You rejoice in it.  You have an irrational feeling that it would be a wrong to shut up so much opulence of personal vitality in any home less wide and open than a great basilica like Trinity Church.  At least, you are not pained with sympathy for homelessness in the case of a man so richly endowed.  To be so pained would be like shivering on behalf of the sun, because, forsooth, the sun had nothing to make him warm and bright.  Phillips Brooks in Trinity Church is like the sun in its sphere.  Still, and were it not impertinent, I could even wish for Phillips Brooks an every-day home, such as would be worthy of him.  What a home it should be!  And with thus much of loyal, if of doubtfully appropriate tribute, irresistibly prompted, and therefore not to be repressed, let me go on to speak of Phillips Brooks as he is to be seen and heard Sunday after Sunday at home in Trinity Church.

Every body knows how magnificent an edifice, with its arrested tower yet waiting and probably long to wait completion, Trinity Church is.  The interior is decorated almost to the point of gorgeousness.  The effect, however, is imposing for “the height, the glow, the glory.”  Good taste reigning over lavish expenditure has prevented chromatic richness from seeming to approach tawdriness.  It is much to say for any man preaching here that the building does not make him look disproportionate, inadequate.  This may strongly be said for Phillips Brooks.  But even for him it can not be said that the form and construction of the interior do not oppose a serious embarrassment to the proper effect of oratory.  I could not help feeling it to be a great wrong to the truth, or, to put it personally, a great wrong to the preacher and to his hearers, that an audience-room should be so broken up with pillars, angles, recesses, so sown with contrasts of light and shade, as necessarily, inevitably, to disperse and waste an immense fraction of the power exerted by the preacher, whatever the measure, great or small, of that power might be.  The reaction of this audience-room upon the oratorical instinct and habit of the man who should customarily speak in it could not but be mischievous in a very high degree.  The sense, which ought to live in every public speaker, of his being fast bound in a grapple of mind to mind, and heart to heart, and soul to soul, with his audience, must be oppressed, if not extinguished, amid such architectural conditions as those which surround Phillips Brooks when he stands to preach.  That in him this needful sense is not extinguished is a thing to be thankful for.  That it is, in fact, oppressed, I can not doubt.  There is evidence of it, I think, in his manner of preaching.  For Mr. Brooks is not an orator such as Mr. Beecher is.  He does not speak to people with people, as Mr. Beecher does; rather he speaks before them, in their presence.  He soliloquizes.  There is almost a minimum of mutual relation between speaker and hearer.  Undoubtedly the swift, urgent monologue is quickened, reinforced, by the consciousness of an audience present.  That consciousness, of course, penetrates to the mind of the speaker.  But it does not dominate the speaker’s mind; it does not turn monologue into dialogue; the speech is monologue still.