really valuable

the

for the light they throw on the temper of a past time. When important matters were afoot, there was abundant seriousness. Take such a case as that of Frederic Dan Huntington, in his early manhood a most popular Unitarian preacher and Harvard professor, in his later life the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. When he left the Unitarian denomination in 1860, he received from one of his brothers, a judge in Western Massachusetts, a letter quite characteristic of its period. "The 'Church,' brother wrote, "has always seemed to me a snug harbor, a quiet retreat, a safe religious asylum for well-disposed people who shudder at all the 'isms' of the day, and conscientiously desire to say their prayers in a social, respectable way, and to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and of their godfathers and godmothers, and to compound for a general weekday indulgence in the fashions, pleasures, and vanities of the world by a steady observance of the set days, the new moons, the feasts, and the fasts, and the fish-days." It was bad enough for a Unitarian

1 It is no wonder that such opinions of the Episcopal Church existed when it is remembered that an Anglican visitor to New York in 1828 wrote of a service at Grace Church: "The appearance of the congregation was highly respectable; indeed it appeared to contain none of the lower classes of society." See America and the American Church, by the Rev. Henry Caswall, p. 11.

to substitute any such new asylum of faith for his old; but had he become an orthodox Congregationalist, a still stronger prejudice on his Unitarian brother's part would have faced him. Of this denomination, the brother wrote in the same letter: "As a body, with their hypocrisy, bigotry, exclusive creed, pharisaic spirit, their clean outside cups and platters and sepulchres, and intolerant and persecuting temper, I think they are about as poor a commentary upon the meek, loving, charitable, and gentle spirit of Christianity as could well be got up."

Or take the later case of the Rev. Dr. George A. Gordon, at the time of his installation, in 1884, as minister of the Old South Church in Boston. The cross-examination to which he was subjected by a Council of sixty-six Congregational ministers and deacons was a trial of orthodoxy almost worthy of the days of Anne Hutchinson. Only she was banished to the wilds of Rhode Island, and Dr. Gordon, approved by a vote of forty-eight to eighteen, was installed in the ministry he has adorned for more than forty years.

They cared very much all these defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints. After their own fashion they did their best to fulfill "the chief end of man" by glorifying God. In the

exercise of their other function, "to enjoy Him forever," they started sometimes on surprising paths.

II

Phillips Brooks was primarily and completely a preacher. Preaching, as he regarded it, was "the bringing of truth through personality." "The sermon," he said, "is truth and man together. It is the truth brought through the man." Before considering the truth he brought to his generation, let us look at the man and his personality.

In the matter of outward circumstance, his life was as uneventful as that of any conspicuous clergyman can be. He was born in Boston, December 13, 1835. At the Boston Latin School he made his preparation for Harvard College, from which he graduated in the class of 1855. After a brief, disastrous attempt at teaching in the Boston Latin School, he entered the Theological Seminary at Alexandria, Virginia, and for three years pursued his studies for the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Then for two years, from 1859 to 1861, he was rector of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia, a small parish in the northern part of the city. From 1861 to 1869 he held the rectorship of Holy Trinity Church, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. In 1869, after

much hesitation, he resigned this position to become rector of Trinity Church, Boston, in the ministry of which he continued until he became Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891. Less than two years later, on January 23, 1893, he died. In the course of his life he employed every vacation opportunity for extensive travel in Europe and the Holy Land, to India and Japan. At various times he might have turned to other work than preaching as a divinity-school teacher in Philadelphia or Cambridge, as president of a Church college in Ohio, as a Harvard professor, as assistant Bishop of Pennsylvania. When the end of his life was at hand, he accepted the bishopric of Massachusetts only under the strongest impulsion of duty.

Such are the bare facts of his career. To the secretary of his college class, demanding information for an anniversary report, he wrote, late in his life: "I have had no wife, no children, no particular honors, no serious misfortunes, 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."' What his record did possess was a singular unity. To be a unit in personality and life that is, to show qualities of the same sort throughout

is a frequent, though of course not invariable, token of greatness. Phillips Brooks was strikingly a unit, without the contradictions in his nature and its expression which in many other men call for reconciliation. This oneness appears first of all in his personality.

What he was and what he did were so interwoven that the two things can hardly be separated. His inheritances and their influence upon him were, however, beyond his control, and their contribution to his personality was marked. His father, a man of high probity and intelligence, through his whole active life a hardware merchant in Boston, came of the Massachusetts family of Brooks, chiefly identified in the generations before him with the successful handling of practical affairs. "They were honored, trusted, and loved," says Dr. Allen, the biographer of Phillips Brooks, "in each passing generation." Back of them ancestrally, through an eighteenth-century marriage, stood the Reverend John Cotton, a dominating clerical figure of Boston in its earliest days, the "very great-grandfather" of whom Phillips Brooks once declared: "I thank him as a Church of England man, as a man loving the Episcopal Church with all my heart, I thank him for being a Puritan.”