where he preached before the Queen, men and women of all classes greeted him as a friend.  They thronged the churches where he preached, not only to hear him but to see him.  Many stories are told of him; some true, some more or less apocryphal, all proving the affectionate sympathy existing between him and his kind.  It was said of him that as soon as he entered a pulpit he was absolutely impersonal.  There was no trace of individual experience or theological conflict by which he might be labeled.  He was simply a messenger of the truth as he held it, a mouthpiece of the gospel as he believed it had been delivered to him.

[Illustration:  PHILIPS BROOKS.]

Although in his seminary days his sermons were described as vague and unpractical, Phillips Brooks was as great a preacher when under thirty years of age as he was at any later time.  His early sermons, delivered to his first charge in Philadelphia, displayed the same individuality, the same force and completeness and clearness of construction, the same deep, strong undertone of religious thought, as his great discourses preached in Westminster Abbey six months before his death.  His sentences are sonorous; his style was characterized by a noble simplicity, impressive, but without a touch showing that dramatic effect was strained for.

He passionately loved nature in all her aspects, and traveled widely in search of the picturesque; but he used his experience with reserve, and his illustrations are used to explain human life.  His power of painting a picture in a few bold strokes appears strikingly in the great sermon on the ‘Lesson of the Life of Saul,’ where he contrasts early promise and final failure; and in that other not less remarkable presentation of the vision of Saint Peter.  His treatment of Bible narratives is not a translation into the modern manner, nor is it an adaptation, but a poetical rendering, in which the flavor of the original is not lost though the lesson is made contemporary.  And while he did not transcribe nature upon his pages, his sermons are not lacking in decoration.  He used figures of speech and drew freely on history and art for illustrations, but not so much to elucidate his subject as to ornament it.  His essays on social and literary subjects are written with the aim of directness of statement, pure and simple; but the stuff of which his sermons are woven is of royal purple.

The conviction that religious sentiment should penetrate the whole life showed itself in Phillips Brooks’s relation to literature.  “Truth bathed in light and uttered in love makes the new unit of power,” he says in his essay on literature.  It was his task to mediate between literature and theology, and restore theology to the place it lost through the abstractions of the schoolmen.  What he would have done if he had devoted himself to literature alone, we can only conjecture by the excellence of his style in essays and sermons.  They show his poetical