Famous leaders among men

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

"I never met any man, or any ecclesiastic, half so natural, so manly, so large-hearted, so intensely Catholic in the only real sense, so loyally true in his friendships, so absolutely unselfish, so modest, so unartificial, so self-forgetful.... A blessing and a gracious presence has vanished out of many lives. With a very sad heart I bid him farewell ... the noblest, truest, and most stainless man I ever knew." Thus wrote Canon Farrar of London in The Review of Reviews for March, 1893, two months after the death of Phillips Brooks.

The various pulpits, the press, the millionnaires, the poor, and the lonely, all felt and said nearly the same thing. Canon Farrar wrote elsewhere, before Dr. Brooks's death, "I cannot recall the name of a single divine among us, of any rank, who either equals him as a preacher, or has the large sympathies and the rich endowments which distinguish him as a man."

The Nation said, "The death of Phillips Brooks strikes down the greatest figure left to the American church."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

The Rev. Stopford W. Brooke, of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, said, "He was so vigorous, so noble, so persuasive, so ever welcome a guest of all our hearts, that we had almost forgotten he, too, was mortal.... We never once doubted his sincerity, or his large, pure, generous humanity. There was a power in his presence, his smile, the grasp of his hand, that deep and magnificent eye, which triumphed, unconsciously to himself, over all our haggling differences of temperament and opinion, and drew, by the same unconsciousness of itself, our best manhood to his side. I think this long consistent unconsciousness of himself was one of the great qualities that so endeared him to us all. Here was a man possessed of most remarkable gifts,—an extraordinary vitality, an astonishing 'volume velocity' and beauty of language, a rich and fertile imagination which idealized everything it touched, a power of feeling which rose and swept into his audience like the tides in the Bay of Fundy; and yet he never seemed aware that he was anything exceptional.... I believe that greatness is more common, goodness is far more common, than that unconsciousness with which he wore his greatness and goodness."

Stopford Brooke speaks of another remarkable characteristic of Phillips Brooks,—"His radiance and his joy. No one who has read at all carefully the literature of our time can have failed to remark how dominant in it is the note of sadness. The leaders of the past generation bore, with a certain sombre melancholy, the burden of the chaos, as Carlyle puts it, which they were endeavoring to fashion into cosmos."

Not so Phillips Brooks. "Goodness and happiness, duty and joy, were constant companions in his life. We looked at him, listened to him, talked with him, and knew he had saved and kept through many long years the soul's best secret. Through all that he said and did there ran this river, fresh, clear, and abundant, of inner joy. What an inspiration that joy was to us!"

Dr. Samuel Eliot, a member of Phillips Brooks's church, and his life-long friend, says in the eulogy of him, delivered at the Boston Memorial Meeting, "He was blessed with a hopefulness of which most of us have but a comparatively scanty share. No trait of his was more conspicuous. No single source of his power over his generation was more abundant or more effective. Whatever the foreground might harbor in shadows, he looked beyond into the distance and saw it radiant....