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his return from a year's leave of absence in 1882 to 1883, which he spent in travel abroad, mainly in India, in which he got a broad knowledge of the religions of the world, a wider view of the totality of man, and. when his preaching dealt more with the simple issues and truths of life.

His fundamental beliefs were simple enough. He found humanity in Christianity. "Truth is not an end, but an instrument"; moral health is tributary to life. Religion is nature, and Christ is the perfect interpreter of nature. He says, "Religion is nothing in the world but the highest conception of life; the unnatural thing is irreligion." His view of the future was full of hope and joy, and his ethical optimism pervaded all his spiritual idealism. He preached the great, practical realities of Christianity, made no claims to prophecy, but always brought a message. A sermon is only an instrument to interpret the Bible. He does not debate his subject or appeal to external authority, but his evidence was inherent and personal, and he often made powerful appeals to the experiences of men. He does not argue, but reasons much, and in a perfectly natural way he proclaims or affirms and his declaration is accepted without question. He reasons from genus to species, from the general to the particular, and makes much use of exposition by analogy. He had a genius for oratorical personification that "put soul into the objects of his thought." His power was largely in his naturalness of language, clearness of statement, and direct address.

Not much may be said of his power of delivery of a sermon. Dr. Vinton said his great oratorical power was his voice, but there was often much hesitancy of speech and even stammering. He spoke so rapidly that sometimes it was quite impossible to catch his meaning, especially if the auditor was somewhat distant from him. Archdeacon Farrar asked him. to speak slower, though Dean Stanley thought rapidity was

one of his sources of power. The following quotation from an address before a school of oratory gives his own idea of the sources of expression :

"I have no theory or doctrine regarding expression, and yet I must speak of it with the profoundest respect. First in importance comes life, the very fact of life itself, - activity and the deed done. Then follows the mind's appropriation of the deed done, and after it has passed into thought it comes forth again in the utterances. Expression comes, fulfills the life of man and feels all life perpetually inspiring it. No one has a right to study expression until he is conscious that behind expression lies thought, and behind thought, deed and action. Nobody can truly stand as an utterer before the world unless he is profoundly living and honestly thinking."

Perhaps his whole power as a speaker may be summed up in the one word "personality." Any preacher who can present such a personality, even though his words come in the halting speech of a Martin Luther or in the rapid, torrentlike rush of words of a Phillips Brooks, may justly be termed a great speaker. As Professor Brastow of Yale University ably puts it: "Any man who would know better what it is to be a helpful, pastoral preacher, a real preacher, full, simple, earnest, unconventional preacher, of an imaginative, suggestive, and ethical mind, who cares chiefly to make the truth effective, who is bent upon getting it at work in the minds and hearts of men, who would fuse and fire the truth with the energy of a manly human heart and soul, may well give himself with diligence to Phillips Brooks." For a full study of the man we direct the attention of the student to Professor A. V. G. Allen's entrancing volume, "The Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks," and for a study of the method of his message no richer yield may be found than the pages of his own sermons, lectures, and addresses.

A SERMON OF GREETING

Preached in Trinity Church, Boston, Sunday, September 23, 1883, by Dr. Brooks the day after his arrival from a year abroad. The sermon was based on the text: Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you. I Corinthians, 1-6.

I. A HOPEFUL OUTLOOK

My dear friends, my dear people, I cannot tell you with what happy thankfulness to God for all his mercies I stand again in this familiar place. After a year of various delightful experiences

- I hope not without much that in the coming years may be in some way for your benefit as well as mine - I see again these dear and well-known walls; I look into the welcome of your dear and well-known faces; I greet you in our Master's name, I greet you in the memory of all the past, which comes rising up like a great flood about me, the memory of all the years of happy work together, of difficulties met and solved, of the common study of God's word, of the common experience of God's love, of sorrows and of joys, in the midst of which the affection of minister and people for each other has ripened and grown strong. I greet you also in the name of the future, which I hope looks as bright and full of hope to you this morning as it looks to me. To-day let all misgivings rest, and let the golden prospect of years and years of life together, and of ever-richening work for God and fellow man, stretch out before us and lavish its temptation on our eager hearts. Let our whole worship of this morning seem but an utterance of one common thankfulness and common consecration; and solemnly, gladly, with hand once more joined in hand, let us go forward in the thoughts of God.

And now, in this first sermon to which I have so long looked forward, what shall I say? Where shall I try to lead your hearts in this first of the many half hours which we are to spend together as preacher and hearers? I do not know where I can better turn than to the Epistle for this eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, which

will always hereafter be remarkable to us as the day which brought us together again after our long separation. The whole passage from which these words are taken rings with St. Paul's delight in his disciples, and thankfulness for all that God has done for them. "I thank my God always on your behalf for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ; that in everything ye are enriched by him, in all utterance and in all knowledge." How like a psalm the great minister sings his exultation over his beloved church! And then there come these other words, which seem to gather up into the most deliberate and thoughtful statements the real ground and substance of his delightful interest in them: "Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you." Just think what those words mean! Behind all other joy in his Corinthians, behind his personal affection for their special lives and characters, behind his satisfaction in their best prosperity, behind his grateful recollection of their kindness to himself, behind his honor for the intelligence and faithfulness and sacrifice with which they had accepted the truth which he had taught them, and had tried to live the Christian life - behind all this there lay one great supreme delight. In them he saw confirmed and illustrated the testimony of his master, Christ. All that he knew his Lord to be became at once more sure and more clear to him as he read the lives of these disciples, as they lay before him flooded with the bright light of their mutual love.

The words at once suggest an illustration of their meaning, which is familiar to every devout and thoughtful man who has traveled much back and forth upon the wonderful, beautiful earth where God has set our lives. I praise the world for many things: kingdom beyond kingdom, city beyond city, race beyond race, there opens everywhere the fascinating mystery of human life. Man, with his endless appeal to man, piercing through foreign dress and language, strange traditions, uncouth social habits, uncongenial forms of government, unapprehended forms of faith, finds out our hearts and claims them, and makes our paths from land to land a constant interest and joy. And the great physical

earth in which this human life is set is worthy of its jewel. The ocean rolls in its majesty; the great plains open their richness from horizon to horizon; the snow peaks lift their silver mystery of light against the sky; the great woods sing with the songs of streams. How beautiful it is! And yet, without losing one element of all this beauty, without robbing eye or ear or mind of one of these spontaneous delights, how instantly poorer this earth of ours would be to the devout and thoughtful man if it meant nothing more, if everywhere it did not bring him even additional testimony and revelation of that supreme intelligence and love, which had first made itself known to him in the experiences of his own soul!

The words of Paul and the illustration of his words, which I have just been giving, may furnish two natural divisions of what I want to say to you to-day. He was talking to Christian disciples, and it was peculiarly and specially over the exhibition of the power of Christ in those who were declaredly his disciples that the apostle was grateful and exultant. But besides this, Paul shows us more than once that he conceived of Christ as a universal power, so present everywhere and always in the world that no part of the world, not even that which was most ignorant or most contemptuous about Him, could help feeling His influence and becoming a witness of His power. To Paul, then, any savage barbarism or any heathen civilization, as well as his Christian church in Corinth, would have found its meaning, its explanation, its key and clue, in Christ. He would have stood among the palaces of Rome or among the wigwams of America and learned from them something of his Master. To them as well as to the streets of Corinth, though with different sense and tone, but with no less sincerity and interest, he would have said, "The testimony of Christ is confirmed for me in you.”

The testimony of Christ." Must we not ask ourselves first, however, whether we understand exactly the meaning of these words? Do they refer to the doctrine which Christ taught, the truths which He left burning in His Gospels for the world's undying light? No doubt they do. But we should little understand

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