Famous leaders among men

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

"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."

Mother-love was always a strong force in the heart of Phillips Brooks. It is related that when some one asked him if he was not afraid when he first preached before Queen Victoria, he replied, "Oh no; I have preached before my mother."

He said in one of his sermons, "The purest mingling of all elements into one character and nature which we ever see, is in the Christian mother, in whom the knowledge of all that she knows, and the love which she feels for her child, make not two natures, as they often do in men, in fathers, but perfectly and absolutely one."

He often spoke of "that self-sacrifice which is the very essence of her motherhood."