BISHOP PHILLIPS BROOKS.
THE American Episcopal Church has sustained a severe loss, which will scarcely be less felt throughout the whole Anglican Communion on this side of the Atlantic. Dr. Phillips Brooks, who was seized with a sudden and fatal illness a few days ago, was only in his fifty-eighth year, and had a powerful physique and an energetic manner which seemed to promise many years of usefulness. It is but six months since he was attracting crowds of eager hearers at Westminster Abbey, and holding them in breathless suspense, while with rapid utterance, and an almost kingly dignity, he discoursed to them on the weightiest truths. It would be misleading to describe him as a pulpit-orator. He had no tricks of rhetoric, none of what Carlyle calls "predetermined pathos," not one of the artifices by which sentences are gracefully rounded off to gratify the ear. Nor was he in any sense the apostle of a new doctrine ; or, indeed, the exponent of what is called doc- trinal truth in any form. There was no sacerdotal claims, no insistence on the divine efficacy of sacraments, or on the mechanism of religion, or the material adjuncts of churches, to be found in his printed sermons. Though warmly attached to the Episcopal Church, be always protested against the assumption by that communion of the title "The American Church," and thought it not inconsistent with a loyal fidelity to his own Church to preach occasionally in the pulpits of other denominations. Yet the breadth and force of his teach- ing attracted so large a following that in effect he strengthened and increased the influence of the Episcopal community in
America much more effectually than if he had carried on an active propaganda on its behalf. Till within recent times,
the one Christian body which held the foremost rank in Boston for social and intellectual distinction was the Uni- tarian ; but the influence of Dr. Brooks, especially on the more thoughtful of the young men of that city, effected a great
change. Those who heard him preach at Boston, and watched the earnest and intelligent looks of his hearers, cannot wonder that Trinity Church became the centre of some of the most vigorous Christian effort in the New World. Dr. Brooks was one of the preachers at Harvard University, and his addresses were always listened to by crowds of students with keen attention. The young people are necessarily connected with different religious organisations, and the preachers are not all of the same section of the Christian Church, but are selected, from time to time, solely on the ground of their intellectual eminence and spiritual force. There was nothing in this arrangement which was alien either to the spirit of American institutions, or to the conception of duty which Phillips Brooks had formed for himself. Yet his tolerance was not that of one indifferent to the truths for which the Christian communities severally contend, but the larger toleration of one profoundly sensible of the need of common effort and wider sympathy among the members of all those communities. In nothing are the priceless volumes of sermons which he leaves behind more remarkable than in the skill with which the Bible narratives, and especially those of the Gospels, are used to enforce practical lessons respecting man's duty and character and the true nature of human ambition and effort. Here, for example, is a reference to the life of Saul, and to the touching statement, " An evil spirit from the Lord troubled him : " the pictured contrast between early promise and eventual failure is full of significance as addressed to young and hopeful yet serious men ;—
" Saul's life, as it is told to us in the first Book of Samuel, is the perfection of a tragedy. If it were not the story of a real man who lived in the Jewish tribe of Benjamin, it might be the most sublime allegory that ever was written of human life in the tragical aspect of it, which is always suggesting itself, and some- times presses itself upon us so urgently, that we can see no other. There is one chapter, the tenth chapter of the first Book of Samuel, which is as fresh as a spring morning. A farmer's boy, light-hearted, innocent, and strong, striding away over the hills to find a flock of asses that had wandered from his father's fields. He talks with his servants ; he questions the group of girls whom he meets at a town gate. At last he meets a venerable prophet, who tells him what fills his young frank eyes with wonder, and makes his heart leap with the mysterious birth of noble ambitions, —that he is to be the first King of the new Kingdom of Israel, It is all as fresh and bright as innocence and hope can make it. Then there is another chapter, the twenty-eighth of the same Book, which is like the bleakest, bitterest day when the year is dying in December. The same Saul. grown old and wretched, with his country all in confusion, with his conscience tortured by memories, the subject of insane fits of melancholy and frenzy."
In the remarkable discourse from the text, " How many loaves have ye P " he traces out with curious subtlety and clearness,—in its relation to the intellectual, the spiritual, and the practical life of man,—the great truth, that in the divine economy, help and guidance are offered to us only on con- dition that we first count the resources we possess, and make the most of them. From the narrative of Peter's vision and the text : "Behold, three men seek thee," he traces out the con- nection between the vision as seen in solitude on the house-top and the practical life when men call on us for instruction and help ; and seeks to show the true relation between visions and tasks, between thought and action :-
" If you look back to the men who have taught you most, and in the fuller light where you now stand, study their character, you will surely find that the real secret of their power lay here, in the harmonious blending of the knowing and the loving powers in their nature ; in the opening of their nature on both sides, so that truth entered in freely here and you entered in freely there, and you and truth met, as it were, familiarly in the hospitality of their great characters. The man who has only the knowing power active, lets truth in, but it finds no man to feed. The man who has only the loving power active, lets man in, but he finds no truth to feed on. The real teacher welcomes both."
The great Bishop's force was in no sense restricted to the pulpit, or to his diocesan and pastoral work. His in- fluence on the best of the social and intellectual movements of Massachusetts, and of the States of the Union generally, was profound and far-reaching. One example of this must suffice here. The great organisation of "reading circles," of
which the summer assembly at Chautauqua is the centre, and which, with its 150,000 members, is exercising so remarkable
an influence on the mental activity and life of the middle and industrial classes throughout the country, has had in him
from the first strong sympathy and effective help. These were inspiring words which he addressed to about 6,000 etudents gathered together at the summer meeting in the Chautauqua woods, for study and mutual improvement :—
" I see busy households where the daily care has been lightened and inspired by the few moments caught every day for earnest study. I see chambers which a single open book fills with light like a burning candle. I see workshops where the toil is all the more faithful because of the higher ambition which fills the toiler's heart. I see parents and children drawn closer to one another in their common pursuit of the same truth, their common delight in the same ideas. I see hearts, young and old, kindling with deepened insights into life, and broadening with enlarged outlooks over the richness of history and the beauty of the world. sappy fellowships in study, self-conquests, self-discoveries, brave resolutions, faithful devotions to ideals and hopes—all these I see as I look abroad upon this multitude of faces of the students of the great College of Chautauqua."
Those in England who were accustomed to look forward
to his too rare appearance in London pulpits, as to a sort of golden opportunity for new thought and fresh inspira- tion, will sympathise deeply with American Christians who have suffered this great bereavement. They will forget the foolish and undignified controversy which was asso- ciated with his name when the Cowley Fathers, in alarm at what they thought to be latitudinarianism, withdrew one of their own number from fellowship with him. And they will remember only the strength, purity, and nobleness of his teaching, his scholarly and chastened eloquence, his deep in. eight into character, and his extraordinary power of lifting up every subject he discussed into a higher region than that of theological discussion,—the region in which conscience and
the voice of God are clearly audible, in which the small interests of life seem smaller, and the great ones greater, because both are seen in the light of dearly bought spiritual experience, of profound faith, and of boundless hope.
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