Phillips Brooks

I

IT was when I was trying to write my first book, John Ward, Preacher, that I fell into the habit of hunting for the ‘why’ of human behaviors. It is an interesting search, but it would be easier if one could ask questions of people who have ‘behaved,’ and so be sure that two and two do really make that four which the exigencies of fiction may require. Questions, however, are rarely possible, though sometimes I ventured, and once I was given an answer that lighted a candle in my mind which has never been blown out. ... It was a winter afternoon, and I had gone up Beacon Hill, hoping to meet Lorin as he came across the Common from his office and walk home with him. When I reached the top of the Hill, I went through Mt. Vernon Place to an icy brick path some seven feet wide which led towards the Common, and was named, impressively, Hancock Avenue. The houses on one side of the ‘Avenue’ were built out to the pavement; on the other side was a rusty iron fence, with generations of cocoons under its spearheads. I stopped and looked through it at the beautiful facade of the State House, which had not then been marred by being sandwiched in between wings of inappropriate white marble.

As I stood there, I felt a hand on my arm, and, turning, saw standing beside me a little old woman. She was smelling of whiskey, but she looked at me with pleasant, twinkling brown eyes. ‘Ah, now, dearie,’ she said, putting out her hand, ‘it’s a dime ye’re goin’ to be givin’ me? I’m all crippled up with rheumatism.’

I demurred. ‘ If I give you a dime, you know you’ll go and get a drink.’

‘Oh, dearie!’ she protested, raising shocked hands, blue with cold. ‘I niver in all me life! The Holy Angels will tell ye— ‘

‘Come, now,’ I said, ‘the Holy Angels don’t tell fibs.’ She chuckled; then her deeply wrinkled face sobered: ‘Well, I won’t deceive ye, yis; but what else is there? Me knees is bad, so I can’t scrub no more, and not a cint do I have most times. And I’m all alone by meself— I ain’t got a fri’nd in the worrld. I had two daughters, — beautiful as queens they was, the two of them, — but they died on me. And I had a son. He’s off. I ain’t seen him for tin years. Dead, mebbe; I don’t know. And what’s a wee drap oncet or twicet a year?’

‘A “drop”?’ I queried—and she came in on the joke. ‘Well, mebbe, two.’ But even while we laughed together I was saying to myself: ‘What can make such a life as hers endurable?’ Then, because the merry old sinner looked so generous, I had one of my impulses to ask her whether she found life worth living.

‘Listen,’ I said to her, coaxingly, ‘I’ll give you some money, and you can go and get a drink if you want to (but I hope you won’t), if you’ll just answer me one question.’

‘Ah, darlin’,’ she said, ’ye’re a lady! It’s plain seein’ it. I’ll answer ye anythin’ ye want to know.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you say you have rheumatism, and rheumatism is horrid — ‘

‘Ah! God knows it is,’ she interrupted, sighing, and shaking her frowzy gray head.

‘I know it, too,’ I agreed, ‘because I’ve had it. But you say you can’t find work — and that’s worrying; and that you’ve no friends and not much money, and you’ve had so much trouble. . . . Now tell me: Are you glad you are alive?’

Her face changed, and she gave me a keen look. Perhaps she wondered if I was serious. I was. Those haunting uncertainties of my own as to the value of Life, in the same world with Love and Death, had deepened. ‘Are you glad you are alive?’ I persisted.

‘Child,’ she said — and it seemed as if we suddenly changed places. I was the beggar, now. She spoke with abrupt authority: ‘Child, listen to mo, and mind what I tell ye! Yis. There is all them things ye say — and more — and more! The heart of me’s been broke over and over, but —’

‘Then how can you be glad?’ I interrupted.

She smiled at me as one smiles at a foolish child. ‘Why, darlin’, it’s this way: if it’s the will of the Blessed Heart of Jesus fer me to be alive, and go through wid it, I am willin’ — yis, I’m glad! Do you hear that? If it is the will of the Blessed Heart of Jesus . . .’

Well, I gave her the money. Though I didn’t realize it as we stood there on the icy bricks, I had received more than I could pay for! She had told me — in her language, not in mine — that the knowledge and acceptance of the Will of God make life worth while, even though Love and Sorrow must sometimes walk hand in hand. But it was a long time before I saw the truth in her archaic words, and put it into my language: ‘Recognizing a Conscious and Infinite Universe,we know that in It we live, and move, and have our being. We are workers together with It. We are sharers in Its immortality! Oneness with Its will is Peace, and we can endure. We call It God.' My old woman who left me to go and get a ‘wee drap’ called It ‘the Blessed Heart of Jesus.’ But names don’t matter.

Speaking of names, I suppose my absorption in hunting for the causes of conduct pinned the label ‘problem novel’ upon poor John Ward — but that came later. It was Lucy Derby who was responsible for the book. She was so sure I could, as she expressed it, ‘easily write a novel,’ that she even suggested its theme: ‘the differing religious faiths of husband and wife.’

When I stopped laughing at her flight of fancy, I told her she was perfectly crazy — that I couldn’t possibly write a book! However, as she enlarged upon her idea, it began to appeal to me, and the first thing I knew I was trying to understand how a devoted husband, who was a sincere Calvinist, and an equally devoted wife, who was a sincere Unitarian, could agree, either emotionally or doctrinally. But that winter I stuck to the job Lucy had sot me, though there were times when she herself must have forgotten it, for she was busy helping Lorin with something he had started in Boston, something which made novelwriting take a back seat: I mean the Sunday evening services in Faneuil Hall, where Phillips Brooks spoke to men who never darkened the doors of Trinity.

I don’t know what put the idea in Lorin’s head. Perhaps it was a glimpse he had, one winter night, of human refuse — forlorn men, huddled in a stifling room, where a good simple man conducted a religious service. The men, Lorin told me, looked bored, and some of them dozed, but probably the comfort of being in a warm place and the prospect of having —after the hell-fire ‘ talk ‘ was over — a sandwich and a cup of something brown and hot called coffee (with all the sugar in it they wanted) sustained them.

These gospel meetings were held every Sunday night, in the cellar of an old warehouse somewhere in the North End. It was heated, but totally unventilated. Lorin, touched by the sincerity of the evangelist, who was trying to save souls by sweeping back the tide of misery with his little broom of a sermon, watched the men closely. They yawned sometimes and looked at the clock on the speaker’s table; they probably speculated as to how soon it would be time for coffee.

Lorin had told Mr. Brooks what he had seen, and asked him to go with him to one of these meetings — ‘just to encourage that good fellow who talks to them,’ he urged. Mr. Brooks said he would go. So one snowy night he and Lorin went in a Kenny & Clark ‘booby’ (a hack on runners, with jingling sleigh bells) down to the Mission. As they rode along they smoked their afterdinner cigars, throwing them away as they drew up at the door of the warehouse.

Lorin guided the clergyman through the dirty hall, down a flight of stairs, into a basement, from which a narrow passage, its stone walls dripping with moisture, led into a storeroom under the street. It was lighted by a few gas jets, and there was the occasional rattle of wheels on the cobblestones overhead. Men were lolling on the benches, and the missionary, standing beside a table which held a clock, a pitcher of ice water, and a tumbler, was speaking — but as he saw his two visitors (Lorin had asked if he might bring Mr. Brooks) he stopped short and came down from the platform to welcome them. Lorin saw that he was trembling with the excitement of having Boston’s beloved preacher speak to his flock.

When the two guests were seated, the service proceeded — a scriptural reading, quavering singing of a Moody and Sankey hymn, and then an impassioned plea for total abstinence: ‘Sign the pledge, my friends!’ the speaker entreated; ‘sign the pledge — and God will help you keep it.’

One or two men grunted ‘Amen!’ Then the missionary said: ‘Now we arc going to have a great pleasure.’ He turned and bowed to Mr. Brooks: ‘Our big brother will speak to us.’

Mr. Brooks rose and gave a wise and friendly talk. When he ended, the missionary asked if there were any questions. ‘Our brother or I will gladly answer them,’ he said. There was a blank silence, broken by the rumbling of a streetcar overhead, and the bustling tick-tick-tick of the nickel clock. Then a man rose and mumbled that he had a question. ‘Go ahead!’ the missionary encouraged him.

‘Well,’ the man said, ‘I’ve been thinkin’ — there’s somethin’ I’d like to know. . . . Course, liquor is bad. Don’t the Good Book say that, ‘less they repent, all drunkards go plumb to Hell? And that outside the Gold Gates there’s a lot of liars, an’ dogs, an’ — an’ naughty gals?’ (He winked at the audience.) ‘But I heard a passon up in Vermont say, oncet, some real pretty po’try.’ (He smiled shyly.) ‘Somethin’ like this: “If you was on hossback, and if yer hoss bucked and throwed yer, bad if, ‘tween the saddle and the groun’, you asked the Lord to have mussy on you and forgive you, He’d do it!”’

‘Amen! Amen!’ said the evangelist.

‘Well,’ the man said, hiccoughing, ‘as I was sayin’, no Christian had ought to drink. But what I want to know’ is, kin a man be a Christian and smoke?’

Lorin and Mr. Brooks didn’t dare to look at each other. The evangelist’s gesture invited the ‘big brother’ to reply, but Mr. Brooks gravely waved the question back to him, and he, looking kindly at the man who asked it, said: ‘You’ve asked a hard question — yes, my friend, a very hard question. But I am going to answer it. And what I am going to say will surprise you, for I am going to say “Yes!” Yes, a man who smokes can be a Christian, but, my friends, he is a dirty, nasty Christian!’ The two ‘Christians’ sitting on the platform looked thoughtfully at the floor. . . .

There were no other questions; so, at the invitation of the missionary, Mr. Brooks pronounced the benediction; after which he and Lorin departed, leaving the men to their coffee and sandwiches.

In the ‘booby’ and out of earshot, Air. Brooks said: ‘Well?’ — and Lorin probably said: ‘Gosh!’ Then they both roared with laughter.

II

But the experience remained like a seed in Lorin’s mind. ‘If only,’ he said, when he told me about it, ‘those poor devils could know Mr. Brooks!’ And on Phillips Brooks’s heart there was the burden of wasted lives. I think it was the memory of the men in that cellar, and the missionary who so honestly tried to feed their souls upon threats of punishment, which awoke in Lorin a vision of Phillips Brooks as an apostle to what had been called the ‘Scum of Boston.’ And, by and by, that vision became a reality. It shaped itself after Lorin had gone the rounds of Boston’s relief organizations for men, and reported what he had seen to Air. Brooks. Then he made a bold suggestion: ‘Couldn’t you have an evening meeting, sir — perhaps in Faneuil Hall — for men like that?’

Mr. Brooks, startled, said: ‘Would they come?’

Lorin said he was sure they would. He said he would get some of the fellows in Mr. Brooks’s Bible Class to go with him to the various Missions, or Municipal Shelters, and invite the men. ‘If you’ll just talk to them,’ lie urged.

‘What about coffee and sandwiches?’ Mr. Brooks evaded.

‘The Shelters do that,’ Lorin said; ‘our meeting must be different.’

The clergyman was doubtful. Lorin insisted — but modestly. It wasn’t for him to say that Mr. Brooks would give them a different kind of ‘bread’! There was a silence. Then Mr. Brooks said: ‘It would be a great privilege to talk to them, Deland, but I am not quite sure that I could.’

’I’m sure,’ Lorin said; ‘let’s try it!’

Of course, before the decision to ‘try’ was reached, the project needed much careful thought. Superintendents of the various City Missions must be consulted, and their advice asked. Trinity Bible Class must be sounded, to see if it would coöperate by drumming up the men. A large voluntary choir, which included the Harvard Glee Club, had to be arranged for — and the newspapers must be asked not to be sensational about the meeting. Sightseers were not desired. ‘It isn’t going to be a circus!’ Lorin said. . . .

At last the Sunday evening in January arrived, and a group of us gathered in front of Faneuil Hall and waited for the doors to open. The great market on the ground floor of the historic building was closed and dark; snow, shoveled from the pavements, was banked between the shuttered booths along the curb. Everywhere there was the litter of empty crates and straw.

A little crowd of shivering men had arrived ahead of us, and also Phillips Brooks, who loomed up in the lurching shadows under an arc lamp. He looked perfectly serene. Gradually, more men appeared. But when at last the doors were opened, and we climbed upstairs to reach the hall, we saw mostly vacancy — and my heart sank! Then the great figure of Phillips Brooks moved across the platform, and with him there came a sense of power. He had, as someone expressed it, ‘no aid from alb or stole.’ There was nothing ecclesiastical in the scene — no pulpit, no sacred symbols, no candles — just a grave and beautiful presence, dominating and vitalizing the half-empty vastness before him. The portraits of the historic dead on the walls — even the picture of Daniel Webster, himself, at the back of the stage — seemed to retreat into the dim unimportance of the past. The policemen stationed here and there about the hall, whose presence indicated the opinion of the public that civic authority should be on hand, were, like the rest of us, subdued by the sense of moral authority. And suddenly those of us who had urged the meeting, and had been very much afraid that it would fail, found ourselves relaxing into content. There was music, and singing, and I think we all said together the Lord’s Prayer. Then came the torrent of impetuous utterance — words of deep, creative understanding of that forlorn audience which looked up at him open-mouthed, in vague, pathetic bewilderment.

When the meeting was over, and the men had shuffled off into the snow, Lorin went back to the Rectory with Mr, Brooks. He told me afterwards of the talk they had in the study. Of course his own eager hope was for more meetings — but Phillips Brooks was noncommittal. Lorin said he was sure that if they had another meeting more men would come’— ‘if you are game to go ahead?’ he said.

‘But how about you?’ Mr. Brooks asked.

‘Oh, I’m game,’ Lorin said. ‘I’m pretty sure that if we keep on we can fill that hall! ‘ Then he made a startling suggestion: ‘Tickets of admission! That’s the way to do it.*

‘ My dear man! If they won’t come to a free meeting . . . ‘

Lorin explained that they would come because it wasn’t free. ‘Tickets would give the meeting dignity,’ he said; ‘they’d make the men feel — well, sort of important. You know what I mean?’ Mr. Brooks said he thought he knew.

‘Good clothes would do it,’ Lorin ruminated, ‘but they can’t be had. . . . Mr. Brooks, I’ll tell you what we can do: we can have tickets printed to look like Symphony Concert tickets, and put “Not Transferable” on the back.’

‘Well, upon my word!’ Mr. Brooks said — and his astonishment made Lorin chuckle. He explained: ‘Don’t you see, sir? That will keep out a lot of people who would want to come — Trinity people . . .’

‘You and me,’ Mr. Brooks suggested, drolly.

But Lorin was serious. He said it would make the men feel it was their meeting — ‘and not a lot of Back Bay people coming to look at them!’

He carried his point. There were more meetings. At the second, the audience was larger. Perhaps the ‘Symphony Concert tickets’ had the psychological effect Lorin had counted upon. The third meeting was very large. The fourth was crowded. ... At the last meeting the hall was packed. I remember Lorin told me to stay at home that night. He said the meetings were for the men — ‘You and Lucy can hear Mr. Brooks at Trinity all you want to; don’t grab and take some poor fellow’s seat — but you can sit in the gallery, if you want to,’ he conceded. So we went up to the gallery, and looked down on that pitiful crowd.

It seemed to me that they sat on the edges of their chairs, leaning forward and looking up at the man on the platform, as if to catch every word that came rushing from his lips and heart. Just at the end there was a moment when he probed any sick soul among his hearers. ‘You think,’ he said, ‘that you don’t care? You think you don’t want to know your Saviour — who knows you, through and through!’ He paused —then, with a gesture that was like a cry, he suddenly opened his arms to them, and, searching their hopeless faces with passionately pitying eyes, he said: ‘Men, my brother men! If you don’t want to know Him, then want to want to know Him!’ At the emotion in his voice, a visible thrill passed over that forlorn multitude.

He stood for a silent moment looking at them. I don’t remember just how he ended. Perhaps it was in the words of Pascal: ‘When you seek Him you have already found Him!’

That was the last of the Faneuil Hall Meetings for the ‘Scum of Boston.’ At first the plan had not met with the entire approval of church people. Some did not believe in ‘casting pearls.’ Some said, bluntly, that they would not take their horses out to go down those slippery streets behind Beacon Hill to Faneuil Hall, even to hear Phillips Brooks! Others were sure the ragtag and bobtail wouldn’t come, or, if they did, they would bring — ‘well, you know,’ bugs, in their clothing. And besides, if they did come, it would be merely from idle curiosity — ‘and curiosity is a poor motive for attending Divine Service!’ As for ‘curiosity’ bringing the ‘Scum of the City’ to Faneuil Hall: there was once a man who, from ‘curiosity,’ climbed up into a sycamore tree to look at a Stranger — a Stranger who called to him: ‘Zacchseus, come down. I must abide at Thy house.’

These are only dim and scattered memories of the Faneuil Hall Meetings, but I know from a few letters the ragtag wrote to Mr. Brooks that his message did abide in some darkened hearts, to comfort and to bless. . . .

III

That Phillips Brooks, in spite of highchurch opposition to his low-churchness, should have been made Bishop of Massachusetts was not surprising. He was loved and revered all over the country, as well as in his own state. But that his elevation to the Bishopric was a blow to Trinity Church cannot be denied. At first, I don’t think it made as much difference to Lorin as it did to me, because he held on to his old privilege of occasionally dropping into the Rectory in the evenings if a light in the study windows showed that the Bishop was at home. ‘Tell me to clear out, sir, if I’m in the way,’ he used to say; but I don’t think Phillips Brooks ever told any of his flock to ‘clear out.’ Yet, as he assumed the responsibilities of the diocese, endless duties piled up, he was constantly away from home and his study windows at night were dark. His face began to show deepening lines; his dark, beautiful eyes, always serene, had not so many flashes of humor in them. Naturally, his old congregation displayed impatience with the demands made upon him by the great diocese. ‘These country parsons,’ Trinity said, ‘have no consideration! When they are in Boston, they are always bursting in upon him.’

Trinity itself, having had ‘the habit of Phillips Brooks’ for twenty-two years, made occasional ‘demands’ on its own account; but these, perforce, were lessening, because the parish had settled down to break in a new rector. Poor gentleman! It wasn’t easy to step into Mr. Brooks’s seven-league boots! To show the sort of service he had always given us, here is an instance: A colored girl, Mary Church, who had been brought up in Trinity Sunday School, and had come for all her young life to Trinity, was dying of tuberculosis. By and by, one Sunday morning, it was evident that death was very near, so one of Mary’s sisters was sent with a message to Mr. Brooks. ‘Tell him,’ the poor mother said, ‘ to come quick — right now! She’s dyin’ — an’ he mus’ help her to die. Tel! him she say she can’t die easy, less’n he’s with her!’ The girl ran as hard as she could through the Negro quarter of the West End, down across the Public Garden, to Trinity Church, where she made her way to the vestry. There, as the low notes of the organ, overflowing from the nave, began to fill the room, she repeated her mother’s words to Mr. Brooks.

Of course he could not go ‘now.’ He took the little sister’s hand, and explained, gently. ‘But I will come later,’ he said. ‘Run home now, and tell Mary I will come as soon as the service is over.’ One of the assistant clergymen went back with the child, to confirm his message; but when Mary’s mother said, ‘Another gem’man’s here, honey, won’t he do?’ the dying girl, with a scarcely perceptible movement of her head, whispered, ‘No.’ Then, gathering up her ebbing life, she murmured: ‘I’ll . . . wait ... to die.’

She waited an hour. ‘She’s still a-breathin’,’ her mother said. Another hour . . . Had she gone? No, her eyes opened: ‘I’m a-waitin’.’ Then they heard a step, and saw the great figure bend his head under the low lintel of the door. In the little room, packed with crowding black faces of the family, he sat down beside her, and with that manner of unhurried time so characteristic of him he talked to her quietly. Then he gave her the Communion — and while she was sinking into peace he blessed her and said: ‘Good-bye, my child.’ Her mother saw her smile, and heard the labored whisper: ‘Bye . . . suh.’ Her waiting was over. . . .

This story is like a hundred others — his swift response to any call for help. As a result, everybody took him for granted — as we took sunshine or the air we breathed. I don’t know just when his own people (as we considered ourselves) began to be uneasy. But I know that, after a while, some of us said: ‘He’s wearing himself out!’ And I remember the affectionate anxiety of gossip: ‘ In the winter he stays in those country rectories

and you know they are always overheated — and he hates very hot rooms! Somebody told me that on one of his visitations they saw him coming out. of a little rectory in the Berkshires, and he just went and stood in the snow, trying to get cool.’ To which someone else retorted: ‘He ought never to have been made Bishop!’

Well, there’s no use going back to that now. What happened was inevitable,

I suppose. Yet, somehow, nobody was prepared for it.

IV

‘Mr. Brooks has a cold,’ Lorin told me. ‘I hope he’ll go to Europe this summer and get a good rest.’ Then we heard that the doctor had ordered him to bed — and there was some amusement at that! Mr. Brooks ‘ordered’! What a joke! Well, if he wouldn’t stop tearing around, working himself to death every minute, it was just as well that the doctor should ‘order’ him. ‘Imprison him! Keep him quiet by force!’ we said, laughing.

But being sent to bed with what was still called ‘a quinsy throat’ didn’t mean any real rest. I have found a note he wrote to Lorin in one of those last days:

January 18, 1893.
DEAR MR. DELAND:
I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you. May God bless you for what you have done, and what you are doing. I wish there was something I could do to relieve you of part of your labors — but there is not. I can only rejoice with you and for you.
Yours most sincerely,
PHILLIPS BROOKS.

I have no idea to what ‘labors’ he referred, or what Lorin had ‘done and was doing,’ but it makes me wince, now, to think that instead of ‘resting’ he took the time — five days before he died — to write these friendly and inspiring words to a young man whose greatest privilege it was to serve him.

On that last fateful morning I was working at my desk, and the telephone rang. I went on writing. It rang again. I went on writing. And it rang, and rang, and rang! I said: ‘Oh, what a nuisance!’ But I went into the next room and took down the receiver. ‘Well?’ I said. A breathless voice replied: ‘Is that Mrs. Deland?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is very terrible! What are we going to do?’

‘Terrible?’ I said. ‘What is terrible? What, are you talking about? Who is speaking, please?’

The name was given — then: ‘Of course you have heard — ‘ The voice

broke.

‘Heard what?’ I said, beginning to be frightened.

‘Mr. Brooks — Mr. Brooks —’

‘Mr. Brooks — what? Tell me! What is the matter?'

I held my breath to hear, and after a struggle for composure the voice faltered the final word of life: ‘Dead.’

Under the shock of that word, I felt as if I had been pushed away from the telephone; I found myself sitting on a little bench, saying breathlessly: ‘You don’t mean Mr. Brooks is — is —?’

‘Yes,’ the voice said, ‘yes. Dead.’

It was my first experience of a public calamity — unless, indeed, I can compare it with my childhood memory of Lincoln’s funeral, which at the time meant to me nothing but the frightening fact that, for the first time in my life,

I saw my mother’s face wet with tears. Now, in Boston, many faces were wet with tears — many lips could not speak.

Boston was not just a city — it was a family, a bereaved family. ... We looked at each other, dazed: ‘But I didn’t know he was sick!'

‘ Why, I saw him, last week, about our Fuel and Food Society! And I know he went out to Newton Wednesday evening, to some church thing. He must have been all right then! ‘

One lady, not of his old parish, Trinity, but of his new parish, the State, was walking across Harvard Bridge that lowering January morning, when a teamster — a man she had never seen before hailed her, and, drawing his wagon up beside her, said in a shaking voice: ‘Say, ma’am, did you know the Bishop’s dead?'

Her matter-of-fact ‘What Bishop?’ showed how far she was from any anxiety about the Bishop of Massachusetts, but when the teamster used the title familiar to them both, ‘Why, Mr. Brooks,’ she cried out in consternation: ‘Oh, no! Not Phillips Brooks?’ The man nodded: ‘It’s him.’ And Boston’s lovely Mrs. Henry Higginson and Boston’s laboring man lamented together.

How such stories might be multiplied! But they would not mean, now, what they meant to the great lady and the teamster, for there has arisen a generation that knows not Joseph. The people who told the stories, or experienced them, have almost all gone. There arc busts of Phillips Brooks by distinguished sculptors — St. Gaudens, French, Bela Pratt. But sometimes, now, one hears the question: ‘Whose statue is that outside Trinity?’ Or, ‘Did that man whose bust I saw at Harvard do anything special?’ Which reminds me: Edward Gardiner, of the Institute of Technology, met Lorin, I think on the Common, that first bewildered morning, and said: ‘Deland, there ought to be a mask of Mr. Brooks — don’t you think so?’

‘I don’t believe anyone has thought of it!’ Lorin said, dismayed. ‘But, of course! I’ll ask one of the vestry about it — or do you think I should go at once to the family?’ Before the question of the mask was settled, another suggestion was made. Lucy Derby said: ‘Lorin, the church won’t begin to hold the people who will want to come to the funeral! Do go and see somebody —Robert Treat Paine, or Mr. Winthrop, or Colonel Codman — and ask them if they won’t arrange to have, after the services in the church, a service outside for the crowd that will be sure to be standing there. Just a prayer and a hymn — everybody can sing “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,”’

These arrangements took time and tact. Some of the people Lorin consulted were not pleased. ‘ An out-of-door service? But suppose it rains?’ a vestryman protested. ‘People might take cold! ‘

‘A death mask?’ someone else said. ‘I don’t believe the Board of Health would permit it. You know his throat was terribly infectious.’

‘And if the Board of Health did permit it,’ another man, not a vestryman, said (he was in a sort of collapse from shock and grief), ‘what good would it do? No; I am against it!’

Lorin explained, gently: ‘There will be a bust of Mr. Brooks made, and the measurements of the face will be very necessary.’ At which the poor, broken man burst out in crazy objection: ‘I suppose you want plaster casts made so you can go down on Trcmont Street and sell them for a quarter!’ Lorin made no denial — he was too sorry for him. When he got his breath, he explained again that the beauty and power of the Bishop’s face must be preserved for the future. ‘You and I, sir, know it,’ Lorin said, ‘you much longer and more intimately than I; but the people who come after us must know it, too.’

The Chairman of the Board of Health did hesitate very seriously, but Paul Bartlett, the sculptor, to whom Lorin went first of all, expressed his willingness to take the risk. So, that dark January day, Lorin went with him and his assistant to the Rectory, and into the quiet room, where he looked long at the face on the pillow. It was divinely worn and tired, for — like his Master — he had been so literally ‘among us as one that serveth.’ When the work began, Lorin obeyed Mr. Bartlett’s orders to wait in the adjoining room.

On the day of the funeral, early in the morning, the crowd began to gather around Trinity — as Lucy had said, ‘The church could not hold us all!’ After it was filled, with not even standing room left, queues of people were still moving along the streets that converged in the Square, to stand there while the services inside were proceeding — an enormous, mourning multitude that filled the great open space from the steps of Trinity, on one side, to the steps of the Public Library on the opposite side, and from the Museum of Fine Arts across to the houses on Boylston Street. Two or three horsecars were stalled in the dense crowd, but on its edges were countless vehicles — ice wagons, broughams, hacks, furniture vans, hucksters’ pushcarts, and I think, here and there, a baby carriage — a great silent concourse, waiting for the man who had helped them to live.

At last, when the services within the church ended, the doors opened, and the great coffin, borne on the shoulders of eight Harvard men, and followed by the clergy, was brought out on to the terrace and placed on draped trestles, in full sight of his people. Then into the breathing silence came those words that have sent a tremor to the hearts of the generations: ’I am the Resurrection and the Life,saith the Lord.’ There was some reading of the Scriptures. Then the minister, standing beside the coffin, said: ‘Let us all say, together, the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father . . There was a following murmur: ‘Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be . . .’ The murmur gathered in volume: ‘Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will . . The confused sound, starting from Trinity, moved on the ground swell of repressed tears — rising, falling, ceasing, then spreading and lifting, to break, on the steps of the Library, into the splendor of Faith: ‘For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory!. . .Amend

There was a pause. . . . The quartette began to sing: —

A woman on my left sobbed; Lorin, beside me, held his clenched fist hard against his unsteady lips. Miss Parker’s beautiful soprano soared on: —

The choir faltered, but still the lifting Voice carried us: —