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
into that life, himself thoroughly believing in it--for Jesus believed
in it with all His human soul.
But then, we ask ourselves, is it possible that we can gather from such
a life as Jesus lived so long ago, a life that was lived back in the
very dust of history and that has come down to us in records which seem
sometimes to be flecked with tradition and obscured with the distance in
which they lived, is it possible that I should get from him a guidance
of my daily life here? Am I, a man of the nineteenth century, when
everything has changed, in Boston, in this modern civilization,--can
Jesus really be my teacher, my guide, in the actual duties and
perplexities of my daily life and lead me into the larger land in which
I know he lives? Ah! the man knows very little about the everlasting
identity of human nature, little of how the world in all these
changeless ages is the same, who asks that; very little, also, of how in
every largest truth there are all particulars and details of human life
involved; little of how everything that a man is to-day, upon every
moment, rests upon some eternal foundation and may be within the power
of some everlasting law. The wonder of the life of Jesus is this--and
you will find it so and you have found it so if you have ever taken your
New Testament and tried to make it the rule of your daily life--that
there is not a single action that you are called upon to do of which you
need be, of which you will be, in any serious doubt for ten minutes as
to what Jesus Christ, if He were here, Jesus Christ being here, would
have you do under those circumstances and with the material upon which
you are called to act. Men have tried to go back and imitate the very
activities of the life of Jesus Christ, to do the very things that He
did. Souls have fled across the sea and tried upon the hills and in the
plains where Jesus lived to reproduce the life that has so fascinated
them. They were poor and unphilosophic souls. The soul that takes in
Jesus' word, the soul that through the words of Jesus enters into the
very person of Jesus, the soul that knows Him as its daily presence and
its daily law--it never hesitates. Do I doubt--I, who see myself called
upon to be the slave of these conditions which are around me--to do this
thing? Because it is the custom of the business in which I am engaged,
do I doubt fora moment if I turn aside and open this New Testament,
which is Jesus' law with regard to that thing? I, with my passion
boiling in my veins, leading me to do some foul act of outrageous lust,
have I a single moment's doubt what Jesus would have me do if He were
here--what Jesus, being here, really wants me to do? There is no single
act of your life, my friend, there is no single dilemma in which you
find yourself placed, in which the answer is not in Jesus Christ. I do
not say that you will find some words in Jesus' teachings in the Gospel
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that will detail exactly the condition
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