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
in which you find yourself placed; but I do say that if, with your human
sympathies and your devoted love, you can feel the presence of that
Jesus behind the words that He said, the personal perfectness, the
divine life manifested in the human life, there is not a single sin or
temptation to sin that will not be convicted.
There is where we rest when we claim that Jesus Christ is the master of
the world, that He opens the great richness and infinite distances of
the human life, that He shows us what it is to be men. It would be
little if He did that simply with the painting of some glorious vision
upon the skies beyond; but that He comes into your life and mine, into
our homes and our shops, into our offices and on our streets, and there
makes known in the actual circumstances of our daily life what we ought
to do and what we ought not to do--that is the wonder of his revelation;
that is what proclaims him to be the Son of God and the Son of man.
Think, as you sit here, of anything that you are doing that is wrong, of
any habit of your life, of your self-indulgence, or of that great,
pervasive habit of your life which makes you a creature of the present
instead of the eternities, a creature of the material earth instead of
the glorious skies. Ask of yourself of any habit that belongs to your
own personal life, and bring it face to face with Jesus Christ and see
if it is not judged. A judgment day that is far away, that is off in the
dim distance when this world is done--it shall come, no doubt. I know
none of us can know much with regard to it, except that it is sure. But
the judgment day that is here now is Christ; the judgment day that is
right close to your life and rebukes you, if you will let Him rebuke you
every time you sin, the judgment day that is here and praises you and
bids you be of good courage, when you do a thing that men disown and
despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure of speech, it is no mere
ecstasy of the imagination of the preacher, when we say that in the
midst of these streets of ours, more real than the men that walk in
them, more real than the sidewalks that are under our feet, and the
buildings that tower over us, there walks an unseen presence. An unseen
presence? Yes. Are you and I going to be such creatures of our senses
that we shall not believe that there are powers that touch us that we
cannot see? Am I going to be so bound down to these poor fingers and to
these poor eyes that I shall know myself in no larger connection with
the great, unseen world? I will not. No great man, no manly man, has
ever allowed such a limitation of himself. There is the unseen presence
in the midst of our life, and he who will feel it may feel it, and that
unseen presence speaks to him continually. It knows every one of us. It
knows the rich man and knows what his wealth has made of him. It knows
whether it has made him selfish. Shall I say it? He, the Christ, the
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