Addresses by Phillips Brooks

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Shall there be no Christ for the strong men who have before them the
duties of their life, and who want the strength with which to do them?
Shall there be no Christ for the young men, the young men standing in
danger, but also standing in such magnificent and splendid chances? It
is great to think of Christ standing by the sorrowing and comforting
them. It is great,--we will not say it is greater,--it is very great,
when by the side of the young man just entering into life there stands
the Christ, saying to his soul, with the voice that he cannot fail to
hear: "Be pure, be strong, be wise, be independent; rejoice in Me and My
appreciation. Let the world go, if it is necessary that the world should
go. Serve the world, but do not be the servant of the world. Make the
world your servant by helping the world in every way in which you can
minister to its life. Be brave, be strong, be manly by My strength." Oh!
young man, if you can hear the Christ speak to you like that behind all
the traditions of the street, behind the teachings of the books, behind
all that the wise and successful men say to you, behind all the cynics
and sneerers say to you, the great, strong, healthy voice of Jesus
Christ, who believes in man because He has known man filled with
divinity, and believes in you because He knows that which has been set
before you by your Father in the sending out of your life, and who longs
and prays and waits to strengthen you, that you may do your work, that
you may escape from sin, that you may live your life, this great figure
of the present Christ that Christianity can produce--it is not the
memory of something that is away back in the past, it is not the
anticipation of something to come in the future. We talk about Christ
the Saviour, and think about Calvary long ago. We talk about the Christ
the Judge, and think of a great white throne set in some mystic valley
of Jehoshaphat, where some day the world is to be judged. We do not so
get hold of Christ. The Christ who is in the past is not our Christ
unless His power holds forth, the power of His spirit, which is the
whole knowledge of the life in which we live. We think of the Christ of
the future, for whom all the world is waiting. He will never enter into
us and lead us unless we know that He is here and now. It does seem to
me sometimes that if men would only take religion as a real and present
thing, and if, instead of worshipping it in the past and expecting it
with fear and dread and vain hope in the future, it could be a real
thing with them here and now, something in which they are to live, not
to which they are to flee in moments of doubt, not of which they should
make rescue, but in which they should do all their work and live, then
religion would be to the soul of man so that it could not be cast aside,
so that they must enter into it and take it into themselves and make it
their own. Religion is not the simple fire-escape that you build, in
anticipation of a possible danger, upon the outside of your dwelling and
leave there until danger comes. You go to it some morning when a fire
breaks out in your house, and the poor old thing that you built up
there, and thought you could use some day, is so rusty and broken, and
the weather has so beaten upon it, and the sun so turned its hinges,
that it will not work. That is the condition of a man who has built
himself what seems to be a creed of faith, a trust in God in
anticipation of the day when danger is to overtake him, and has said to
himself, I am safe, for I will take refuge in it then. But religion is
the house in which we live, it is the table at which we sit, it is the
fireside to which we draw near, the room that arches its graceful and
familiar presence over us; it is the bed on which we lie and think of
the past and anticipate the future and gather our refreshment. There is
no Christ except the present Christ for every man, unto whom all the
power of the historic Christ is always appearing, and who is great with
all the sweet solemnity that comes from the knowledge of what in the
future He is to be to the world and to the soul. I am anxious to-day to
impress this upon you: that the Christian faith is not a dogma, it is
not primarily a law, but is a personal presence and an immediate life
that is right here and now. I am anxious to have you know that to be a
Christian does not mean primarily to believe this or that. It does not
mean primarily, although it means necessarily afterward, to do this or
that. But it means to know the presence of a true personal Christ among
us and to follow. Here is the only true power by which a religion can
become perpetual. Men outgrow many dogmas which they hold. The lines in
which they try to live change their application to their lives. But I
know a person with a deep, true life; I enter into a friendship with one
who is worthy I should be his friend, and he is mine always. What is the
meaning of this sort of talk that we hear about a faith that they held
once, but they have outgrown? What is the reason of this expectation
that seems to have spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy who
had a religion should lose his religion some time or other, and that by
and by he should take up a man's religion somewhere upon the other side
of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, through which he has passed
in the mean while? You expect your boy of ten years old to be religious
with a child's sweet, trusting faith; and you hope that your man of
forty and fifty, beaten by the world, is to have found a God who can be
his salvation. But the years between? What do you think of your young
men of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty years old? To have
outgrown the boy's faith, and not to have come to the man's faith? That
seems almost to be an awful fate and destiny which you expect for them.
But if our faith be this, then there shall be no need, no chance that a
man shall outgrow it. Know Christ with the first conceptions, imperfect
and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall go on knowing more and more
of that Christ. That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, shall
be different from the Christ he knew at ten, just exactly as the friend
I know at fifty is different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty
years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, forever opening the
richness of an ever richer life, filling it with new experiences, with
new manifestations of Himself. Let him drop something which seemed to
him to be a part of the religion, but was only a temporary phase or
condition of it, going forward with the soul all through the opening
stages of life, and at last going forward with the soul into the life
where it shall see as all along it has been seen, and know as it has
been known. The old legend was that the clothes of the Israelites, which
the Bible said waxed not old upon them in the desert during those forty
years, not merely waxed not old those forty years, but grew with their
growth, so that the little Hebrew who crossed the Red Sea in his boy's
clothes wore the same clothes when he entered into the Promised Land. It
is the parable of that which comes to the man who has a true Christian
faith, a faith which comes in the personal friendship of Christ, a faith
which comes not in the belief of certain things about Him, not in the
doing slavishly of certain things which it seemed as if it had been said
by Him that we must do, but in the personal entrance into His nature in
a life for Him, in which He is able to send His life down into us.

Then there is another thing that people are always thinking, that I hear
very often from men, and that I have no doubt that I should hear from
many of you, one by one. You talk about your earlier religion as if it
had been some sort of a bondage from which you had escaped. How common
it is to hear men, especially in this region, say: "I would be, perhaps,
religious, except that there was so much religion forced upon me in my
earliest days. I was driven to church when I was a boy, in those old
Puritan days. I went to school, where they forced prayers upon me all
the time. I was made to be religious, so now I cannot be religious." Was
there ever a more dreadful thing than for a soul to say that, because,
it may be, of the unwisdom, or the imprudence, the overzeal and the
mistaken zeal of other men, we have not got the full blessing of that
rich, open, free life with Christ which the youth may have, and
therefore we will abandon the privileges of our higher life which is
given to us in our manlier years? It all comes of this awful way of
talking as if religion were the duty and not the inestimable privilege
of human kind. The Christ stands before us and says, "Come to me." You
say, "Must I?" And He answers, "You may." He will not even say, "You
must." You may. And duty loses itself in privilege, and the soul enters
into independence and escapes from its sins, fulfils its life, lays hold
of its salvation, becomes eternal, begins to live an eternal life in the
accepted and loving service of Christ.

Now just one word, my friends. If this be so, whether you to-day are
ready to make Christ your master and your friend or not, do not, I beg
you, let yourself say that it is a silly or unreasonable belief, thus to
know of a spiritual presence which is here among us, in which God is
really in humanity. Do not let yourselves say, my friends, that the man
who gives himself to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to enter in deeper
and deeper into his life and tries to do his will, that he may know the
Christ and know himself in the Christ more and more--dare not call that
brother a fool, as you have sometimes called your Christian man who
watched scrupulously over his life and prayed, yes, prayed, the thing
you think perhaps the foolishest thing that man can do, the thing that
is the most reasonable act that any man does upon God's earth. If man is
man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing:
it is an infinitely foolish thing. When a man for the first time bows
down upon his knees and prays, "Oh! Christ, come unto me, reveal Thyself
to me, make me to know Thee, that I may receive Thee, make me to be
obedient that I may take Thee into my life," then that man has claimed
his manhood. I beg you, I implore you, I adjure you that, if you be not
ready to be Christian, you at least will know that the Christian life is
the only true human life, and that the man who becomes thoroughly a
Christian sets his face toward the fulfilment of his humanity, and so
for the first time truly is a man. "As many as received Him,"--so the
great Scripture word runs of this Christ of whom we have been
talking,--"As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the
sons of God."

Just think of it!--the sons of God! The power to become that to as many
as will receive the present Christ.

VI. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.[1]

"He chose David also His servant, and took him away from the sheepfolds;
that he might feed Jacob His people, and Israel His inheritance. So he
fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with
all his power."--PSALM lxxviii. 71, 72, 73.

While I speak to you to-day, the body of the President who ruled this
people, is lying, honored and loved, in our city. It is impossible with
that sacred presence in our midst for me to stand and speak of ordinary
topics which occupy the pulpit. I must speak of him to-day; and I
therefore undertake to do what I had intended to do at some future time,
to invite you to study with me the character of Abraham Lincoln, the
impulses of his life and the causes of his death. I know how hard it is
to do it rightly, how impossible it is to do it worthily. But I shall
speak with confidence, because I speak to those who love him, and whose
ready love will fill out the deficiencies in a picture which my words
will weakly try to draw.

We take it for granted, first of all, that there is an essential
connection between Mr. Lincoln's character and his violent and bloody
death. It is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence. He lived as
he did, and he died as he did, because he was what he was. The more we
see of events, the less we come to believe in any fate or destiny except
the destiny of character. It will be our duty, then, to see what there
was in the character of our great President that created the history of
his life, and at last produced the catastrophe of his cruel death. After
the first trembling horror, the first outburst of indignant sorrow, has
grown calm, these are the questions which we are bound to ask and
answer.

It is not necessary for me even to sketch the biography of Mr. Lincoln.
He was born in Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky was a pioneer
State. He lived, as boy and man, the hard and needy life of a
backwoodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by his own
efforts at self-education, of an active, respected, influential citizen,
in the half-organized and manifold interests of a new and energetic
community. From his boyhood up he lived in direct and vigorous contact
with men and things, not as in older States and easier conditions with
words and theories; and both his moral convictions and his intellectual
pinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by
which men knew him, that character which is the most distinctive
possession of the best American nature, that almost indescribable
quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears
in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as
honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of
active life as practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all
shaped by the same essential force and testifying to the same inner
influences, was what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he
was to live and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view
than this of what he was. Even his physical conditions are not to be
forgotten in making up his character. We make too little always of the
physical; certainly we make too little of it here if we lose out of
sight the strength and muscular activity, the power of doing and
enduring, which the backwoods-boy inherited from generations of
hard-living ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a long discipline
of bodily toil. He brought to the solution of the question of labor in
this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with
labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and
excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every
sense that work had made clear and true. He could not have brought the
mind for his task so perfectly, unless he had first brought the body
whose rugged and stubborn health was always contradicting to him the
false theories of labor, and always asserting the true.

As to the moral and mental powers which distinguished him, all
embraceable under this general description of clearness of truth, the
most remarkable thing is the way in which they blend with one another,
so that it is next to impossible to examine them in separation. A great
many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an
intellectual man or not; as if intellect were a thing always of the same
sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's
nature and weigh by itself, and compare by pounds and ounces in this man
with another. The fact is, that in all the simplest characters that line
between the mental and moral natures is always vague and indistinct.
They run together, and in their best combinations you are unable to
discriminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and
how much is intellectual. You are unable to tell whether in the wise
acts and words which issue from such a life there is more of the
righteousness that comes of a clear conscience, or of the sagacity that
comes of a clear brain. In more complex characters and under more
complex conditions, the moral and the mental lives come to be less
healthily combined. They co-operate, they help each other less. They
come even to stand over against each other as antagonists; till we have
that vague but most melancholy notion which pervades the life of all
elaborate civilization, that goodness and greatness, as we call them,
are not to be looked for together, till we expect to see and so do see a
feeble and narrow conscientiousness on the one hand, and a bad,
unprincipled intelligence on the other, dividing the suffrages of men.

It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. Lincoln's, that they
reunite what God has joined together and man has put asunder. In him was
vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real
greatness. The twain were one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes who
stood and looked up to him for direction with such a loving and implicit
trust can tell you to-day whether the wise judgments that he gave came
most from a strong head or a sound heart. If you ask them, they are
puzzled. There are men as good as he, but they do bad things. There are
men as intelligent as he, but they do foolish things. In him goodness
and intelligence combined and made their best result of wisdom. For
perfect truth consists not merely in the right constituents of
character, but in their right and intimate conjunction. This union of
the mental and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is what we most
admire in children; but in them it is unsettled and unpractical. But
when it is preserved into manhood, deepened into reliability and
maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend
simplicity, which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness,
and is chosen by God to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for his
people, of faithful and true heart, such as he had who was our
President.

Another evident quality of such a character as this will be its
freshness or newness; if we may so speak. Its freshness or
readiness--call it what you will--its ability to take up new duties and
do them in a new way, will result of necessity from its truth and
clearness. The simple natures and forces will always be the most pliant
ones. Water bends and shapes itself to any channel. Air folds and adapts
itself to each new figure. They are the simplest and the most infinitely
active things in nature. So this nature, in very virtue of its
simplicity, must be also free, always fitting itself to each new need.
It will always start from the most fundamental and eternal conditions,
and work in the straightest even although they be the newest ways, to
the present prescribed purpose. In one word, it must be broad and
independent and radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the
character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate qualities, but the
necessary results of his simplicity and childlikeness and truth.

Here then we have some conception of the man. Out of this character came
the life which we admire and the death which we lament to-day. He was
called in that character to that life and death. It was just the nature,
as you see, which a new nation such as ours ought to produce. All the
conditions of his birth, his youth, his manhood, which made him what he
was, were not irregular and exceptional, but were the normal conditions
of a new and simple country. His pioneer home in Indiana was a type of
the pioneer land in which he lived. If ever there was a man who was a
part of the time and country he lived in, this was he. The same simple
respect for labor won in the school of work and incorporated into blood
and muscle; the same unassuming loyalty to the simple virtues of
temperance and industry and integrity; the same sagacious judgment
which had learned to be quick-eyed and quick-brained in the constant
presence of emergency; the same direct and clear thought about things,
social, political, and religious, that was in him supremely, was in the
people he was sent to rule. Surely, with such a type-man for ruler,
there would seem to be but a smooth and even road over which he might
lead the people whose character he represented into the new region of
national happiness and comfort and usefulness, for which that character
had been designed.

But then we come to the beginning of all trouble. Abraham Lincoln was
the type-man of the country, but not of the whole country. This
character which we have been trying to describe was the character of an
American under the discipline of freedom. There was another American
character which had been developed under the influence of slavery. There
was no one American character embracing the land. There were two
characters, with impulses of irrepressible and deadly conflict. This
citizen whom we have been honoring and praising represented one. The
whole great scheme with which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and
which has finally killed him, represented the other. Beside this nature,
true and fresh and new, there was another nature, false and effete and
old. The one nature found itself in a new world, and set itself to
discover the new ways for the new duties that were given it. The other
nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a
new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the
structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and
which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of
the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature
depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other
scorned him. The one was simple and direct; the other, complex, full of
sophistries and self-excuses. The one was free to look all that claimed
to be truth in the face, and separate the error from the truth that
might be in it; the other did not dare to investigate, because its own
established prides and systems were dearer to it than the truth itself,
and so even truth went about in it doing the work of error. The one was
ready to state broad principles, of the brotherhood of man, the
universal fatherhood and justice of God, however imperfectly it might
realize them in practice; the other denied even the principles, and so
dug deep and laid below its special sins the broad foundation of a
consistent, acknowledged sinfulness. In a word, one nature was full of
the influences of Freedom, the other nature was full of the influences
of Slavery.

In general, these two regions of our national life were separated by a
geographical boundary. One was the spirit of the North, the other was
the spirit of the South. But the Southern nature was by no means all a
Southern thing. There it had an organized, established form, a certain
definite, established institution about which it clustered. Here,
lacking advantage, it lived in less expressive ways and so lived more
weakly. There, there was the horrible sacrament of slavery, the outward
and visible sign round which the inward and spiritual temper gathered
and kept itself alive. But who doubts that among us the spirit of
slavery lived and thrived? Its formal existence had been swept away from
one State after another, partly on conscientious, partly on economical
grounds, but its spirit was here, in every sympathy that Northern winds
carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave-holder, and in every
oppression of the weak by the strong, every proud assumption of idleness
over labor which echoed the music of Southern life back to us. Here in
our midst lived that worse and falser nature, side by side with the true
and better nature which God meant should be the nature of Americans, of
which he was shaping out the type and champion in his chosen David of
the sheepfold.

Here then we have the two. The history of our country for many years is
the history of how these two elements of American life approached
collision. They wrought their separate reactions on each other. Men
debate and quarrel even now about the rise of Northern Abolitionism,
about whether the Northern Abolitionists were right or wrong, whether
they did harm or good. How vain the quarrel is! It was inevitable. It
was inevitable in the nature of things that two such natures living here
together should be set violently against each other. It is inevitable,
till man be far more unfeeling and untrue to his convictions than he has
always been, that a great wrong asserting itself vehemently should
arouse to no less vehement assertion the opposing right. The only wonder
is that there was not more of it. The only wonder is that so few were
swept away to take by an impulse they could not resist their stand of
hatred to the wicked institution. The only wonder is, that only one
brave, reckless man came forth to cast himself, almost single-handed,
with a hopeless hope, against the proud power that he hated, and trust
to the influence of a soul marching on into the history of his
countrymen to stir them to a vindication of the truth he loved. At any
rate, whether the Abolitionists were wrong or right, there grew up
about their violence, as there always will about the extremism of
extreme reformers, a great mass of feeling, catching their spirit and
asserting it firmly, though in more moderate degrees and methods. About
the nucleus of Abolitionism grew up a great American Anti-Slavery
determination, which at last gathered strength enough to take its stand
to insist upon the checking and limiting the extension of the power of
slavery, and to put the type-man, whom God had been preparing for the
task, before the world, to do the work on which it had resolved. Then
came discontent, secession, treason. The two American natures, long
advancing to encounter, met at last, and a whole country, yet trembling
with the shock, bears witness how terrible the meeting was.

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