Addresses by Phillips Brooks

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V. THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRISTIANS BELIEVE.

I want to read to you again the words of Jesus in the eighth chapter of
the Gospel of St. John: "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." The
service of God is not self-restraint, but self-indulgence. That is the
first truth of all religion. That is the truth which we found uttered in
those words of Jesus when we were thinking of them the other day. That
is the truth to which we return as we come back again to think of those
words and all that they mean and all that the speaker of them means to
us and to our lives. When we remember that truth, when we recognize that
no man is ever to be saved except by the fulfilment of his own nature,
and not by the restraint of his nature, when we recognize that no man,
no personal, individual man, is ever to be ransomed from his sins except
by having opened to him a larger and fuller life into which he has
entered, we seem to have displayed to us a large region, into which we
are tempted to enter, and which is so rich and inviting to us that we
immediately begin to ask ourselves if it is possible that there should
be such a region. It is simply a great dream that we set before us. It
is something that we imagine, something that comes out of the
imaginations and anticipations of our own hearts, simply stimulated by
the possibilities of the life in which we are living. It would be very
much indeed, if it were only that. It would bear a certain testimony of
itself, if it simply came out of the perpetual dissatisfaction of men's
souls, even if there were no distinct manifestation of that life and no
possibility of entering into it at once with our own personal
consecration, with the resolution of our own wills. But if it were
simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away out of the thoughts of
men. It is impossible that men should keep on, year after year, age
after age, this simple dream of something which does not exist. It would
be like those pictures which the poet has drawn, something which appeals
to nothing in our human nature and stands only as a parable of something
that is a great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures to us in his
imagination those things which do not appeal to our life, because they
find nothing to correspond to their high portraits, to show those
transformations of nature into something that is entirely different and
foreign to itself. If religion be simply the dream that some men hold it
to be, if it simply be the cheating of man's soul with that which has no
reality to correspond to it, then it will be no more than this. Is there
any assurance that is given to us, that is before the soul of man, of
some great new life which it is given for man to seek, without which it
is given for no man to be satisfied? I do not know where any man could
find that assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there had stood
forth before us the person of Him who spoke these words and who
manifested them in His life. And therefore it is that, having pictured
to you the richness of the life which is open to every man, his own true
life, the large freedom into which he may go if, giving up his sins he
enters into the fulness of the life of God, I cannot help now calling
you to think about Him who gives, not merely by His words, but by the
whole of His own person and life, that manifestation of the reality of
the divine existence and tempts us to follow after Him. In other words,
we come to-day to think of Christ, Christ who claims to be the master of
the world, Christ from whom the revelation of that higher life has come,
not in its first instance in the manifestation of the words which he
spoke, for it had been the dream of human hearts through all the ages,
but who made it so distinct and clear that ever since the time of Christ
men have been able to cease to seek after it, men have never been able
to give up the hope and dream that it was there. It is our Christ in
whom we Christians believe. It is the Christ in whom a great many of you
listening to me now claim to believe--I do myself--in whom many of you
do believe, whom many of you have followed into that newer life. I would
to God that I could so set Him before you to-day, could so make you feel
his actual presence in the life which we are living, which we may be
living, that there should be no question in any man of the power that is
open before him to enter into the higher life and to fulfil his soul to
God. What I want to do, in the few moments which I may speak to you this
morning, is--laying aside all the theological conceptions regarding
Him, laying aside everything that attaches to the complications and
mysteries in which His nature has been involved in men's dreams of Him,
laying aside everything which the churches are holding as the special
doctrine of their especial creed--to go back to the very beginning and
see if we can understand anything of what it is--this personal Christ,
who lives here in the world and manifests the power of God and opens the
possibility of every man. Surely it is good that we should know
something about Him of whom we speak so much, that there should be some
clear and directest conception of one whose name has been upon the lips
of men for eighteen hundred years; and it is possible for us, in the
simplest way, to understand how His power has come into the world and to
see where it is possible that it should come and enrich our lives and
make us different men. We go back, then, to the very beginning of the
aspiration after God, which is in the heart of man everywhere. There has
never been a race that has been without it. There has never been a
generation that has not reached forward and thought there was a higher
life, a fuller liberty, to which it could come. It has been in all the
religions which have been not simply fears, but which have been the
highest utterances of all the different races in all the different
generations of mankind and all the different countries of the world; and
there was one especial race in one especial part of the world in whom
that aspiration was especially strong. We will not ask how it came to be
there. There it was in this strange people living on the eastern shore
of the Mediterranean Sea, and in all its history marked out by the
strange peculiarity that it was a spiritual people, that in the midst of
all its sins, blunders, and weaknesses it was forever lifting up its
soul to God and striving to find Him out. Very often it blundered
strangely and sadly. Very often it failed to get that for which it was
seeking, by the very impetuousness, rashness, and earnestness of search.
But it was always seeking after Him. And the years rolled by, and by and
by in the midst of that great nation there was a little company of men
who, accompanying one another from the beginning of their lives, had
been searching after this God and trying everywhere if they could find
Him. And one day they heard that down by the river which ran through
their country, which was sacred to them from the multitude of old
national associations, there was a great teacher come, who was declaring
that for which the human soul was forever reaching after, the need of
escaping from sin and entering upon and leading a higher life. This
little company went down and met two disciples of John the Baptist, and
learned from them everything that they had to teach them. Their souls
were stirred by that which he had to say. But one day, while he was
teaching them, it seemed as if they had come to an end of that which he
could teach them. He looked up, and there upon the hill just above the
river there was passing one upon whom the gaze of the fishermen by the
river immediately kindled, and he lifted his hand and said, "He is the
one who is to teach you now. You must go after him. Behold the Lamb of
God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Great and mysterious
words, that filled in that which men had believed in all the records
they had read and the thinking they had done before! And they turned
away from John and went after this new teacher and, following to His
house, there they abode with Him during that day and the days that
followed after. Little by little, as we read the story of their being
with him, we can see them taken into His power, we can see how there was
a certain fascination in His presence which laid hold upon them. It
seemed at first to be purely human, to be the way in which one strong
man takes possession of his fellow-man and compels him to rely upon him.
It was upon purely human ground. It was in the manifestation of the
excellence of this human nature of ours that they believed in Jesus and
gradually became His disciples. Little by little it so commanded them
that at last the moment came when it was impossible for them to separate
themselves from Him; and one day, when the people were turning away from
Him when He was preaching and saying things that it was hard for them to
understand, He looked around upon them and said, "Are you going also,
will you leave me now?" And then there burst forth from the lips of one
of them, the most strong and characteristic act of the little company,
those great words that declared how He had become necessary to them:
"Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." You
see the power that Jesus had acquired over these men. You see the way in
which He had taken them absolutely into His dominion, simply because of
the manifestation of character and life, simply because He had shown
them what man might be and opened the springs of the better life in
themselves by the words He had spoken to them. And then they lived on
with Him still, and by and by they had become so convinced by His truth
and wisdom, His character had so taken possession of them, that they
were ready to believe anything that He said. One day He lifted up His
voice and declared that which had gradually been dawning upon them all
the time, that He was more than they were, that He had brought in some
mysterious way a divine life into this world and had much to communicate
to them. He told them that He was the Father from whom His life and
their life had come. He told them that He and the Father were one. He
told them, not in theological statement, not as men have worked out
since in their desire to know it fully, but in the simple statement of
the truth that could be the inspiration of their life, that in His
presence there was here the very presence of God among them. It was not
strange to them, though human creatures, though men, that the highest
aspiration of their humanity had never thought God so far from this
world that it seemed to them strange that there should be in very human
presence the divine life here with them. They could not explain it and
did not try to explain it. Here it was, that which they had seen
shadowed in the divinest men whom they had known, that which they had
recognized. Here it was before them in this being who had won such a
power over them that they were ready to accept His testimony with regard
to Himself. Oh! my friends, let us not feel that the evidence of our
Christian faith fails when it is seen to rest upon the word of Christ
Himself. My neighbor knows more of himself than I know of him. I know
more of myself than any man can know of me, if only I be earnest and
sincere. And that the greatest of men who ever trod this earth should
not know more of His nature than any other man should know, and that
therefore His word should not be the richest revelation of that which is
in His life and makes His power over mankind, that is incredible.
Therefore the men were right when they believed Jesus' own word and
looked to Him for the divinity which He said was present with Him upon
the earth. Then His life went on, and by and by fulfilled itself in the
one great action in which He declared those two things which He longed
to know, the life and newness of God and the power of their human
nature. He gave His life for them, indeed, in the awful suffering that
preceded and that culminated upon the cross. He gave His life in
crucifixion for them, and in that crucifixion opened the divinest doors
of His life, when opening a sanctuary of sorrow; and He bade them enter
in and know there the absolute life of God and the great capacity of
human nature to sacrifice itself for God. And before He died, and
afterward, He again appeared to them. He spoke great words which said
that this was not the end of things, that after they had ceased to see
Him and touch Him and hear His voice He still was to be present in the
world. He said that the mysterious presence of those who had passed
away, which all had known, was to culminate and be fulfilled in Him. "I
am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Wherever you "are
together in my name, there am I." Words and words and words again like
those He spoke, in which He declared that He was to be an everlasting
presence among mankind, and therefore that which had taken place in the
life of those disciples might forever take place; that that which Jesus
had done in the days when He was present upon the earth should be
continually repeated, in that He was forever to do that which He had
been doing, giving Himself to human kind for their inspiration, for
their elevation, for their correction, for their reproof, as He had been
doing, their salvation, as He had been doing in those days in which He
was here among them. Men have believed that simply. They have recognized
that word of Christ, and found the fulfilment of it in their own lives;
and that has been the Christian religion,--just exactly what it was in
the old days when Jesus was present in Jerusalem and Galilee. Just
exactly what men did then men have been doing in all the generations
that have come since. Just exactly what was possible then is possible
for them now--that we may become the followers of that same Christ and
the receivers through Him of the divine life, by which alone the human
life is perfected and fulfilled.

That is the Christian religion. That is the Christian faith. Is it not
clear and simple, whether it be true or not? My friends, you may believe
it or you may disbelieve it, but the Christian faith is clear and simple
enough surely in this statement, stripped of a thousand difficulties,
perplexities, and bewilderments. That is it, that there is in the world
to-day the same Christ who was in the world eighteen hundred and more
years ago, and that men may go to Him and receive His life and the
inspiration of His presence and the guidance of His wisdom just exactly
as they did then. If you and I had been in Jerusalem in those old days,
what would we have done, if we were more than mere creatures of others,
more than men merely absorbed in our business, if there were any
stirring in our souls after the deeper and diviner desires, could we,
would we have been satisfied until we had gone wherever He might be,--in
the temple, in the courts, or on the country road,--and found that
Jesus, and entered into some sympathy with His life, that He might give
to us what revelation of life and what guidance of will it might be
possible should come from Him to men who trusted Him, until we had
entered into sympathy with Him and the fascinations of His character?
That is the Christian life, my friends, the thing we make so vague and
mysterious and difficult. That is the Christian life, the following of
Jesus Christ.

What is the Christian? Everywhere the man who, so far as he comprehends
Jesus Christ, so far as he can get any knowledge of Him, is His servant,
the man who makes Christ a teacher of his intelligence and the guide of
his soul, the man who obeys Christ as far as he has been able to
understand Him. What, you say, the man who imperfectly understands
Christ, who don't know anything about His divinity, who denies the great
doctrines of the Church in regard to Him, is he a Christian? Certainly
he is, my friends. There is no other test than this, the following of
Jesus Christ. So far as any soul deeply consecrated to Him, and wanting
the influence that it feels that He has to give, follows Christ, enters
into His obedience and His company, and receives His blessings, just so
far He is able to bestow it. I cannot sympathize with any feeling that
desires to make the name of Christian a narrower name. I would spread it
just as wide as it can be possibly made to spread. I would know any man
as a Christian, rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would
recognize as a Christian, and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in those old days
recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest
sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what
He was and of what He could do.

And then, again, is it not very strange, certainly, that there should
be, in these later days, in all these centuries that have passed between
the day of Jesus Christ and us, that there should have come a vast
accumulation of speculation and conjecture, of theorizing and thought
with regard to Christ and what He was, and that a great deal of it
should have been very strange and should seem to us to-day to have been
very silly, a great part of it should have seemed to be but a work of
intelligences that were half dulled and blinded, full of prejudice, and
shrinking from the error and the danger in which they stood? What does
it mean--all these complicated theologies that we say are keeping us
away from the simple following of the grandest figure that has ever
presented Himself before human kind? I know not how else it can be when
I see what has been the power of Jesus over thoughts and homes and
hearts of men through all these years. It seems to be a previous
necessity that He who most fastens the heart and life of man, who seems
to be most necessary to the soul of men, shall so attract their thought,
shall so draw them all to Himself that their crudest speculations, that
their most erroneous conceptions, shall fasten upon him, and they shall
be in some true way a testimony of the way in which He has always held
the human heart. This is the way in which all crudities of theology, all
the weaknesses of speculation, all even of the most strange and foul
thoughts in regard to the life of Jesus and His manifestation in the
world, have accumulated around that gracious figure, so simple and
strong, which walks through our human life and manifests to us the God.
Surely it is in one conception of it, and the true conception of it, the
great perpetual testimony of how men have cared about Jesus, that they
have speculated about Him in such strange perplexing ways. But He about
whom the world does not care walks through the world and bears His
simple being. There is nothing that fastens upon Him, that perplexes His
life, that makes mysterious and strange the life He lives. But where is
the great man in all the history of human kind that has not gathered
about his person and work the speculations of those whom we find, with
their crude and unguided minds, have formed their theories in regard to
Him? It is the very abundance of the strange speculations with regard to
Christ, it is the very strangeness of the theories that have been formed
with regard to Him, that has shown me how He has drawn the hearts of
men, how He has not let them go, but compelled them to fasten themselves
to Him, to think about Him and try to follow Him in such poor, blind
ways as they were able to give themselves to Him in. This, then, is the
Christian faith. This is the way in which the larger life opens before
mankind, by the following of a person, by the giving of the life into
the dominion and the guidance and the obedience of one who goes forward
into that life, himself thoroughly believing in it--for Jesus believed
in it with all His human soul.

But then, we ask ourselves, is it possible that we can gather from such
a life as Jesus lived so long ago, a life that was lived back in the
very dust of history and that has come down to us in records which seem
sometimes to be flecked with tradition and obscured with the distance in
which they lived, is it possible that I should get from him a guidance
of my daily life here? Am I, a man of the nineteenth century, when
everything has changed, in Boston, in this modern civilization,--can
Jesus really be my teacher, my guide, in the actual duties and
perplexities of my daily life and lead me into the larger land in which
I know he lives? Ah! the man knows very little about the everlasting
identity of human nature, little of how the world in all these
changeless ages is the same, who asks that; very little, also, of how in
every largest truth there are all particulars and details of human life
involved; little of how everything that a man is to-day, upon every
moment, rests upon some eternal foundation and may be within the power
of some everlasting law. The wonder of the life of Jesus is this--and
you will find it so and you have found it so if you have ever taken your
New Testament and tried to make it the rule of your daily life--that
there is not a single action that you are called upon to do of which you
need be, of which you will be, in any serious doubt for ten minutes as
to what Jesus Christ, if He were here, Jesus Christ being here, would
have you do under those circumstances and with the material upon which
you are called to act. Men have tried to go back and imitate the very
activities of the life of Jesus Christ, to do the very things that He
did. Souls have fled across the sea and tried upon the hills and in the
plains where Jesus lived to reproduce the life that has so fascinated
them. They were poor and unphilosophic souls. The soul that takes in
Jesus' word, the soul that through the words of Jesus enters into the
very person of Jesus, the soul that knows Him as its daily presence and
its daily law--it never hesitates. Do I doubt--I, who see myself called
upon to be the slave of these conditions which are around me--to do this
thing? Because it is the custom of the business in which I am engaged,
do I doubt fora moment if I turn aside and open this New Testament,
which is Jesus' law with regard to that thing? I, with my passion
boiling in my veins, leading me to do some foul act of outrageous lust,
have I a single moment's doubt what Jesus would have me do if He were
here--what Jesus, being here, really wants me to do? There is no single
act of your life, my friend, there is no single dilemma in which you
find yourself placed, in which the answer is not in Jesus Christ. I do
not say that you will find some words in Jesus' teachings in the Gospel
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that will detail exactly the condition
in which you find yourself placed; but I do say that if, with your human
sympathies and your devoted love, you can feel the presence of that
Jesus behind the words that He said, the personal perfectness, the
divine life manifested in the human life, there is not a single sin or
temptation to sin that will not be convicted.

There is where we rest when we claim that Jesus Christ is the master of
the world, that He opens the great richness and infinite distances of
the human life, that He shows us what it is to be men. It would be
little if He did that simply with the painting of some glorious vision
upon the skies beyond; but that He comes into your life and mine, into
our homes and our shops, into our offices and on our streets, and there
makes known in the actual circumstances of our daily life what we ought
to do and what we ought not to do--that is the wonder of his revelation;
that is what proclaims him to be the Son of God and the Son of man.
Think, as you sit here, of anything that you are doing that is wrong, of
any habit of your life, of your self-indulgence, or of that great,
pervasive habit of your life which makes you a creature of the present
instead of the eternities, a creature of the material earth instead of
the glorious skies. Ask of yourself of any habit that belongs to your
own personal life, and bring it face to face with Jesus Christ and see
if it is not judged. A judgment day that is far away, that is off in the
dim distance when this world is done--it shall come, no doubt. I know
none of us can know much with regard to it, except that it is sure. But
the judgment day that is here now is Christ; the judgment day that is
right close to your life and rebukes you, if you will let Him rebuke you
every time you sin, the judgment day that is here and praises you and
bids you be of good courage, when you do a thing that men disown and
despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure of speech, it is no mere
ecstasy of the imagination of the preacher, when we say that in the
midst of these streets of ours, more real than the men that walk in
them, more real than the sidewalks that are under our feet, and the
buildings that tower over us, there walks an unseen presence. An unseen
presence? Yes. Are you and I going to be such creatures of our senses
that we shall not believe that there are powers that touch us that we
cannot see? Am I going to be so bound down to these poor fingers and to
these poor eyes that I shall know myself in no larger connection with
the great, unseen world? I will not. No great man, no manly man, has
ever allowed such a limitation of himself. There is the unseen presence
in the midst of our life, and he who will feel it may feel it, and that
unseen presence speaks to him continually. It knows every one of us. It
knows the rich man and knows what his wealth has made of him. It knows
whether it has made him selfish. Shall I say it? He, the Christ, the
present Christ, knows whether the rich man's riches have made him
selfish and base and mean, covetous and poor and little-souled, or
whether he has been glad to rise to the greatness of his privilege, and
be the very utterance of the beneficence of God upon the earth. He knows
the poor man and his struggles, he knows the poor man and his
self-respect. He speaks to the poor man's soul, who has been kept poor
because he will not enter into the baser methods and motives of our
modern life, and is despised, and says to him, "Be of good courage, for
I know what you are." He speaks to the poor in distress and poverty. He
speaks to the wretched in their disappointment and their pain. He is
their comforter. He knows every sin. He knows every sorrow of our life.
He goes, unseen on earth, into the chambers where the dead lie dead, and
where the sick lie dying, and He speaks His words of consolation, He
opens up the glory of the perfect life. He lays his hand upon the
mourner whose soul is bowed down to the earth and says, "Look up," and
points into eternity and heaven. All these things Christ can do not
merely, but Christ is doing. He is the inspiring power of this life,
that keeps it from rotting in its corruption and degradation. We dwell
too much, I think, upon some of these things; we cannot dwell too much,
perhaps, but we dwell out of proportion, it may be, to the thought of
Jesus Christ, the comforter of sorrow. He is the comforter of sorrow,
for he knew and he knows what sorrow is. In His own crucifixion, in that
which came before His crucifixion, He knew the suffering of this earthly
life. There is no human being who ever has known the misery of man as
Jesus knows it, and so He comes to all sorrows with tender consolation.
God grant, God grant He may come to any of you who have come into these
doors to-day with a sorrow, with a fear, with a dread upon your hearts,
with souls that are wrung, with bodies that are suffering! God grant
that the Christ may comfort you, may comfort you! But not only that.
Shall there be no Christ for those who for the moment seem to need no
comfort?

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