And all along since then there have been messengers of God into whom the same divine breath has been, as it were, without measure breathed, and who have been the quickeners and inspirers of their fellows.  Nothing less than this can explain that wholly exceptional and yet consistent influence which he whom we mourn gave forth.  It was not confined or limited by merely personal or physical conditions, but breathed with equal and quickening power through all that he taught and wrote.  There were multitudes who never saw or heard him, but by whom nevertheless he was as intimately known and understood as if he had been their daily companion.

Never was there an instance which more truly fulfilled the saying, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”  They reached down to the inmost need of empty and aching hearts and answered it.  They spoke to that in the most sin-stained and wayward soul which is, after all, the image of the invisible God,—­spoke to it, touched it, constrained it.  “What has this fine-bred Boston scholar,” plain men asked, when he bade him come to us and preach in our Trinity—­“what has such an one to say to the business men of Wall Street?” But when he came, straightway every man found out that he had indeed something to say to him,—­a word of power, a word of hope, a word of enduring joy and strength!

A kindred thinker of large vision and rare insight, New England born and nurtured like himself, speaking of him not long after his death, said: 

“There are three forms pertaining to the Christian truths:  they are true as facts, they are true as doctrines intellectually apprehended, they are true as spiritual experiences to be realized.  Bishop Brooks struck directly for the last.  In the spirit he found the truth; and only as he could get it into a spiritual form did he conceive it to have power.

“It was because he assumed the facts as true in the main, refusing to insist on petty accuracy, and passed by doctrinal forms concerning which there might be great divergence of opinion, and carried his thought on into the world of spirit, that he won so great a hearing and such conviction of belief.  For it is the spirit that gives common standing-ground; it says substantially the same thing in all men.  Speak as a spirit to the spiritual nature of men, and they will respond, because in the spirit they draw near to their common source and to the world to which all belong.

“It was because he dealt with this common factor of the human and the divine nature that he was too positive and practical.  In the spirit it is all yea and amen; there is no negative; in the New Jerusalem there is no night.  We can describe this feature of his ministry by words from, one of his own sermons:  ’It has always been through men of belief, not unbelief, that power from God has poured into man.  It is not the discriminating critic, but he whose