Of Browning he writes, in "Letters of Travel," "He was one of the men whom I wanted most to see here; a pleasant gentleman, full of talk about London and London people, with not a bit of the poet about him externally."
Again he writes, "I dined with Mr. Forster and Mr. Bright, and had our great English friend pretty much to myself for two hours. He is a great talker, especially when he gets onto America; and he knows what he is talking about. Both he and Forster are friends worth having. Bright, personally, wins you in a minute by his frankness and cordialness and manliness of his greeting."
He attended one of Mrs. Gladstone's receptions; met Mr. Gladstone at dinner at Mr. Bryce's; breakfasted with Matthew Arnold, "and liked him very much;" met Jean Ingelow, Mrs. Ritchie (Thackeray's daughter), Hughes, and many others.
Dr. Brooks returned to Boston Sept. 22, and the people received him with open arms.
Dr. Brooks was a Broad Churchman, and broad in every sense of the word. His secretary tells of a conversation he had with the rector, when, after differing in opinion, he said to Phillips Brooks, "I am very sorry that I have said what I have just said."
"Why?" was asked.
"Because it is not pleasant to me to differ with you in opinions," was the reply of the secretary. Dr. Brooks answered with much earnestness, "This is a free country, and every man has the right to express his own opinions."
Phillips Brooks was one of the most tolerant of men. In two lectures on "Tolerance," delivered before the students of several divinity schools of the Episcopal Church, he said, "Tolerance is the willing consent that other men should hold and express opinions with which we disagree, until they are convinced by reason that those opinions are untrue.
"I know some ministers," he said, "who want all their parishioners to think after their fashion, and are troubled when any of their people show signs of thinking for themselves, and holding ideas which the minister does not hold. Thank God, the human nature is too vital, especially when it is inspired with such a vital force as Christian faith, to yield itself to such unworthy slavery....
"Bidden to believe that souls would be punished for wrong-thinking, people have come to doubt whether souls would be punished for anything at all. The only possibility of any light upon the darkness, any order in the confusion, must lie in the clear and unqualified assertion that such as God is can punish such as men are for nothing except wickedness, and that honestly mistaken opinions are not wicked....