"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.... A blessing and a gracious presence has vanished out of many lives. With a very sad heart I bid him farewell ... the noblest, truest, and most stainless man I ever knew." Thus wrote Canon Farrar of London in The Review of Reviews for March, 1893, two months after the death of Phillips Brooks.

The various pulpits, the press, the millionnaires, the poor, and the lonely, all felt and said nearly the same thing. Canon Farrar wrote elsewhere, before Dr. Brooks's death, "I cannot recall the name of a single divine among us, of any rank, who either equals him as a preacher, or has the large sympathies and the rich endowments which distinguish him as a man."

The Nation said, "The death of Phillips Brooks strikes down the greatest figure left to the American church."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

The Rev. Stopford W. Brooke, of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, said, "He was so vigorous, so noble, so persuasive, so ever welcome a guest of all our hearts, that we had almost forgotten he, too, was mortal.... We never once doubted his sincerity, or his large, pure, generous humanity. There was a power in his presence, his smile, the grasp of his hand, that deep and magnificent eye, which triumphed, unconsciously to himself, over all our haggling differences of temperament and opinion, and drew, by the same unconsciousness of itself, our best manhood to his side. I think this long consistent unconsciousness of himself was one of the great qualities that so endeared him to us all. Here was a man possessed of most remarkable gifts,—an extraordinary vitality, an astonishing 'volume velocity' and beauty of language, a rich and fertile imagination which idealized everything it touched, a power of feeling which rose and swept into his audience like the tides in the Bay of Fundy; and yet he never seemed aware that he was anything exceptional.... I believe that greatness is more common, goodness is far more common, than that unconsciousness with which he wore his greatness and goodness."

Stopford Brooke speaks of another remarkable characteristic of Phillips Brooks,—"His radiance and his joy. No one who has read at all carefully the literature of our time can have failed to remark how dominant in it is the note of sadness. The leaders of the past generation bore, with a certain sombre melancholy, the burden of the chaos, as Carlyle puts it, which they were endeavoring to fashion into cosmos."

Not so Phillips Brooks. "Goodness and happiness, duty and joy, were constant companions in his life. We looked at him, listened to him, talked with him, and knew he had saved and kept through many long years the soul's best secret. Through all that he said and did there ran this river, fresh, clear, and abundant, of inner joy. What an inspiration that joy was to us!"

Dr. Samuel Eliot, a member of Phillips Brooks's church, and his life-long friend, says in the eulogy of him, delivered at the Boston Memorial Meeting, "He was blessed with a hopefulness of which most of us have but a comparatively scanty share. No trait of his was more conspicuous. No single source of his power over his generation was more abundant or more effective. Whatever the foreground might harbor in shadows, he looked beyond into the distance and saw it radiant....

"How he helped others to be hopeful also, how many shackles he thus loosed from the heavy-laden, how he thus encouraged his people to work their way forward to a future filled with promise, is a familiar story. His hopefulness gave him his strong hold upon young men. To them, always looking before and not behind, he stood beckoning, and the fire caught from him spread through them and out from them. Neither they, nor any others, may have known all the hope that was in him; indeed, he may not have known it all himself. It often seemed as if he were hoping for brighter days and holier lives than are consistent with human imperfections."

Dr. Eliot, after speaking of Phillips Brooks's affection, playfulness of conversation with his friends, his humor, which rendered his companionship charming, his delight in children, his unconsciousness of all his distinctions and successes, the unchangeable simplicity of his habits, his manners, his opinions, says, "These are pleasant recollections to all who loved him.... They linger like the soft glow of a summer twilight, now that his day on earth is over....

"This great man was never greater than he was in the sight of those who knew him best. 'I shall not change,' he said to a brother clergyman who seems to have been doubtful whether he would be the same after being a bishop,—'I shall not change, and you will always find me just as you have found me heretofore.'"

The Rev. Arthur Brooks, D.D., in a memorial sermon preached in the Church of the Incarnation, New York City, says that on the afternoon of the day of the consecration of his brother as a bishop, fearing that some of his friends might not come to see him as often as heretofore, he said earnestly, "Don't desert me."

Phillips Brooks was born Dec. 13, 1835, on High Street, Boston, the second in a family of six sons. His mother, Mary Ann Phillips, the granddaughter of Judge Phillips, the founder of Phillips Academy, Andover, was a woman of fine intellect and unusually earnest piety. His father, William Gray Brooks, a hardware merchant, whose ancestors, like the Phillipses, held high social position, and power in the State as well, was a man of refinement and scholarly tastes.

The son Phillips, says the Rev. Julius H. Ward in the New England Magazine for January, 1892, "seems to have inherited from his mother the deep and earnest piety and intellectual strength which have always been his characteristics, and from his father the robust physical constitution, the strong and resolute spirit, which he has shown in using them."

"Parents whose praise," says Dr. Arthur Brooks, "because of this great son, is in the churches to-day, earned it by self-denial and the subordination of all interests and ambitions to the training and education of a family of boys.... That love to Christ which glowed in his words and flashed in his eye, was caught from a mother's lips, and was read with boyish eyes as the central power of a mother's soul and life."

Mother-love was always a strong force in the heart of Phillips Brooks. It is related that when some one asked him if he was not afraid when he first preached before Queen Victoria, he replied, "Oh no; I have preached before my mother."

He said in one of his sermons, "The purest mingling of all elements into one character and nature which we ever see, is in the Christian mother, in whom the knowledge of all that she knows, and the love which she feels for her child, make not two natures, as they often do in men, in fathers, but perfectly and absolutely one."

He often spoke of "that self-sacrifice which is the very essence of her motherhood."

At eight years of age, Phillips and his brother William Gray, a year and a half older, were at the Adams School in Mason Street, and entered the Latin School, then on Bedford Street, in 1846, when Phillips was eleven years old. Here he was a quiet, good scholar, excelling in the languages, and all unconscious of his great future. His teacher, Francis Gardner, was a sad, earnest man, whom Phillips Brooks described nearly forty years later, when he spoke, April 23, 1885, at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Latin School, the oldest school in America.

"Tall, gaunt, muscular ... impressing every boy with the strong sense of vigor, now lovely and now hateful, but never for a moment tame or dull or false; indignant, passionate, an athlete both in body and mind.... He was not always easy for the boys to get along with. Probably it was not always easy for him to get along with himself. But it has left a strength of truth and honor and devoted manliness which will always be a treasure in the school he loved."

In this school young Brooks learned his fondness for and advocacy of the public school system. He said in his anniversary address, "The German statesman, if you talk with him, will tell you that, with every evil of his great military system, which makes every citizen a soldier for some portion of his life, it yet has one redeeming good. It brings each young man of the land once in his life directly into the country's service; lets him directly feel its touch of dignity and power; makes him proud of it as his personal commander, and so insures a more definite and vivid loyalty through all his life.

"More graciously, more healthily, more Christianly, the American public school does what the barracks and the drill-room try to do. Would that its blessing might be made absolutely universal! Would that it might be so arranged that once in the life of every Boston boy, if only for three months, he might be a pupil of a public school; might see his city sitting in the teacher's chair; might find himself, along with boys of all degrees and classes, simply recognized by his community as one of her children! It would put an element into his character and life which he would never lose. It would insure the unity and public spirit of our citizens."

These words of Phillips Brooks. Mr. Edwin D. Mead thinks, should "be printed in letters of gold, and hung up in every home where parents are thinking of sending their children into private schools, thereby condemning them to a narrower and less sturdy education than that given by the State, while also thus withdrawing their own personal interest from the public schools, which need the personal interest and love of every earnest citizen to-day as they have never needed them before."

From the Boston Latin School young Brooks went to Harvard College when he was about fifteen and a half years old. "The college attracted him with its promises," writes the Rev. Dr. Alexander McKenzie, in the May, 1893, New England Magazine. "Even the Triennial Catalogue was stimulating as he read there of twenty-five men named Phillips and twenty named Brooks, who had graduated from this university. The place for his own name which should join the two lines was inviting."

And yet Phillips Brooks in no way distinguished himself in college, save, perhaps, in composition. His professors were such men as Agassiz, Longfellow, Asa Gray, Lowell, and others. During his junior year he roomed in Massachusetts Hall, and his senior year in Stoughton.

One of Brooks's class writes, "He was a general favorite, always hearty and kindly, with an abounding sense of humor, which he carried with him through life.... No one could have surmised what profession he would choose, and almost any calling would have seemed appropriate."

Mr. Robert Treat Paine, his classmate, says, "At college he cared little for sport, but preferred to read omniverously almost everything and anything that came in his way." Tennyson was an especial favorite.

After graduation Brooks returned to the Boston Latin School, and became a tutor. Here he failed. He could not or would not be a strict disciplinarian, and he left the position.

Francis Gardner, his former teacher, had said that he "never knew a man who had failed as a schoolmaster to succeed in any other occupation." In one case at least he was mistaken. The young man might and did fail as a schoolteacher; he was a great success as a preacher and a man.

He went back to his college president, James Walker, to advise about his future work in life, and decided to enter the ministry.

At the suggestion of his pastor, Dr. Alexander H. Vinton, of St. Paul's Church on Tremont Street, he went to a theological seminary at Alexandria, Va., in 1856. Here his piety seemed to deepen, as he gave himself to study and to mission work.

He preached his first sermon in a little hamlet called Sharon, two or three miles from the seminary, urged to go thither by a classmate. The people were mostly poor whites and negroes, who, being plain themselves, enjoyed the plain preaching. The schoolhouse was soon crowded, and more came than could be accommodated.

His classmate told, at his home in Philadelphia, of this good work. The Church of the Advent in that city needed a rector. A committee came to hear Brooks, of course without his knowledge, were delighted, and called him to their poor parish.

Fearful that he would not give satisfaction, young Brooks, now twenty-four years of age, consented to preach for three months, and at the end of that time accepted the call for a year, at a salary of one thousand dollars.

"The dissatisfaction with his work," says Dr. Arthur Brooks, "and the eagerness to press on to something better and more complete, while all the time men were praising what he had done, was always a recognized feature of his power."

Fortunately for young Brooks, Dr. Vinton had moved to Philadelphia, and had become rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, in a wealthy part of the city.

Not forgetting his former parishioner, he invited the young preacher to occupy his pulpit Sunday afternoons. Both here and at the Advent, Phillips Brooks soon won a place in the hearts and lives of his hearers.

Dr. Vinton was called to St. Mark 's Church, in New York, and Phillips Brooks was asked to take his place at the Holy Trinity. He did not accept till invited the third time, and finally became rector Jan. 1, 1862, when he was twenty-seven.

During Phillips Brooks's ten years in Philadelphia, he took a fearless stand for the colored people, and in all that related to the Civil War.

When the three months' men were called out to defend Philadelphia from a feared attack of the Confederates, young Brooks, with a shovel on his shoulder, was in the van to help throw up earthworks.

In his Thanksgiving sermon, Nov. 26, 1863, he thanked God "that the institution of African slavery in our beloved land is one big year nearer to its inevitable death than it was last Thanksgiving Day."

When Abraham Lincoln lay dead at Independence Hall, in the journey from Washington to Springfield, Ill., Phillips Brooks preached a noble sermon, April 23, 1865. Many have recalled these words, which might be written of himself, now that he has gone from us.

"In him," said Phillips Brooks, "was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness.... How many ears will never lose the thrill of some kind word he spoke—he who could speak so kindly to promise a kindness that always matched his word. How often he surprised the land with a clemency which made even those who questioned his policy love him the more for what they called his weakness; seeing the man in whom God had most embodied the discipline of freedom not only could not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant....

"The gentlest, kindest, most indulgent man that ever ruled a state!... The shepherd of the people!... What ruler ever wore it like this dead President of ours? He fed us faithfully and truly. He fed us with counsel when we were in doubt, with inspiration when we sometimes faltered, with caution when we would be rash, with calm, clear, trustful cheerfulness through many an hour when our hearts were dark. He spread before the whole land feasts of great duty and devotion and patriotism, on which the land grew strong. He fed us with solemn, solid truths....

"He showed us how to love truth, and yet be charitable—how to hate wrong and all oppression, and yet not treasure one personal injury or insult. He fed all his people, from the highest to the lowest, from the most privileged to the most enslaved. Best of all, he fed us with a reverent and genuine religion."

When Harvard celebrated the close of the war, and Lowell gave his immortal "Commemoration Ode," Phillips Brooks offered the prayer, as only one with his great heart and eloquent lips could pray. Nobody ever forgot that prayer. Harvard from that day forward knew and honored her son.

A few years later, May 30, 1873, Phillips Brooks spoke at the dedication of Memorial Hall in Andover. He said, "They saw that their country was like a precious vase of rarest porcelain, priceless while it was whole, valueless if it was broken into fragments. What they died to keep whole may we in our several places live to keep holy!"

In 1869 Phillips Brooks was called to Trinity Church, Boston. He loved his native city, "the home of new ideas," as he called it, and accepted. At that time the church edifice of Quincy granite was on Summer Street. It was burned in the great fire of 1872, whereupon the wealthy congregation, idolizing their pastor, built on the Back Bay, at Copley Square, the present Trinity Church edifice, costing about one million dollars, one of the handsomest and most complete church buildings on this continent. It was designed by the famous architect, Mr. H. H. Richardson. It is in the form of a Latin Cross.

"The style of the church," says Mr. Richardson, "may be characterized as a free rendering of the French Romanesque, inclining particularly to the school that flourished in the eleventh century in Central France,—the ancient Aquitaine."

Four thousand five hundred piles were driven to support the building, the tower of which, resting on four piers, weighs nearly nineteen million pounds. Mr. John La Farge decorated the building with great skill and beauty. Dr. Vinton, the venerable pastor of Phillips Brooks's boyhood, preached the consecration sermon in the new church, Feb. 9, 1877.

Phillips Brooks did not wish that this grand church should be for the people of Trinity only. The galleries were made free, and the rented pews could be occupied by strangers after a stated hour. He said, "Such a church as this has no right to exist, or to think that it exists, for any limited company who own its pews. It would not be a Christian parish if it harbored such a thought. No, let the world come in. Let all men hear, if they will, the truths we love. Let no soul go unsaved through any selfishness of ours."

This year Mr. Brooks was made a Doctor of Divinity by Harvard University. He had already been one of her overseers for several years. In 1881 the beloved Dr. Andrew P. Peabody resigned his office as preacher at Harvard, and the President and Fellows naturally turned to Phillips Brooks as the one of all others who could win and hold the students to a higher spiritual life. He was chosen preacher to the university, and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals.

Dr. Brooks loved his Alma Mater, and hated to refuse, but Trinity Church and Boston could not spare him. When he gave his answer, President Eliot says, "He was very pale and grave, and he spoke like a man who had seen a beatific vision which he could not pursue."

More and more, however, Phillips Brooks became a part of the higher life of Harvard. The religious work at the college is divided among six preachers. In each half-year, for two or three weeks, a minister conducts morning prayers, preaches Sunday evenings, and each forenoon is at Wadsworth House, to talk with any students who may choose to come.

These were precious seasons to Phillips Brooks: for he loved young men, and they loved him. The Rev. Julius Ward tells of a letter written by Dr. Brooks to the father of a freshman, in which the warm heart of the preacher exclaims. "What dear, beautiful creatures these boys are!"

For twenty-two years Phillips Brooks did his grand work in Trinity Church, and, indeed, in the whole city and the whole land. He said, "No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind."

When the Rev. Dr. George A. Gordon of Boston remarked to Dr. Brooks, after hearing his twentieth anniversary sermon, that he had also heard him preach his ninth, he replied, "Twenty years is a long time in a man's life, and I cannot expect more than another twenty;" and then with a serious but eager look, added, "And then I hope something better will come."

He preached to overflowing congregations at Trinity, at the Young Men's Christian Union, the Moody Tabernacle, Appleton Chapel at Harvard, and elsewhere. He did not seem to realize that men crowded the house to hear him. To a brother minister in a Boston suburb, where he frequently preached, and where every inch of standing-room was utilized when he came, he remarked, "Grey, what a splendid congregation you have!"

He was extremely modest. When invited to furnish some data for his college class record, he wrote, "I have had no wife, no children, no particular honors, no serious misfortune, and no adventures worth speaking of. It is shameful at such times as these not to have a history, but I have not got one, and must come without."

Phillips Brooks was as great in pastoral work as in preaching. He said in his "Lectures on Preaching," delivered at the Yale Divinity School, in January and February, 1877, "The preacher needs to be pastor, that he may preach to real men. The pastor must be preacher, that he may keep the dignity of his work alive. The preacher who is not a pastor grows remote. The pastor who is not a preacher grows petty.... Be both; for you cannot really be one unless you also are the other."

He visited his people, both poor and rich. Two young men had attended Trinity Church for a time, and then ceased going. They roomed at the top of a high building in a plain quarter of the city. One day, answering a rap at their door, they beheld the majestic figure of Phillips Brooks. "Well, boys," he said, grasping them cordially by the hand, "you did not expect to see me here, did you?"

Indeed, they did not, for they supposed that the rector did not know them even by sight. They went regularly to Trinity after that friendly visit.

A physician tells this story, which has appeared in the press. He said to a poor woman whom he had visited, "You don't need any more medicine. What you need now is nourishment and fresh air. You need to get out."

"But I have nobody to leave with the children," was the reply.

"Well, you must manage to get out somehow," was the response.

The doctor dropped in a day or two later to see how the poor woman had "managed." She had told her troubles to the man who bore many burdens cheerfully, Phillips Brooks; and he was there caring for the children while the poor mother took the air.

Dr. Brooks loved mission work. Like Charles Kingsley, he was always very close in heart with the poor and the laborers. He said, "It is not wealth simply in itself,—it is the pride of wealth, the indifference of wealth, the cruelty of wealth, the vulgarity of wealth, in one great word, the selfishness of wealth, which really makes the poor man's heart ache and the poor man's blood boil, and constitutes the danger of a community where poor men and rich men live side by side." He was especially interested in St. Andrew's Church on Chambers Street, which was under the care of Trinity. Here one of the first, if not the first, girls' clubs in the country was organized, to which Dr. Brooks delighted to speak of his travels abroad. The Vincent Hospital, the Guild Hall of St. Andrew's, hung with pictures, gifts from him, the Kindergarten for the Blind,—all were dear to his heart.

Phillips Brooks was a generous man, with both money and time. He helped many a boy through college. On one occasion he received a check for one hundred dollars from a parish where he had preached, and immediately sent it to a poor clergyman. To a chapel in a suburban town he gave five hundred dollars towards paying its debt.

He did not like to have his photograph taken and sold; but when informed by those who were holding a fair for St. Andrew's Mission that they would probably make fifty dollars through such sale, he immediately sent a check for that amount.

He was finally prevailed upon to sit for his picture in 1887. In the following eight months more than three thousand photographs were sold. Four years later an arrangement was made whereby a royalty was paid on each picture, and the proceeds used in mission work.

A lady desired some instruments for a medical missionary about to start for Japan. She applied to Phillips Brooks, with the thought that some of his wealthy parishioners might provide them. "A good set will cost one hundred dollars," she said; "but an inferior one can be bought for fifty dollars."

"Would you send your son to the war with an old-fashioned musket," he said, "instead of a rifle? The man who goes to fight Satan in his strongholds must have the best appliances that can be obtained." And Dr. Brooks paid the money from his own pocket.

A printer, the husband of a woman attending Dr. Brooks's church, became ill, and the men in the office raised money to send their fellow-workman to California. The preacher heard of it, and called at the building. The cashier spoke through the tube to the foreman in the composing-room, saying that a gentleman wished to see him. "Send him up," was the reply. And up four flights walked Phillips Brooks, and quietly slipped twenty dollars into the foreman's hands, though refusing to allow his name to be put on the subscription paper.

He gave his time generously. When his private secretary, the Rev. William Henry Brooks, DD., said to him that in using so much time for others he had none left for himself, he replied, "I have plenty of time." Being asked "Where?" he answered, "In the railroad cars."

Soon after Phillips Brooks became bishop he was urged to have office hours, but refused. He said, writes his secretary, in a sketch of the great leader, "A clergyman may come from a distance to see me, and be compelled to return very soon. Not knowing my office hours (should there be such), he might fail of the accomplishment of his errand, and so have his journey to no purpose. Or a layman, leaving his business to consult with me, not knowing of the observance of office hours, might find his time wasted, and be disappointed of the desired interview. No, I am not willing to have office hours. If people wish to see me I ought to and will see them."

When some one expressed fear that these numberless calls would wear him out, he said, "God save the day when they won't come to me."

When I had occasion myself two or three times to consult him, he never seemed in a hurry, never cold or indifferent, never ostentatious,—only small souls are that,—and never exclusive. He had so mastered himself as not to be annoyed; and such mastery over self gives mastery over others.

He answered letters by the thousands; indeed, none ever went unanswered. He was like Longfellow in this respect,—a true gentleman.

He received letters from all countries, and upon all subjects. A lady wrote from the South, wishing a position in the house of one of the diocesan institutions, with her two children, and if that were not possible, asked that he would recommend a boarding-place. Phillips Brooks was abroad, but sent the letter to his secretary, asking that he send her the desired information. "Be sure," wrote Dr. Brooks, "and tell her that the answer was not delayed any longer than was absolutely necessary. Explain to her that I am in Europe."

A widow in Minnesota, whose husband, a Massachusetts man, had been killed in the war, could not prove that he was her husband, as she had lost her marriage certificate, and therefore could not obtain a pension. She knew the name of the minister who married her, but he was dead. Phillips Brooks took time to find evidence of her marriage, and she received her pension.

A letter came from New York City, asking that a list of all the papers and periodicals published by the several parishes in Dr. Brooks's diocese be sent. It was a work of many hours, but it was done.

The Girls' Friendly Magazine tells this incident. Phillips Brooks said to a friend in his study, "Who is this man who writes this letter? You ought to be able to tell me, for he comes from your town. He wants to know if I think it is right to play chess."

"That man," said the friend, "is a poor old crank. There is nothing for you to do but to throw his letter in the waste-basket."

"That I will not do," was the answer of Phillips Brooks. "He has written me a courteous letter, and I am going to return him a courteous answer, like a gentleman."

Phillips Brooks was extremely fond of children, as one may see from his letters to his nieces, published in the August, 1893, Century Magazine, or from the beautiful picture in "The Child and the Bishop," where, in 1890, Dr. Brooks holds, as he says, "'Beautiful Blessing' in my happy arms."

In 1882-83 he spent over a year in Europe, sailing in the Servia about the middle of June, 1882, with his friend, the Rev. Dr. McVickar of Philadelphia, with other friends. Dr. Brooks visited England, France, Italy, India, and Spain.

From Venice he writes to his niece Gertie, the daughter of William Gray Brooks, in a Boston bank, "Do go into my house, when you get there, and see if the doll and her baby are well and happy, but do not carry them off; and make the music-box play a tune, and remember your affectionate uncle,

Phillips."

The people of Trinity Church had built for their pastor a beautiful home on Clarendon Street. In one of the closets were kept dolls for his nieces. This home was the scene of many merry-makings for the children of his brothers, and for other children.

From Jeypoor he writes to Gertie about the monkeys of India, and the nose-jewels of the women, and tells her he has got a nose-jewel for her. He rides on a great elephant, "almost as big as Jumbo."

To Josephine, the little daughter of the Rev. John Cotton Brooks, his brother, in Springfield, Mass., be sends an amusing poem of his own composition. From England he writes that he wished the strawberries grew on trees, as it was difficult for him to pick them, as one might imagine from his great size,—six feet four inches tall, and large frame in proportion.

At Badgastein he takes a bath for Gertie, who has rheumatism, back in America; and from Chamouni, he writes her that she must get well and strong, "to play with me."

He writes to his brother William interesting accounts of India. Bombay, with its great hospital for sick and wounded animals, where "they cure them if they can, or keep them till they die," is very curious. It is to be hoped that we, with our boasted civilization, will some time be as kind to animals as they are in India.

He preaches at Delhi. He is extremely interested in Benares, with its five thousand Hindoo temples, the "very Back Bay of Asia." He sees thousands of pilgrims bathing in the sacred Ganges to wash their sins away, or burn their dead upon its banks.

Phillips Brooks preached during his absence at St. Botolph's Church, Boston, Lincolnshire, England; at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London; at St. Paul's Cathedral, the Temple Church, St. Margaret's, at Westminster Abbey, at Lincoln Cathedral, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and elsewhere, always to the great delight of his hearers. He met such men as Browning and Tennyson. He was the warm friend of the lamented Dean Stanley.

Of Browning he writes, in "Letters of Travel," "He was one of the men whom I wanted most to see here; a pleasant gentleman, full of talk about London and London people, with not a bit of the poet about him externally."

Again he writes, "I dined with Mr. Forster and Mr. Bright, and had our great English friend pretty much to myself for two hours. He is a great talker, especially when he gets onto America; and he knows what he is talking about. Both he and Forster are friends worth having. Bright, personally, wins you in a minute by his frankness and cordialness and manliness of his greeting."

He attended one of Mrs. Gladstone's receptions; met Mr. Gladstone at dinner at Mr. Bryce's; breakfasted with Matthew Arnold, "and liked him very much;" met Jean Ingelow, Mrs. Ritchie (Thackeray's daughter), Hughes, and many others.

Dr. Brooks returned to Boston Sept. 22, and the people received him with open arms.

Dr. Brooks was a Broad Churchman, and broad in every sense of the word. His secretary tells of a conversation he had with the rector, when, after differing in opinion, he said to Phillips Brooks, "I am very sorry that I have said what I have just said."

"Why?" was asked.

"Because it is not pleasant to me to differ with you in opinions," was the reply of the secretary. Dr. Brooks answered with much earnestness, "This is a free country, and every man has the right to express his own opinions."

Phillips Brooks was one of the most tolerant of men. In two lectures on "Tolerance," delivered before the students of several divinity schools of the Episcopal Church, he said, "Tolerance is the willing consent that other men should hold and express opinions with which we disagree, until they are convinced by reason that those opinions are untrue.

"I know some ministers," he said, "who want all their parishioners to think after their fashion, and are troubled when any of their people show signs of thinking for themselves, and holding ideas which the minister does not hold. Thank God, the human nature is too vital, especially when it is inspired with such a vital force as Christian faith, to yield itself to such unworthy slavery....

"Bidden to believe that souls would be punished for wrong-thinking, people have come to doubt whether souls would be punished for anything at all. The only possibility of any light upon the darkness, any order in the confusion, must lie in the clear and unqualified assertion that such as God is can punish such as men are for nothing except wickedness, and that honestly mistaken opinions are not wicked....

"The only ground for us to take is simply the broad ground that error is not punishable at all. Error is not guilt. The guilt of error is the fallacy and fiction which has haunted good men's minds."

Again he said, "Insincerity (whether it profess to hold what we think is false or what we think is true), cant, selfishness, deception of one's self or of other people, cruelty, prejudice,—these are the things with which the Church ought to be a great deal more angry than she is. The anger which she is ready to expend upon the misbeliever ought to be poured out on these."

"The noblest utterance of hopeful tolerance in all that noble century," said Dr. Brooks of the Pilgrims, "was in the famous speech in which John Robinson, their minister, bade loving farewell to his departing flock at Leyden, in which occur those memorable words, 'I am verily persuaded, I am very confident, that the Lord has more truth to break out of His holy word.'"

"At the consecration of Trinity Church," says the Rev. Julius H. Ward, "he invited prominent Unitarian clergymen, and at least one layman, to receive the communion." And yet Phillips Brooks's one gospel message, in which he believed and spoke, was the power of Christ unto salvation.

"Of the Episcopal Church," he said, "there are some of her children who love to call her in exclusive phrase The American Church. She is not that; and to call her that would be to give her a name to which she has no right. The American Church is the great total body of Christianity in America, in many divisions, under many names ... as a whole bearing perpetual testimony to the people of America of the authority and love of God, of the redemption of Christ, and of the sacred possibilities of man....

"The church which to-day effectively denounces intemperance and the licentiousness of social life, the cruelty or indifference of the rich to the poor, and the prostitution of public office, will become the real church of America. Our church has done some good service here. She ought to do more.... She ought to blow her trumpet in the ears of the young men of fortune, summoning them from their clubs and their frivolities to do the chivalrous work which their nobility obliges them to do for their fellow-men. She ought to speak to Culture, and teach it its responsibility."

Five volumes of Dr. Brooks's sermons have been published and read widely: one in 1878; another in 1881, "The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons,"—the first sermon was preached in London, and attracted wide attention; in 1883, "Sermons in the English Churches;" in 1886, "Twenty Sermons," dedicated to the memory of Frederick Brooks, his brother; and in 1890, "The Light of the World and Other Sermons," dedicated to the memory of his "brother, George Brooks, who died in the great war."

The Rev. Frederick Brooks, who was the talented young pastor of St. Paul's Church in Cleveland, Ohio, was drowned by falling one dark evening through the Charlestown draw of the Boston and Lowell Railroad bridge. The last inspiring talk which he made was at one of the Temperance Friendly Inns in Cleveland, where he encouraged us with his words of sympathy and interest.

Phillips Brooks wrote two other books, "Lectures on Preaching," and the "Bohlen Lectures," on "The Influence of Jesus." Besides these he has written several Christmas carols of extreme beauty, and some pamphlets. All his books have gone through many editions, and, like Spurgeon's, have been read by thousands.

In an address on "Biography," delivered at Phillips Exeter Academy, he said that he would rather have written a great biography than any other great book.

The "Lectures on Preaching" abound, like all his work, in short, concise sentences full of meaning, and should be read especially by every one who intends to preach.

He tells young men that the talk about prevalent aversion to hearing the gospel is foolish. "The age," he says, "has no aversion to preaching as such. It may not listen to your preaching. If that prove to be the case, look for the fault first in your preaching, and not in the age. I wonder at the eagerness and patience of congregations.... Never fear, as you preach, to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble."

The necessary qualities in a preacher, Phillips Brooks thinks, are, "Personal piety,—nothing but fire kindles fire,"—hopefulness; such physical condition as comes from a due regard to health; enthusiasm; "the quality that kindles at the sight of men, that feels a keen joy at the meeting of truth and the human mind."

First among the elements of power, Phillips Brooks puts "personal uprightness and purity." "No man permanently succeeds in the ministry who cannot make men believe that he is pure and devoted; and the only sure and lasting way to make men believe in one's devotion and purity is to be what one wishes to be believed to be." He said. "No man can do much for others who is not much himself.... The priest must be the most manly of all men."

The second element of power is "freedom from self-consciousness." "No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon."

The third element is "genuine respect for the people whom he preaches to." "There is no good preaching in the supercilious preacher."

The fourth is "gravity." Dr. Brooks thinks the "merely solemn ministers are very empty ... cheats and shams;" but thinks the "clerical jester" merits "the contempt of Christian people." "He is full of Bible jokes.... There are passages in the Bible which are soiled forever by the touches which the hands of ministers who delight in cheap and easy jokes have left upon them.... Refrain from all joking about congregations, flocks, parish visits, sermons, the mishaps of the pulpit, or the makeshifts of the study. Such joking is always bad, and almost always stupid; but it is very common, and it takes the bloom off a young minister's life." Dr. Brooks was especially careful in remarks about any person.

The fifth element of power is "courage." "If you are afraid of men, and a slave to their opinion, go and do something else. Go and make shoes to fit them."

Phillips Brooks then turns to the dangers which beset young preachers. The first is self-conceit. "He who lives with God must be humble," he has said in his sermon, "How to Abound." Another danger is narrowness. Still another is self-indulgence. "We are apt to become men of moods, thinking we cannot work unless we feel like it.... The first business of the preacher is to conquer the tyranny of his moods, and to be always ready for his work. It can be done.... Resent indulgences which are not given to men of other professions. Learn to enjoy and be sober; learn to suffer and be strong. Never appeal for sympathy."

Again he said, "The clergy are largely what the laity make them.... It was not good that the minister should be worshipped and made an oracle. It is still worse that he should be flattered and made a pet. And there is such a tendency in these days among our weaker people.... It is possible for such a man, if he has popular gifts, to be petted all through his ministry, never once to come into strong contact with other men, or to receive one good hard knock of the sort that brings out manliness and character."

Dr. Brooks liked to have ministers share their knowledge; giving such lectures as Norman Macleod's on geology to the weavers at Newmilns. "Would that more of us were able to follow his example." This was what Charles Kingsley loved to do.

Of political preaching, Dr. Brooks said to the students, "I despise, and call upon you to despise, all the weak assertions that a minister must not preach politics because he will injure his influence if he does, or because it is unworthy of his sacred office.

"When some clear question of right and wrong presents itself, and men with some strong passion or sordid interest are going wrong, then your sermon is a poor, untimely thing if it deals only with the abstractions of eternity, and has no word to help the men who are dizzied with the whirl and blinded with the darkness of to-day."

He constantly urged men of all classes to do their best. "The primary fact of duty lies at the core of everything," he said.

He preached his own sermons with the single motive "of moving men's souls." He wrote rapidly, and spoke rapidly, over two hundred words a minute. Two stenographers were always necessary to record his sermons or addresses. His Lenten noonday sermons at Trinity Church, New York, or at St. Paul's Church, Boston, were crowded with the busiest business men of both cities. He could preach with or without notes. He could write a sermon in six hours, at two sittings of three hours each; but he had been studying and thinking all his life for it.

In 1886 Dr. Brooks was elected assistant-bishop of Pennsylvania, but declined.

In 1889 the freshmen of Wellesley College made him an honorary member of their class. He accepted the position, as had Dr. Holmes and others with former classes. He enjoyed meeting with the young women, for he always treated men and women alike, with no increased suavity for the latter. About a week before his death, says an article in the Feb. 15, 1894, Golden Rule, he went to Wellesley College to address the students, and afterwards received them in the large parlors. "I met my class here one Sunday afternoon," he said, "and they asked me questions, ten to the minute. It was very interesting. They did not differentiate at all between the questions that may be answered and the questions that may not."

In 1891 Phillips Brooks was chosen Bishop of Massachusetts, after a heated contest between the High and Broad Churchmen. Dr. Brooks wisely kept silent during the whole controversy.

He possessed, what he said impressed him most about Mr. Moody, "astonishing good sense."

He was consecrated with most impressive services, Oct. 14, 1891, in Trinity Church; Bishop Potter of New York preaching the consecration sermon.

It is said that the regular salary of the former Massachusetts bishop was six thousand dollars. As Phillips Brooks received eight thousand from Trinity, it was suggested that he be given eight as bishop, but this he would not permit.

Bishop Brooks took up his work with his wonted earnestness and zeal. "The amount of speaking that he did was appalling," says Bishop William Lawrence; "four to seven sermons and addresses on a Sunday, with sermons, addresses, and speeches in quick succession through the week."

"He was the most unselfish man I ever knew," says his secretary. "He was always sacrificing himself for others. Not only did he never speak of himself, but he never even thought of himself." He seemed never to waste a moment of time, and yet had time for everything. He was careful always to keep appointments promptly.

Bishop Brooks lived the frankness which he preached. "To keep clear of concealment," he said, "to keep clear of the need of concealment, to do nothing which he might not do out on the middle of Boston Common at noonday—I cannot say how more and more that seems to me to be the glory of a young man's life. It is an awful hour when the first necessity of hiding anything comes. The whole life is different thenceforth."

Phillips Brooks kept his warm heart through life. "Sentiment," he said, "is the finest essence of the human life. It is, like all the finest things, the easiest to spoil.... Let him glow with admiration, let him burn with indignation, let him believe with intensity, let him trust unquestioningly, let him sympathize with all his soul. The hard young man is the most terrible of all. To have a skin at twenty that does not tingle with indignation at the sight of wrong, and quiver with pity at the sight of pain, is monstrous." He thought a young man should "go responsive through the world, answering quickly to every touch, knowing the burdened man's burden just because of the unpressed lightness of his own shoulders, ... buoyant through all his unconquerable hope, overcoming the world with his exuberant faith.... Be not afraid of sentiment, but only of untruth. Trust your sentiments, and so be a man."

Phillips Brooks urged the joy which he always showed in his own life. "Joy, not sadness, is the characteristic fact of young humanity. To know this, to keep it as the truth to which the soul constantly returns,—that is the young man's salvation. Whatever young depression there is, there must be no young despair. In the morning, at least, it must seem a fine thing to live."

He loved his work better than all else on earth. He wrote a friend in England, "I have had a delightful life; and the last twenty years of it, which I have spent in Trinity Church, have been unbroken in their happiness."

Bishop Brooks was courageous. In his sermon, "The Man with Two Talents," he says, "To do great things in spite of difficulties, that is a very bugle-call to many men."

Again he says, in "Going up to Jerusalem," "Oh, do not pray for easy lives! Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle!"

He emphasizes this in his sermon, "The Choice Young Man," in his Fifth Series. "Sad is it when a community grows more and more to abound in young men who worship wealth, and think they cannot live without luxury and physical comfort. The choicest of its strength is gone."

Of gambling he said, "In social life, in club, in college, on the street, the willingness of young men to give or receive money on the mere turn of chances is a token of the decay of manliness and self-respect, which is more alarming than almost anything besides."

Bishop Brooks was grandly optimistic. Dr. Samuel Eliot says, "A mother wrote, asking him to baptize her little boy, and he wrote back, 'What a glorious future before a child born at the close of our century!'"

"I don't want to be old," he used to say, "but I should like to live on this earth five hundred years."

"Believe in man with all your childhood's confidence," he wrote in "Visions and Tasks," "while you work for man with all a man's prudence and circumspection. Such union of energy and wisdom makes the completest character, and the most powerful life."

He said, "I always like men who believe terribly in other men."

"Nothing was more remarkable in him," says Canon Farrar, "than his royal optimism. With him it was a matter of faith and temperament. I think he must have been born an optimist. Often, when I was inclined to despond, his conversation, his bright spirits, his friendliness, his illimitable hopes, came to me like a breath of vernal air."

The summer of 1892 was spent in Europe by Dr. Brooks. He wrote Archdeacon Farrar after his return, on his birthday, Dec. 13, "In the midst of a thousand useless things which I do every day, there is always coming up the recollection of last summer, and how good you were to me, and what enjoyment I had in those delightful idle days. Never shall I cease to thank you for taking me to Tennyson's, and letting me see the great dear man again. How good he was that day!... and how perfect his death was!... And Whittier, too, is gone.... How strange it seems, this writing against one friend's name after another that you will see his face no more!... I hope that you are well and happy. Do not let the great world trouble you."

While he enjoyed England, he was thoroughly American. He wrote from London, "I think that the more one travels here the more he feels that, while there is very much to admire and desire in these English ways, the simplicity and directness of our American fashions of doing things are far more satisfactory."

Two weeks later he preached a Christmas sermon at the Church of the Incarnation, New York, for his brother, Dr. Arthur Brooks. This was the day of all days which he loved. He enjoyed giving and receiving Christmas gifts.

He said in his sermon, "One of the very wonderful things about our human life is the perpetual freshness, the indestructible joy, that clings forever about the idea of birth. You cannot find the hovel so miserable, the circumstances and the prospects of life so wretched, that it is not a bright and glorious thing for a child to be born there.

"Hope flickers up for an instant from its embers at the first breathing of the baby's breath. No squalidness of the life into which it came can make the new life seem squalid at its coming. By and by it will grow dull and gray, perhaps, in sad harmony with its sad surroundings; but at the first there is some glory in it, and for a moment it burns bright upon the bosom of the dulness where it has fallen, and seems as if it ought to set it afire.

"And so there was nothing that could with such vividness represent the newness of Christianity in the world as to have it forever associated with the birth of a child.

"It is a strange, a wonderful, birth.... I do not care to understand that story fully. It is enough for me that in it there is represented the full truth about the wondrous child of Christmas Day. He is the child of heaven and earth together. It is the spontaneous utterance of the celestial life. It is likewise the answer to the cry of need with which every hill and valley of the earth has rung, that lies here in the cradle....

"The humble birth of Jesus in the stable of the inn at Bethlehem was a proclamation of the insignificance of circumstances in the greatest moments and experiences of life."

A few days later, Jan. 14, 1893, Bishop Brooks took cold at the consecration of a church in East Boston, and a soreness of throat resulted. Five days later, Thursday, he seemed somewhat ill, and went to bed. A physician came, but no alarm was felt. Sunday night the throat grew diphtheretic, and the bishop became delirious. Monday morning, Jan. 23, at 6.30, Phillips Brooks ceased to breathe.

His last words, spoken to his brother William and the faithful servants and nurse who stood by the bedside, as he waved his hand, were, "Good-by; I am going home. I will see you in the morning."

The sad news could scarcely be believed. The great, strong man, bishop for only a year and three months, had fallen in his very prime. Men's faces were blanched, and women wept. The poor and the rich had a common sorrow. Even children felt the bereavement. A little five-year-old girl was told by her mother that "Bishop Brooks had gone to heaven."

The child knew and loved him, and had always delighted to meet him. "O mamma!" she replied, "how happy the angels will be!"

On Thursday, Jan. 26, Bishop Brooks was buried. No other funeral was ever like it in Boston. At 7.45 in the morning the coffin was borne from the bishop's residence, at the corner of Clarendon and Newbury Streets, to the vestibule of Trinity Church, accompanied by a guard of the Loyal Legion, of which Phillips Brooks was chaplain. The colors of the Loyal Legion covered the coffin, on which lay some Easter lilies among palms.

It is estimated that from eight to eleven o'clock twelve or fifteen thousand persons passed by the body as it lay in state, and looked once more upon the face of the man they loved and honored. A heavy plate glass was over the face, and the coffin was hermetically sealed.

Rich and poor, children and adults, sobbed as they passed on. A gray-haired and very poorly dressed woman drew a cluster of roses from her bosom, and, with tears flowing down her cheeks, laid them reverently upon the casket.

A pale-faced woman, with a little boy scantily dressed for the winter weather, who could not enter the church for the crowd, begged a policeman to let her in. He replied brusquely, telling her to get into line.

"Oh, but I must see him once more!" she sobbed; "he paid for the operation which gave sight to my boy, and I must see him again."

The people about her were moved by her entreaty, and an usher quietly told the officer to allow the mother and her child to come in.

Meantime Trinity Church had become filled with the various delegations,—from Harvard College, Boston University, the Governor and Committee of the Legislature, clergymen from a distance, theological schools, officers of the Young Men's Christian Association and Young Men's Christian Union, and various other organizations.

The church was beautifully decorated. At the back of the chancel was an arch of laurel, fifteen feet high and nine feet wide, with a spruce-tree eight feet high on each side. In front of this was a tall cross of Easter lilies, and the baptismal font was filled with the same flowers. Roses and lilies sent by friends were heaped everywhere, although a request had been made that no flowers should be sent.

Among the flowers was a cross with the words, "From Helen." This was the gift of the little blind girl, Helen Keller, at the South Boston Institute for the Blind, of whom the dead preacher was very fond.

Just before noon the body, borne on the shoulders of eight strong men, picked from the various athletic teams of Harvard, passed up the aisle of the church, headed by the bishops and honorary pall-bearers. The whole congregation joined in singing "Jesus, lover of my soul," the music broken by audible sobbing. After brief services, while the people remained standing, and the organ played its low, solemn notes, the body was borne out into Copley Square in front of Trinity, and placed on a draped platform, where an out-door service was held for the more than twenty thousand persons who could not get inside the church.

A memorial service was held at the same hour in the First Baptist Church, near by.

After the Lord's Prayer, in which all joined, the hymn beginning,—

was sung. Copies of it had been distributed among the people. Three cornetists led the singing.

It was an hour never to be forgotten. Eyes unused to tears were wet that day.

The funeral procession of fifty carriages then moved towards Mount Auburn, across Harvard Bridge, through a line of thousands of people. Places of business throughout the city were closed, and the bells upon the churches and public buildings in Boston and other cities were tolled.

When the head of the procession reached Beck Hall, Cambridge, the university bell began tolling, with the old bell in Harvard Hall, and the bells of Christ Church, chiming,—

Two thousand college students, standing several deep, with heads uncovered, were formed in two lines from the University building to the West Gate. Through their ranks, entering from Harvard Street, the body of their beloved preacher was borne. "Never in all our college life," writes Dr. McKenzie, "has there been a burial like his."

From the college grounds the procession moved to Mount Auburn, where the brothers, John and Arthur, conducted the services. Flowers, which the dead bishop loved, lay everywhere upon the pure, white snow,—lilies, roses, carnations, and sheaves of wheat. The fence about the family lot was hung with ivy and violets tied with purple ribbon.

The crowd drew aside to let three weeping women look into the open grave, before the dirt fell upon the coffin. They were three sisters,—servants who had long ministered in the bishop's home, and whose devotion had been repaid by constant appreciation and kindness.

The world went back to its work, but we are never the same after a great life has touched our own. Phillips Brooks said in his sermon on "Withheld Completion of Life," "The ideal life is in our blood, and never will be still. We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are. Every time we see a man who has attained our human ideal a little more fully than we have, it awakens our languid blood and fills us with new longings."

All who ever knew or heard Phillips Brooks will forever strive after his unselfishness, his courage, his thoughtfulness, his eagerness to make the world better.

Bishop William Lawrence, who succeeded Phillips Brooks, wrote of him in the March-April, 1893, Andover Review, "When all has been said about his eloquence, his mastery of language, and his tumult of thought, we are turned back to the thought that the sermons were great because the man was great. His was a great soul. He stood above us; he moved in higher realms of thought and life; he had a wider sweep of spiritual vision; he was gigantic. And yet he was so completely one of us, so sympathetic, childlike, and naturally simple, that it was often only by an effort of thought that we could realize that he was great. Kingly in character, we buried him like a king."

Memorial services were held in scores of churches; in Boston, in Lowell, in Worcester, in New York, in Maine, in Rhode Island, and elsewhere. At the old South Church in Boston, Protestants and Roman Catholics united in the service.

The Rev. Dr. Philip S. Moxom of the First Baptist Church well said of Phillips Brooks, "He was a loyal Episcopalian in the very best sense in which a man can be loyal to the church of his choice; but he was not and could not be confined in the Episcopal Church. He belonged to no church or party or sect; rather he belonged to all churches and parties and sects in so far as they represent elemental truths and express elemental sympathies. The Congregationalists claimed him, the Unitarians claimed him, the Baptists claimed him, the Methodists claimed him; and the claims of all were just, because beneath all these names and party badges is the common human heart and the one universal church of God; and to that human and that church of God, Phillips Brooks belonged." The next generation will not remember the rush of his voice in the pulpit, or the warm clasp of his hand, or his kindling eye, but his influence will go on forever.

As he himself said, "He whose life grows abundant grows into sympathy with the lives of fellow-men, as when one pool among the many on the seashore rocks fills itself full, it overflows, and becomes one with the other pools, making them also one with each other all over the broad expanse."

For such a life there are no seashore limits; no limits of time or space. His words will have fulfilment. We shall "see him in the morning."