Addresses by Phillips Brooks

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"Ay," but you say, "those miracles in the life of Jesus Christ, how
strange those are; how strange that He should have touched the water and
the water become wine; how strange that He should have called to the
dead man and he should have come forth from the tomb; how strange that
He should have spoken to the waters and the storm grow still!" Ah, my
friends, it seems to me that there again we are dishonoring nature as
just before we did dishonor man. There again we are thinking that we
have exhausted the capacity of this wondrous world in which we live.
What is the glory of that world? That it answers to human kind. In the
mystic tradition of the Book of Genesis it is told how, when God first
made man, He set him master of this world and all its powers; and, ever
since, the world has been answering to man, who is its master, and every
message that comes back to him, every response that the field makes to
the farmer, or that the rock makes to the scientist, is but an assertion
and the culmination and the fulfilment of that which God did back there.
As man has been, so has the world responded to his touch and call.
Suppose that to-morrow morning the perfect man should come, not the man
simply of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first, who shall be
greater in his humanity than we, but suppose the perfect man, the
perfect man because the divine man, comes. I cannot dream that nature
shall not have words to say and a response to make to him that it will
not make to these poor hands of mine. I can do something with the rock
and field, I can do something with the sea and sky. What shall he do who
is to my humanity what the perfect is to the absolutely and dreadfully
imperfect? What shall the divine man do? When Paul speaks in that great
verse of his and tells us how the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
waiting for the manifestation of the Son of God, the whole future
history of human science, of man's knowledge and use of the world, is in
his words. The world shall know man as fast as man shows himself, and
when the Son of God shall be manifested, then the groaning and
travailing creation shall set all its powers free, and with the
knowledge with which it floods him and with the usages and service with
which it supplies him, it shall claim at last its glory as the servant,
the obedient servant of man. The Son of man has come. You may at least
suppose it if you do not believe it. And if He came to-morrow morning,
would not this whole world lift itself up and answer Him? Who can say
what the hills and valleys and trees and oceans and seas would have to
say to Him who at last manifested that which the world had been waiting
and groaning for, the manifestation, the complete manifestation, of the
Son of God? That is the reason why I claim that miracles--I do not know
that there have not been fastened upon the miraculous power of Jesus
stories of things, thinking that they were done miraculously, which He
did by what we choose in our ignorance to call the ordinary powers of
nature--but I do know that the coming into the world must have been more
to this world, that it would have been the most unnatural and incredible
thing if the divine man coming here had been to the world and the world
had been to him only what it is to us.

And now the question comes to each one of us--for I must hasten on--how
shall a man get within the region of that which perhaps you recognize,
which I do not see how you can help believing, how shall a man get
within the region of that higher power and let it be the rule of his
life, let it manifest itself through him? How do you get within the
power of any force, my friends? Here is Christ, a force if He is
anything, not a spectacle, not a miracle, not a marvel, not wonderful to
look at, but a force to feel. How do you get within the power of any
force? You look out of your window, and men say the frost is freezing,
and you see your neighbors wrapping their cloaks about them and going
down the street as if they were cold. Men say that a storm is blowing,
and you see them shelter themselves against the storm that blows. How
will you make that storm a true thing for yourself? Go out into it. Let
the frost smite your cheek, let the rain beat into your face, let the
wind blow upon your back, and then you know by personal experience what
you had known by your observation before. And so I say that only when a
man puts himself where he can feel the power of the Christ, where it is
possible for him, if there be a Christ, if Christ be all that the
Christian religion claims that He is, only when a man puts himself where
he needs and must have and must certainly feel that Christ, if there be
a Christ, only then has he a right to disbelieve if the Christ be not
there, only then has he a right to believe if the Christ find him there.
And where is that? When a man takes up the highest duties, when he
accepts the noblest life, when he lays open his soul to the great
exactions and obligations which belong to him in his spiritual nature,
when he tries to be a pure man, a devoted man, a noble man, only then
has he a chance to know that force which only then comes into its
activity. Only when a man tries to live the divine life can the divine
Christ manifest Himself to him. Therefore the true way for you to find
Christ is not to go groping in a thousand books. It is not for you to
try evidences about a thousand things that people have believed of Him,
but it is for you to undertake so great a life, so devoted a life, so
pure a life, so serviceable a life, that you cannot do it except by
Christ, and then see whether Christ helps you. See whether there comes
to you the certainty that you are a child of God, and the manifestation
of the child of God becomes the most credible, the most certain thing to
you in all of history.

It may have been that such moments have been in some of your lives.
Think of the noblest moment that you ever passed, of the time when,
lifted up to the heights of glory, or bowed down into the very depths of
sorrow, every power that was in you was called forth to meet the
exigency or to do the work. Think of the time when you stood upon the
mountain top or plunged into the gulf. Remember that time--it may have
been the death of your little child, it may have been your own
sickness, it may have been your failure in business, it may have been
the moment of your complete success in business, when you were
solemnized as the great shower of wealth poured down upon you, and you
felt that now you really had some work for God to do in the world. Ah,
look back to that moment and see if then it seemed so strange to you
that God should come into the presence and person of His universe, of
His children, and take possession of their life. We grow so easily to
forget our noblest and most splendid times. It seems to me there is no
maxim for a noble life like this: Count always your highest moments your
truest moments. Believe that in the time when you were the greatest and
most spiritual man, then you were your truest self. Men do just the
other thing. They say it was "an exception, a derangement of my nature,
an exultation, a frenzy, it was something that I must not expect again."
How about the time when they plunged into baseness and made their soul
like a dog's soul? They shudder at the thought of that because they
think it would come again. Nay, nay, shudder if you will at the thought
of that, but believe that the highest you ever have been you may be all
the time, and vastly higher still if only the power of the Christ can
occupy you and fill your life all the time.

I said that there were many things that people attached to Christianity
that did not belong to Christianity. I know there are. It is impossible
that a great system like the system of Christ, a great person like the
great person of Christ, should be in the world, and men not have
speculated and thought in regard to Him. Those are not Christianity. I
want to-day, if I may do nothing else, to tell you absolutely how simple
and single the Christian faith, the Christ, really is. It is not the
inspiration of this book or any theory in regard to its inspiration. It
is not the election of certain souls and the perdition of other souls.
It is not the length of man's punishment, whether it is going to be
forever and ever, or whether man is to go to his restoration. It is not
even the constitution of the divine life, the great truth of the way in
which God lives within His own nature. None of these are the essence of
the Christian faith, but simply this: The testimony of the divine in man
to the divine in man that lifts the man up and says: "For me to be
brutal is unmanly; to be divine is to be my only true self." Why do I
believe in God? If some man asked me, when on the street, I think I
should have an answer to give him. I could give one great reason--two
great reasons which are really but one great reason--why I believe in
God. I believe in God, my friends, I believe in God with all my soul,
because this world is inexplicable without Him and explicable with Him,
and because Jesus Christ believed in Him; and it was Jesus Christ that
showed me that this world demanded God and was inexplicable without Him;
that made certain every suspicion and dream that I had had before, and
Jesus Christ believed in Him. Shall I go to the expert about chemistry
or geology and ask him the truth with regard to the structure of the
world and the meeting of its atoms and forces? And shall not I go to the
spiritual expert, to him in whom the spiritual life of man has been
clearest, and say, "O Christ, tell me what is the centre and source and
end of all?" When he says, "God," shall I not believe Him?

It is impossible, as I have suggested to you again and again in what I
have been saying, that a man can have his mind open to the receipt of
the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind of man himself. I do
not know but the basest and the wickedest man who lives may believe in
the Copernican theory, or that two and two make four, yet I cannot help
believing that if he were a better and truer man he would believe even
those truths, outside of himself, of science and arithmetic, more fully
and deeply. Men were not all astray in the first thing that they were
seeking after, though they were wofully astray in many things that they
said about it, when they talked about faith and works. Faith enters in
through the soul that does a noble deed, and in the coming in of that
faith the higher deed becomes possible to him. Hear the words that Jesus
said, words that our age must take to itself until it shall be wiser
than it is to-day: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God." "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine,
whether it be of God." Ponder those words, my friends. See how
reasonable they are. See how important they are. See how they have the
secret of your own life, of what it is to do, of what it is to be,
forever and ever sealed up in them. These two things, I am sure, are
true with regard to the method of belief--that no man can ever go
forward to a higher belief until he is true to the faith which he
already holds. Be the noblest man that your present faith, poor and weak
and imperfect as it is, can make you to be. Live up to your present
growth, your present faith. So, and so only, as you take the next
straight step forward, as you stand strong where you are now, so only
can you think the curtain will draw back and there will be revealed to
you what lies beyond. And then live in your positives and not in your
negatives. I am tired of asking man what his religious faith is and
having him tell me what he don't believe. He tells me that he don't
believe in baptism or inspiration or in the trinity. If I asked a man
where he was going and he told me he was not going to Washington, what
could I know about where he was going? He would not go anywhere so long
as he simply rested in that mere negative. Be done with saying what you
don't believe, and find somewhere or other the truest, divinest thing to
your soul that you do believe to-day, and work that out: work it out in
all the action and consecration of the soul in the doing of your work.
This I take to be the real freedom of Christian thought--when the man
goes forward always into a fuller and fuller belief as he becomes
obedient to that which he already holds.

But yet I know I have not touched the opinion, the feeling, nay, I will
say the black prejudice that is upon many, many minds. "Ah, but you have
bound yourself," you say. "You have given your assent to a certain
creed, you believe certain dogmas. To put it as simply as you have put
it to us this morning, you believe a certain person. I, I am free, I
believe nothing, I can go wandering here and everywhere and disbelieve
to my heart's content." Yes, I do believe something, and I thank God for
it. But I deny with all my intelligence and soul the very idea that in
believing that something I have shut my soul to evidence. I am ready to
hear any man living, any man living to-day who will prove to me that the
Christ has never lived and that he is not the Lord of men. I will listen
to any man who is in earnest and who is sincere. I will not listen to
any trifler, caviller, who is merely trying to make a point and to get
ahead of the poor arguments that I can use; but let any fellow-man come
to me with an earnest face, either of puzzled doubt, or of earnest and
convinced unbelief, and say to me, "Are you not wrong?" or "I believe
that you are wrong," and I, of course, will talk to him. Do I want to
believe anything that cannot be proved to be true, anything that my
intelligence shall not receive? Why should I believe it? Shall I trust
myself to the ship merely because I have refused to examine its timbers,
when men tell me that it is unsound? Shall I throw away my truthfulness
simply for the sake of holding what I want, what I choose to call the
truth? It is not because it is safe, it is not because it is pleasant,
it is because it seems to the Christian man to be true, that the
Christian man believes in the presence, the life, the power of Jesus
Christ. Therefore come, let me hear every one of you what you have to
say. Let me see where that upon which my soul rests for its very life
breaks down; but, until I hear, I will go forward, strong in the
assurance of that which takes hold of all my life, convinces my reason,
lays hold of my affections, enlarges my actions, and opens my whole
being to the freedom of the child of God.

And why should not you, my friends, why should not you? I honor the
sceptic, the faithful and devout sceptic, with all my soul. I am no
scorner of the man who, without scorn, finds it impossible to accept
that which to my soul seems to be the absolute truth. I will scorn only
that which God scorns. He scorns the scorner, and only the scorning man
is worthy of the scorn of human kind. But while I honor the sceptic,
while I invite him to make manifest his scepticism, not merely for his
sake but for my own, I will not hold, I cannot hold that he is living a
larger life than the man whom the Christ invites to every noble duty, to
every faithful fulfilment of himself. I will feel that he, perhaps by
the necessity of his nature, perhaps by his circumstances, perhaps by
something which came down to him from his ancestors, is shut in, is a
contained and hampered and hindered man, and I will long for the day
when he, lifting up his eyes, sees that Christ walking in the midst of
humanity, and yet at the head of humanity, manifesting our human nature,
but outgoing our human nature, glorifying our streets while He
interprets our streets for the first time into their full meaning,
giving to our shops and houses a radiancy which they have expected and
dreamed of, but never felt, and tempting us always into a deeper belief
in Him, which, embodying itself in a completer consecration to the right
and true, shall lead us on into the fulness which he fills. Can I, can
you, have Christ in human history, Christ in the world, and live as if
He were not here? Will you not give yourself to that of Him which you
know to-day? Will you not at least lay hold of the very skirts of His
garment and say, "I see that Thou art good, I see that Thou art true.
Lead me into the goodness and truth which by communion and sympathy
shall know Thee more. Lord, I believe. I believe just a little. Lord, I
know that that must come which Thou hast said has come in Thee. I would
enter into Thee, to see whether it has indeed come in Thee, and Thou
shalt lead me, Thou shalt teach me. Lord, I believe. I have not grasped
Thee. No man has grasped Thee. The man who says that he has grasped Thee
proves thereby that he does not know Thee. I know that I have not
grasped Thee, but I will follow Thee by doing righteousness, by serving
truth, by knowing and acknowledging Thee until all of that shall become
clear to me. I will follow Thee, and Thou shalt lead me into the glory
which Thou Thyself abidest in. Lord, I believe, Lord, I believe, help
Thou mine unbelief." The story of the present, the hope, the pure,
certain hope of the future is in those great words: "Lord, I believe,
help Thou mine unbelief."

III. THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN.

I will read to you once again the words which I have read before, the
words of Jesus in 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 forever: but the Son abideth ever. If the
Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

I do not know how any man can stand and plead with his brethren for the
higher life, that they will enter into and make their own the life of
Christ and God, unless he is perpetually conscious that around them with
whom he pleads there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of God
Himself. Unless a man believes that, everything that he has to say must
seem, in the first place, impertinent, and, in the second place, almost
absolutely hopeless. Who is man that he shall plead with his fellow-man
for the change of a life, for the entrance into a whole new career, for
the alteration of a spirit, for the surrounding of himself with a new
region in which he has not lived before? But if it be so, that God is
pleading with every one of His children to enter into the highest life;
if it be so, that God is making His application and His appeal to every
soul to know Him, and in Him to know himself, then one may plead with
earnestness and plead with great hopefulness before his brethren. And so
it is. The great truth of Jesus Christ is that, that God is pleading
with every soul, not merely in the words which we hear from one another,
not merely in the words which we read from His book, but in every
influence of life; and, in those unknown influences which are too subtle
for us to understand or perceive, God is forever seeking after the souls
of His children.

I cannot stand before you for the last time that I shall stand In these
meetings, my friends, without reminding myself and without reminding you
of that; without reminding myself also and without trying to remind you
of how absolutely conformable it is to everything that man does in this
world. The great richness of nature, the great richness of life, comes
when we understand that behind every specific action of man there is
some one of the more elemental and primary forces of the universe that
are always trying to express themselves. There is nothing that man does
that finds its beginning within itself, but everything, every work of
every trade, of every occupation, is simply the utterance of some one of
those great forces which lie behind all life, and in the various ways of
the different generations and of the different men are always trying to
make their mark upon the world. Behind the power that the man exercises
there always lies the great power of life, the continual struggle of
nature to write herself in the life and work of man, the power of beauty
struggling to manifest itself, the harmony that is always desiring to
make itself known. To the merchant there are the great laws of trade, of
which his works are but the immediate expression. To the mechanic there
are the continual forces of nature, gravitation uttering itself in all
its majesty, made no less majestic because it simply takes its
expression for the moment in some particular exercise of his art. To the
ship that sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds that come
out of the treasuries of God and fulfil His purpose in carrying His
children to their destination. There is no perfection of the universe
and of the special life of man in the universe until it comes to this.
The greatest of all forces are ready without condescension, are ready as
the true expression of their life, to manifest themselves in the
particular activities which we find everywhere, and which are going on
everywhere. The little child digs his well in the sea-shore sand, and
the great Atlantic, miles deep, miles wide, is stirred all through and
through to fill it for him. Shall it not be so then here to-day, and
shall it not be the truth, upon which we let our minds especially dwell,
and which we keep in our souls all the time that I am speaking and you
are listening, that however He may be hidden from our sight God is the
ultimate fact and the final purpose and power of the universe, and that
everything that man tries to do for his fellow-man is but the expression
of that love of God which is everywhere struggling to utter itself in
blessing, to give itself away to the soul of every one for whom He
cares?

It is in this truth that I find the real secret, the deepest meaning,
of the everlasting dissatisfaction of man that is always ready to be
stirred. We moralize, we philosophize about the discontent of man. We
give little reasons for it; but the real reason of it all is this, that
which everything lying behind it really signifies: that man is greater
than his circumstances, and that God is always calling to him to come up
to the fulness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when the world
becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself
over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes
absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts
that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not
forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do
something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do
because he is the child of God. And there is the real secret of the
man's struggle with his sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the
sin, as we have said again and again, but it is the dim perception, the
deep suspicion, the real knowledge at the heart of the man, that there
is a richer and a sinless region in which it is really meant for him to
dwell. Man stands separated from that life of God, as it were, by a
great, thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, to make himself
a nobler and a purer man, is simply his beating at the inside of that
door which stands between him and the life of God, which he knows that
he ought to be living. It is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who
feels through all the thick wall that shuts him out from it the sunlight
and the joyous life that is outside, who knows that his imprisonment is
not his true condition, and so with every tool that his hands can grasp
and with his bleeding hands themselves beats on the stone, that he may
find his way out. And the glory and the beauty of it is that while he is
beating upon the inside of the wall there is also a noble power praying
upon the outside of that wall, The life to which he ought to come is
striving in its turn, upon its side, to break away the hindrance that is
keeping him from the thing he ought to be, that is keeping him from the
life he ought to live. God, with His sunshine and lightning, with the
great majestic manifestations of Himself, and with all the peaceful
exhibitions of His life, is forever trying, upon His side of the wall,
to break away the great barrier that separates the sinner's life from
Him. Great is the power, great is the courage of the sinner, when
through the thickness of the walls he feels that beating life of God,
when he knows that he is not working alone, when he is sure that God is
wanting him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants God. He bears
himself to a nobler struggle with his enemy and a more determined effort
to break down the resistance that stands between him and the higher
life. Our figure is all imperfect, as all our figures are so imperfect,
because it seems to be the man all by himself, working by himself, until
he shall come forth into the life of God, as if God waited there to
receive him when he came forth the freed man, and as if the working of
the freedom upon the sinner's side had not something also of the purpose
of God within him. God is not merely in the sunshine; God is in the
cavern of the man's sin. God is with the sinner wherever he can be.
There is no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined in its
defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned his throne room at the centre
of the sinner's life, and every movement is the God movement and every
effort is the God force, with which man tries to break forth from his
sin and come forth into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do you not
think how full of hope it is? Do you not see that when this great
conception of the universe, which is Christ's conception, which beamed
in every look that He shed upon the world, which was told in every word
that He spoke and which was in every movement of His hand--do you not
see how, when this great conception of the universe takes possession of
a man, then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it becomes a
strong struggle, a glorious struggle. He hears perpetually the voice of
Christ, "Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. You shall overcome
it by the same strength which overcame with Me."

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