ss of human nature that never yet, in the history of
mankind, has a real and needed reform failed, in the end, of success.

Among latter-day clergymen in America, none has achieved a wider
reputation or a greater personal popularity than Phillips Brooks. Born
in Boston in 1835, a graduate of Harvard, ordained to the Episcopal
ministry at the age of twenty-four, and ten years later called to the
rectorship of Trinity church, Boston, it was in this latter field, which
he would never leave, that he showed himself to be one of the strongest
personalities and noblest preachers of his age. No more striking figure
ever appeared in a pulpit. Of magnificent physique, with a striking and
massive head and handsome countenance, breathing the very spirit of
youth, in spite of his grey hair, he had the interest and attention of
any audience before he opened his lips.

Phillips Brooks has been compared to Henry Ward Beecher, and in many
things they were alike. But the former's culture, while perhaps less
varied than Beecher's, was deeper and richer, his sermons were less
brilliant but cast in better form, his appeal was narrower but to a far
more influential class. He was, in a word, the preacher of the
intellectual. No one who heard him preach ever failed to be startled at
first by his tremendous rapidity of delivery--averaging two hundred
words a minute--or failed to find himself, at first, lagging behind the
equal rapidity of thought. But once accustomed to these--once realizing
that, in listening to him there could be no inattention or wandering of
wits--his sermon became a source of keenest intellectual delight and
noblest spiritual inspiration.

Phillips Brooks often said that he had to preach rapidly, or not at all.
In youth he had suffered from something resembling an impediment in his
speech, and more measured utterance gave it a chance to recur.
Certainly, no one who ever listened to his fluent and limpid utterance
would have suspected it. But he was far more than a great preacher. By
his broad tolerance, his lofty character and immense personal influence,
he became, in a way, a national figure, the common property of the
nation which felt itself the richer for possessing him. A gracious and
courtly figure, with a heart as wide as the human race, he lives,
somehow, as the true type of clergyman, whose concern is humanity and
whose field the world.

Which brings us to the life of the last man we shall consider in this
cha