Touching Puritanism itself there are other words of Phillips Brooks illustrating the humorous apprehension of many things which was a positive element in his make-up. "It stands," he said, "like a rusty gun in a corner of the room; but let no man ever fool with Puritanism, thinking the thing is not loaded, for by and by it will go off. . . . I suppose the real proof that we are Puritans is that we are proud of being Puritans; which nobody but a Puritan would be."

The Brookses turned from Orthodoxy to Unitarianism in time for Phillips Brooks's father to grow up in it. Not so the Phillips family, the founders and benefactors of the Phillips Academies at Andover and Exeter, from whom the mother of Phillips Brooks derived her name and descent. The Puritanism of a long line of preachers antedating these foundations ran strong in her veins. Mrs. William Gray Brooks (Mary Ann Phillips), the mother of six sons, four of whom entered the ministry of the Episcopal Church, was concerned quite as deeply throughout their boyhood for their spiritual as for their physical welfare. This feeling doubtless played its part in the early separation of Phillips Brooks's parents from the Unitarian Church in which they began their married life, and the transfer of their allegiance

to the Episcopal parish of St. Paul's in Boston. Here they and their growing family of boys found abundant satisfaction in the religious influences which formed a vital part of the family life. The ineradicable Puritanism of the mother revealed itself strangely from time to time. There is a story of her hearing her two sons, Phillips and Frederick, after they had become rectors of important churches respectively in Philadelphia and Cleveland, laughing unrestrainedly together on a Sunday visit to their parents, and coming to the doorway of the room in which they sat to warn them with, "Boys, remember it is Sunday." There was a time, moreover, while Phillips Brooks was still in Philadelphia, when his mother feared the effect of Horace Bushnell's writings upon his orthodoxy. "Philly," she wrote to him, "they are nothing better than Unitarianism that I suffered under all my young life. . . . I hope you do not own the book called 'Christ and His Salvation.' But if you do I want you to burn it with Frederick present to witness and exult over it. I have no patience with the book or with the man.'

When her most eminent son was first taking his place as a distinguished preacher, she wrote him another letter containing these pathetic sentences:

"Sometimes I really feel that nothing but the mother's love remains in me. That will never cease, for the dead or the living. And Philly, often now, truly I don't feel quite equal to writing to you. You have got before me now, and this is the course of all nature. The old stalk is good for nothing after it has yielded its fruit. Just so it is with you and me.' Between the mother and son no such divergence as she feared ever came to pass. When she died in 1880 Phillips Brooks wrote to his friend, Dr. Weir Mitchell, "My mother has been the centre of all the happiness of my life. Thank God she is not less my pride and treasure now." Writing at the same time to his brother Arthur, "The Brooks boys have got to stand together as long as they are left, he gave further token of that depth of family affection, and indeed of all personal loyalties, which must be counted among his strongest individual traits. These loyalties were many, and among them his friendships - springing from the relations of school, college, seminary, and the ministry held always an important place. In the circle of his sympathies the unfortunate and the burdened, and especially the children, with all the satisfaction or the pathos of ultimate adjustments to living still in store for them, were

warmly enclosed. No more touching and illuminating picture of his relations with a child can be found than in the autobiography of Helen Keller, the eyes of whose soul he did so much to open.

"Every true preacher," he once said, "must be a poet"; and quite apart from his own adventures in verse, in which feeling and felicity are both to be found, the vein of poetry that ran through all his prose accounted for a marked and appealing element of beauty in his sermons. The creative imagination of the poet is suggested, moreover, in such a bit of testimony as that of a director of charities in Trinity Church, Boston. It was her custom to give him from time to time a list of poor women in distress that he might visit and pray with them. Especially those who had lost young children would come to her afterwards and say, "How can he know so well just how I feel?"

With the poetic sense went a sense of proportion - by no means always an attribute of poets. In the case of Phillips Brooks this was doubtless related to a sound and pervading sense of humor, and perhaps also in some degree to an early experience of utter failure.

The best sense of humor is that which enables

its possessor to join in a laugh at his own expense. If Phillips Brooks, six feet four inches in height, had not possessed this endowment, it is doubtful whether he would have been willing, as a member of the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, to take part in Fielding's "Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great,' in which he enacted the rôle of "Glumdalca of the Giants, a captive Queen, beloved by the King, but in love with Tom Thumb." The incongruities of word and action resulting from this union of Fielding and the future bishop have an ex post facto humor not to be ignored. Another good sign of his unwillingness as an undergraduate to take himself too seriously is found in the pleasure he is reported to have taken in telling an anecdote of his instruction in English composition by Professor Child. He had written a college exercise of which the opening portion had all the elaboration of "fine writing" and greatly pleased him. It was good for his acquisition of the writer's art, though bad for his self-esteem at the moment, to have Professor Child return the paper with the penciled words, at the end of the introduction, "Begin here." (William Everett, his college junior by four years, may have profited by the same methods, for when he became an instructor in