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
Know Christ with the first conceptions, imperfect
and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall go on knowing more and more
of that Christ. That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, shall
be different from the Christ he knew at ten, just exactly as the friend
I know at fifty is different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty
years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, forever opening the
richness of an ever richer life, filling it with new experiences, with
new manifestations of Himself. Let him drop something which seemed to
him to be a part of the religion, but was only a temporary phase or
condition of it, going forward with the soul all through the opening
stages of life, and at last going forward with the soul into the life
where it shall see as all along it has been seen, and know as it has
been known. The old legend was that the clothes of the Israelites, which
the Bible said waxed not old upon them in the desert during those forty
years, not merely waxed not old those forty years, but grew with their
growth, so that the little Hebrew who crossed the Red Sea in his boy's
clothes wore the same clothes when he entered into the Promised Land. It
is the parable of that which comes to the man who has a true Christian
faith, a faith which comes in the personal friendship of Christ, a faith
which comes not in the belief of certain things about Him, not in the
doing slavishly of certain things which it seemed as if it had been said
by Him that we must do, but in the personal entrance into His nature in
a life for Him, in which He is able to send His life down into us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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