"How he helped others to be hopeful also, how many shackles he thus
loosed from the heavy-laden, how he thus encouraged his people to work
their way forward to a future filled with promise, is a familiar story.
His hopefulness gave him his strong hold upon young men. To them, always
looking before and not behind, he stood beckoning, and the fire caught
from him spread through them and out from them. Neither they, nor any
others, may have known all the hope that was in him; indeed, he may not
have known it all himself. It often seemed as if he were hoping for
brighter days and holier lives than are consistent with human
imperfections."
Dr. Eliot, after speaking of Phillips Brooks's affection, playfulness of
conversation with his friends, his humor, which rendered his
companionship charming, his delight in children, his unconsciousness of
all his distinctions and successes, the unchangeable simplicity of his
habits, his manners, his opinions, says, "These are pleasant
recollections to all who loved him.... They linger like the soft glow of
a summer twilight, now that his day on earth is over....
"This great man was never greater than he was in the sight of those who
knew him best. 'I shall not change,' he said to a brother clergyman who
seems to have been doubtful whether he would be the same after being a
bishop,--'I shall not change, and you will always find me just as you
have found me heretofore.'"
The Rev. Arthur Brooks, D.D., in a memorial sermon preached in the
Church of the Incarnation, New York City, says that on the afternoon of
the day of the consecration of his brother as a bishop, fearing that
some of his friends might not come to see him as often as heretofore, he
said earnestly, "Don't desert me."
Phillips Brooks was born Dec. 13, 1835, on High Street, Boston, the
second in a family of six sons. His mother, Mary Ann Phillips, the
granddaughter of Judge Phillips, the founder of Phillips Academy,
Andover, was a woman of fine intellect and unusually earnest piety. His
father, William Gray Brooks, a hardware merchant, whose ancestors, like
the Phillipses, held high social position, and power in the State as
well, was a man of refinement and scholarly tastes.
The son Phillips, says the Rev. Julius H. Ward in the _New England
Magazine_ for January, 1892, "seems to have inherited from his mother
the deep and earnest piety and intellectual strength which have always
been his characteristics, and from his father the robust physical
constitution, the strong and resolute spirit, which he has shown in
using them."
"Parents whose praise," says Dr. Arthur Brooks, "because of this great
son, is in the churches to-day, earned it by self-denial and the
subordination of all interests and ambitions to the training and
education of a family of boys.... That love to Christ which glowed in
his words and flashed in his eye, was caught from a mother's lips, and
was read with boyish eyes as the central power of a mother's soul and
life."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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