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
present Christ, knows whether the rich man's riches have made him
selfish and base and mean, covetous and poor and little-souled, or
whether he has been glad to rise to the greatness of his privilege, and
be the very utterance of the beneficence of God upon the earth. He knows
the poor man and his struggles, he knows the poor man and his
self-respect. He speaks to the poor man's soul, who has been kept poor
because he will not enter into the baser methods and motives of our
modern life, and is despised, and says to him, "Be of good courage, for
I know what you are." He speaks to the poor in distress and poverty. He
speaks to the wretched in their disappointment and their pain. He is
their comforter. He knows every sin. He knows every sorrow of our life.
He goes, unseen on earth, into the chambers where the dead lie dead, and
where the sick lie dying, and He speaks His words of consolation, He
opens up the glory of the perfect life. He lays his hand upon the
mourner whose soul is bowed down to the earth and says, "Look up," and
points into eternity and heaven. All these things Christ can do not
merely, but Christ is doing. He is the inspiring power of this life,
that keeps it from rotting in its corruption and degradation. We dwell
too much, I think, upon some of these things; we cannot dwell too much,
perhaps, but we dwell out of proportion, it may be, to the thought of
Jesus Christ, the comforter of sorrow. He is the comforter of sorrow,
for he knew and he knows what sorrow is. In His own crucifixion, in that
which came before His crucifixion, He knew the suffering of this earthly
life. There is no human being who ever has known the misery of man as
Jesus knows it, and so He comes to all sorrows with tender consolation.
God grant, God grant He may come to any of you who have come into these
doors to-day with a sorrow, with a fear, with a dread upon your hearts,
with souls that are wrung, with bodies that are suffering! God grant
that the Christ may comfort you, may comfort you! But not only that.
Shall there be no Christ for those who for the moment seem to need no
comfort?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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