of God. Consequently when a great doctrine came before him which had the ages of experience behind it or upon it, the question he asked was not "Is it true?" but "Why is it true?" or "Wherein resides its truth?" So it was with the great pivotal doctrine of the divinity of Christ, or, as he preferred to call it, the Incarnation. He found its truth to reside in the fact that Christ had lived out the secret yearnings and possibilities of humanity; Christ was the prophecy of the Christ that was everywhere to be. On the great question of the miracles he was orthodox. He lived in a time when Biblical criticism in this country was in its earlier stages. He could honestly write to a German inquirer: "There is nothing in the results of modern scholarship which conflicts with the statements in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds concerning the birth of Jesus." As Allen remarks, Brooks was in the habit of "sheathing his critical faculties where the people's faith was concerned." He used the Bible, therefore, pretty much as he found it, or rather he used what he found beneath it.

It was toward middle life, about the time that a fresh study of the Gospels found expression in the Influence of Jesus (1880), that his emphasis seemed to shift from historic Christianity to the personal Christ. Over and over he insisted on the centrality of Christ. "Not Christianity but Christ! Not a doctrine but a person! Christianity only for Christ! . . . Our religion is-Christ. To believe in Him is what? To say a Creed? To join a church? No, but to have a great, strong, divine Master, whom we perfectly love." And how perfectly he loved him and how Christ responded to the embraces of this man's love, a letter on the eve of his consecration to the bishopric shows:

These last years have a peace and fulness which there did not use to be. I do not think it is the mere quietness of advancing age. I am sure it is not indifference to anything which I used to care for. I am sure that it is a deeper knowledge and truer love of Christ. I cannot tell you how personal this grows to me. He is here. He knows me and I know Him. It is no figure of speech. It is the reallest thing in the world. And every day makes it realler. And one wonders with delight what it will grow to as the years go on.

And yet, notwithstanding his anchorage in the past, he believed in a port ahead, for each individual primarily, but also for the race. Even his ecstatic and unreserved loyalty to the incarnate Christ did not serve as an iron door let down athwart the highway of progress. He intimated that his teaching regarding divorce was determined by temporary circumstances and that his scheme of punishments is not an essential factor of his religion. It is true, naturally, with his strong belief in immortality and in the individual's sonship to God, that he held that society is here for the sake of the individual and not the individual for the sake of society. But in the later years we find almost a new note in his writings. "Life may become too strong for literature," he says. "It may be the former methods and standards are not sufficient for the expression of the growing life, its new activities, its unexpected energies, its feverish problems. . . . A man must believe in the future more than he reverences the past." In a speech before the Boston Chamber of Commerce he is reported as having said that "the world was bound to press onward and find an escape from the things that terrified it, not by retreat but by a perpetual progress into the large calm that lay beyond." In the sermon which gives the title to his volume The Light of the World (1890),-wherein is succinctly set forth his gospel, "the essential possibility and richness of humanity and its essential belonging to divinity,”we have these majestic words:

It is so hard for us to believe in the mystery of man. "Behold man is this, we say, shutting down some near gate which falls only just beyond, quite in sight of, what human nature already has attained. If man would go beyond that, he must be something else than man. And just then something breaks the gate away, and, lo far out beyond where we can see, stretches the mystery of man, the beautiful, the awful mystery of man. To him, to man, all lower lives have climbed, and, having come to him, have found a field where evolution may go on for ever.

Such passages are rare in his writings, for usually his gaze takes in the past with Christ resplendent in it and does not lose itself in the future; then gratitude gets the upper hand of struggle. He rarely preaches an entirely "social" sermon. In The Christian City, wherein he departs from his custom, he be

seeches Londoners to take heart because the modern city is so Christian, though unconsciously. The Giant with the Wounded Heel is one of the finest and most characteristic of his sermons. He believes the giant, man, is constantly crushing the serpent, and he is content to see a pretty large wound in his heel.

This largeness and poise of view is the most distinctive characteristic of Phillips Brooks. It stamps him with the mark of intellect. Occasionally he seems to value the mind for itself and to ascribe to it standards of its own. "The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs." Once he admits, without catching himself, that the mind is "the noblest part of us." In the sermon where this admission is made, The Mind's Love for God, he declares: "You cannot know that one idea is necessarily true because it seems to help you, nor that another idea is false because it wounds and seems to hinder you. Your mind is your faculty for judging what is true." But these are isolated sayings. Ordinarily he refuses to think of the intellect as a thing apart from the entire man, and he finds truth, as did his Master, inherent in life, a personal quality, discovered, determined, and determinable by personal ends. When he first began to think, Socrates was almost the ideal figure. But later, Socrates seemed thin in comparison with Christ. "Socrates brings an argument to meet an objection. Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nature; a whole being which the truth has filled with strength to meet another whole being, which error has filled with feebleness." In his sermon on the death of Lincoln he discloses his inner thought:

A great many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual man or not, as if intellect were a thing, always of the same sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's nature and weigh by itself. The fact is that in all the simplest characters, the line between the mental and moral nature is always vague and indistinct. They run together, and in their best combination you are unable to discriminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and how much is intellectual.

In his student days he confides to his notebook: "A fresh thought may be spoiled by sheer admiration. It was given us

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to work in and to live by. . . . It will give its blessing to us only on its knees. From this point of view, thought is as holy a thing as prayer, for both are worship." The best description, perhaps, of his own mind is to be found in his enumeration of the "intellectual characteristics which Christ's disciples gathered from their Master," namely: "A poetic conception of the world we live in, a willing acceptance of mystery, an expectation of progress by development, an absence of fastidiousness that comes from a sense of the possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into the essential."

These peculiar intellectual characteristics, rooted in their passionate reverence for humanity, for its ideals and its achievements, determine the place of Brooks among the great preachers of the world. He is at his best when he preaches by indirection. Enlargement is his effect. A man sees his own time in relation to all time, discovers his greatness by the greatness of which he is a part. Brooks's mission was not to advance the frontiers of knowledge, not even of spiritual knowledge, but rather to annex the cleared areas to the old domains. His abiding preoccupation-fatal to the scientist, detrimental to the sociologist, fortunate for the fame and immediate influence of the preacher-was to hold the present, changing into the future, loyal to the past. He was not the stuff of which martyrs are made, but his soul was of that vastness which kept the public from making martyrs of the truthful. He seems to watch and bless rather than to urge forward. His great service to his age was that of a mediator. Standing himself as a trinitarian and a supernaturalist, rejoicing in the greenness of the historic pastures, he discovered at the base of his doctrines the same essential spiritual food which others sought on freer uplands and less confined stretches. He ministered to orthodox and unorthodox alike beneath their differences. He did much to keep spiritual evolution free from the bitterness and contempt of revolution.

VOL. III-IS

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CHAPTER XVII

Later Philosophy

HE prevailing other-worldliness of American philosophers seems to be the only explanation for our failure to

develop an original and vigorous political philosophy to meet our unique political experience. On a priori grounds it seems indisputable that philosophy must share the characteristics of the life of which it is a part and on which it is its business to reflect. But we actually do not know with certainty what kind of philosophy any given set of historic conditions will always produce. Thus no one has convincingly pointed out any direct and really significant influence on American philosophy exercised by our colonial organization, by the Revolutionary War, by the slavery struggle, by the Civil War, by our unprecedented immigration, or by the open frontier life which our historians now generally regard as the key to American history. The fact that, excepting some passages in Calhoun,' none of our important philosophic writings mentions the existence of slavery or of the negro race, that liberal democratic philosophers like Jefferson' could continue to own and even sell slaves and still fervently believe that all men are created free and equal, ought to serve as a reminder of the air-tight compartments into which the human mind is frequently divided, and of the extent to which one's professed philosophy can be entirely disconnected from the routine of one's daily occupation. Indeed, it would seem that most of our philosophy is not a reflection on life but, like music or Utopian

1 See Book II, Chap. xv. The keen pamphlet on Slavery and Freedom by A. T. Bledsoe, the most versatile of our Southern philosophers, and the references to the ethics of slavery in Wayland's Moral Philosophy, can hardly be considered as derogating from the statement in the text. See Book I, Chap. VIII.

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