Addresses by Phillips Brooks

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Two men are walking down the street together and talking away. See what
different conditions those two men are in. One of them has his soul
absolutely full of the desire to help his fellow-man. He peers into
those faces as he goes, and sees the divine possibility that is in them,
and he sees the divine nature everywhere. They are talking about the
idlest trifles, about the last bit of local Boston politics. But in
their souls one of those men has consecrated himself, with the new
morning, to the glorious service of God, and the other of them is asking
how he may be a little richer in his miserable wealth when the day
sinks. Oh, we look into the other world and read the great words and
hear it said, Between me and thee, this and that, there is a great gulf
fixed; and we think of something that is to come in the eternal life. Is
there any gulf in eternity, is there any gulf between heaven and hell
that is wider, and deeper, and blacker, that is more impassable than
that gulf which lies between these two men going upon their daily way?
Oh, friends, it is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is
not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant
and know that God knows me through all these misconceptions and blunders
of my brethren, that God knows me--that is the awful thing. The future
judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now. It
is awful to think how the commonplace things that men can do, the
commonplace thoughts that men can think, the commonplace lives that men
can live, are but in the bosom of the future. The thing that impresses
me more and more is this--that we only need to have extended to the
multitude that which is at this moment present in the few, and the world
really would be saved. There is but the need of the extension into a
multitude of souls of that which a few souls have already attained in
their consecration of themselves to human good, and to the service of
God, and I will not say the millennium would have come, I don't know
much about the millennium, but heaven would have come, the new Jerusalem
would be here. There are men enough in this church this morning, there
are men enough sitting here within the sound of my voice to-day, if they
were inspired by the spirit of God and counted it the great privilege of
their life, to do the work of God--there are men enough here to save
this city, and to make this a glowing city of our Lord, to relieve its
poverty, to lighten its darkness, to lift up the cloud that is upon
hearts, to turn it into a great, I will not say psalm-singing city, but
God-serving, God-abiding city, to touch all the difficult problems of
how society and government ought to be organized then with a power with
which they should yield their difficulty and open gradually. The light
to measure would be clear enough, if only the spirit is there. Give me
five hundred men, nay, give me one hundred men of the spirit that I know
to-day in three men that I well understand, and I will answer for it
that the city shall be saved. And you, my friend, are one of the five
hundred--you are one of the one hundred.

"Oh, but," you say, "is not this slavery over again? You have talked
about freedom, and here I am once more a slave. I had about got free
from the bondage of my fellow-men, and here I am right in the midst of
it again. What has become of my personality, of my independence, if I am
to live thus?" Ay, you have got to learn what every noblest man has
always learned, that no man becomes independent of his fellow-men
excepting in serving his fellow-men. You have got to learn that
Christianity comes to us not simply as a luxury but as a force, and no
man who values Christianity simply as a luxury which he possesses really
gets the Christianity which he tries to value. Only when Christianity is
a force, only when I seek independence of men in serving men, do I cease
to be a slave to their whims. I must dress as they think I ought to
dress; I must walk in the streets as they think I ought to walk; I must
do business just after their fashion; I must accept their standards; but
when Christ has taken possession of me and I am a total man, I am more
or less independent of these men. Shall I care about their little whims
and oddities? Shall I care about how they criticise the outside of my
life? Shall I peer into their faces as I meet them in the street, to see
whether they approve of me or not? And yet am I not their servant? There
is nothing now I will not do to serve them, there is nothing now I will
not do to save them. If the cross comes, I welcome the cross, and look
upon it with joy, if, by my death upon the cross in any way, I may echo
the salvation of my Lord and save them. Independent of them? Surely. And
yet their servant? Perfectly. Was ever man so independent in Jerusalem
as Jesus was? What cared He for the sneer of the Pharisee, for the
learned scorn of the Sadducee, for the taunt of the people and the
little boys that had been taught to jeer at Him as He went down the
street, and yet the very servant of all their life? He says there are
two kinds of men--they who sit upon a throne and eat, and they who
serve. "I am among you as he that serveth." Oh, seek independence.
Insist upon independence. Insist that you will not be the slave of the
poor, petty standards of your fellow-men. But insist upon it only in the
way in which it can be insisted upon, by becoming absolutely the servant
of their needs. So only shall you be independent of their whims. There
is one great figure, and it has taken in all Christian consciousness,
that again and again this work with Christ has been asserted to be the
true service in the army of a great master, of a great captain, who goes
before us to his victory, that it is asserted that in that captain, in
the entrance into his army, every power is set free. Do you remember the
words that a good many of us read or heard yesterday in our churches,
where Jesus was doing one of His miracles, and it is said that a devil
was cast out, the dumb spake? Every power becomes the man's possession,
and he uses it in his freedom, and he fights with it with all his force,
just as soon as the devil is cast out of him.

I have tried to tell you the noblest motive in which you should be a
pure, an upright, a faithful, and a strong man. It is not for the
salvation of your life, it is not for the salvation of yourself. It is
not for the satisfaction of your tastes. It is that you may take your
place in the great army of God and go forward having something to do
with the work that He is doing in the world. You remember the days of
the war, and how ashamed of himself a man felt who never touched with
his finger the great struggle in which the nation was engaged. Oh, to go
through this life and never touch with my finger the vast work that
Christ is doing, and when the cry of triumph arises at the end to stand
there, not having done one little, unknown, unnoticed thing to bring
about that which is the true life of the man and of the world, that is
awful. And I dare to believe that there are young men in this church
this morning who, failing to be touched by every promise of their own
salvation and every threatening of their own damnation, will still lift
themselves up and take upon them the duty of men, and be soldiers of
Jesus Christ, and have a part in the battle, and have a part somewhere
in the victory that is sure to come. Don't be selfish anywhere. Don't be
selfish, most of all, in your religion. Let yourselves free into your
religion, and be utterly unselfish. Claim your freedom in service.

II. THOUGHT AND ACTION.

I want once more to read to you these words from the eighth chapter of
the Gospel of St. John:

"As He spake these words, many believed on Him. Then said Jesus to
those Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in My word, then
are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed,
and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest Thou, Ye shall be
made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant
abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the
Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

There are two great regions in which the life of every true man resides.
They are the region of action and the region of thought. It is
impossible to separate these two regions from one another and to bid
one man live in one of them alone and the other man live only in the
other of them. It is impossible to say to the business man that he shall
live only in the region of action, it is impossible to say to the
scholar that he shall live only in the region of thought, for thought
and action make one complete and single life. Thought is not simply the
sea upon which the world of action rests, but, like the air which
pervades the whole solid substance of our globe, it permeates and fills
it in every part. It is thought which gives to it its life. It is
thought which makes the manifestation of itself in every different
action of man. I hope we are not so deluded as men have been sometimes,
as some men are to-day, that we shall try to separate these two lives
from one another, and one man say, "Everything depends upon my action,
and I care not what I think," or, as men have said, at least, in other
times, "If I think right, it matters not how I act." But the right
thought and the right action make one complete and single man.

Now we have been speaking, upon these Monday noons, with regard to the
freedom of that highest life which is lived under the inspiration of
Jesus Christ and which we call the Christian life. We have claimed that
it is the highest of all lives because it is the freest of all lives,
that it is the freest of all lives because it is the highest, and it
may be that we have thought that it was true with regard to the active
life in which men live, it may be that we have somehow persuaded
ourselves, that it has seemed to us as if there were evidence that a man
who lived his life in the following of Jesus Christ was a free man in
regard to his activity. But now there comes to us the other thought, and
it is impossible for us to meet together as we have met together again
and again here without asking with regard to the other region of man's
life and how it is with man there, for there are a great many people, I
believe, who think that while the Christian faith offers to man a noble
sphere of action and sets free powers that would otherwise remain
unchanged, yet when we come to the region of thought or belief, there it
is inevitable that man should know himself, when he accepts the faith of
Jesus Christ, it is inevitable that there the man should become less
free than it has been thought that he was before the blessed Saviour
was accepted as the Master and the ruler of his life. Men say to
themselves and to one another, "Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be
nobler in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind and spirit, I
shall certainty bind myself to think, away from the rich freedom of
thought in which I have been inclined to live." We make very much of
free thought in these days. Let us always remember that free thought
means the opportunity to think, and not the opportunity not to think. We
rejoice in the way in which our fathers came to this country and in
their children perpetuated the purpose of their coming, in order that
they might have freedom to worship God. Do we worship God? Simply to
have attained freedom and not to use freedom for its true purpose, not
to live within the world of freedom according to the life which is given
to us there--that is to do dishonor to the freedom, to disown the
purpose for which the freedom has been given to us. I want to speak to
you then, while I may speak to-day, with regard to the freedom of the
Christian thought.

I want to claim, that which I believe with all my soul, that he who
lives in the faith of Jesus Christ lives in the freest action of his
mental powers, and there sees before him and makes himself a part of the
large world into which man shall enter, in which he has perfect liberty
and can exercise his powers as he could never have exercised them
without. It is not very strange to think that men should have sometimes
come to think that the religion of Jesus Christ was a slavery that was
laid upon the mind of man, because very often those who have been the
disciples of that religion, those who have been the preachers and
exponents of that religion, have claimed just exactly that thing. They
have seemed to say to themselves and to one another, to the world to
which they speak, that man does give up the powers of his reason when he
enters into the powers of his faith, when he enters into the great realm
of faith. Led by some sort of influence, led by some heresy with regard
to the capacity of man, or with regard to the dealing of God with man,
or with regard to the purposes of man's life upon the earth, they have
been content to say that man must give up the power of thought in order
that he might enter into the Christian life and attain to all the
purposes of the Christian discipline, they have been content to say that
man must give up the noblest power of his nature in order to enter upon
the highest life. Well might a man hesitate, hesitate whatever the
blessings that were offered to him in the fulness of the Christian
experience, if he were called upon to give up that which made the very
centre and glory of his life, that which linked him most immediately to
the God from whom he sprang. It would be as if in the storm the ship
should cast over its engine in order to save its own life. The ship
might be saved a little while from going down in the depths of despair,
but it never would reach the port to which it had been bound; it never
would accomplish the purpose of the voyage upon which it had set forth.
Let us put absolutely away from, us all such thoughts. Let us come under
the inspiration of Jesus Christ Himself, who says to us, in these words
which we have repeatedly read to one another, that it is the truth that
is to make us free, and that the entrance of the man therefore into that
freedom is the largest freedom, of every region of man's life.

I want to speak to you of the way in which my Master, Jesus Christ,
appeals to the intelligence of man, of the way in which He comes to us
in the noblest part of our nature, and claims us there for our true life
within Himself. I would feel altogether wrong if I let you depart, if I
allowed you to meet here with me week after week and say these words
which I am privileged to speak to you unless I did thus claim that the
Christian life is the largest life of the human intellect, that in it
the noblest and central powers of man shall attain to their true
liberty. It is given for us perhaps to ask ourselves for one moment why
it is that man thinks, is ready to think, that he must give up the very
noblest part of his life, his powers of thinking, in order that he may
enter into Christianity. It seems to me that there are certain reasons
for it which we can see; but how fallacious those reasons are! Is it not
partly because man, when he is called upon to live Jesus' life, when he
is called upon to be a spiritual creature, immediately sees that he is
entering into a new and different region from that in which his reason
has always been exercised. He has been dealing with those things that
belong to this earth, with the different duties and opportunities and
pleasures that present themselves to him every day, and that higher and
loftier region into which he has entered seems to have no capacity to
call forth those powers which he has been using in this lower region.
And then I think again there is upon the souls of men who deal with
Christianity one great conviction which is very deep and strong. It is
that the Christian religion cannot be absolutely that which it presents
itself to human mankind as being, because it is so rich in the blessings
that it offers, because it comes with such a large enjoyment to our
human life, and opens such great opportunities for human living. Is it
not because it seems to us too good to be true that we sometimes turn
away from Christianity, and think that if we enter it at all we must
enter it in the dark, that it cannot possibly appeal to these human
natures and make them understand its truth, and let them take it into
their intelligence that thence it may issue into the soul and become the
guiding power of the life? Sometimes it seems as if Christianity were
so high that it was impossible that man should attain to it, as if it
were something altogether beyond our human powers. Do you want me, a
creature with this human body and this human relationship, with this
body and with these perpetual bindings and connections with my
fellow-men, do you want me to mount up and live among the stars and hold
communion with the God of all? And if you want me to, is there any
possibility of my doing it? Such a life is glorious, but not for me. It
goes beyond any capacity that I possess. Ask yourselves, my friends, if
something like this which I have tried to describe is not very often in
your minds as you hear the magnificent invitations which Christ gives to
the human soul to live its fullest life, to man to be his fullest being.
There are, no doubt, other reasons which present themselves to men, and
of those I do not speak. I will not think that the men who are listening
here to me now, in a base and low way shrink from the evidence of
Christianity and from the life of Christ because they do not want to
enter into that religion because it would make too great demands upon
them in the sacrifices that they would be called upon to make. It is
said sometimes, and I doubt not that it is sometimes true, that men will
not see the power and truth of Christianity because they do not want to
see it. It seems to me that the other is also often true, and it is
that upon which we would much rather dwell. Men sometimes hesitate at
Christianity and tremble, and will not enter into the great region that
is open to them, because they do not want it so intimately. The
critical, the sceptical disposition is very often born just of man's
perception of the glory of the life that is offered to him, and of the
intense desire that is at the bottom of his soul to enter into that
life. Who is the man that criticises the ship most carefully as she lies
at the wharf, that will see what capacity she has for the great voyage
that she has set before her? Is he the man who means to linger
carelessly upon the bank and never sail away, or the man who is obliged,
if she can sail across the ocean, to go with her? Just in proportion to
the depth of interest with which we look upon all Christian truth we
must be deep questioners with regard to the truth of that truth. We must
search into all its evidence. We must try to understand how it commends
itself to all our minds. But first of all we want to know certainly what
Christianity is, if it is able to deal with the thing with which we are
puzzling or never to give an intelligent definition of it.

How is it now? I go to a certain man and ask him, "Why do you not
believe in Christianity?" and he says, "It is incredible. I cannot
believe in it." "What is it that you cannot believe in?" and then he
takes forsooth some little point of Christian doctrine, some speculation
of some Christian teacher, some dogma of some Christian church, and
says, "That is incredible," as if that were Christianity. Over and over
again men are telling that they do not believe in Christianity, when the
real thing that they do not believe in is something that is no essential
part of Christian faith whatsoever. They never have given to themselves
a real definition of what the Christ and the Christianity in which they
are called upon to believe, into which they are invited to enter, really
is. The lecturer goes up and down the land and in the face of mighty
audiences he denounces Christianity. He declares it to be unintelligible
and absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when you ask what it is that
he is thus denouncing, what it is that he is thus convicting over and
over again, you find that it is something not simply which makes no part
of Christianity, but which is absolutely hostile to the spirit of
Christianity itself. Many and many a sceptical lecturer is denouncing
that which Christian men would, with all their hearts, denounce; is
declaring that to be untrue which no true Christian thinker really
believes, that which is no real part of the great Christian faith, which
is our glory. Do not think when I speak thus, when I say that there are
things attached to Christianity which men do not believe, that they do
not believe in the great truth of Jesus, without them, which men
denouncing think that they are denouncing the religion which is saving
the world. Do not think that I am simply paring away our great Christian
faith, and making it mean just as little as possible in order that men
may accept it into their lives. I am coming to the heart and soul of it.
I want to know, if my life is all bound up with this religion of Jesus
Christ, I want to know intrinsically what that religion is. I will
scatter a thousand things which in the devout thought of men have
fastened themselves to it. It is but clearing the ship for action, the
making it ready that it may do its work, the binding everything tight
just before the storm comes on, for that is just the moment when nothing
essential to the ship itself must be cast away, when I make sure, if I
can, that every plank and timber, that every iron and brass is in its
true place and ready for the strain that may be put upon it.

But what, then, is the Christian religion? It is the simple following of
the divine person, Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, has
made evident two things--the love of God for that humanity, and the
power of that humanity to answer to the love of God. The one thing that
the eye of the Christian sees and never can lose is that majestic,
simple figure, great in its simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity
and in its unworldliness, that walked once on this earth and that walks
forever through the lives of men, showing Himself to human kind,
manifest in human kind. The power to receive it, the divine life wakened
in every child of man by the divine life manifested in Jesus Christ.
That is the great Christian faith, and the man becomes a Christian in
his belief when he assures himself that that manifestation of the divine
life has been made and is perpetually being made, and he answers to that
appeal of the Christ. He manifests his belief in action when he gives
himself to the education and the guiding of that Christ, that in him
there may be awakened the life of divinity, which is his true human
life. Is it not glorious, this absolute simplicity of the Christian
faith? It is not primarily a truth; it is a person, it is He who walked
in Galilee and Judea, who sat in the houses of mankind, who hung upon
the cross, in order that He might perfectly manifest how God could live
and how man could suffer in the obedience to the life of God, and then
sent forth out of that inspiration and said, "Lo, I am with you always,
doing this very thing, being this very Saviour, even to the end of the
world." That which the Christian man believes to-day as a Christian,
whatever else he may believe in his private speculation, in his personal
opinion, is this: The life of God manifest in Jesus of Nazareth and
thenceforth going out into the world wakening the divine capacity in
every man.

You say, "How can a man believe that? What evidence is there of it?" The
personal evidence of Jesus Christ himself. It is the self testimony of
Christ that makes the assurance of the Christian faith. Does that sound
to you all unreasonable? Do you turn here in your pew or in your aisle
and say, "After all, it is the old story which I have tested and know to
be untrue."

Suppose yourself back there in Jerusalem. Suppose the self testimony
came to you from the very person of Jesus Christ. Suppose the words that
He absolutely said and the deeds that He absolutely did bore to you a
testimony that some greater than a human life was there, and that then,
as you pressed close to Him and became a part of His life, you found
your own life awakened and became a nobler man, ashamed to sin, aspiring
after holiness, thinking noble thoughts, lifting yourself not above the
earth, but lifting yourself with the whole great earth, which then is
taken up into the presence of God and made sacred through and through. I
know no man in whom I trust except by the personal evidence that he
bears to me of himself. I know no man's nature finally but by that
testimony which the nature gives me of him. Bring me all evidence that
the man is trustworthy, and then when I am convinced I will go and stand
in the presence of that man himself, and he shall tell me. So the world
stood, so the world stands to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ. His
presence on earth is an historic fact. The words that He spoke are
written down in a true record. The deeds that He did are the history of
the manifestations of His character, and the story of His christendom is
the continued manifestation of His life, the divine life in the life of
man, made divine through Him. Now, a question that comes in the
Christian's mind is "Why don't people believe this?" Why should they
not? Is it not written in the historical record? Has it not manifested
itself in the experience of mankind? If it has, surely then it appeals
to man's reason, and is not merely the act of the blind, stupid thing
which we call faith, but it is the noblest action of that hour in which
I believe, in the heavens above me and in the earth under my feet, in
the brother with whom I have to do in the long course of history, in the
total humanity which has grandly lived. The reason that men do not
believe it is that of course there seems to be to them some strange and
previous presumption with regard to it, something which makes the story
incredible. They say it is the supernatural in it, that it goes beyond
the ordinary experience of man. Ah! it seems also strange to me, the
ordinary experience of man. Who dares to dream that human life has lived
its completest and shown the noblest power of receiving God into itself?
Who dares to think that these few thousand years have exhausted this
majestic and mysterious being that we call man? Who dares to think of
his own life that, in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has
lived, he has known and shown all that God can do in and for him? Who
dares to say that it is impossible, that it is improbable, that he who
is the child of God shall receive some newer and closer access to his
father, that there shall come some new revelation which shall be written
not in a book, not upon the skies, not in the history of human kind, not
on the rocks under our feet, but here in our human flesh, that there
shall be an incarnation, that the God who is perpetually trying to
manifest Himself to human kind should find at last, should take at last
the most exquisite, the most sensitive, the most perfect, the most
divine of all material on which to write His message, and in that human
nature show at once what God was and what man is? Until there be some
exhaustive sight of human nature as that, it is in no wise improbable
that there would be that which outgoes our observation, that once in the
long music of our human life the great key-note of humanity shall be
struck, that once in our great groping after the God who made us He
shall seem to draw the veil aside, nay, more than that, shall come and
like the sunlight crowd Himself through every cloud until He takes
possession of our humanity.

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