The World's Great Sermons, Volume 08: Talmage to Knox Little

by Unknown

Never was there an instance which more truly fulfilled the saying, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." They reached down to the inmost need of empty and aching hearts and answered it. They spoke to that in the most sin-stained and wayward soul which is, after all, the image of the invisible God,—spoke to it, touched it, constrained it. "What has this fine-bred Boston scholar," plain men asked, when he bade him come to us and preach in our Trinity—"what has such an one to say to the business men of Wall Street?" But when he came, straightway every man found out that he had indeed something to say to him,—a word of power, a word of hope, a word of enduring joy and strength!

A kindred thinker of large vision and rare insight, New England born and nurtured like himself, speaking of him not long after his death, said:

"There are three forms pertaining to the Christian truths: they are true as facts, they are true as doctrines intellectually apprehended, they are true as spiritual experiences to be realized. Bishop Brooks struck directly for the last. In the spirit he found the truth; and only as he could get it into a spiritual form did he conceive it to have power.

"It was because he assumed the facts as true in the main, refusing to insist on petty accuracy, and passed by doctrinal forms concerning which there might be great divergence of opinion, and carried his thought on into the world of spirit, that he won so great a hearing and such conviction of belief. For it is the spirit that gives common standing-ground; it says substantially the same thing in all men. Speak as a spirit to the spiritual nature of men, and they will respond, because in the spirit they draw near to their common source and to the world to which all belong.

"It was because he dealt with this common factor of the human and the divine nature that he was too positive and practical. In the spirit it is all yea and amen; there is no negative; in the New Jerusalem there is no night. We can describe this feature of his ministry by words from, one of his own sermons: 'It has always been through men of belief, not unbelief, that power from God has poured into man. It is not the discriminating critic, but he whose beating, throbbing life offers itself a channel for the divine force,—he is the man through, whom the world grows rich, and whom it remembers, remembers with perpetual thanksgiving.'"

And shall not you who are here to-day thank God that such a man was, tho for so brief a space, your bishop? Some there were, you remember, who thought that those greater spiritual gifts of his would unfit him for the business of practical affairs. "A bishop's daily round," they said, "his endless correspondence, his hurried journeyings, his weight of anxious cares, the misadventures of other men, ever returning to plague him,—how can he bring himself to stoop and deal with these?"

But as in so much else that was transcendent in him, how little here, too, his critics understood him! No more pathetic proof of this has come to light than in that testimony of one among you who, as his private secretary, stood in closest and most intimate relations to him. What a story that is which he has given to us of a great soul—faithful always in the greatest? Yes, but no less faithful in the least. There seems a strange, almost grotesque impossibility in the thought that such an one should ever have come to be regarded as "a stickler for the canons."

But we look a little deeper than the surface, and all that is incongruous straightway disappears. His was the realm of a divine order,—his was the office of his Lord's servant. God had called him. He had put him where he was. He had set his Church to be His witness in the world, and in it, all His children, the greatest with the least, to walk in ways of reverent appointment. Those ways might irk and cramp him sometimes. They did: he might speak of them with sharp impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and then,—for he was human like the rest of us! But mark you this, my brothers, for, in an age which, under one figment or another, whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much self-will,—we shall do well to remember it,—his was a life of orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the Church's plain and stately ways: kept to them and prized them too.

But all the while he held his soul wide open to the vision of his Lord! Up out of a routine that seemed to others that did not know or could not understand him, and who vouchsafed to him much condescending compassion for a bondage which he never felt, and of which in vain they strove to persuade him to complain,—up out of the narrower round in which so faithfully he walked, from time to time he climbed, and came back bathed in a heavenly light, with lips aglow with heavenly fire. The Spirit had spoken to him, and so he spoke to us. "The flesh profiteth nothing: it is the spirit that quickeneth. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."

And so we thank God not alone for his message, but that it was given to him to speak it as a bishop in the Church of God. We thank God that in a generation that so greatly needs to cry, as our Te Deum teaches us, "Govern us and lift us up!" he was given to the Church not alone to rule but to uplift.