Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips BrooksBrooks, Phillips
Religion
Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips Brooks
Brooks, Phillips
Episcopal Church -- Sermons; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Sermons; Sermons, American
everlasting ruin for another's sin; and so I dare to see the love of God
pursuing that lost soul where you cannot pursue it. But that does not
for one moment lift the shadow from your heart, or cease to make you
tremble when you think of how your sin has outgrown itself and is
running far, far away where you can never follow it.
Thank God the other thing is true as well. Thank God that when a man
does a bit of service, however little it may be, of that too he can
never trace the consequences. Thank God that that which in some better
moment, in some nobler inspiration, you did ten years ago to make your
brother's faith a little more strong, to let your shop boy confirm and
not doubt the confidence in man which he had brought into his business,
to establish the purity of a soul instead of staining it and shaking it,
thank God, in this quick, electric atmosphere in which we live, that,
too, runs forth. Do not say in your terror, "I will do nothing." You
must do something. Only let Christ tell you--let Christ tell you that
there is nothing that a man rests upon in the moment, that he thinks of,
as he looks back upon it when it has sunk into the past, with any
satisfaction, except some service to his fellow-man, some strengthening
and helping of a human soul.
Two men are walking down the street together and talking away. See what
different conditions those two men are in. One of them has his soul
absolutely full of the desire to help his fellow-man. He peers into
those faces as he goes, and sees the divine possibility that is in them,
and he sees the divine nature everywhere. They are talking about the
idlest trifles, about the last bit of local Boston politics. But in
their souls one of those men has consecrated himself, with the new
morning, to the glorious service of God, and the other of them is asking
how he may be a little richer in his miserable wealth when the day
sinks. Oh, we look into the other world and read the great words and
hear it said, Between me and thee, this and that, there is a great gulf
fixed; and we think of something that is to come in the eternal life. Is
there any gulf in eternity, is there any gulf between heaven and hell
that is wider, and deeper, and blacker, that is more impassable than
that gulf which lies between these two men going upon their daily way?
Oh, friends, it is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is
not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant
and know that God knows me through all these misconceptions and blunders
of my brethren, that God knows me--that is the awful thing. The future
judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now. It
is awful to think how the commonplace things that men can do, the
commonplace thoughts that men can think, the commonplace lives that men
can live, are but in the bosom of the future. The thing that impresses
me more and more is this--that we only need to have extended to the
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