Again he said, "The clergy are largely what the laity make them.... It was not good that the minister should be worshipped and made an oracle. It is still worse that he should be flattered and made a pet. And there is such a tendency in these days among our weaker people.... It is possible for such a man, if he has popular gifts, to be petted all through his ministry, never once to come into strong contact with other men, or to receive one good hard knock of the sort that brings out manliness and character."
Dr. Brooks liked to have ministers share their knowledge; giving such lectures as Norman Macleod's on geology to the weavers at Newmilns. "Would that more of us were able to follow his example." This was what Charles Kingsley loved to do.
Of political preaching, Dr. Brooks said to the students, "I despise, and call upon you to despise, all the weak assertions that a minister must not preach politics because he will injure his influence if he does, or because it is unworthy of his sacred office.
"When some clear question of right and wrong presents itself, and men with some strong passion or sordid interest are going wrong, then your sermon is a poor, untimely thing if it deals only with the abstractions of eternity, and has no word to help the men who are dizzied with the whirl and blinded with the darkness of to-day."
He constantly urged men of all classes to do their best. "The primary fact of duty lies at the core of everything," he said.
He preached his own sermons with the single motive "of moving men's souls." He wrote rapidly, and spoke rapidly, over two hundred words a minute. Two stenographers were always necessary to record his sermons or addresses. His Lenten noonday sermons at Trinity Church, New York, or at St. Paul's Church, Boston, were crowded with the busiest business men of both cities. He could preach with or without notes. He could write a sermon in six hours, at two sittings of three hours each; but he had been studying and thinking all his life for it.
In 1886 Dr. Brooks was elected assistant-bishop of Pennsylvania, but declined.
In 1889 the freshmen of Wellesley College made him an honorary member of their class. He accepted the position, as had Dr. Holmes and others with former classes. He enjoyed meeting with the young women, for he always treated men and women alike, with no increased suavity for the latter. About a week before his death, says an article in the Feb. 15, 1894, Golden Rule, he went to Wellesley College to address the students, and afterwards received them in the large parlors. "I met my class here one Sunday afternoon," he said, "and they asked me questions, ten to the minute. It was very interesting. They did not differentiate at all between the questions that may be answered and the questions that may not."
In 1891 Phillips Brooks was chosen Bishop of Massachusetts, after a heated contest between the High and Broad Churchmen. Dr. Brooks wisely kept silent during the whole controversy.