men. So for the last few years of his life this great, good man threw the influence of his powerful example upon the side of total abstinence.

For ourselves, we wish he had given the tobacco problem equal consideration. There is universal agreement among scientists to-day that nicotine is a poison. Law is no respecter of persons, and tobacco in some measure injured Brooks as it certainly injured Grant. Sincerely do we wish that he had not impaired his strength and set a dangerous example to the young by the introduction of that poison into his system; but no one who knew him or listened to his preaching ever dreamed that he violated his own conscience upon this question any more than Stonewall Jackson violated his conscience by fighting for his native State. But while we insist that Brooks was not consciously doing wrong, yet his lack of insight on these points shows that his knowledge of men and of practical affairs was defective. He was, therefore, lacking in one element of a great teacher.

But before deciding hastily that Phillips Brooks was destitute of art one other important fact must be considered. The basis of all real and genuine art is love of the truth one preaches and of the people to whom he preaches. If a preacher loves truth for its own sake he will constantly cultivate the best form of presenting it, and so grow in art as the ideal form of truth. If he loves the people he will surely find access to their hearts. So a preacher or reformer who seldom thinks of the graces of rhetoric or the arts of oratory will, through his love for others, cause his truth to have all the weight, and perhaps even more weight, than it inherently deserves. In this respect Dr. Brooks displayed the highest art. His life was remarkable for its unselfishness and its love for others. When he was preaching at Trinity Church, Boston, on a salary of ten thousand dollars, he was offered twenty thousand dollars to serve another church. He declined the call because he could not seem to preach for money, and because he felt that his labor in Boston was not done. Later Trinity Church raised his salary to fifteen thousand dollars a year. We may know that he was a generous helper of all good causes because, despite his large income as a preacher, at his death he was found to be worth little aside from his house and his library. But one may be unselfish and still

lack influence, because his unselfishness springs out of his indif ference to life, his lack of interest in himself or in others. But Brooks's unselfishness sprang from no such weak and unworthy motive. Surely he never could have developed so Christlike a character had he not recognized himself as a child of God, a prince in the King's household. His appreciation of his own spiritual worth was swallowed up in his love for others. His secretary says that he never talked about himself, and apparently never thought of himself. Dr. Brooks speaks in one of his sermons of Jesus's "discovering an interest in people whom the world would have found dull. And this same habit, passing over to his disciples, made the wide and democratic character of the new faith."

Phillips Brooks's freedom from fastidionsness, his breadth and sympathy and hope, gave a largeness to the life of the great preacher which everyone who knew him recognized. He showed all the warmth and directness of personal affection without its distortions and partialities. The wideness of his friendships redeemed his mind from narrowness, while they kept it eager and intense. Who will forget the picture of this giant, weighing nearly three hundred pounds, bounding up four flights of stairs and slipping a twenty-dollar bill into the hands of the foreman of a printing office as his contribution toward sending a consumptive printer to a health resort? Who will forget this popular idol walking with two fashionable young ladies of his congregation across the Boston Public Garden until he meets two servant girls who also belong to his church, and then excusing himself from his delightful companions and turning back to speak a few words of encouragement to those faithful toilers? Who will forget the picture of the poor woman grasping the hand of her boy, pressing in with the great crowd to catch a last glimpse of the face of the dead man, and telling the policeman as he thrusts her back, "My boy must see him; he paid for the operation which gave my son his sight?"

But aside from his unselfishness and his interest in other people this man carried about with him a strange sense of the presence of God. This was the chief source of his influence over others. What wonder that such qualities made a success out of even the dull administrative office of a bishop! His brief episcopate is the most brilliant in the history of the diocese

over which he presided. If God intended him, as he doubtless intended Chrysostom, for the pulpit rather than the episcopate, there was yet so much manhood in him that he could not fail even in an uncongenial office. Indeed, we incline to think that there was so much humanity at its best wrapped up in Phillips Brooks that he would have made a great statesman or a great business man had occasion demanded it. We believe, therefore, that his love for others, trained by his practical experience in the bishopric, would have made his administration the most brilliant and helpful which his Church in America has thus far known had his life been spared a quarter of a century longer. His large unselfishness and love for others, combined with the presence of God in his soul, enabled him to adapt his truth to the people to whom he ministered and to the age in which he lived.

3. But, whatever our views of the truth which Phillips Brooks taught or of the art with which he influenced his generation, all unite in bearing witness to the majestic personality of this princely man. His conception of man's sonship to God was not simply a theory; it became the controlling thought of his life, a fact of consciousness ever present with him. The power of Emerson consisted in his intellectual apprehension of man's divinity. Accordingly he sings:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When duty whispers low, "Thou must,"
The youth replies, "I can."

But Brooks applied Emerson's philosophy far more personally than did the sage of Concord. He loved communion with God.. When Horace Bushnell was an old man he was asked one morning how he had rested through the night. He replied that he had not slept much, but had enjoyed a delightful visit with God. So we imagine Brooks enjoyed many a delightful visit with the heavenly Father. In speaking of the night which Jesus spent with God before calling his disciples Dr. Brooks insists that Jesus did not spend the time in begging the Father to furnish him the best twelve candidates for the apostleship. He thinks the night was spent chiefly in communion, and the decisions upon the persons for the apostolate occupied a comparatively short time near the dawn. The speculation throws light upon Dr. Brooks's habits. He probably did not spend

many nights wrestling with God for external blessings, like Jacob and Elijah. His praying was rather such a communion with Christ as St. John must have enjoyed after the ascension of the Master. Dr. Brooks fully believed that he was a son of God, and his life was as fully controlled by his consciousness of such a relation to God as a prince's life is controlled by the consciousness of his relation to the royal family. It was this which made the life of Phillips Brooks so dignified and yet so attractive. He was certainly one of the most lovable men on the globe. At the center of his being he was not primarily an ecclesiastic or even a preacher. The core of all was manliness. But manliness with him was not simply earthly. At the center he was consciously the child of God. Better still, he claimed the same privilege of divine fellowship for every other human being, and was himself, therefore, simply the representative of our humanity at its best. So we love to call him Phillips Brooks, just as we love to call our great martyr President Abraham Lincoln, because each represented manhood in its grandeur and its simplicity.

It was this blending of truth and of love for others, with his noble personality, which made Dr. Brooks one of the greatest preachers of his age. Surely his cultivation of spiritual vision by obedience to the light, his humility in not even asking to know everything and in not aiming to frame a philosophy of the universe, and the harmonious blending of his intellectual and emotional and moral life produced a great preacher and remarkable sermons. The sermons were written almost spontaneously. His thought in them flows with the swift rush of Niagara between Lake Erie and the falls. What largeness and breadth and sympathy and insight, what discernment of the principles of spiritual life and growth, and what vital truth he preached his sermons reveal in part, but only those who heard him can fully know. His consciousness of God, his insight into spiritual truth, and the atmosphere of the other world which he carried with him made him essentially the prophet of his age. It has been the writer's privilege to hear, aside from the leading preachers of his own Church, Beecher and Talmage and Moody and Storrs in America, and Spurgeon, Farrar, George MacDonald, Père Hyacinthe, and Canon Liddon in Europe. Liddon was a greater logician than Dr. Brooks, although he did not see such

great spiritual truths as Brooks behield. Beecher was a greater master of the art of oratory, but was not so inspiring a preacher as Brooks. Spurgeon was a man of greater practical knowledge, but did not impress one so fully as did Brooks as a man sent from God to bear witness to the truth. In this respect Bishop Simpson most nearly resembled him. Both were prophets, seeing visions and revealing the mind of Christ. Simpson sometimes caught visions of the third heaven, which transcended the experiences of Brooks. But Brooks dwelt far more constantly in the atmosphere of the first heaven than did his great compeer. As a preacher he will probably exercise a wider influence upon thoughtful ministers in the twentieth century than Beecher or Simpson or Spurgeon or Liddon, or perhaps than all of them combined. But posterity will never see his princely form, towering six feet and a half in height, and his majestic face, combining the thoughtfulness and fire of Webster with the sweetness of Fénelon or Fletcher, and his massive frame, impressing one at first as a giant, yet so filled with light and life that he seemed as radiant as an angel.

We are all disappointed that just as his long years of communion with God were blossoming into fruitfulness, just as all America was learning to love him and Europe was beginning to recognize him, just as the material philosophy of our nineteenth century was becoming leavened by his spiritual thought, projected through his consecrated life, while the problem of his success as an ecclesiastical statesman was unsettled, and when his own Church so greatly needed him, this great, good man, without a family and without a sympathizing word from friends who did not dream of his danger, and with his great tasks apparently unfinished, was suddenly called away. But perhaps it is well. Every life has its Gethsemane and its Golgotha. His great work and his sudden death will hallow his life and place an aureole around his brow. Like Enoch "he was not; for God took him." So passed the Chrysostom of America, the St. John of the twentieth century. "Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?"

J. U Bashford