr. Brooks was by nature a preacher rather than a teacher. There is a subtle difference between the two professions. The teacher imparts information characteristically, although the great teacher gives inspiration to the life as well as truth to the intellect. The preacher, upon the other hand, imparts truth incidentally, but must bring life and inspiration to dead souls. It is possible to enlighten the mind so that it shall see more clearly all its daily duties without imparting specific information. Dr. Brooks's abandonment of teaching as a profession shows that he wisely recognized his limitations as an instructor. Even his sermons seem to us to be wheels with lines of thought running out like spokes from his central truth rather than pyramids built up layer by layer upon an established foundation. In hearing him preach and in reading his sermons the writer has often thought of Ezekiel's vision of the wheel with the spirit of the living creature in it and the glory of God above it. Perhaps a better illustration of his sermons is the sun, pouring out light and warmth, but

never showing its foundations or revealing the method by which it is built up. We incline to think there was a limitation to his nature on the practical side. Protestantism in its revolt from an external spiritual authority lost the vision of a kingdom of heaven upon earth. It is just regaining this truth in its crude attempts at applied Christianity. Brooks was the spiritual product of Protestantism. He furnished the inspi

ration and the ideals for individuals, rather than methods for reform or laws for the kingdom of heaven upon earth.

Again, it must be confessed that Dr. Brooks not only lacked somewhat in knowledge of practical affairs, but that he was an optimist by temperament, that he was spared by circumstances close contact with the most sinful and degraded classes, and that he saw the glory of manhood rather than its shame, and dwelt upon the privileges of sonship more than upon its duties. Some of us recall, in one of his sermons, the reference to the coarse caricature of Christ as a winebibber and a glutton. He said that there was just enough truth at the bottom of this caricature to give us an insight into the healthy, bodily life of Jesus. "That physical pleasure should be the accompaniment of spiritual joy, Jesus accepted as a part of the harmony of the universe." So Brooks's optimistic philosophy, his lack of any large knowledge of the deceitfulness of sin, and his belief in the appropriateness of the physical appetites led him to indulge in two habits which are common to our age, but which a more scientific study of dietetics will condemn. In the use of wine he did not feel that he was going a hair's-breadth beyond the example of his Master. In this view and practice he was in the company of such men as Godet and Spurgeon in our generation and a host of saints in all ages. But Brooks was remarkable for his common sense so far as he was brought in contact with practical problems; and the fashionable society with which he was surrounded thrust upon his notice the fearful problem of intemperance. He seemed puzzled at first; for the example of his Master, as he understood it, seemed to him safe. But he later reached a conclusion on the subject alike creditable to his head and heart and abandoned the use of wine entirely, not because he felt that there was a precept in the New Testament against it, but because the spirit of his Master forbade the use of that which was harming his fellow