conflict by which he might be labeled. He was simply a messenger of the
truth as he held it, a mouthpiece of the gospel as he believed it had
been delivered to him.

[Illustration: PHILIPS BROOKS.]

Although in his seminary days his sermons were described as vague and
unpractical, Phillips Brooks was as great a preacher when under thirty
years of age as he was at any later time. His early sermons,
delivered to his first charge in Philadelphia, displayed the same
individuality, the same force and completeness and clearness of
construction, the same deep, strong undertone of religious thought, as
his great discourses preached in Westminster Abbey six months before his
death. His sentences are sonorous; his style was characterized by a
noble simplicity, impressive, but without a touch showing that dramatic
effect was strained for.

He passionately loved nature in all her aspects, and traveled widely in
search of the picturesque; but he used his experience with reserve, and
his illustrations are used to explain human life. His power of painting
a picture in a few bold strokes appears strikingly in the great sermon
on the 'Lesson of the Life of Saul,' where he contrasts early promise
and final failure; and in that other not less remarkable presentation of
the vision of Saint Peter. His treatment of Bible narratives is not a
translation into the modern manner, nor is it an adaptation, but a
poetical rendering, in which the flavor of the original is not lost
though the lesson is made contemporary. And while he did not transcribe
nature upon his pages, his sermons are not lacking in decoration. He
used figures of speech and drew freely on history and art for
illustrations, but not so much to elucidate his subject as to ornament
it. His essays on social and literary subjects are written with the aim
of directness of statement, pure and simple; but the stuff of which his
sermons are woven is of royal purple.

The conviction that religious sentiment should penetrate the whole life
showed itself in Phillips Brooks's relation to literature. "Truth bathed
in light and uttered in love makes the new unit of power," he says in
his essay on literature. It was his task to mediate between literature
and theology, and restore theology to the place it lost through the
abstractions of the schoolmen. What he would have done if he had devoted
himself to literature alone, we can only conjecture by the excellence of
his style in essays and