The Great Preacher

IMMEDIATELY after the death of Phillips Brooks, Dr. Allen contributed to this magazine ¹ a warm-hearted, discriminating appreciation of the great preacher. He wrote from the same sort of personal knowledge which other of his friends had, and, without attempting any historical study, held Dr. Brooks to have been throughout his life a man with a genius for preaching. “ In Phillips Brooks,” he said, “ the inward preparation does not seem to correspond with the vast influence he exerted, and certainly the negative attitude of antagonism toward rejected beliefs was almost wholly wanting.” Now, after three years’ close study of the great volume of Dr. Brooks’s printed and unprinted writings, and of the tributes, public and private, to his character and influence, he has written a generous memoir,² which is a revisal of his early judgment, and such a disclosure of the correspondence between inward preparation and out-ward influence as would be hard to parallel in the whole range of biographic literature. Dr. Allen intimates in his preface that he started out on his task with no theory respecting biography. The result is evident in the free handling of his great subject. Clearly he had no theory, but he had a consuming desire to get at the man himself, and, if possible, to reproduce in his volumes some image of a nature which towered head and shoulders above other men of like vocation in his generation. It was plain to Dr. Allen, as it must be to any one who stops to reflect, that a history of Phillips Brooks’s career could be told with brevity. A preacher who confined his work almost wholly to preaching, who held but three rectorships in the thirty-three years of his ministry, who took almost no part in any organization outside of his parish, and scarcely any initiative there, whose vacations were spent in foreign travel, and whose recreation was in his friendships, — what was there in the outward details of such a life to demand and hold attention ?

There was nothing dramatic in this preacher’s life, except as one counts the scenes connected with his successive promotions in influence as dramatic ; and yet what a triumphal progress that was when the young man who broke down at the outset of his career as a teacher, and was harried out of the schoolroom by boys, finally was borne in his dead majesty on the shoulders of manly students out of a great church which was a glorious monument to the affection his people bore him, through a weeping multitude, and across a college yard where a university stood hushed in solemn grief, while the whole city of his birth mourned over the untimely death ! Surely a life sealed with such profound witness held something that could be told beyond the simple annals of a popular preacher, and Dr. Allen was right when he judged that a man built on so great a scale as was Phillips Brooks was to be measured and interpreted only as one applied himself to the discovery of the very secret of his being.

For this Life of Phillips Brooks is the history of a human soul, engaged in the greatest of affairs, and yet in its work unwittingly writing down the records by which its history may be read. The documents which were at the hand of the biographer were the sermons Brooks had preached, of which many had been printed ; the abundant notebooks, which contained the jottings of the hour ; a great many letters, comparatively of little value ; and the contemporary records of the press, which preserved the impressions created by the preacher on many occasions. Added to this material were the numberless testimonies of men and women and children who had come within the sweep of his personal influence. Out of all this really vast mass of evidence Dr. Allen was to construct an image which we may justly regard as having the same relation to the spiritual life of Brooks, and as permanently so, as the statue by St. Gaudens may be expected to have to his physical presence, or Trinity Church to his constructive power as a great force in the society of his day. The Life never loses sight of its great purpose to show the correspondence between the inward preparation and the outward influence.

Dr. Allen very wisely looks carefully at the stock from which Brooks sprang, and especially does he reproduce, not in a single statement, but with a multitude of significant touches, the figures of his father and mother and the whole family group; for with all the breadth of his affection, indeed because of it, Phillips Brooks was a plant that struck its roots deep in the family life. Near the end of the book, when the shadows begin to fall, we are told that now Brooks spoke often of his mother. The phrase is an illuminating one. Mrs. Brooks had then been dead more than ten years, and when she died he had spoken little of her. She was too deeply set in the secret place of his life to be lightly spoken of ; but when his own end drew near, he could not help discovering this holy presence, — the veil was being removed. The letters from Mrs. Brooks to her son which Dr. Allen prints show us a New England Monica ; and one is tempted to ask again and again, Is such a life to be lost out of the world in the extinction of the New England type of evangelical religion ? And if so, what have we to show that is worthy to take its place ? It is not difficult to see in what a shrine Phillips Brooks set his mother, a shrine in the very heart of the household, — homely, close, and yet infinitely sacred. We are even fain to believe that in the very sanctity of her nature, her burning zeal for the truth of God as she perceived it, lay in part the difficulty of her son’s approach to her, which finds its explanation in Dr. Allen’s pages in the nature of the son himself.

For early in the study of Phillips Brooks’s character we come upon that profound reserve, that deep consciousness of the sacrosanct personality, which lay at the very foundation of his being. Here was a mother loving her son with a passionate fervor, and hungering for some confession from his lips of a consecration of his life to the God whom she worshiped with the whole might of her nature ; and here was the son himself conscious of a great turning toward God, yet dumb in the presence of his anxious, trembling mother. Surely it was not only his deep reserve, but something also of awe before that saint, that sealed his lips.

The boyish portrait of the young collegian, the first in an admirable series of portraits scattered through the two volumes, comports well with the description which Dr. Allen gives of Brooks’s youth; and in the narrative which recounts the experiment in teaching at the Latin School, when Brooks made so conspicuous a failure, we are able to trace something of the character lying behind the incident. The instinct for teaching which sent him back to his old school after he was graduated from Harvard was one which deepened into the consciousness of a great vocation. The defeat which he met at the threshold of his career was precisely of a nature to give him pause in the particular form of teaching he had essayed, and to throw him in on such an examination of his own nature as led him into a profounder apprehension of life. Dr. Allen, pursuing the wise course adopted for the whole work, has given copious extracts from Phillips Brooks’s notebooks during the period which elapsed between the resignation of the ushership at the Latin School and his entrance on theological studies at Alexandria, but he has not indulged in much speculation over the process which was going on in the young man’s mind. In consequence, though one reads these pages attentively he gains little specific knowledge of the workings of the young man’s thought, but he brings away a strong sense of the reserve which was so fundamental a characteristic. Those lonely walks through Boston streets, those reflections on books and life committed to the notebooks, and the hunger after companionship which his letters disclose, — what are they all but half-hidden evidences of a struggle going on deep beneath the surface, a struggle in which the bitter sense of personal humiliation unquestionably stung his thought about himself into action ? Now and then one sees a meek man who betrays by the telltale flush on his cheek that his meekness is not a negative quality, but a virtue won by hard battle with an imperious nature. It is not too much to say that the pride which accompanies so strong a sense of personal dignity as Phillips Brooks had by an endowment of nature was at this time resolutely subdued, and that the humility which throughout life was the crowning grace of this masterly man registered a victory which was won after the indignity he had suffered. This humility, which was Pauline in its nobility, lay behind that disposition he now felt to subject himself to further discipline under the teaching of the greatest of sciences, and the almost secret departure for Alexandria marked a temper which was at once docile and honest and yet profoundly self-centred.

It is a striking fact that not only did Phillips Brooks enter a school for the training of Christian ministers before he had apparently made up his mind to accept that calling, but before he had come forward for confirmation, or, to use the term which the evangelical school in which he was brought up would say, before he was converted. The independence of his nature could not better be affirmed, nor the sincerity of his purpose. With scarcely a word to those most concerned he put himself to the test, and he put also to the test the claims of the church upon him for service. The strength of his convictions which made him so powerful a pleader for righteousness was due, in the first instance, to his determination to stand on no false bottom of merely hereditary faith or conventional view of the ministry.

The life at Alexandria, which occupies a large space in Dr. Allen’s record, was in part a prolongation of the lonely walks in Boston when he had been thrown in his early wrestling match. To one who looks eagerly for the hand of the potter shaping each vessel to honor or dishonor, nothing could seem more fit than the secluded life that Phillips Brooks now led, with little in the way of collegiate instruction to distract him, with a companionship easily limited in intimacy to a very few who remained lifelong friends, but with leisure for great books and the meditation on great themes. It is a commonplace that great men have had this sort of withdrawal into the wilderness, and certainly there is no seminary of intellectual eminence which does not seem to include in its academic buildings a hermitage. Here, as one reads on and on in the notebooks which contain the confidences of Phillips Brooks, one sees the gradual unfolding of a rare soul. What splendor of imagination is revealed, what glowing spirit of discovery in the great realms of human feeling, new, undiscovered territory to every son of man, yet so rarely traversed, since most are content with their own little plots of earth ! To read these passages alone, one might easily fancy that here a poet was making ; and it is no surprise to find the young theological student taking verse naturally and simply as his vehicle of expression, packing criticism into a sonnet, and singing his way among the mysteries.

Dr. Allen has called attention to the predominance of intellectualism in his early sermons, and to the play even of fancy, but he has also reminded us of the fervor and the strong human sympathy which from the first marked his preaching. What most impresses the reader, as he follows Phillips Brooks through his ministry in Philadelphia, is the manner in which he threw himself into the national cause of the war for the Union, and then and later into the education of the blacks. The war came at a time when the young preacher was coming into conscious possession of his power, and furnished him at once with a field for large endeavor. He proved himself to be of the order of prophets ; and as we are most concerned with the development of the man, we have a right to say that the cause of union and freedom both amplified his thought and prepared the way for that still higher consecration of his powers which came when he concentrated, as he did later, all his energies in the work of declaring a gospel commensurate with the needs and aspirations of humanity. In those days Phillips Brooks was a great civilian. His conception of nationality was a religious conception, and the attitude which he took toward the war was one which presaged his attitude toward life, when this dramatic occasion passed. He had a profound respect for the individual soul; but his vision was always of a large humanity penetrated with the divine influence, and his preaching grew steadily in the direction of the interpretation of this truth.

For, though one may not seek to mark the boundaries of life in such a nature, it is clear, from the evidence given in these volumes, that when Phillips Brooks transferred the scene of his endeavor from Philadelphia to Boston, there was something more than a mere change of residence or expansion of influence. No great development comes in a man’s expression which does not spring from some inner experience, however that experience may be concealed from view; and in a marked degree, this man, so reticent in his speech regarding himself, so little given to personal disclosure, from this time forward became the most personal of preachers. One hesitates about seeming too intimate with this reserved man, yet it almost appears that as, at the time of his disappointment over his trial of teaching in Boston, he had gone down to the depths of his nature, and come forth as a strong man armed for the calling of his life, so now he had touched some deep experience in life which thenceforth made him surrender himself, and not merely his gifts, to the noble work of preaching. This man, who could be dumb before the passionate longing of his mother for a response, even while he was quite ready to meet her most darling wish, could now stand before an audience and empty his heart and soul to them.

In nothing has Dr. Allen shown greater insight as a biographer than in the interpretation which he has put upon the abundant material he possessed in Phillips Brooks’s sermons, whether printed or unprinted. The letters which Brooks wrote are very expressive of a certain side of his nature, that sunny side which made so large a part of his greatness, but they rarely are more than superficial disclosures of his temperament. In his case, as in so many others, life must be read in the man’s performance of his chosen work ; and when one has such ample witness to work as may be found in these innumerable sermons, one feels instinctively that there he must look for the man. Dr. Allen, at any rate, had this instinct. He looked for Brooks in his sermons, and there he has found him. Never was there a more complete fulfillment of the mystic words of Christ: “ What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light : and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.” It is not merely that the great truths which were luminous in these sermons had been nourished in the secret places of life, but the still voice which had whispered in his ear, and had come from the very depth of his personal experience, was now at once translated by him into a public message. Again and again does Dr. Allen draw forth from this rich treasury sentences which, if deftly put together, would be a very mosaic of the man’s inner portrait. The great cardinal truths were there, especially the comprehensive one of the Incarnation ; but the terms in which they were presented were often autobiographic, though veiled in an impersonal speech.

From this time forward one must increasingly think of Phillips Brooks as a great preacher; and here comes into view a homely consideration, almost startling in the impression which it makes on the reader’s mind. If there was any one feature in Brooks’s impassioned discourse which had universal acceptance, it was his spontaneity, so that one always regarded him as possessing in his nature a wonderful living spring which flowed as if inexhaustible. At the very last of his life he was at a New England dinner in New York. “A gentleman who sat beside him complained that he could not enjoy the dinner because of the speech he had to make. ‘That,’ said Phillips Brooks, ‘is also my trouble.’ ‘ Why,’ said the gentleman, ‘ I did not suppose you ever gave a thought to any speech you had to make.’ ‘And is that your impression of the way in which I have done all my work ? ’ 'It is,’ said the gentleman ; ‘ I have thought it was all spontaneous, costing you no effort of preparation.’ ” Now, the evidence which Dr. Allen brings from the preacher’s multitudinous notebooks and memoranda is cumulative to the effect that the most apparently unpremeditated discourse was patiently prepared. The glimpses we get into the workshop of this man of genius show him to the very last making the most careful preparation for every discourse, however simple. The views we get of him in the delivery also show him very often apparently brushing aside manuscripts and notes, and letting his impetuous speech carry him beyond the bounds of his preparation. But the fact that is most important is the respect in which he held his audience and his work, so that he never slighted his workmanship. His rapid utterance made a stenographic report exceedingly difficult, and it was in part the risk he ran of being misquoted that led him imperatively to refuse a sanction of publication following upon such reports ; but beside this it may justly be inferred that, knowing the actual discourse to be a genuine work of art, he would not have a mangled substitute presented.

Alike the scrupulous care in preparation and the freedom afterward, knowing that he could trust his spontaneity since it had been so brought under the control of a disciplined judgment, testified to the nobility of his conception of the preacher’s vocation. We are sometimes in danger of suspecting the art of an orator, to hold it as something inferior to the wayward impulse of the improvisatore, and to regard what looks like an unpremeditated burst of eloquence as a bit of nature, and thus above the work of the artist, and subject only to some law superior to the ordinary laws of art. But here was an example of freedom gained by perfect obedience, and the example is of the utmost value. If ever a man had a genius for pulpit oratory, it was Phillips Brooks, and yet this memoir bears indisputable evidence of the toil with which he wrought at his sermons. The explanation is to be found in two causes. There was in him the consciousness of an artist. One can see this in such insignificant matters as the character of his handwriting and the finish of his ordinary expression as in familiar letters. He was not merely a man of taste, exquisitely modulated for the appreciation of all forms of art, if music be excepted, — a not uncommon exception, — but he had the constructive gift, and his first efforts in youth made it easy to predict for him a literary career. But there was in him emphatically that which now and then lifts an artist into the region of inspiration, namely, a possession. And here, again, it will not do to look upon him as some half-conscious instrument, to be played upon by spiritual forces ; he had, by the struggles to which we have referred, and by a long process of training, wrought of himself a mighty engine for doing a piece of work in which the emotional nature and the intellectual energy both bore a part. Filled he was in all his being by this breath of the divine will; but the largeness of soul which could be so filled was not a mere gift, —it was a great development. As the reader moves through these absorbing pages, he becomes aware of a concentration at last of the preacher upon the great message of reconciliation, of harmony, which it is his to deliver. That picture drawn of the eloquent preacher in the darkening church, with the light thrown only upon his rapt face as he makes his passionate appeal, may stand for an image of the life; for it would seem that, though his horizon was constantly widening and his opportunities increasing, he was forever, by the force of his determination and the impulse of a mighty purpose, narrowing the activities of life to this one function of preaching. Books came, but they were his sermons put into type ; and when he spoke on occasions commonly regarded as secular, he was swiftly drawn by the controlling purpose of his life into some radiant transfiguration of the occasion, so that his hearers could not fail to be swept into that circle within which he was moving.

It is especially to be noted that while the first impression of a hearer was likely to be of light and heat in the glow of the preacher’s discourse, he was soon made aware that he was not being magnetized by a man of overpowering emotional nature, but that he was listening to one whose mind was very far from losing itself in vague generalities. It was a part of Phillips Brooks’s work as a preacher to transfuse thought and emotion, to attack the whole man, because it was the whole man that was on fire with great ideas. Dr. Allen has touched upon Dr. Brooks’s theology from point to point, and in one masterly chapter has passed the whole subject in review ; and ample evidence is given that here was a man not merely gifted with poetic insight, but having a high order of ratiocination. So overpowering was the eloquence of the man that it was easy to suspect he could not be a deep thinker, It ought not to be so easy now, in the face of these memoirs.

It was in happy accord with the character of this great preacher that he should have been a great traveler. By this we mean that, though he only once went round the globe, he made repeated visits to Europe, and was at home in many cities and countries. It was a pity, we think, that he could not have known more of America by travel, both that many more might have known him, and that he might have come by personal contact to have conceived more perfectly the range and variety of American life ; but the conditions were unfavorable. His travels were vacation travels, and the rest of the ocean and the freedom from responsibilities in his office were essential parts of such a break in his life. Moreover, he was eager to apprehend the great movements of history, and these were brought more vividly to his notice by the monuments of history that make Europe a crowded museum, and by his association with men and women, especially in England, who were active instruments in current religious and social development.

Our purpose has been simply to intimate how thoroughly Dr. Allen has performed the very delicate task of showing the growth of a noble nature, and we have scarcely hinted at the admirable manner in which he has set Brooks before us in the habit as he lived. But of the warm nature of the man, his humor, his genius for friendship, his versatility, the memoir gives delightful illustration. A loving hand has traced the outline of a very human life, and the honesty, the uncompromising truthfulness, of the subject has entered into the disposition of the biographer. It is proverbially difficult for a biographer to exclude himself from his work, and Dr. Allen is here ; but he is here as Phillips Brooks’s friend, with a wise sympathy and with a beautiful charity; for he has treated those incidents in Bishop Brooks’s life like the ordeal through which he passed when called to the episcopate with a dignified reserve which leaves nothing to be desired. No one will find in these volumes any arsenal of controversial weapons.

It is for this reason in particular, and for the reason in general that we have here presented the figure of an inspiring man, that we welcome this Life and Letters as not only a very notable contribution to the small class of really worthy American biographies, but as the prolongation of one of the finest influences that have been moulding American character, especially in the field of spiritual development. Many busy men and women will doubtless look with dismay upon so considerable an undertaking as the reading of some sixteen hundred pages upon the life of one man, but great lives demand great books, and the wealth and variety of the material compelled this profuse illustration. And there is, moreover, one very important class in the community to whom this memoir will be simply invaluable : for a generation to come, those who are qualifying themselves for the Christian ministry, of whatever name, must read this book. It is indispensable to them, for nowhere else can they find so rich a portrayal of that character which all instinctively feel to be the one hope of the Christian ministry, — the character of utter devotion, of sure-footed theology, of the consecration of great powers in the noblest of professions. The exceptional endowments of Phillips Brooks will always give him an elevation which will inspire young students and forbid them to emulate him, but his large-hearted humanity will affect them with a noble zeal to warm themselves at the same fires which made him to glow.

It is most fortunate that so rich a life should have been written by a man who has the writer’s art. Dr. Allen disavows any theory as to how biography should be written. If any one thinks he has mistaken the annalist’s function for that of the biographer, merely because he has required great space, let him read the consummate sketch of Phillips Brooks’s brother Arthur in the preface to this Life, and he will see that Dr. Allen is not only a great portrait painter, but can produce an exquisite miniature.