BOOKS.

MR. PHILLIPS BROOKS' SERMONS.* THIS 18 a very striking volume of Sermons. The subjects with which M. Brooks deals are treated with great freshness and vigour, and with an almost complete absence of the convention- ality which so often destroys our interest in hearing or reading sermons. Mr. Brooks, as far as we can judge from this volume, is a man of great acuteness and ingenuity of thought, and of considerable knowledge of life. He has brought to bear upon a wide field of human experience a sagacious and penetrating mind, and his sermons are therefore always highly suggestive and interesting. On almost every page one finds remarks which are evidently the result of original thought, hints which surprise one by their ingenuity and novelty. Though the language is hardly eloquent in the highest sense of the word, yet, considering that these were, we believe, extempore sermons, it maintains a high level of beauty and lucidity, and occasion- ally rises into grandeur. In the following passage, a very beautiful and true thought is clothed in language of appropriate eloquence :—

" We talk about God's remembering us as if it were a special effort in laying bold by His great mind of something outside of Himself, which He determined to remember. But if we could only know bow truly we belong to God, it would be different. God's remembrance of us is the natural claiming of our life by Him as true part of his own. When the spring comes, the oak-tree with its thousands upon thousands of leaves blossoms all over. The great heart of the oak- tree remembers every remotest tip of every farthest branch, and sends to each the message in the power of new life. And yet we do not think of the heart of the oak-tree as if it were burdened with such multitudinous remembrance, or as if it were any harder work for it to make a million leaves than it would be to make one. It is simply the thrill of the common life translated into these million forms. The great heart beats, and wherever the channels of a common life are standing open the rich blood flows, and out on every tip the green leaf springs. Somewhat in that way it seems to me that we may think of God's remembrance of His million children They are far-off leaves on the great tree of His life, far off, and yet as near to the beating of His heart as any leaf on all the tree."

The sermon on the " Greatness of Faith," from which this passage

is taken, is a good instance of Mr. Brooks's striking ingenuity of thought, rising, as in this passage, at times into something better than ingenuity. The central thought is the power of weakness over strength, as shown in the claim of faith upon

our Lord's miraculous help. This is illustrated by Mr. Brooks, as is his wont, from the similar facts in our own lives ; and he specially shows that the higher the nature, the more subject is it to this law of submission to the weaker :—

"The lowest conditions of life hardly know it at all. This power of weakness over strength comes to perfection in Jesus. Could there be a more complete picture of it than shines out in His own story of the shepherd and the sheep. The shepherd has folded his ninety-and- nine ; everything is safe and strong and prosperous ; be stands with his hand upon the sheepfold gate, and then, just as he seems all wrapped up in the satisfaction and completeness of the sight, there comes, so light that no ear except his can hear it, the cry of one poor lost sheep off in the mountains, and it summons him with an irre- sistible challenge, and his staff is in his band instantly, and be turns his back on everything else to be the slave of that one lost sheep till it is found."

This is one way in which Mr. Brooks shows his ingenuity,—in his happy illustrations of moral laws by Scriptural events and sayings. The same ingenuity is displayed by the manner in which he makes his central thought unfold itself and blossom out into several striking and often beautiful reflections, each of which he develops and illustrates with great sagacity. Thus, in another very noteworthy sermon, on "Nature and Circumstances," the subject of which is the contrast of the personal greatness of St. John the Baptist with the inferiority of his condition compared to that of Christians, Mr. Brooks passes on to the subsidiary reflection that the transition from the lower to the higher condition is often attended with some loss of personal power. "As a being or a work, which has seemed perfect in some lower region, goes up to some higher region, it seems to grow imperfect; at best it manifests its imperfection." This, which is very true, though not of course new, is illustrated with great ingenuity by the common way in which the lower criticises

• Sermons Preached in English Churches. By the Rev. Phillips Brooks, Rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts. London ; Macmillan and Co. 1863.

the higher, because of this very imperfection which only the superiority of condition has developed :—

"One of the most wonderful things in the world is this power of men to draw themselves a line beyond which they never dream of counting themselves responsible, across which they look and judge with cruellest criticism the men who are really fighting the world's sins and troubles on the other side, as if of them there were no more to be asked than just that they should be perfect in their own self-limited world of elegant uselessness. I am no Christian,' says the practical man ; I do not pretend to be pious or religious.' And then he looks up in your face as if he had settled the whole question, as if his entire business thenceforth were just to stand by and see what sort of a Christian you were, and how your piety came on."

That is an admirable piece of sagacious observation, and its humour is no less remarkable than its truth. It is in passages like this that Mr. Brooks excels ; and any one who reads the four consecutive sermons in this volume—the "Greatness of Faith," "Nature and Circumstances," "Why could not we cast him out?" and "The Willing Surrender "—will be enriched by no little ingenuity and practical shrewdness of observation, and by many instances of true wit, if wit is the perception of the con- nection between apparently remote ideas.

But we have some criticisms to make. Mr. Brooks seems to us, in the first place, to be more acute than profound, more ingenious than penetrating. His thought is not always quite clear, and it is never deep. We may take the first sermon in

this volume as an instance. He is dwelling on the ideal of our- lives which is in God's mind, as the pattern of the Ark was shown to Moses on the Mount, and he exhorts his hearers to "go up to God to get the pattern of their living." But when he comes to the obvious question, "How shall the man know,

what that pattern is ?" he can only answer that, as "Christ is the meeting-place of divinity and humanity any man wanting to know God's idea of him, must go up into Christ, and he will find it there." But surely this leaves the difficulty very much where it was. For ordinary dull men in the nine- teenth century, it is almost as mystifying to be told to "go up into Christ," as to be told to go up into the Mount, and find there the pattern of their lives. We believe Mr. Brooks has a mean- ing, and we believe we know what he means, but it is very vaguely stated here, and the whole passage gives one the idea that he is skimming over a real difficulty, which is not to be evaded by elo- quent talk about "piercing the clouds and reaching the summit." One great duty of modern preachers—a duty which so many of them invariably ignore—is to make clear to us what St. Paul and other great Christian writers meant by being "in Christ," and to show us practically how men are to "go to him and get the perfect idea of life, and of every action of life."

There is a similar want of clearness and depth in a very fine sermon on "Man's Wonder and God's Knowledge." In a former sermon Mr. Brooks lays great stress on the duty of loving God with the mind, and not confining religion to the emotions alone. In this sermon, however, he protests strongly against associating religion with any special form of faith, on the ground that "God must be teaching us all that faith, the essential relation of the human soul to His soul, the deep rest of the child's life on the Father's life; faith, the reception by man of the Word of God, which comes to him in voices as manifold as is the nature of God Himself ; that faith, a thing so deep, essential and eternal, is not to be conditioned on the permanence of any one of the temporary forms in which it may be clothed." But what has become of the mind's love for God ? Where is there room for an intellectual apprehension of his nature, if all the forms of faith are only temporary, and faith itself is as purely unin- tellectual a thing as Mr. Brooks describes it in this passage? If the mind is to love God, it must be able to grasp some truths concerning him, and it is mere mockery to tell it that its appre- hension of these truths is temporary, or, in other words, which Mr. Brooks does not use, that we can know nothing definitely and finally true about God at all. Some kind of vague trustfulness is consistent with a very limited knowledge of God, though even here there is an irreducible minimum of doctrine, for "he that cometh to God must believe that he is," but for intellectual faith much more is wanted, and Mr. Brooks gives us no criterion to distinguish between what is essential and what is transitory.

But all this is really part of a more fundamental defect, of which we were more or less conscious throughout this volume. Mr. Brooks' whole treatment of religion is too fanciful and casual; he does not, in these Sermons at least, show that he is penetrated by the truths with which he deals and the principles by which he explains them. Each sermon gives one the impression that the preacher has had to look for his subject—it has not found him ; and when he has got it, instead of going at once to the deep underlying religious meaning of it, he has let his fancy and his wit and his sagacity play round it; and he thus gives us much that is valuable, much that is wise, much that is ingenious and thoughtful, but he does not strengthen the foundations of religious thought or add to the great principles by which men's moral lives are guided. We may be doing Mr. Brooks an injustice which a wider acquaintance with his preaching would correct ; but in this volume we see the work of the sagacious observer of life, who can extract a great deal of interest from any given subject, but who does not bring to it the profound religions earnestness or the clear theological insight that make men great preachers. Mr. Brooks is a fine preacher of the second class ; the difference between him and Cardinal Newman, or Dr. Mozley, or Frederick Robertson, or Bishop Butler, is one of kind rather than of degree. The deeper, snore essential truths of religion do not seem to be very congenial or natural to him, but his sermons are full of interest to those who like to reflect on the secondary principles, the accidental developments of morality and life.