Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism

American Intellectual Culture Series Editors: Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago, Ted V. McAllister, Pepperdine University, Wilfred M. McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals by Paul K. Conkin Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism by Daphne Patai Postmodemism Rightly Understood: The Retum to Realism in American Thought by Peter Augustine Lawler A Requiem for the American Village by Paul K. Conkin A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History by John Pettegrew The Next Religious Establishment by Eldon J. Eisenach A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity by Christopher Shannon Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual by Peter S. Field Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians? by Tevi Troy American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Seg 1875-1915 by Catherine Tumber The Lost Soul of American Protestantism by D. G. Hart TransnationalAmerica: Cultural Pluralist Thought in the Twentieth Century by Everett Helmut Akam Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges by J. David Hoeveler Species of Origin: America s Search for a Creation Story by Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa Apostle of Human Progress: Lester Frank Ward and American Political Thought, 1841-1913 by Edward C. Rafferty Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism by Gillis J. Harp

Brahmin Prophet Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism

Gillis J. Harp

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, I N C .

Lanham Boulder New York Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 0 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Excerpts from various sources as cited in the notes are used by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Archives of the Episcopal Church, USA; and Bishop Payne Library, Virginia Theological Seminary. Excerpts appearing in chapter 1 from “The Young Phillips Brooks: A Reassessment,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1998) used by permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts appearing in chapter 3 from the journal Church History used by kind permission. Excerpts appearing in the conclusion from “A Once and Former Evangelical-Phillips Brooks: A Cautionary Tale,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity (March 2003) used by kind permission. Frontispiece of Phillips Brooks and the photograph of Trinity Church appearing on page 87 used with kind permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Harp, Gillis J. Brahmin prophet : Phillips Brooks and the path of liberal Protestantism / Gillis J. Harp. p. cm. - (American intellectual culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8476-9960-9 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8476-9961-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1 . Brooks, Phillips, 1835-1893. 2. Episcopal Church-Massachusetts-BishopsBiography. I. Title. 11. Series. BX5995.BSH37 2003 283‘.092-d~2 1 2003009079 Printed in the United States of America

aTM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992.

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Contents

ix

Preface Introduction

1

1 Christian Nurture

9

2 Civil Warrior

47

3 Separation and Reconstruction

67

4 A Prince of the Pulpit: Phillips Brooks and Nineteenth-Century Preaching

107

5 The Modern Christian

149

Conclusion

207

Bibliography

22 1

Index

23 1

About the Author

237

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Preface

I began this study of Phillips Brooks with some trepidation. After surveying some of his papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library for the first time, I confess that I started to appreciate Gamaliel Bradford’s comments about researching Brooks. Bradford wrote to Brooks biographer William Lawrence: The queer thing was that when I came to read for Phillips Brooks I couldn’t make anything out of him at all. . . . There seemed to be this magnificent, inexhaustible fountain of golden, infectious, spiritualizing speech. But apparently it flowed through the mere human instrument as if it were the direct gift of some divine effluence, which acquired its power and richness precisely from the complete negation of the human personality which received it. I couldn’t make anything of a man of that magnificent physique who yet was perfectly indifferent to all athletics and sports of every kind. I couldn’t trace any human passion in him, any love or hate or ambition or despair. I couldn’t find any real religious struggle. Everything seemed to be accepted naturally and happily as in the preordained order of things. Then when I came to the little touch in your book about his indifference to physical pain, I gave up. I said, a man who is not human enough even to feel pain is not a subject for me.’

While I soon learned that Bradford was wrong about the absence of “love or hate or ambition” in Brooks, his portrait (like all caricatures) did have a certain kernel of truth in it. Brooks was an extraordinarily private man who usually kept his feelings to himself. There is something paradoxical about the preacher whose evocative rhetoric tugged at his hearers’ heartstrings and kindled their imaginations but whose personal correspondence was often lacking philosophical angst or, sometimes, even passion. As I dug deeper, I began to focus less on Brooks’s personality and the narrative of his life (both ix

X

Preface

already chronicled in considerable detail in Raymond W. Albright’s Focus on Infinity and John Woolverton’s The Education of Phillips Brooks2)and more on his religious thought. In particular, I sought to understand Brooks contextually, not as some unique genius (though, undeniably,he had special gifts as a preacher and pastor) but as an admired clergyman whose ministry both reflected the intellectual and cultural tensions of his time and helped, in turn, to reshape American Protestantism. I am indebted to many who have helped me research and write this book. Among those who read and provided critical commentary upon portions of this manuscript at various stages were Allen Guelzo, John H. Haas, Paul Kemeny, George Marsden, Robert Morrison, Mark Noll, Gary S. Smith, Ralph Stewart, James Turner, and John Woolverton. Such a terse acknowledgment is plainly inadequate; I am deeply grateful to them for their perceptive comments and generous friendship. None of these scholars will agree with everything I have written here and none is responsible for any factual errors or slips of judgment that may tarnish what follows. Rowman & Littlefield’s Mary Carpenter has been an exemplary editor, and series editors Wilfred McClay and Ted McAllister have been consistently supportive (Bill McClay ’s combination of lucid insight and warm humanity is a rare mixture in contemporary academe). My current Dean, Charles W. Dunn, has also spurred me on with his kind encouragement. This project began with a generous grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and I am grateful for their support and for financial assistance from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Moreover, I am obliged to the History Department at the University of Notre Dame for granting me Visiting Scholar status during the 1996-1997 academic year. On a more mundane level, Betsy and Paul Kemeny and Kathy and John Van Ti1 both opened up their homes to me when I needed a quiet place to write; I will always appreciate their generosity. I would also be remiss if I did not acknowledge the inspiration of three historians who, while not directly involved in this project, taught me an enormous amount about being a historian: Merrill D. Peterson, Dorothy R. Ross, and Michael J. Sydenham. My maternal grandfather, Cornelius W. Wiebe, was born only a few weeks after the death of Phillips Brooks. He often asked me about this book (even at age 105) and I am sorry that he did not live to see it finished. His generous support helped me pay for graduate school. Phillips Brooks would have admired his benevolent spirit. Grove City, Pa. Lent 2003

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xi

NOTES 1 . Gamaliel Bradford, quoted in Helen Howe, The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 24748. 2 . Raymond Albright, Focus on Injinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961); John F. Woolverton, The Education of Phillips Brooks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

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Introduction

There is something that every man holds back from us; and the more of a man he is, the more conscious we are of this reserve. -Phillips Brooks’ His figure still stands in Boston’s Copley Square in the shadow of the immense stone church that served as his preaching station for more than fourteen years. Apart from Trinity Church itself, it would be hard to conceive of a more powerful tribute. Like the church that towers above it, the memorial is anything but subtle. The bronze statue by Augustus SaintGaudens portrays Brooks standing confidently, garbed in his signature Geneva gown, with his right arm raised dramatically and his left grasping the lectern. By itself, Brooks’s image is imposing, but behind the preacher stands a large plain cross and a sombre, hooded Christ with his hand resting on his servant’s shoulder. The raised figure of Christ in the background adds an eerie feel to the monument but its meaning is unmistakable: In his pulpit ministry, Brooks was God’s mouthpiece? Phillips Brooks died suddenly (probably of diphtheria complicated by a cold or flu) at a comparatively youthful fifty-seven years in early 1893.3 His untimely passing moved thousands of Bostonians, and SaintGaudens’s stunning memorial is testimony to the depth of their affection and grief. Writing to editor E. L. Godkin, less than a week after Brooks’s death, cultural critic and Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton offered an appreciative, though more critical, assessment. Brooks had done more, Norton commented, “than anyone else to maintain the respectability of the clerical profession, and the waning respect for the clergy. And this was a great service.” But Norton went on to explain: “His mind was not of an 1

2

Introduction

order to trouble him with speculative doubts, or open to him the difficulties of the clerical position. He was quite sincere, for religion was a matter of sentiment not of intelligence with him. His strong sense of right & wrong prevented his optimism from sapping his moral integrity, and from doing much harm to the easygoing public whom he served and pleased. The eulogies of him are sadly e~travagant.”~ Regrettably, most of Brooks’s biographers have taken Saint-Gaudens’s hagiographical approach, rather than Norton’s more critical, if condescending, tack. As Allen Guelzo has observed, the history of the Episcopal Church has been “served largely by self-protective biography”; biographies of Brooks provide ample confirmation of this observation? With one recent exception, Brooks biographies have been ponderously reverential. Alexander V. G. Allen, author of the massive three-volume Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks (1901), was a younger clerical colleague who admired Brooks enormously; the same is true of Episcopal bishop William Lawrence, who wrote a short biography, Life of Phillips Brooks, in 1930. The more scholarly Raymond W. Albright, William Reed Huntington Professor of Church History at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1952 to 1965, did not fare much better. Albright’s Focus on Infinity (1961) is more a partisan celebration of Brooks’s genius than a critical assessment of Brooks’s life and work. Indeed, Albright is unself-conscious in his filiopiety. Dismissing theological critics who had raised objections to Brooks’s alleged universalism, Albright explains blithely that they had nothing to worry about for “Brooks simply believed in God more profoundly than most men are capable of doing.”6 Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom describes Brooks and liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as “in a class by themselves, envied and emulated the country over.” Brooks, Ahlstrom added, was “by all odds the most popular voice the Episcopal church has ever had.”’ Yet today, Brooks is little remembered, apart from being the author of a favorite sentimental Christmas carol, “0Little Town of Bethlehem.” Unlike Beecher, the rector of Trinity Church and, subsequently, Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts has attracted comparatively little academic interest? Nor has Brooks’s theology received much sustained scrutiny. Intellectual historians like Henry F. May dismiss Brooks fairly quickly as a superficial idealist? Even dutiful denominational portraits of Brooks rarely explore his preaching and theology in any depth. Allen is more descriptive than analytical and Albright attempts little sustained theological investigation.Albright, in fact, declares in the introduction to Focus on Infinity that limitations of space made it “impossible [for him] to develop with any degree

Introduction

3

of comprehensiveness the critical thought and the theology of Phillips Brooks.”’O Certainly, as Norton and many since his day have recognized, Brooks was neither a particularly sophisticated nor a terribly deep thinker, but then neither was Beecher. Surely Brooks’s lack of originality and his enormous popularity together make him, like Beecher, all the more important if one seeks to understand the religious thought of his time and how, in some respects, it marked out the way for mainline Protestantism in the twentieth century. The project of Phillips Brooks and his circle was to make the Christian faith more accessible and winsome by redefining and restating its essentials in modem terms. Further, they sought to make the Christian Church a more relevant and influential part of contemporary culture. While significant on its own terms and for an understanding of his complex era, a study of Phillips Brooks can also shed light on the trajectory mainline Protestantism has taken during the twentieth century. Its course has been one of conflict, cultural marginalization, and, in recent decades, numerical decline. Several historic Protestant denominations witnessed conflict and division during the Fundamentalisthiodemist controversy of the first third of the century. The Episcopal Church mostly escaped these battles because it had accepted the broad view of doctrine articulated by Brooks and his circle. Other major bodies such as the northern Baptists and northern Presbyterians suffered schisms. Over time, the mainline communions witnessed a marked diminution of their once central cultural role. Protestant clerics no longer defined the public debate, even on major ethical issues. And, since the mid-l960s, the membership of mainline Protestant denominations has plummeted. Many sons and daughters of older members left the church as adolescents, and few have returned. By 1998, the Episcopal Church had lost approximately 36 percent of its 1965 membership.” Finally, there has been renewed theological conflict within the mainline since the 1970s,especially over contentious questions of sexuality. The ordination of practicing homosexual persons and the blessing of same-sex unions have been particularly divisive questions within North American Anglican circles in recent years. In the wake of these kinds of conflict, and in order to accommodate divergent views, some denominations have embraced a doctrinal pluralism that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. Examining Brooks and his generation of liberal Protestants can illuminate the beginnings of this larger story and, perhaps, shed light on the current situation. Although Brooks’s brand of theological liberalism was chastened considerably by neoorthodoxy after World War I, its method and agenda did certainly shape American Protestantism for much of the twentieth century.

4

Introduction

This book is not a conventional biography; Allen, Lawrence, and Albright all provide detailed personal narratives of Brooks’s life. Rather, it is a study of three major themes or aspects of Brooks’s preaching, writing, and wider ministry. Like many of his contemporaries, Phillips Brooks sought to bring Christianity into modernity both theologically and, in some broader sense, culturally. Like other theological liberals at the close of the nineteenth century, Brooks “emphasized the immanence of God in nature and human nature ,” leaned “toward a general humanistic optimism,” stressed “good works . . .over professions and confessions,” and focused on the Incarnation as the central doctrine that “signified and ratified the actual presence of God in humanity.”’* Beyond the narrowly theological or doctrinal, the New Theology’s “dominating theme ,” according to William R. Hutchison, was “God’s presence in the world and in human ~ulture.”’~ Brooks had a deep faith that American society was moving inexorably toward some larger fulfillment as part of the Kingdom of God. This assumption shaped his thinking about most political and social questions. For Brooks, this revision of traditional beliefs did not, by and large, involve an anguished struggle with Darwinian evolution or with the corrosive results of biblical higher criticism. Romanticism (in various forms) appears to have smoothed Brooks’s movement away from orthodoxy. How that happened and its particular impression on Brooks’s thinking is a major part of this book. The following chapters seek to discover where, for Brooks, the distinguishing emphases identified by Hutchison came from, how they were assimilated, and what part they came to play in his mature thought. Along the way, the analysis endeavors to show how Brooks’s message reflected key aspects of nineteenth-century AngloAmerican culture, thus providing a fuller explanation of Brooks’s remarkably broad appeal. Second, this study explores how Brooks not only modified the message of American Christianity but also transformed its medium by helping to alter Protestant homiletics. The meaning and method of preaching changed during Brooks’s lifetime, and he contributed significantly to that critical transformation. None of these changes occurred painlessly or without interpersonal or institutional conflict (although one might conclude that, reading older treatments of Brooks). This leads to the third and final subject of this study, Brooks’s position within his denomination, his relationship to the party battles of the 1860s and 1870s, and his role in the redefinition of the Episcopal Church by the end of the century. In particular, Brooks’s example casts a new light on the virtual disappearance of the hitherto strong Evangelical party and the triumph of the liberal Broad Church. His biographers have tended to portray Brooks as initially

Introduction

5

rooted in this Evangelical school, even though he subsequently became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary training, Brooks “freely accepted the leading truths which are known as E ~ a n g e l i c a l . ”E.~ Clowes ~ Chorley asserts simply that “Brooks never drifted from the heart of Evangelical re1igion.”l5 The following chapters argue that such an interpretation is misleading and that it is inaccurate to portray Brooks (at least as an adult) as an Evangelical in the traditional sense. Clearly his mature thought was at odds with evangelical understandings in some key respects. Allen and others stress the evangelical origins of Brooks’s thought in order to argue for significant continuities between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism. There were continuities, but this portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the essence of an early Evangelicalism while later embracing his church’s liberal future has served what Guelzo has aptly called the “myth of synthesis” in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does not view Evangelicals as being eased out of the church in the 1870s but posits a benign creative synthesis that enabled the church to transcend the aberrant party battles of midcentury.I6 Moreover, this conflict had not just a doctrinal but also a cultural dimension; recognizing this facet can enrich our understanding of the quarrel. Brooks’s example should inspire a further rethinking of the conventional whiggish story of the progressive translation of Evangelicals into Broad Churchmen within the Episcopal Church. Phillips Brooks was an admirable person, a man of principle, loyal to his friends, with a warm, sympathetic spirit and a boyish sense of humor. His English friend, F. W. Farrar, called him “the noblest, truest, and most stainless man I ever knew” and many others would have agreed.17 Brooks earnestly sought to remove perceived stumbling blocks in the conventional evangelical presentation of the Christian gospel so that sincere seekers could embrace his infectiously optimistic faith. His winsome presentation of the message was highly effective, at least judging by the number who filled the pews at Trinity Church and bought his published sermons. But one cannot understand Brooks’s larger significance and his legacy or make a critical assessment of his life and work if one is committed primarily to paying tribute. Fitting Phillips Brooks’s religious thought into its proper historical, cultural, and ecclesiastical contexts, while clarifying the sources of his thinking, can provide a fuller, richer portrait of the religious ferment of this transitional era and help clarify how Brooks’s views affected the direction of mainline liberal Protestantism.

6

Introduction

NOTES 1. PB quoted in Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 367. 2. Saint-Gaudens died before the statue was completed and others finished the work. See Raymond W. Albright, Focus on Injinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 396. 3. Albright offers this explanation of Brooks’s illness in Focus, 391-92. 4. Letter, Charles E. Norton to E. L. Godkin, 29 January 1893, Norton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, #bMSAM 1083 (779). I am indebted to Professor James Turner for this reference. 5. Allen Guelzo, “Ritualism, Romanism and Rebellion,” Anglican and Episcopal History 62 (1993): 553. 6. Albright, Focus, 199. John Woolverton’s recent monograph is a welcome exception to this rule but it focuses only on Brooks’s upbringing and education. See The Education of Phillips Brooks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). See also Bayard S. Clark, “Phillips Brooks in Biography,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 3 1 (1962): 54-57. 7. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 740,778. 8. William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870 (New York: Knopf, 1970); Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the BeecherTilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ahlstrom recognizes that the “merits and importance [of Beecher and Brooks] has often been underestimated.” See Ahlstrom, Religious History, 738. 9. Henry F. May, Protestant Churches in Industrial America (New York: Harper, 1949), 64-67. 10. Albright, Focus, x. This despite the fact that Albright’s biography is 400 pages, excluding endnotes. 11. ECUSA membership stood at 3.615 million members in 1965 and 2.317 million in 1998. See Eileen W. Lidner, ed., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 2001), 11. 12. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 3-4. 13. Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 79. Hutchison distinguishes evangelical liberals from modernistic liberals by arguing that the former accept the Christian revelation as normative and modify it, while the latter actually begin instead with modern science-a helpful differentiation that, nevertheless, overlooks some key questions. Brooks is closer to the evangelical liberal category but does seem to have moved in the direction of Modernism in his later years. Hutchison contends that religious liberalism during this period was “less an effort to adjust religion to culture than an attempt to renounce the long-standing and singular commitment, in Western thought, to what liberals saw as an artificial separation between religion and culture.” See Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 8-9.

Introduction

7

14. Though his interpretation is much more nuanced, Woolverton appears to agree. He argues that Brooks “supported the Evangelicals of Virginia in their theology.” Later, he comments: “Still, he remained surprisingly loyal to the reformed theology that he learned on his own and from others at Virginia Theological Seminary.” See Education, 64, 105. Also, see Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 , 315-16. Albright asserted that Brooks “had been greatly influenced by Alexander H. Vinton, [and] shared many of the evangelical views even in the later years when many considered him a broad churchman.” See Raymond W. Albright, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 171. 15. E. Clowes Chorley, Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 299. One welcome exception to this interpretation is C. G. Brown who argues that, by the early 1860s, Brooks “had already moved out of a simple Evangelicalism, if indeed, he was ever in bondage to it .” See “Christocentric Liberalism in the Episcopal Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 37 (1968): 10. 16. Allen Guelzo, “Ritual, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Disappearance of the Evangelical Episcopalians, 1853-1 873 ,” Anglican and Episcopal History 62 (1993): 553. With regard to the disappearance of Evangelicals, John Woolverton agrees that “there was indeed a cover-up.” The point of contention seems to be whether Anglo-Catholic or Broad Church historians were chiefly responsible for it. See Woolverton, “Editorial,” Anglican and Episcopal History 62 (1993): 495. 17. F. W. Farrar, “Leader of Religious Thought and Action,” Review of the Churches 3 (Feb. 15,1893): 273.

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Chapter One

Christian Nurture

We have but faith; we cannot know, For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness; let it grow. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam It is, then, a noble thing for a man to have something noble to believe.

-Phillips Brooks’

Phillips Brooks’s theological project was not only the fruit of mature philosophical reflection, but also was rooted in the familial, cultural, and ecclesiastical contexts of antebellum Boston. His humanistic, Romanticized Christianity was partly a product of his upbringing and education.From his earliest days, one recognizes a palpable tension between the antidogmatic temper of his paternal Unitarianism and the warm piety of his maternal Evangelicalism. Romanticism represented for Brooks an attractive way to reconcile these two distinct traditions. In the formative years from adolescence to early manhood, Brooks began to stake out the paths he would walk as an adult. The distinctive concerns and themes that would characterize his mature thinking took shape around the Brookses’ kitchen table, in the family pew at St. Paul’s, Tremont Street, and in a Harvard lecture hall and dormitory room.

ANTEBELLUM BOSTON Phillips Brooks was born in Boston on 13 December 1835 at 56 High Street. Then located in a residential area, High Street was soon an avenue 9

10

Chapter One

dominated by businesses and shops? The city Phillips Brooks called home witnessed a similar economic, political, and cultural transformation both prior to his birth and during his childhood and adolescence. The economic life of Boston had been dominated by overseas trade since colonial times. Boston’s rise as a key port in the British empire had done much to transform the insular life of the Puritan colony that had prevailed during the seventeenth century? Commercial men and merchants of various sorts composed the economic leadership of the city by the eve of the Revolution. But by the time Phillips Brooks was born in 1835, a crucial shift had occurred in the New England economy. Although commercial and mercantile interests remained central to the city’s economic life, the rise of manufacturing had begun to transform the way Boston’s population made money. Leading the way were the new textile mills first introduced by Francis Lowell at Waltham in 1813. Textile manufacturing changed both Boston’s economic base and, soon, the national economy at large. Cotton mills were on the cutting edge of American manufacturing during the 1820s and New England as a region dominated the industry prior to 1860.4 This transition from “mast to mill” had a significant impact on the class structure of antebellum Boston. During the eighteenth century, Boston’s wealthiest families had mostly made their fortunes in trade and commerce. The core group was composed of a handful of major trading houses such as Russell & Company and J. & T. H. Perkins. Closely connected to and serving these merchants were banks such as the Massachusetts First National Bank of Boston (established 1784).This same elite expanded into real estate development and speculation in the city by the early 1800s. Not all of these maritime families had been wealthy for generations, however. The Revolution had opened opportunities for class advancement for some. Peter Chardon Brooks, arguably Boston’s richest man for much of the antebellum period (and an uncle to both of Phillips Brooks’s parents) came from humble origins? The Embargo, War of 1812, and other factors pushed a new generation of the maritime elite to choose manufacturing over trade. By the 1830s, manufacturing magnates had supplemented if not displaced these mercantile elites. There was undeniably some friction between the mercantile remnant and the newer manufacturers but this gradually dissipated. As Frederic C. Jaher observes, the traditional Boston elite, “absorbing the capital and talent of new men . . . successfully mastered the challenge to their economic hegemony and were one of the rare mercantile upper classes that retained their standing by adapting to industrialism.”6 As Robert Dalzell has argued, they managed to achieve this

Christian Nurture

11

feat by following a conservative path that sought to “blunt” industrial capitalism’s “more ominous tendencies .”7 Although innovative in important respects, the Boston Associates were socially conservative and sought stability and not just quick returns on their investments. The number of investors grew in Lowell’s firm but they continued to be drawn from a relatively small collection of families? An influx of cheap immigrant labor also facilitated the expansion of industrial enterprise, especially with the arrival of the Irish after 1845.9 Since colonial times, the maldistribution of property in Boston had been worsening and the new economy furthered this trend. Thirty-three percent of Boston’s personal property was owned by the top one percent of the city’s population in 1833; by 1848, the figure stood at 37 percent.I0 Hence Phillips Brooks was born into a society led by a socially conservative old-money elite that had a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Despite their best efforts to retain as much of the old order, industrial capitalism was creating a more clearly defined class system and opening up the gap between those at the top of the social pyramid and those at the very bottom. These economic changes also had important political implications. The political vision of Boston’s power elite had always assumed interclass consensus and deference to a natural governing aristocracy. The Federalist Party had been firmly entrenched in New England since the first years of the early republic, but the years between 1800 and 1815 constituted a period of crisis and decline for the party. By the 1820s, the party was dead but the political power of the old elite had not evaporated. As Jaher explains, “A younger generation of upper-class Federalists (and some of their elders) showed the same resourcefulness as their entrepreneurial counterparts; one switching to a new line of business, the other to the dominant political party.”” The Jeffersonian Republicans constituted the governing party that soon fractured into at least two distinct groups. Many of the city’s political elites threw their lot in with those, like John Quincy Adams, who now distinguished themselves as National Republicans. Although some old-time Federalists denounced as opportunists those who showed such pragmatism, most made the transition. Not that the shift was always an easy one for the governing grandees; it meant accepting a more egalitarian model of the political process and enduring, nay, even adopting what eighteenth-century gentlemen had dismissed as “electioneering.” As successors to the National Republicans, the Whigs embodied this accommodation with Jacksonian egalitarianism.’* At the time of Phillips Brooks’s birth, the Whigs were well on their way to becoming a strong national political party with grassroots support. Whig ideology naturally reflected many of the concerns and commitments of Boston patricians.13Both

12

Chapter One

assumed a social consensus supported policies that would circumscribe the excesses of a freewheeling capitalist market. They both favored a sort of state promotionalism (like the tariff and internal improvements) to encourage economic development for the common good. Moreover,Whigs also injected an evangelical moralism into their politics and their policies; indeed, their view of the state as a moral agent characterized almost everything they did.l4 It was, in fact, a moral dilemma that ultimately divided New England Whigs by the late 1840s. They broke into the “Cotton” Whigs and the “Conscience” Whigs, with the latter supporting the Free Soil Party in 1848 and many becoming Republicans during the following decade. A few went as far as supporting ab01itionism.l~Sometimes, as in the case of Phillips Brooks and his father, the split was generational, with younger patricians convinced that the Republicans were the rightful heirs of the Whigs, the authentic party of the future and of economic progress. But there was another development that threatened the political (if not the economic) hegemony of the Boston Associates and their friends in the antebellum period. This event was the arrival of thousands of Irish immigrants beginning in the 1840s. As early as 1850, Irish-born Bostonians represented 25.8 percent of the city’s population but 48 percent of its laborers.16The Irish were successfully courted by the Democrats and naturally viewed the Whigs as meddling Evangelicals. As Oscar Handlin has put it succinctly: “The whole galaxy of reforms that absorbed New England in the thirty years after 1835 met the determined opposition of the Irish Catholic population of Boston.”” By the early 1850s, Boston elites were divided over which threat to the American republic was more serious, the “Slave Power” or the influx of mostly Roman Catholic immigrants who, under generous naturalization laws, were voters. For example, Amos A. Lawrence assumed his uncle’s (Abbott Lawrence) political leadership position when the latter died in 1855. But the contemporaneous death of the Whigs seemed to leave the Brahmin now without a party. The younger Lawrence, along with notables such as Nathan Appleton, Edward Everett, and Robert Winthrop, agreed to support the anti-immigrant American party and its Whiggish presidential nominee in 1856, Millard Fillmore. Among the committed Fillmore men in 1856 was William Brooks Sr. Because of their profound commitment to national cohesion, the Associates were leery of an avowedly sectional party such as the Republicans. Nevertheless, fighting the Civil War eventually brought Boston’s ruling class into Republican ranks.’* Boston’s growing Irish population certainly changed the cultural milieu of the city. By the time Phillips Brooks was a teenager, tensions between the foreign-born and native-born Protestants were producing conflict over

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13

the public school system, immigrant political participation, and other issues rooted in religious differences. After all, Boston had been an overwhelmingly Protestant city prior to the arrival of the Irish. The Congregational Church in Massachusetts had not actually been fully disestablished until 1833. Boston’s business and governing classes were mostly of Congregational stock, many tracing their roots back to Puritan forebears. After the Revolution, a fissure had opened up within the established church, however. Many congregations were split down the middle by differences between Unitarians and orthodox Trinitarians. On the whole, the city’s elites went with the rationalist Unitarians, though there were notable exceptions (among these Mary Phillips’s family) who stayed with something closer to the faith of their fathers. The Unitarian capture of Brahmincontrolled Harvard by 1810 was definitely an important indicator of this shift. But the rationalist character of the dominant Unitarianism was being challenged by a breed of American Romanticism by the 1830s, especially in the wake of Emerson’s Divinity School Address of 1838. (See below under “An Evangelical Schooling.”)I9 Meanwhile, Anglicanism had a very low profile in Boston in the early nineteenth century. The entire state of Massachusetts had but thirteen Episcopal churches in 1810. Unlike the central place it held among New York’s wealthy, the Protestant Episcopal Church was far from the hub of Boston’s religious life. In some respects, it was still recovering from its association with Toryism during the Revolution. Yet under Bishop Alexander Vets Griswold, Episcopalianism began to grow after the War of 1812 and the variant that flowered was emphatically Low Church and evangelical. Before 1830, Griswold had ordained at least 111 new priests and confirmed almost ten thousand of the faithful. Griswold’s humility won him the grudging respect even of some traditional Congregationalists, one of whom remarked: “He is the best representative of an Apostle that I have ever seen, particularly because he doesn’t know it.7720 By the 1830s,buoyed by the ascendancy of the Evangelical party in the national church, the Episcopal Church in Boston was poised to take on a more weighty role in Boston society.

A FAMILY’S FAITH The young parents who welcomed their second son that day in December 1835 were William Gray Brooks and Mary Ann Phillips. Phillips Brooks’s mother was from a pious, orthodox Trinitarian Congregational family. Her father was John Phillips (1776-1820), one of the founders of Andover Theological Seminary and someone, in Allen’s words, committed to “the

14

Chapter One

maintenance unimpaired of the Puritan theological heritage.”21Phillips Brooks’s mother possessed a deep and warm evangelical faith and made every effort to pass her commitments and piety to all of her sons. Daily Bible reading and prayer were a central feature of her household and by the time Phillips was a teenager he had, under her tutelage, memorized scores of evangelical hymns. Even after her son was ordained, Mrs. Brooks gave her son theological pointers in her many letters to him. When she died at age seventy-two in 1880, Brooks wrote simply to a close friend: “My mother has been the centre of all the happiness of my life.”22 Meanwhile, William Gray Brooks’s family was not known for either their learning or their religiosity. The Brookses were successful farmers. One of the few ancestors who had entered the ordained ministry, Edward Brooks (1733-1781) was a sharp critic of orthodox Calvinism. Although William Gray Brooks’s relations included the wealthy Peter Chardon Brooks (1767-1 849), Phillips’s father was from solid middle-class s t o ~ k . 2He ~ began a hardware and dry goods store in Boston when he moved there from Portland, Maine, in 1824. Through hard work and a meticulous attention to detail, William Brooks prospered and his family grew. Eventually, Phillips had four brothers and the family lived in a handsome house on Hancock Street. William Gray Brooks was a Unitarian, and when he married Mary Ann Phillips in 1833, it seemed natural for the newlyweds to attend Unitarian services. First Church was a logical choice because of relations who were members there. Although the division of Unitarians and Trinitarians was old news by 1835, some Unitarians did not (unlike William Ellery Channing) emphasize their differences with their former brethren. The pastor of First Church, N. L. Frothingham, was one such Unitarian. Frothingham steered clear of the Unitarian label and emphasized confidence in the scriptural record and faith in the sanctifying work of the Holy S ~ i r i t . 2 ~ Given the moderation of First’s pastor, the keenly Trinitarian Mrs. Brooks may have hoped that she could endure Unitarianism. Mary Ann Phillips had encountered Unitarians before, even in her family’s home church in North Andover when they appointed a liberal pastor in 1810. But, in the same year that Phillips Brooks was born, Pastor Frothingham spoke explicitly in an anniversary sermon about his identification with the Unitarian party and his emphatic rejection not only of Trinitarianism but of “any of the peculiar articles of that scheme of faith which went under the name of the Genevan reformer.” 25 Phillips’s mother shortly thereafter decided that she could no longer abide Unitarianism. By October 1839, the switch had been formally made; the Brookses had rented a pew at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Tremont Street.

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It is not clear why the Brookses did not simply return to the orthodox Congregational fold. Allen suggests that the Episcopal Church represented an easy way to sidestep all of the acrimony of the unhappy Congregationalist divisions, and this may have been the case. Two things are certain. One, the switch was largely at Mrs. Brooks’s instigation. Phillips Brooks’s mother sought out the conservative Evangelical rector of St. Paul’s, Dr. John S. Stone. Lengthy interviews followed, covering a myriad of theological and liturgical points. There was some concern about the baptism of the two eldest Brooks boys, but Stone was satisfied that a full trinitarian formula had been used and that the sacrament was therefore valid. For Mary Ann Phillips, the orthodox evangelical faith was a family affair, and when she became a member of the Episcopal Church she was accompanied by her sister, Susan. Notably, she was not joined initially by her husband. William Gray Brooks’s journal confirms that his wife was the main instigator of this important move: “Wife was never much pleased with Mr. F.’s [Frothingham’s] liberal style of preaching,” he wrote, “and after a good deal of consideration and reflection we concluded to change.” Phillips’s father accepted the change but, initially at least, with very little enthusiasm: “It is at all times unpleasant changing our habits and places of resort. For myself, I feel myself attached to the Unitarian Church, having been brought up to that doctrine; but at the same time I cannot say I have so much repugnance to the Orthodox sect as many have; the example of one of the best mothers would forbid it. Being, therefore, as I myself say, indifferent, I gave up my inclinations and prejudices for my old place of worship to gratify that of my wife. Certain it is that women make religion more a matter of conscience and the heart than men do. On many accounts I regretted leaving Dr. Frothingham’s church.”26 Nearly two years later, it is clear that William Brooks had still not completely reconciled himself to their new parish home. Although they had left First Church and rented a pew in an Episcopal parish, the senior Brooks’s initial response was apparently to stop attending church altogether. In one journal entry, he referred to absenting himself from Sunday services for “eighteen weeks,” adding that this represented a “length of time . . . I never was absent [from Sunday worship] before since I was old enough to attend.” He commented that Stone was “a sound preacher,” but added that “The morning service is rather too long, and to one not much interested is at times tedious.” The only faint praise he could muster regarding St. Paul’s was hardly a ringing endorsement: “the afternoon service is a very agreeable one. But with these objections I feel no wish to go back to the dull and dry services of the Unitarian Church we left.”27

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Chapter One

Second, it is equally clear that the Brooks family’s move was part of a larger antebellum shift away from what Emerson pungently described as the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College.”** For some, this disenchantment with Unitarian rationalism (those “dull and dry services” William Brooks did not miss) meant exploring the vagaries of Transcendentalism. Here, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity Hall Address” in 1838 constituted the opening salvo in a heated debate that would rage within Unitarian circles for decades. Emerson excoriated the arid dearth of spirit and emotion in most churches. To a startled audience, he attacked the “noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus” that characterized the teaching of conventional Christianity while he celebrated the “greatness of man” and the need to find God within the indi~idual.2~ For others, the disenchantment meant a reconsideration of Trinitarian orthodoxy, though also viewed through the lens of Romanticism. In this respect, the Brooks family was unknowingly on the leading edge of a larger cultural movement when they embraced the Episcopal Church in 1839. By the 1840s, certain Unitarian preachers were rediscovering orthodox themes such as atonement, redemption, and individual sanctification. By 1857, one Unitarian minister and editor, George E. Ellis, saw Unitarian homiletics discarding the “excesses of rationalism” and taking up a “more fervent and heart-satisfying Christ~logy.”~~ Combined with these concerns was a new interest among some Unitarians in forms of worship and aesthetic considerations. “But, of course” observes Daniel Walker Howe, “by its very nature, Unitarianism could never satisfy the yearnings for a devotional aesthetic as well as Episcopalianism itself . . . [Accordingly] by the mid-nineteenth century, many prominent Bostonians had converted from Liberalism to Epis~opalianism.”~’ The recovery of evangelical themes and the exploration of a higher view of the person of Christ by some Unitarians eventually bore fruit in the conversion of the former pastor of South Church and the recently appointed Plummer Professor of Morals at Harvard, Frederic Dan Huntington. Huntington had been steadily working toward something similar to orthodox Trinitarianism, By December 1859, he had concluded that his ecclesiastical position was no longer tenable; by early 1860, he was received into the Episcopal Church. Soon, Huntington was organizing a new Episcopal congregation in the Back Bay area composed largely of former Unitarians?* Huntington’s move had been anticipated years before by some leading Boston families. Samuel Snelling, an Episcopal clergyman, later recalled the reputation of St. Paul’s (Episcopal) during the 1840s and 1850s: “Many prominent families attended St. Paul’s in those days; and the congregation was known for its wealth and culture. The parish was the resort

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of people who could not become Unitarians; and, though not Episcopalians, were drawn to a Church which did not offend against good taste-especially in the matter of emotional revivalism- and preached neither politics nor the condemnatory doctrines heard in nearby Park Street church, then known as ‘Brimstone Corner.”’ Not that St. Paul’s was latitudinarian; under both Stone and his successor A. H. Vinton, the parish was solidly evangelical. Vinton was firmly committed to the classic evangelical doctrinal position and later became a sharp critic of Ritualism. “All his thinking,” recalled one who had heard him as a youth, “was systematic; and it was but natural that he should be attracted to a System of Theology which was then [ca. 18351 in a position of ascendancy, and numbered among it adherents the chief Protestant scholars and thinkers of the time. It was the Evangelical Theology of the English and American Low Church School.” But, the observer added, Vinton came “from a distinguished family.”33 He wore his Evangelicalism in a way that did not threaten the well-heeled manners of St. Paul’s. There was evangelical doctrine and piety but in decorous package. As Snelling added: “The other Episcopal churches [in Boston at this time] seemed dull and formal, with no fervor of spirit and no atmosphere of devotion,” hence St. Paul’s seemed a perfect fit for some. “Many of the most influential persons in Boston . . ., leading merchants, bankers, lawyers and other professional men” gathered then in the neoclassical stone church on Tremont But the transition to trinitarian Evangelicalism was not always a smooth one, as William Brooks discovered. Both the form and the content of the Prayer Book were bound to irritate the Enlightenment humanism of a selfsufficient Unitarian. Mary (Lyman) Eliot (mother of Harvard president Charles W. Eliot) was reported to have asked a recent convert to Episcopalianism in disbelief “Eliza, do you kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner? Neither I nor any member of my family will ever do that!”35William Brooks was convinced that part of the peculiar appeal of the Episcopal Church was gender specific. When attempting to explain his wife’s denominational preferences, the elder Brooks had identified a distinctively feminine concern for a religion of “the heart.”36Cleveland Amory agrees that upper-crust Boston ladies during the nineteenth century found Episcopal worship more attractive: “Many a First family woman turned with joy to the more definite ritual of this Episcopalianism, which included kneeling for prayer-Unitarians bend and make ‘slight obeisance’ but do not kneel-and belief in the divinity of Christ. Sometimes she brought her husband along with her; sometimes First families were split on the q~estion.”~’ For a few years at least, the Brookses appear to have split on the question.

18

Chapter One

THE ORDEAL OF WILLIAM GRAY BROOKS Hence a cluster of theological and cultural factors may have kept Phillips Brooks’s father from embracing Episcopalianism very eagerly at first. Most commentators have rightly emphasized Mary Ann Phillips’s religious influence on her sons, but the cool religiosity that their father modeled especially during their early formative years should not be overWilliam Brooks’s journal reveals a pragmatic man, little given to spiritual introspection. When he first encountered Episcopal worship, he complained of the length of the service and disarmingly described himself as “one not much intere~ted.”~~ Beyond these sorts of remarks (revealing as they are), one does not get an intimate portrait of William Brooks’s spirituality. A few others of his class, however, have left a fuller record of their religious reflections and these may shed some light on this otherwise dimly lit corridor in Phillips Brooks’s home. William Appleton (1786-1862), a wealthy Boston merchant and grandfather of subsequent Episcopal Bishop (and Phillips Brooks biographer) William Lawrence, kept a private diary for decades. Appleton’s diary lays bare the strong internal tension that troubled some prosperous antebellum Boston businessmen of Puritan stock. Appleton clearly enjoyed making money and (especially) enjoyed saving it, but he was also concerned to be known for his good works, rather than solely for his wealth. Cleveland Amory aptly describes Appleton’s diary as “a novel of suspense. The merchant’s worldly desires, though often earnestly resisted, cannot be overcome, yet his religious convictions, though often baffled, keep returning to the fray. The issue remains in doubt to the very end of his life.’” Like the Brooks family, Appleton attended St. Paul’s but his business concerns frequently kept him from getting much out of the services there. He conceded frankly to himself: “I feel that I am quite eaten up with business; while in Church, my mind with all the exertion I endeavored to make, was flying from City to City, from Ship to Ship and from Speculation to Spe~ulation.”~’ In 1838, he makes a critical self-assessment: “Beyond my immediate circle very little has been done to promote the cause of religion, and strange to say that with full conviction of the error, I continue to be engrossed in the cares of this World.”42In his latter years, his concentration in church does not appear to have improved. In the wake of the financial panic of 1857, Appleton wrote: “attended St. Paul’s Church, Communion; regret much to find myself so much agitated as to the business of the past week that I could not keep my mind from it during the devotions of the day; poor miserable beings we are.”43In his seventies, he confided to his diary: “I must be busy. I don’t know when to stop. . . . I can’t help seeing openings for

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profit, neither can I help availing of them. I pray God to keep me from being avaricious, and proud of my success.”44Perhaps Emerson also had Appleton in mind when he caustically defined “Boston Episcopalianism as the best diagonal line that could be drawn between the life of Jesus Christ and that of Boston merchant Abbott Lawrence.”45Peter Chardon Brooks (William Brooks’s wealthy uncle) also kept a private journal and it is even more worldly in tone. This particular Brooks said his prayers and attended services regularly but he was definitely not a man of fervent, overt piety.& Perhaps William Brooks grappled with the same tensions and his emotional disengagement from things religious must have had some impact on his four sons. One encounters some of the senior Brooks’s habit of neatly separating sacred from secular when he later warned his son not to preach on social or political ~ubjects.4~ But unlike William Appleton, Phillips Brooks’s father showed signs of coming around in due time. By Christmas Day 1846,William Brooks noted approvingly of the growing popular observance of Christmas in Boston. Something had changed. Perhaps Vinton’s persuasive evangelistic preaching had borne fruit. Finally, the senior Brooks underwent the rite of confirmation and became a communicant member of St. Paul’s. The entry in his diary was almost effusive: “To record my thoughts of this day would be an utter impossibility. . . . In pursuing this course I have been much assisted by our rector, Rev. Dr. Vinton [Stone’s successor beginning in 18421,and for advice and encouragement no less to my dear wife, who has been a member of this Church for now seven years. God grant that the union to both of us may be blessed, and that hereafter we may walk together as one in Christ as our head and guide.”48 William Brooks remained the pragmatic merchant but references to his faith were warmer and more numerous in his journal and in his letters after the late 1840s.His entry for 25 December 1847 sums up well the change: “Truly, the first Christmas I have ever spent as it ought to be spent. For, though I have attended the services of the Church the past three or four years on that day, I have never before attended that other and most comforting and elevating accompaniment, the communion.”49 Still, for the first eleven years of Phillips Brooks’s life, his father was at best a nominal Christian with a spotty church attendance record. While the senior Brooks’s faith was clearly deepening during his son’s adolescence, his level of commitment appears not to have approached that of his wife. William Brooks’s Unitarian roots may cast some light on his son’s openness to liberal humanistic strains of theology; his unhurried pilgrimage to orthodoxy may help explain Phillips Brooks’s otherwise peculiar failure to be confirmed until he was a twenty-one-year-old seminarian.

20

Chapter One

The social significance of a move to Episcopalianism in the Boston of the 1830s was complex, and an adolescent Phillips Brooks struggled with it as his father had done before him. Nationally and historically, the Episcopal Church was the establishment religious body par excellence. In the Tidewater South and in the middle states, its pews were filled with a disproportionate share of the young republic’s political and economic elite. (Notably, St. Paul’s new rector was thus aptly named Alexander Hamilton Vinton.) But, in antebellum Boston, the signals were more mixed; far from all of the upper orders were Episcopalian and the diocese was firmly evangelical, not latitudinarian.And, furthermore, the growing evangelical party within the Episcopal Church was part of a tradition within Protestantism whose relationship with its social betters had sometimes been tense. Leaders of the various eighteenth-century revivals both in America and in England had commonly attacked the worldliness and self-indulgent affluence of the landed gentry.5O There was enough of that otherworldly, anti-aristocratic, occasionally anti-intellectual spirit left even in the establishment evangelicalism of St. Paul’s to rile the young Brooks. Much of what the adolescent Phillips Brooks had learned from his father, his family’s social circle, and his schooling was called into question by the earnest Dr. Vinton on occasion; Brooks’s reaction was telling: “Is it almost time,” he wrote, as a twentyyear-old after hearing a particular sermon, for some men to learn that their incessant railing at Earthly riches & power & learning are doing far more harm than good. That [?] men are really convinced on reasonable grounds that these things are good, worthy objects of ambition & endeavour, and that if they have higher & worthier advantages[?] to offer their way to recommend them must not be to decry & deprecate what little good man already possesses. Such men may thank merely the weakness of their cause & of themselves that their Efforts are not productive of more serious effects. Once convince men that wealth, power, & learning are mean & despicable & wrong & you have crowned inefficiency & ignorance, brutality & stupidity as the monarchs of our race forever?’

The attitudes of some Evangelicals regarding social attainment and learning presented a barrier for Brooks (and for others of his generation and station), making evangelicalism problematic despite a pietistic upbringing. William Gray Brooks sent his son Phillips to Boston Latin School and Harvard College. At the former, Phillips proved to be an able student, excelling in classical languages. He graduated third in his class in 1851. He was the first son to enter Harvard (William Jr. having set out on a business

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career without attending college) where he became involved in several societies and fraternal organizations. Despite his large build (he had grown to well over six feet), Brooks participated in no college sports. He continued to enjoy and achieve high grades in Latin and Greek. But what he did best was read voraciously. He read quickly and former classmates recalled often seeing him lying on his dormitory bed immersed in reading with library books stacked around him. He did not, at first, read nineteenthcentury literature but began with Elizabethan poetry and eighteenthcentury English essayists. He eventually worked his way into more contemporary authors, in particular Carlyle and Tennyson. Being especially attracted to biography, Brooks savored Carlyle’s Life of Cromwell. One of the key features of Romantic literature for Brooks was its celebration of “great men.” His graduating dissertation on the Huguenot prophet Paul Rabaut underlines this early debt to the Romantic heroic ideal. Later, there are appreciative references in his seminary notebooks to Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship?* Like many of his contemporaries, Brooks was profoundly affected by Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson’s powerful poem was a lengthy meditation on death, life, and immortality. Its Prologue affirmed that only faith can ultimately reveal the meaning of the larger divine plan and related my~teries.5~ If Brooks’s immersion in literary Romanticism produced any cognitive dissonance with the traditional Evangelicalism of his mother and his pastor, he kept it to himself. It seems implausible that it did not produce some tensions. His reluctance to be confirmed would suggest that there was a struggle of some sort but Phillips Brooks, like his father, did not wear his beliefs on his sleeve. Allen sums up the situation with palpable frustration: “When we turn . . . to inquire what forces were acting upon his religious life, we are met with reserve and an almost unfathomable silence.”54When Brooks did treat religious subjects in his written work during this period (which was rarely), his approach seems distant or disengaged. He appeared convinced that religious belief was a very good thing but was not convincing that he had truly made it his own. In his address at graduation, he observed in revealing terms that sounded almost wistful: “It is, then, a noble thing for a man to have something noble to believe.”55 Upon graduation, Brooks accepted a post at Boston Latin, teaching the Third Class. The appointment was a disaster. Brooks’s shyness and inexperience made him an easy target for the teenage boys who humiliated their young instructor. He lasted less than six months, his father encouraging him to resign in early February 1856. The spectacular failure at his first adult employment provoked a vocational crisis for Brooks, if not exactly a spiritual one. Dr. Vinton told William Brooks that his son should

22

Chapter One

visit him to discuss his future but, significantly, Phillips declined the invitation at first. When he decided it was time to consult his elders, Brooks, revealingly, chose instead President James Walker of Harvard. As Brooks later remembered to a friend: “President Walker encouraged me in choosing the ministry, but he was not enthusiastic; he was not an enthusiastic man, but he was distinctly en~ouraging.”~~ Only then did Brooks seek out his pastor. Vinton predictably urged Brooks to attend Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) in Alexandria, Virginia. VTS had been founded and run by low-church Evangelicals and by the 1850s was recognized as one of the centers of that movement within the Episcopal Church. Allen describes the unusual interview: “He went at last to call upon Dr. Vinton, to ask what steps should be taken by one who proposed to study for the ministry. According to his own report of the conversation at a much later time, Dr. Vinton said to him that it was customary to have received confirmation before becoming a candidate for orders, and also remarked that conversion was generally regarded as a prerequisite for confirmation. To this Phillips Brooks replied that he did not know what conversion meant.”57 That the son of Mary Ann Phillips and a long-time parishioner of St. Paul’s claimed not to understand the meaning of conversion suggested that some sort of internal rebellion against his evangelical upbringing had occurred at college. Nevertheless, Brooks chose to enter the ministry, leaving for seminary after the fall term had begun and, oddly, without telling even his closest friends. It is clear by the time he left for seminary that Phillips Brooks considered himself a Christian but that much else within his belief system remained undefined. He clearly did not undergo the sort emotional personal conversion experience that was the norm for his mother and for his pastor. Nor did his rejection of key features of Evangelicalism appear to involve much public anguish. But in this respect, Brooks was typical of the cohort of liberal Evangelicals who rose to prominence in the 1880s. William R. Hutchison includes Brooks in a group of ten or so Protestant clergy and seminary faculty who shared similar social backgrounds and even demeanours. “Most,” explains Hutchison, “had been raised in middle-class New England families and educated in New England colleges. Nearly all were either Congregationalist or, like Brooks and [Brooks biographer A.V.G.] Allen, linked to the Congregational tradition by family ties and education. . . . Notably lacking in their backgrounds were conversion experiences of an even conventionally emotional or precipitate kind, or experiences of sharp reaction against a repressive home or church environment. . . .As these patterns of personal history may suggest, the New Theologians were men of irenic temper and of mediating

23

Christian Nurture

per~onality.”~~ All of which, however, is not to say that Phillips Brooks’s theological and ecclesiastical journey was untroubled or without important fractures; they are less obvious perhaps than in the careers of some liberal Protestants but they are nonetheless significant.

AN EVANGELICAL SCHOOLING That state of things I saw on the whole at Alexandria to be narrowing and deadening in its influence.

-Phillips Brooks59 Phillips Brooks’s intellectual and spiritual response to Virginia Seminary was not (as some have argued) simply to embrace a generic Evangelicalism.60 Certainly, Brooks’s thoroughly Protestant understanding of the character of the ordained ministry and his preference for simplicity in worship (that made him dislike Anglo-Catholicism) were both bolstered by his seminary training and clearly stayed with him. Brooks did reject essential features of Calvinist dogmatics but he moved further away from the core elements of traditional Evangelicalism.What emerged was a Romanticized and moralistic form of Christian belief that was underwritten by an exceedingly pragmatic view of dogma. Exactly how Brooks arrived at such a position and how certain social and cultural factors interacted within his personal experience can tell one some interesting things about Brooks’s own pilgrimage and the emergence of liberal theology both within the Episcopal Church and American Protestantism at large. Indeed, Brooks represents a fascinating case study of the attractions of the new Romantic theology to those raised within evangelical circles in the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the chief obstacles to garnering a fuller understanding of Phillips Brooks’s early theological development is an approach in historical accounts that one might term Anglican “exceptionalism.” Eager to celebrate the unique genius of their denomination and perhaps of their particular subject, Episcopal biographers have rarely placed their subjects within their broader historical and cultural contexts. Conventional denominational histories seldom spend much time on the contemporary theological and cultural milieu outside their tradition. Or when the question of context is raised, it is dealt with summarily. Thus, A. V. G . Allen could dismiss the period when Brooks attended seminary: “In the decade of the fifties, there was in America but little theological activity, no free enquiry in theology, outside of certain circles in New England; and no attempt to

24

Chapter One

defend by intellectual processes the conviction upon which the Evangelical faith was resting.” Given Brooks’s New England roots, surely some exploration of those “certain circles in New England” is warranted?’ As an American Protestant, Brooks functioned within an intellectual milieu profoundly shaped by evangelical Protestantism. Within the American context, a diverse group of evangelical Protestants occupied the intellectual stage during the antebellum era. As Mark No11 summarizes the situation, “most of those who exerted the greatest influence either propounded some variety of evangelical Protestantism or advanced their thought in self-conscious dialogue with evangelical traditions.”62Among the most conservative Protestants were the Old School confessional Presbyterians at Princeton, led during all of the period under discussion by the indomitable Charles Hodge. The Princeton theology combined Scottish Common Sense philosophy with a conservative Reformed confessionalism, and a lofty view of the Bible’s divine inspiration and historical accuracy. Although the common picture of the Princeton School as hobbled by an arid scholasticism is exaggerated, their appreciation of the importance of authentic religious experience and the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit was not always prominent in their w0rk.6~Yet, despite their innate conservatism, Hodge and his successors, son A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, read widely and grappled with much of the new theological work, both American and European. Princeton seminary was arguably the most influential theological college in the United States during the nineteenth century; Charles Hodge himself taught thousands of students during his lengthy Princeton tenure. The Evangelicalism that Brooks encountered at Virginia Seminary had strong Reformed underpinnings. Not all evangelical Episcopalians were Calvinists but many, like Bishop Charles P. McIlvaine, had strong ties to Princeton Presbyterianism (McIlvaine attended Princeton with Charles Hodge and the two remained friends for decades).@ Slightly to the theological left of the Princetonians were the champions of the New England Theology, including in this period Congregationalists Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858) and Edwards A. Park (1808-1900). Adherents of the New England school understood themselves as standing within the Calvinist tradition and developing, in a measured way, the theological rigor of Jonathan Edwards as well as his support for religious revival. Yet Taylor at Yale and Park at Andover both clearly moved away from Edwards’s understanding of total depravity and individual free agency. Taylor argued that sin was rooted not so much in a fallen nature as in individual sinful choices. Humans, declared Taylor, when considering ethical dilemmas, have within them a “power to the ~ o n t r a r y . ” ~ ~

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One of Taylor’s most creative and controversial students proved to be Horace Bushnell. The conflict between Taylorite New School Congregationalists and Old School elements raged during Bushnell’s time at Yale Divinity School (1831-1833), though it is unclear how much Bushnell (whose own religious views at the time were in considerable flux) was actually affected by the Like many of his generation, Bushnell was powerfully influenced by the writings of Coleridge, especially his Aids to Reflection; in fact, he admitted that he owed more to the latter work than to any other text outside of the But the impact of Coleridge’s idealism did not become clear until Bushnell underwent a sort of personal spiritual renewal in 1848.68Bushnell’s fresh understanding of the gospel came in the wake of fierce critical reaction to his first book, Discourses on Christian Nurture (1847). In this volume, he had argued that the standard understanding of regeneration was inadequate and that many children could be raised as Christians from infancy and never need experience a sudden, emotional conversion experience -no doubt an argument that would have appealed to a young Phillips Br0oks.6~In any case, as Shelton Smith puts it, Bushnell’s “illumination of 1848 determined the creative center of his theology.”70Addressing many of the same issues that had divided Congregationalists since his college days, Bushnell developed his new ideas in lectures given at his alma mater and at Andover and Harvard; these addresses were collected together in God in Christ, which appeared in print in 1849. Bushnell began with a searching critique of theological language. All religious or moral language was inescapably figurative, said Bushnell, because it articulated the subjective religious experience of the individual speaker or writer. Accordingly, theological terms, even those imbedded in the early creeds, must be used circumspectly,for their claim to truth is limited and, indeed, they always contain something actually “contrary to the truth intended.”71Bushnell employed this method of removing the “drapery of language” and highlighting the “real truth of feeling” in his interpretation of the Incarnation and the Atonement. Here, Bushnell rejected speculative metaphysical attempts to understand the Trinity and instead stressed God’s presence in the humanity of Jesus. He affirmed God’s full expression of himself in Christ but tossed aside traditional definitions of Christ’s divine and human natures?* Later, in The Kcarious Sacrijke (1866), Bushnell developed a moral theory of the atonement that was different from his predecessors’, both Unitarian and orthodox. Like Channing (see below), he discarded the traditional forensic understanding of justification, of Christ serving as penal substitute, the object of God’s wrath and satisfying his judicial demands; Bushnell dismissed such a construction as

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violating human moral feelings. But he went on to celebrate the Cross as singular testimony to God’s self-sacrificing love?3 Jesus’ death was “not a sacrifice in any literal sense” yet it could have a mighty impact on individual ~ i l l s . 7Thus ~ Jesus’ “work terminates, not in the release of penalties by due Compensation, but in the transformation of chara~ter.”~~ Of course, such an interpretation would please neither Unitarians nor confessionalists like the Princetonians. Hodge, for instance, spent seven pages in his influential Systematic Theology developing a detailed critique of Bushnell’s position and of similar interpretations?6 Edwards Park, who (in Bruce Kuklick’s apt phrase) was “anxious to domesticate Bushnell,” sought a halfway point somewhere between the claims of the head and the heart?7 Park argued in a famous lecture in 1850 that there were two theologies, one of the intellect and one of the feelings. While Bushnell had contended that all theology was in the realm of symbol and metaphor, Park separated the two ways of knowing and granted both a legitimate place and role. The problem, observed Park, was when some insisted on interpreting portions of the Bible as literal when they were meant to be taken symbolically. Among Park’s examples of this flawed approach was the classic Reformed doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin of disobedience to all of his descendants. Such an attack was bound to bring forth a critical response from Hodge, and their prolonged exchange in the republic’s two most important theological journals (the Princeton Review and Bibliotheca Sacra) pitted conservative Reformed confessionalism against a liberalizing Evangelicalism. While Hodge recognized that Park did not intend to be “subversive of the authority of the Bible,” he treated the implications of Park’s approach as very dangerous?* The distinction upon which Park based his case was illegitimate and subtly undermined the historicity of the biblical record. In the end, such an approach represented a clever way for Park and others to reject doctrines they personally abh0rred.7~ While standing outside the boundaries of mainstream Protestantism, Unitarian William Ellery Channing and former Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson were also important voices within American religious discourse during this period. In fact, some have argued that it was Channing’s sermon “Unitarian Christianity’’ (18 19) that had laid out with admirable clarity the four central issues that Congregationalists and others would debate in the following three decades: the trinity, Christology, total depravity, and the atonement.8O Channing began his seminal address with an attack on the orthodox understanding of the trinitarian nature of the Godhead. “We believe in the doctrine of God’s UNITY,” he declared, while the orthodox in effect believed in a muddled way in three gods, a position that was “ir-

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rational and unscriptural.”8’With regard to the classic creedal formulae of Christ having two distinct natures (one human and one divine), Channing argued that this approach “made Christ two beings.”82Channing’s attack on the conventional Calvinist construction of total depravity struck a resonant note among New Englanders who could point back to the debate between Edwards and Charles Chauncy in the eighteenth century. Here, Channing denounced what he termed the “Calvinist system” for teaching that God condemns humans for a sinful nature with which he created them. The stormy debate that followed pushed trinitarian Congregationalists like Taylor to redefine human depravity in a manner that highlighted individual ch0ice.8~Finally, Channing gutted the traditional understanding of Christ’s atoning death. He rejected the concept of Christ’s death satisfying God’s judgment as “pernicious” and dismissed Christ’s substitutionary role on Calvary’s cr0ss.8~Rather than saving humans from fiery punishment, Christ’s primary mission then and now was to encourage godly character. But, by the time Brooks entered Harvard in 1851, the birth of Unitarianism was old news. Since Emerson’s controversial “Divinity School Address” (1838), a new force was at work within Unitarianism (and religious and philosophical circles in general) in New England. Applying insights from European Romanticism, Emerson and fellow Transcendentalists such as Theodore Parker rejected what they deemed the arid rationalism of Unitarian belief .85 Emerson celebrated individual spiritual intuition without the aid of church or bible. Nature, since it symbolized spirit, could facilitate the individual’s experience of God. And man was capable of a kind of direct communion with God wherein he “becomes God.”86The Christian Church, claimed Emerson, had focused too much on the person of Christ and thus distorted this divinity of man. In contrast with traditional Reformed perspectives,there seemed to be little room in Emerson’s monistic system for a sustained consideration of evil, suffering, or sin. His radical views quickly brought Emerson fierce criticism from more traditional Unitarians and, obviously, from mainstream evangelical Protestants. Yet Emerson’s influence was broad and subtle and his devotees included many who were hardly Transcendentalists. His individualism and Romantic celebration of spiritual intuition formed the minds of many growing up in the antebellum era, including Evangelicals whose pietist assumptions had long welcomed a certain subjectivism. Sydney Ahlstrom, for instance, observes “the pervasive presence of Bushnell’s and Emerson’s thought in the churches, classrooms, and parlors of America- and one could say even more about their contribution to America’s ways of understanding itself and expressing its ideals.”87

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To what extent Brooks followed the preceding debates is unclear, but he could not have been unaware of them. In fact, Brooks latched onto Andover as his preferred refuge when Virginia Seminary seemed at first unbearable (see below). Prior to coming to VTS, then, and in his initial time as a seminarian there, Brooks was shaped by assorted intellectual influences. Brooks’s journals and notebooks from his seminary days clarify the course of his intellectual development. What stands out most is an amalgam of liberal Romantic Evangelicalism and literary Romanticism. The sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and the poetry of Coleridge and Goethe were early favorites. Indeed, Allen asserts that “Coleridge was prominent among the writers with a philosophical purpose who most influenced Phillips Brooks . . . he lingered over Coleridge’s poetry.”88 Given the intellectual and religious milieu described above, it is not surprising that Brooks’s most important non-American influence in these early years was the work of Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was part philosopher, poet, essayist, theologian, and oracle. Coleridge’s personal journey mirrored the intellectual development of his era. He began as a rationalist and a deist (he actually served briefly as a Unitarian preacher). Yet he searched for a personal intimacy with God that enlightenment rationalism had denied him. Eventually, he embraced Trinitarianism as the solution to the philosophical questions with which he had been gra~pling.8~ Like many Romantics, Coleridge’s mature thought was founded upon a fundamental distinction (found in Kant) between Reason and Understanding. The former constituted a higher, direct way of knowing, while the latter was limited, being based solely upon the physical senses. Coleridge viewed his brand of idealism as Platonist; indeed, he divided all philosophers into two categories, Platonists and Aristoteleans.g0 So the test for truth for Coleridge “was whether it worked in man’s whole being and life, not whether it satisfied his logical faculty.The understanding was as incapable of judging evidence as it was of finding truth.” In short, Coleridge sought always to preserve what good he located in tradition but he cherished the exercise of a free mind to evaluate the “relative value of things .”9’ Brooks was profoundly affected by Coleridge’s brand of Romantic idealism and his “conserving” approach to traditional beliefs. But back to Alexandria. Brooks was soon very unhappy at VTS. Although his attitude brightened over time, his initial assessment was very bleak and he complained bitterly about the place in letters to his family. Though some of his dislike clearly arose from the culture shock of a thoroughly Yankee seminarian training for the ministry in Virginia on the eve of the Civil War, this element has sometimes been exaggerated.

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Brooks’s father was a “cotton Whig” of conservative views regarding slavery and had several Southern friends. Nor was Brooks alone at VTS; by the 1860-1861 session, half of the seminary’s students came from the North.92Sometimes, it seems to have been the social location of the students and the perceived anti-intellectualism of both the students and faculty members that aggravated Br00ks.9~ With respect to social class, VTS clearly did not measure up. As a Harvard student he had once argued in an address that Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal . . . is a doctrine disproved by every birth. To live in perfect equality has been tried and found impra~tical.”~~ Upon arriving in Alexandria in the fall of 1856, Brooks described his fellow students as “an extremely good but not particularly interesting set of young men.”95In a letter to one of his brothers, he ridiculed Alexandria society: “‘The Season’ in Virginia is in full blast now. I have been to one big party and two little ones; each only equalled in stupidity by the other.”96Indeed, part of Brooks’s disdain for the South seems to have been linked to the demeanor of those in humbler stations. As he remarked in a letter to his father upon returning to seminary for his second year: “You can hardly imagine how disagreeable it is to get back again among Southern men after New England. Shopkeepers, railroad men, omnibus drivers, everybody, is above his business and takes your ticket or sells you your goods as a personal favor.”97Accordingly, one is not surprised to hear one former classmate later remember Brooks in those early days as “modest, quiet, reserved, with rather more of the Massachusetts frostiness than he exhibited in later years.”98 Considerations of social class would continue to surface in Brooks’s early ministerial career, well before his ministry among Boston’s Brahmins at Trinity Church, Copley Square. The young cleric had an active social life in the 1860s that included attending parties hosted by A. H. Vinton, now rector of Holy Trinity, Philadelphia. At these fashionable gatherings, Brooks met “the upper ten of Philadelphia” s0ciety.9~Indeed, when Brooks was enticed away from his first parish, the Church of the Advent, to the more affluent Holy Trinity in 1862, at least one reporter at Philadelphia’s Daily Press interpreted the move in terms of class conflict: “the poor of Advent are left to wander without a shepherd, that the aristocratic attendants upon Holy Trinity may be accommodated . . . The finger of suspicion will long point at him [i.e., Brooks] as one guided in his holy calling by temporal interests. This and more he will have to encounter. The cold-blooded aristocrats of Holy Trinity will treat him with frigid dignity, nothing more.”100Notably, when describing the need for good clergy in the Episcopal Church to his brother Fred at about this same time,

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Brooks did not stress fervency or loyalty to some evangelical position but noted that there were “so few trained and cultivated men to do the ‘ministry of Christ.”’l0’ When Brooks went about organizing an Episcopal clericus for the first time in Philadelphia, “the social element,” as he put it, “was prominent, for the members were chosen by ballot, and the one object was to get ‘clubable’ men.”1o2In short, it is too easy simply to dismiss Brooks’s comments at VTS as immature snobbery. While he rarely expressed himself in such stark terms later in life, class considerations were far from peripheral to Brooks’s subsequent ministry. Brooks’s concomitant concern about VTS was anti-intellectualism and his mood was at times rather bleak. “I am living my common life here,” he reflected in a notebook sometime during 1857,“surrounded with minds as dull & hearts as dead, & ears as deaf & tongues as dumb as my own. In spite of my own deficiencies it wearies me. Let me do better if I can.”’03 As he recalled twenty years later, his initial encounter with the evangelical seminarians at VTS had produced conflicting emotions in the youth: I shall never forget my first experience of a divinity school. I had come from a college where men studied hard, but said nothing about faith. I had never been at a prayer meeting in my life. The first place I was taken to at the seminary was the prayer meeting; and never shall I lose the impression of the devoutness with which these men prayed and exhorted one another. Their whole souls seemed exalted and their natures were on fire. I sat bewildered and ashamed and went away depressed. On the next day, I met some of those at the Greek recitation. It would be little to say of some of the devoutest of them that they had not learned their lessons. Their whole way showed that they never learned their lessons; that they had not got hold of the first principles of hard, faithful, conscientious study. The boiler had no connection with the engine. The devotion did not touch the work which then and there was the work, and the only work, for them to do.’O4

This familiar anecdote is remarkable in several respects. Despite being raised in a fervently evangelical parish, Brooks had apparently never experienced a prayer meeting firsthand. Allen’s conclusions about Brooks at this juncture are, if anything, understated. “He had not,” writes Allen, “been consciously reached by the religious teaching at St. Paul’s church, and to a certain degree was in revolt against it.”lo5Brooks’s description of Harvard as a place where “men studied hard, but said nothing about faith” sounds autobiographical.It may tell us more about his studiousness, since Harvard was notorious at his time for having comparatively few students who were truly committed to their studies. Apparently, his initial reaction to the religiosity of his peers was the welling up of a strong sense of spir-

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itual inferiority (“bewildered and ashamed . . . depressed”). This picture of Evangelicals as fervent but untutored and undisciplined was confirmed by Brooks’s subsequent experience at Virginia. His friend C. A. L. Richards once recalled Brooks commenting in a letter: “When are you coming to see us? Leave your intellect behind; you won’t need it here.”lo6 Given his reaction to Virginia Seminary, it is not surprising to find Brooks plotting his escape near the end of his first year. He was searching eagerly for alternatives but seemed unenthusiastic about other Episcopal seminaries. Instead, he latched onto one of the most innovative Protestant seminaries, And0~er.l~’ “I must feel every day,” he wrote to his father in the spring, “that I might do more and better than I am doing; that either study in Boston or at some other seminary would be far preferable. New York [i.e., General Seminary, a High Church bastion], from what I can learn, is not far in advance of this. I am thinking strongly of Andover. It is the most full of life, and is in reality the place from which almost all the theology of this seminary comes at second-hand. Please let me know what you think of it, for I must confess I am strongly drawn to it.”Io8Although Brooks’s characterization of VTS here was not entirely accurate, he was certainly right that Andover (with Park and others) was much closer to the cutting edge of American theology in 1857 than was parochial Alexandria. Accordingly, his classmate, C. A. L. Richards, wrote Andover to inquire about Episcopal students studying there. The response from both Andover and William Gray Brooks, however, was discouraging. The elder Brooks had consulted Dr. Vinton and the rector’s reply was predictable. Brooks found it difficult to conceal his disappointment and bitterness. Writing again to his father, he explained: “I received sometime ago your letter telling me of what Dr Vinton said about leaving here. I have not decided anything more yet. Have pretty nearly given up Andover. One of my friends (I haven’t but two) here wrote to Andover, as he was thinking somewhat of going there, to make Enquiries about six weeks ago & Prof Park in a very gentlemanly way has never answered his letter.”’09When Park finally replied to the letter, he poured cold water on the proposal and added that Episcopal students could not be released from chapel attendance should they insist on making the switch.l1° The young seminarian’s preference for Andover, even over other Episcopal seminaries, suggests that he may have been more of a student of the New England Theology than has usually been recognized. In any event, Brooks soon concluded that he needed to make the best of things at VTS. Although his attitude improved over time, it was clearly a struggle for him. Part of the problem was rooted in the difference between Brooks’s Romanticized piety and the more traditional Evangelicalism of his fellow

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seminarians. Brooks’s spirituality owed more to the literary or poetic than to the narrowly biblical or theological. He immersed himself in nineteenth-century Romantic poetry and prose both before and during his studies at Virginia Seminary.”’ The early diaries and the notebooks he filled while a seminarian are packed with quotations from Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. He was also fond of Elizabeth Banett Browning’s poetry, which is referred to in letters and elsewhere.”* Brooks drew several key themes from his extensive and sustained exploration of Romantic literature.First, there was the Romantic celebration of the self and its inherent nobility. Writing in his personal notebook at seminary, the young Brooks described “the mainspring of all Moral life” as “the belief that there is in us a real power over the/our future, to turn a false to a true, a mean to a noble, an unholy to a pure.”’13This emphasis on the self and its dignity owed much to the characteristic UnitariadIdealist focus on “selfculture” so prevalent in antebellum New England. In the same notebook, Brooks transcribed several verses from Lowell’s Lines on Concord BattleJield “Yet to their instincts they were true / And had the genius to be rnen.”’l4 Or perhaps Frederick Douglass’s words, also cited by Brooks, express this Romantic individualism more succinctly: “One with God is a maj~rity.””~ All of this idealistic celebration of the virtues of the individual left religious dogma in a precarious position. The reflective Brooks clearly struggled with the inherited beliefs of the institutional church. From Coleridge’s Aids to ReJlection he took solace: “The man is more & other than his belief & God only knows how small or how large a part of him the belief in question may be for good or for evil. Resist every false doctrine: & call no man heretic. The false doctrine does not necessarily make a man a heretic; but an evil heart can make any doctrine hereti~al.””~ Many have observed Coleridge’s broad influence within antebellum Protestantism.’l 7 Beyond Coleridge’s oft-noted impact on the Transcendentalists, James Turner highlights “the other stream . . .[flowing] principally through Horace Bushnell into the main currents of American Protestantism.””8 As noted above, Bushnell was convinced that there were vital truths beneath the accepted forms, be they ancient creeds, confessional formulations, or scholastic theological systems. Gradually, under the leadership of Bushnell and others, many began to regard traditional formulations as straitjackets that did not do justice to the complexity or the beauty of religious truth. Such an approach inevitably got Bushnell into trouble but, as Turner rightly concludes, “younger men thought they heard the accents of truth in Bushnell’s writings, and his influence amplified as the years Not unlike Henry Ward Beecher, Brooks built upon the innovations of Horace Bushnell. He read Bushnell and was clearly influenced by his ap-

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proach despite explicit maternal warnings.120 His mother wrote later in 1864 that she was “so shocked by” a collection of Bushnell’s sermons “that I cannot refrain from warning you against them as being a preacher of the Cross of Christ.” In Mary Ann Phillips’s mind, they “tear the view of Christ’s vicarious suffering all to pieces.”’*’ It was unusual for his mother to mention specific books in her letters and thus the warning may well have been the product of a specific concern of Brooks’s pious mother. Allen observes that “no books in Brooks’s library show signs of harder usage than Bushnell’s Sermons for the New Life, and [Frederick] Maurice’s Theological Essays.”122 As Charles Feidelson has explained it, “Bushnell’s aim was to differentiate the logical and the poetic modes of language, to define the function of each, and to replace a scientific, logical, mechanistic, or abstractive ideal of language with an aesthetic, symbolic, organic, literary Such a “replacement” of the abstract and mechanistic with the aesthetic and symbolic well describes Brooks’s mature preaching, those sermons that proved to be so popular in printed form. Though it would be inaccurate to portray Brooks as a simple disciple of Bushnell, unquestionably, the latter’s Romanticized version of evangelical belief was in the air during the 1850s and Brooks breathed it in.’24 One result of this “inhalation” was an impatience with dogma. The particular form of dogmatism that Brooks targeted as a seminarian was Calvinism. Here, Brooks was certainly not alone. The tension between Arminian and Calvinist perspectives within evangelical Anglicanism stretched back at least to the eighteenth century and the infamous pamphlet wars between John Wesley and Augustus Toplady. Among evangelical Episcopalians in this period there were many who were not consistent, thoroughgoing C a l v i n i ~ t s .In ’ ~ any ~ case, Brooks had considerable difficulty with the Reformed style of Evangelicalism taught at VTS before the Civil War.126Seminarians then were served good helpings of Charles Hodge, the doyen of Calvinistic orthodoxy in mid-nineteenth-century America; Brooks found much of it hard to swallow. Reacting to Hodge’s treatment of infant baptism, Brooks wrote to a friend in a flippant tone: “It looks like a charmingly safe book, proving all the sure points conclusively, and leaving a poor heretic like me (and you 0 Revd) as rudderless as ever on all the rest.”’27A good part of Brooks’s trouble with Evangelicalism was apparently its Calvinistic face at VTS. One of his notebooks reveals that Brooks, like many of his generation, was unable to accept the traditional understanding of total depravity.128Moreover, he was fond of Henry Ward Beecher ’s thoroughly Arminian reading of election, which he quoted in his private notebook: “The Elect are whosoever will, the

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Non-elect whosoever won’t.”129The single faculty member at VTS that Brooks can be said to have really enjoyed (and then in his final year) was one of its more self-consciously Arminian instructors, Dean William sparrow.130 One of Brooks’s closest college friends seems to have recognized this connection between his professional training and Reformed orthodoxy; Brooks bristled at the suggestion: All I can discover [in the friend’s last letter] is some satirical allusion to ‘Calvinists’ and ‘Churchmen’ in connection with Sylvester Judd [(18131853) Unitarian clergyman and author of the tract A Young Man’s Account ofHis Conversionfrom Calvinism (184?)]. The last charge [i.e., of being a ‘Churchman’] I am willing and ready to stand, with all the consequences and deductions that you can logically deduce from it, but the first, the Calvinist part, I emphatically reject as not only not implied in the second, but entirely inconsistent with it.13’

Brooks evidently believed that one could not be a true churchman and at the same time a thoroughgoing Calvinist. Certainly he would not have been taught the alleged inconsistency of these two positions at Virginia Seminary during his years there. In fact, Brooks’s reply suggests that he had reacted against a good deal of his instruction in his first year.132He may have been referring to some of these points of Reformed dogmatics when he wrote in his second year: “These things may be true or false that we are saying and believing every day about the daily points that are always coming up for us to think or speak about. We cannot but fear that very many of them are very far indeed from the truth; but still it is well for us to believe them, and to say them, too, for it is these words and faith that really make a life for us which otherwise we could not have.”133 Though it may not have been his conscious intention, it is hard not to read this last remark as referring to his clerical vocation, that is, if one does not assent to certain dogmatic formulations, as inadequate and limiting as they may be, one cannot follow this calling; one cannot have this sort of profe~sion.’~~ It was, of course, not a great leap from such an attitude toward doctrinal systems (coupled with an almost utilitarian approach to personal belief) to a rather pragmatic (almost proto-Pragmatist) view of religious faith. Of course some of this pragmatism was rooted simply in Brooks’s personality; he appears to have inherited some of the utilitarian approach to religious belief that distinguished his father. As a class, William Gray Brooks’s Boston business elite was not known for its introspection and Brooks seems to have acquired a similar attitude that focused on the re-

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sults of religious belief, rather than on abstract theological speculation for its own sake.135“I don’t believe,” wrote Brooks in his private notebook while at VTS, “as this my neighbour does, but I see his faith giving him the same comfort, purity & energy that I am trying here to get from mine. I feel with him then, I sympathise with his ends if not his means, with his peace if not his faith.”136Or, as he put it more succinctly a few pages later: ‘‘I believe in these things because I know they have helped my race.”137 Struggling with the inherited beliefs of his particular ecclesiastical tradition, the young Brooks, like many after him, was attracted to a purely functional or instrumental approach. The mature Brooks struck more of a balance in this regard but, during his seminary years, such a tack clearly held its appeal. The young Brooks’s critique of dogmatic systems naturally led to a new emphasis on moral behavior over and above right belief. Here again, the relationship of this moralism with mid-century American Evangelicalism was a complex one and not simply adversarial. James Turner, for one, has stressed the “pervasive drift” toward moralism among antebellum Evangelicals themselves.I3* This movement “away from conversion” and “toward character” implicitly involved embracing a moralistic perspective. Virginia Seminary in the 1850s had not, by any means, abandoned a conversionist model but a concern for right conduct could and did sometimes displace the customary evangelical focus on the Atonement and the central role of personal faith. Much of the moralism that came to characterize Brooks’s mature message came directly from Romantic literature, as well as from Romanticized Evangelicals. Like some of the Romantics he read, Brooks was fond of quoting Kant, including the latter’s definition of religion as “the acknowledgment of our duties as divine commands.”139 While many Evangelicals would not have put it quite this way, the influence of Romantic or idealist moralism was considerable within the movement. Kant’s definition was echoed by Francis Wayland, the author of the standard antebellum moral philosophy text, much loved by Evangelicals and assigned to most undergraduates (though probably not part of Brooks’s curriculum at Harvard). “In Religion,” Wayland contended, “our only business is to understand and obey the laws to which He [i.e., God] has subjected the moral universe.”14 Yet Brooks was attracted to others (such as Carlyle) decidedly out of fashion with more conservative Evangelicals. Like Carlyle, he admired the great German Romantic writer Goethe. In seminary, Brooks read and enjoyed G. H. Lewes’s laudatory Life of Goethe, quoting often from it in his notebooks. Lewes himself was an unlikely choice for an Evangelical,being a noted skeptic and devotee of Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity. The

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English intellectual had been attracted to Comte’s system in part because of its intense moralism, and his portrait of Goethe echoes this concern. Lewes quotes Johann Heinrich Merck’s remark that what Goethe “lived was more beautiful than what he wrote.”14’ Brooks himself quoted with approval Goethe’s contention that science, despite its advances, “will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as it shines forth in the Gospels.”142Brooks was not apt to be attracted to Comte’s atheistic humanism but he definitely built upon the moralistic concern for character that he encountered in some of the Romantics and that dovetailed with the moralism of some Victorian Evangelicalism. Allen aptly characterizes Brooks’s first sermon at his first parish in Philadelphia (the Church of the Advent) as “enforcing the ethical as the highest demand of Christianity,urging character rather than religious experience or than devotion to dogmas.” While not an entirely “new note in preaching,” Brooks’s sermon is further evidence of a fundamental shift already well under way within some evangelical circles by the late 1 8 5 0 ~ Like ’ ~ ~ much of Brooks’s developing thought, it was shaped by intellectual influences clearly outside of evangelical orthodoxy, while also drawing upon newer emphases already present within Anglo-American Protestantism. Finally, there is also what one might term an argument from silence. What is perhaps most striking about Brooks’s private writings during and immediately after his seminary days is the relative absence of traditional evangelical themes. He read a great deal of history, biography, and poetry in the tiny library at Alexandria. He was struck by many passages treating truth, beauty, and moral duty and these he earnestly copied into his notebooks. Yet what is largely missing from these pages is probably most revealing. There are very few references to the cross, to the role of faith for an individual believer, and almost no reference at all to the theme of religious conversion. Only two pages are set aside for scripture verses in one particular notebook (dated 1858) and the other extant journals are similar in the space they devote to biblical references. To be sure, there are lengthy quotations from the Church Fathers in these notebooks, especially Tertullian. But there is little from the Reformers and almost nothing from the eighteenthcentury fathers of Evangelicalism-a startling omission for someone attending Virginia Seminary in this period.’44A survey of his surviving correspondence only confirms this picture. There are almost no biblical references in his letters to brothers or friends. In one particularly revealing letter to a disappointed brother, Phillips Brooks’s counsel is to “Read a little Tennyson & get over it the best you can.”145Even his letters to his parents, though often warm and sentimental, rarely showed much overtly

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religious emotion or contained any pietistic rhetoric. Obviously Brooks’s devout mother was bound to be disappointed by this feature of her son’s correspondence and there are many warnings from both parents about arrogance and conceit, especially as Phillips assumed his first cure.146In fact, at about the midpoint in his seminary training, the young Brooks felt constrained to reassure his parents in this regard. “The truth is,” he explained to them, “I can write what I feel deeply much easier & better than I can say it but the feeling I at least know is none the less deep for that. Let this explain a great deal of what you may have fancied is coldness in all my life & more particularly in my new p r o f e s ~ i o n . ’ ”Such ~ ~ an assurance does, of course, still beg the question of the young Brooks’s apparent reluctance to discuss the state of his soul even in writing. In light of the foregoing, Allen’s conclusion that Brooks, by the close of his seminary training, “freely accepted the leading truths which are known as Evangelical” is mi~1eading.l~~ While many have noted Brooks’s subsequent leading role within the Broad Church movement, few recognize how little appeal Evangelicalism apparently held for Brooks even at the beginning of his ministry. Allen and others seem to have based their interpretation upon several doctrinal essays written by Brooks for Dr. Sparrow at VTS. Among other things, one of the essays defends a propitiatory understanding of Christ’s sacrifice.149Yet given the fact that these were formal essays submitted for credit, it seems prudent to place more weight on Brooks’s private notebooks and personal correspondence during these years. Without being disingenuous, the mature Brooks was always very careful to avoid theological controversy in all his public utterances; perhaps Brooks learned to be guarded as a seminarian.150 The young Brooks’s encounter, then, with Virginia Seminary confirms that there was no easy elision from Evangelicalism to the Broad Church. A variety of elements, both cultural and more narrowly intellectual or theological, combined to make a traditional Evangelicalism problematic for Brooks. On the face of it, there was much that should have inclined him to embrace evangelical orthodoxy: a pietistic mother, being raised in an evangelical parish (itself within a firmly evangelical diocese), and three years of ministerial training at Virginia Theological Seminary, all at a time when it was generally respectable to be identified with the movement. Though he always maintained a close relationship with his mother, Brooks reacted against much of what he heard at St. Paul’s and quietly rebelled against key features of VTS’s particular brand of evangelical Protestantism. Significantly, Brooks’s developing position was rooted in an earlier Romantic revision of orthodoxy, rather than in the historicism of Higher Criticism or evolutionary theory. While some have stressed that

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he owed a lot to the Evangelicalism of Virginia Seminary, it seems more accurate to attribute much of his emphasis on “the feelings and the emotions” to the Romantic idealism that underlay so much of what he read as an impressionable young man.15’ Moreover, Phillips Brooks’s experience testifies to the fact that, despite Evangelicalism’s substantial social influence, it was becoming difficult for some of New England’s cultural elite to subscribe to several of its central tenets.*52Without a new generation of gifted men to lead the Evangelical party, the challenges of the 1860s and 1870s would take a heavy toll, while up-and-coming low churchmen would be drawn to Broad Church liberalism instead. Furthermore, the foregoing suggests a revision of the received view of the mature Brooks. While some development is clearly evident in Brooks’s later thinking, the preceding portrait indicates that his theological liberalism was deeply rooted in his earliest experience^.'^^

NOTES 1. Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 99. 2. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,31-32. 3. See Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1 765 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). 4. Douglas C . North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1 860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 159-64. 5. F. C. Jaher, “Politics of Boston Brahmins,” in Boston 1700-1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics, ed. Ronald P. Formisano and Constance K. Bums (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 60-61. 6. Jaher, “Politics of Boston Brahmins,” 70. 7. Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 33. 8 . Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, chap. 3 9. Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, I79u-1880: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), 76-77. 10. Jaher, “Politics of Boston Brahmins,” 74. 11. Jaher, “Politics of Boston Brahmins,” 7 1. 12. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation ofAmerican Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), chaps. 4 and 8. 13. To illustrate this affinity, note that 86.5 percent of Bostonians worth in excess of $100,000 were Whigs between 1836 and 1848. See Jaher, “Politics of Boston Brahmins,” 75.

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14. Daniel W. Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), esp. chaps. 2 and 7. 15. F. C. Jaher, “Politics of Boston Brahmins,” 76-77. 16. Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 243,253. 17. Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 132. 18. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 214-219. 19. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 599-602. 20. Quoted in E. Clowes Chorley,Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1946), 38. See also Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),chap. 2. 21. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,27. 22. Phillips Brooks (PB), quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,378. Brooks used the English spelling for center. 23. Brooks was believed to have been Boston’s wealthiest citizen when he died. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,27. 24. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,37-38. 25. Frothingham, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,39. 26. William Gray Brooks (WGB), quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 , 4 2 4 3 . 27. WGB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,43. 28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Peny Miller in the foreword to TheAmerican Transcendentalists:Their Prose and Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: 1957), ix. 29. Emerson, quoted in Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol I : 1799-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 181.Timothy L. Smith observes here: “But transcendentalism was not to be the answer. Erratic, sophisticated, and at odds with popular religious prejudices, its champions were as much inclined to withdraw from the world as they were to reform it.” See Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [ 1957]), 102. Similarly, Daniel Walker Howe concludes: “As an ecclesiastical enterprise, the Unitarian awakening was a failure.” Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1970), 173. 30. Ellis, quoted in Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 96. 3 1. Howe, Unitarian Conscience, 172. Cleveland Amory observes: “Little by little, . . . a practical low-church Episcopalianism began to make severe inroads on Boston’s home-grown Unitarianism.” Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 104-05. 32. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 100-01. 33. Samuel Snelling, “Memoirs of Phillips Brooks,” n.d. (ca. 1917), Brooks Papers *54M-46 MS Am 1342, Houghton Library, pp. 3 4 , 2 . See also “Vinton, Alexander Hamilton,” in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Scribner’s, 1938), 10:280-82.

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34. Snelling, “Memoirs of Phillips Brooks,” 4-5. Many evangelical churchmen confronted the strain between Anglican churchly decorum and American revivalism. Diana H. Butler explores this tension at length in her Standing against the Whirlwind, esp. chap. 3. 35. Amory, Proper Bostonians, 105. 36. WGB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,43. 37. Amory, Proper Bostonians, 105.Amory adds that this gender dimension was part of Phillips Brooks’s appeal when he returned to Boston as rector of Trinity Church in 1869: “When the handsome young bachelor Phillips Brooks came to Boston in 1869 from Philadelphia, it was the Boston woman who soon made a social as well as an ecclesiastical lion out of him. With ringing rhetoric from his Trinity Church pulpit Brooks soon had even such staunch Unitarian feminists as the daughters of James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proudly referring to him as ‘our bishop’; since Brooks had been born a Unitarian, his success was singularly important in placing Episcopalianism on a par with Unitarianism in the fight for the No. 1 religion of Boston’s best.” Amory, Proper Bostonians, 105. 38. See E. L. MacMahon, The Mother’s Influence on Phillips Brooks with a Short Sketch of the Episcopal Church (Boston, Mass.: Commercial Press, 1916). 39. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,43. 40. Amory, Proper Bostonians, 80. 41. Appleton, quoted in Amory, Proper Bostonians, 8 1. 42. Amory, Proper Bostonians, 82. 43. Amory, Proper Bostonians, 85. 44. Amory, Proper Bostonians, 86. 45. Emerson, quoted in Amory, Proper Bostonians, 105. 46. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,28-29. Allen sums up Peter Chardon Brooks’s piety with typical understatement: “There is religion here, but it is of a different type from that of the doctrinal Puritan, with whom the future world and its interests outweigh in importance the usages of the existing order. Here the religion is mingled with the business of common life, and no effort is made to disengage it as something distinct from and above the medium of its manifestation,” Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,29. 47. See letter, WGB to PB, 13 December 1864, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,522. 48. WGB , 3 0 May 1847, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,44. 49. WGB, 25 December 1847, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,45. 50. Rhys Isaac explores this conflict during the eighteenth century between Evangelicals (in this case, Baptists) and the gentry in his The Transfomation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va.). 51. PB, note sheets, Phillips Brooks Papers, bMS AM 1594.1, (635), box 20, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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52. See Raymond Albright, Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 24-29. 53. Tennyson eventually became a leading literary figure in the liberal Broad Church movement within the Church of England. 54. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,87. Allen: “The scrutiny of his college essays reveals no tendency to dwell upon the subject of religion. This is in contrast to his theses written while in the Latin School.” See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,90. 55. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,99. 56. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 122. 57. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 141-142. 58. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 78. 59. Letter, PB to Frederick Brooks, 24 November 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,433. 60. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,315-16. 61. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,283; quoted approvingly in Chorley, Men and Movements, 298. 62. Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 232. 63. See Mark Noll, “The Princeton Theology,” in The Princeton Theology, ed. David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1989), 17-24. These categories are Noll’s. 64.The founders of VTS emphasized a Calvinist view of human depravity in the Washington Theological Repertory in 18 19. See an excellent treatment of this question in Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind, 52 n26. McIlvaine took the side of moderate Presbyterian William Sprague when it came to Finney’s revivalist extremes. See Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind, 89 n51. 65. Taylor, quoted by Noll, History ofchristianity, 233. See also: Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), chapter 7 on Taylor. 66. H. Shelton Smith, ed., Horace Bushnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 22; also Kuklick, Churchmen, chapter 11. 67. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 262. 68. Smith, Horace Bushnell, 24,27. 69. Smith, Horace Bushnell, 24. 70. Smith, Horace Bushnell, 26. 71. Bushnell, quoted in Welch, Protestant Thought, 260. My summary of Bushnell here follows that of Welch. Smith writes that “Bushnell’s theory of religious knowledge derived from two traditions: German Romanticism, and Puritanism as revitalized in Edward’s doctrine of the divine light. His relation to the former tradition is generally emphasized, but his connection with the latter has been entirely neglected” (p. 34). 72. Welch, Protestant Thought, 266.

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73. F. R. Webber, A History of Preaching (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Northwestern Publishing House, 1952), 291. 74. Bushnell, quoted in Welch, Protestant Thought, 267. 75. Bushnell, quoted in Webber, History, 291. 76. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970 [1952]), 2566-73. 77. Kuklick, Churchmen, 210. Brooks stayed with Park when the former lectured at Andover in 1873 and described him as “charming, bright, witty, and genial.” Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,210. 78. Charles Hodge, “The Theology of the Intellect,” in Essays and Reviews (New York: R. Carter, 1857), 54243. 79. Hodge, “Theology,”, 549-50; Kuklick, Churchmen,21 1. 80. List from Smith, Horace Bushnell, 4,22. 81. Channing, quoted in Smith, Horace Bushnell, 5. 82. Smith, Horace Bushnell, 10. 83. My account here closely follows Smith, Horace Bushnell, 12-18. 84. Smith, Horace Bushnell, 20. 85. Theodore Parker was one of the city’s most celebrated preachers, especially after his move to the Boston Music Hall in 1852. Some Harvard students visited Parker’s lectures, though it is unclear whether their number included Brooks in these years. Mrs. Brooks expressed her concern about Parker’s Hegelian message. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,87-88. 86. Emerson, quoted by Welch, Protestant Thought, 179. 87. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 613-614. Ahlstrom notes earlier that Emerson “is, with William James, peculiarly America’s own philosopher . . .the theologian of something we might almost term ‘the American religion.”’ See 605. 88. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,219,227. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 181, lists Charles Kingsley and Knapp’s Systematic Divinity as books Brooks read in seminary,but not necessarily influences. 89. See also, among others: J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). 90. Thus Coleridge: “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist,” from Literary Remains, in W. G. T. Shedd, ed., Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Harper, 1884), 37. 91. Charles R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement: Studies in S. I: Coleridge, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, J. C. Hare, Thomas Carlyle, and E D. Maurice (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942), 4 8 4 9 , 2 2 . 92. John E. Booty, Mission and Ministry: A History of the Virginia Theological Seminary (Alexandria, Va.: VTS, 1995), 91. 93. One incident at the seminary particularly angered Brooks. A personal copy of the Atlantic Monthly was silently removed from a collection of magazines that the seminarians shared because it contained an antislavery article. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 203. Yet Brooks was not

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above teasing the African help at the Seminary on occasion, nor above making racist-sounding comments. See John F. Woolverton, The Education of Phillips Brooks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 67. Woolverton also uses the term culture shock to describe Brooks’s reaction to the antebellum South as a New Englander. See Education, 66. 94. PB, 13 July 1853, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,84. 95. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 151. 96. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,201. 97. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,201. 98. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 172. 99. Thomas G. Ott, “An Appraisal of the Ministry of Phillips Brooks, 1859-1869”(DST thesis, Temple University, 1956), 58. 100. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,381-382. 101. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,393. Emphasis mine. 102. PB, cited in Ott, “An Appraisal,” 59. 103. PB, Notebook, p. 67, Brooks Papers in ECUSA Archives, Austin, TX, call no. PP199. In the original manuscript, Brooks appears to have scratched out a different (now illegible) word and written on top of it “my own,” perhaps conscious of how arrogant the statement might sound without including himself in the indictment in some way. 104. PB, quoted by Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,318-19. Old Princeton scion B. B. Warfield once commented about this story in an address to his students: “Well, it was not at Princeton Seminary that Dr. Brooks saw these evils.” See B. B. Warfield, “Spiritual Culture in the Theological Seminary,” (1904) in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. WarJield,ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970), 2: 474. 105. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 121. 106. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 175. 107. Brooks’s biographers make little of the larger significance of Brooks’s choice here. See Albright, Focus on Infinity, 38. 108. PB to his father, 8 May 1857, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 165. 109. PB to his father, 1 June 1857, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMs Am 1564.1 (4). 110. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,168; Albright, Focus on Infinity, 38. Brooks also considered the new Philadelphia Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School in Connecticut but nothing came of either. 111. Woolverton rightly stresses Brooks’s debt to literary Romanticism. See Woolverton, Education, esp. 90 ff. 112. See Albright, Focus on Infinity, 29 ff. 113. PB, Notebook, 1858, bMS AM 1594.1 (635), box 23,95 in Houghton Library, Harvard University. 114. PB, Notebook.

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115. PB, Notebook, 249. 116. PB, Notebook, 23-27. 117. James Turner identifies the chief intellectual “conduit” in the American context as philosopher and academic James Marsh, who edited the first American edition of the Aids in 1829. See James Turner, Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 106-07. As for Coleridge’s influence within Anglican circles, see Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement; Alex R . Vidler, F: D. Maurice and Company: Nineteenth Century Studies (London: SCM, 1966). 118. Turner, Without God, without Creed, 107. 119. Turner, Without God, without Creed. 120. For example, in one of his seminary notebooks, Brooks recommends a portion of “Dr. Bushnell’s ‘Nature & the Supernatural.”’ Brooks Papers, ECUSA Archives, Austin, TX, no. PP199, 1858-1859 Notebook, 61. 121. Mary Brooks to PB, 27 November 1864. Quoted in Woolverton, Education, 15. 122. Alexander V. G. Allen, Phillips Brooks, 1835-1893: Memories of His Life, with Extracts from His Letters and Note-Books (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), 66. 123. Feidelson, quoted in Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 61 1. 124. William Lawrence listed only Coleridge, Wordsworth, Maurice, Robertson, and Bushnell as Brooks’s “leaders.” See William Lawrence, Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Harper & Bros., 1930), 39. 125. For a helpful discussion of this question, see Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind,29-32. 126. Woolverton may exaggerate Brooks’s debt to his ancestors’ Puritanism. See Woolverton, Education, esp. 84-89. As for the faculty, Joseph Packard (who taught Phillips Brooks scripture) has been described by one graduate as “moderately Calvinistic, a believer in the highest views of [biblical] Inspiration.” See William A. R. Goodwin, History of the Theological Seminary in Urginia and its Historical Background (New York: E. S. Gorham, 1923), 561. 127. PB toC.A.L.Richards, 18February 1859,bMSAM 2022(159)Houghton Library, Harvard University. In the same letter, he described William Gresley’s Treatise on Preaching as “the nearest finite approach to the eternal stupidity.” 128. See PB, Notebook, 1858, bMS AM 1594.1 (635), 23 in Houghton Library, Harvard University. 129. PB, Notebook, 1858, bMS AM 1594.1 (635), 27. 130. Woolverton, Education, 74. 131. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 169. 132. Though Brooks endorsed the great Reformational doctrine of justification by faith in at least one seminary essay (see Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 316), he later described one of Luther’s “faults of opinion as . . . his exagerated [sic] notions of grace compared with works.” PB, Notebook, 1882, bMs Am 1594.1 (635), 35 in Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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133. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,303-04. 134. Brooks was reported to have once remarked that “the Articles in the Prayer Book in America are simply an affair of the book binder anyway.” Quoted in John Wallace Suter, ed., Life and Letters of WilliamReed Huntington, a Champion of Unity (New York: Century, 1925),463. 135. Amory quotes Boston’s Endicott Peabody (later long-time Headmaster at Groton) as commenting: “I am not sure I like boys to think too much. A lot of people think a lot of things we could do without.” Moreover, he summarizes the religious convictions of Bishop William Lawrence (Brooks’s successor as Bishop of Massachusetts) in simple terms: “God was good to Bishop Lawrence and Bishop Lawrence was, in turn, grateful to God.” Amory, Proper Bostonians, 88. 136. PB, Notebook, 1858, bMS AM 1594.1 (635), 182 in Houghton Library, Harvard University. Emphasis in the original. 137. PB, Notebook, 1858, bMS AM 1594.1 (635), 182 in Houghton Library, Harvard University, 203. 138. Turner, Without God, without Creed, 85. 139. PB, Notebook, 1858, bMS AM 1594.1 (635), 23 in Houghton Library, Harvard University. 140. Cited in Turner, Without God, without Creed, 85. 141. Quoted in G. H. Lewes, The Life of Goethe (London: Smith, Elder, 1890), 2. Lewes’s biography was dedicated to Carlyle. 142. PB, Notebook, 1858 (?), bMS AM 1594.1 (635), 22 in Houghton Library, Harvard University 143. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,331. 144. Brooks clearly did read Hooker and the Thirty-Nine Articles carefully while in seminary. Woolverton also notes that Phillips Brooks virtually ignored Calvin, Luther, and the Reformation in his reading. Moreover, Woolverton draws a very helpful comparison between Brooks and English evangelical (and future Church of England bishop) H. C. G. Moule that is very revealing in this regard. See Woolverton, Education, 90. As one alumnus involved in fund-raising for VTS wrote at this time, the paramount requirement for seminary faculty was that “they hold and teach the great Evangelical doctrines of our articles of religion and the Reformation.” Quoted in Booty, Mission and Ministry, 94. 145. Letter, PB to ? Brooks, October or November 1857, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. bMS Am 1594.1 (4) folder 2. 146. See, for example, letter from Mary Ann Phillips to PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 347. 147. PB to parents, 24 December 1857, in Houghton Library, Harvard University. Emphasis mine. bMS Am 1594.1 (4) folder 2. 148. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,315-16. 149. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,316. 150. Allen notes that at Harvard on assigned papers Brooks “did what was required, and that was all,” Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,77. 151. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,318.

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152. The theological odysseys of Catherine Beecher, her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe also come to mind here. 153. I would therefore argue that Allen is mistaken to maintain that Brooks’s stress on “the cognitive power of the feeling” emerged mostly “as he passed through the struggle of the [eighteen-]seventies,’’ Allen, Life and Leffers of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,471.

C h ap t e r Two

Civil Warrior

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

-Emerson’

Despite his later reputation for avoiding social issues in the pulpit, Phillips Brooks actually began his public ministry as a reformer of sorts. He quickly gained a reputation at his first congregation in Philadelphia as an advocate of views that were considerably in advance of those of his usually apolitical denomination. With regard to the morality of slavery and the extension of suffrage to freedmen, Brooks threw in his lot with Congressional Radicals? Although his style was usually reserved and circumspect,Brooks spoke out on subjects that were controversial in conservative Philadelphia. His public stance is all the more remarkable given the relative silence of his denomination on the subject of slavery before and during the Civil War? The young minister’s views on these subjects had been shaped by his three years in Virginia. There, he had reacted against the efforts of southern students to stifle free discussion of the slavery issue.“ Brooks was encouraged by his evangelical colleagues in Philadelphia to be candid about slavery and related racial questions? But his forthright approach was also the fruit of Brooks’s New England roots and his debt to Romanticism with its accent on following one’s conscience.Steeped in Romanticism’s heroic ideal, Brooks latched onto figures such as McClellan and Lincoln during the war years. Moreover, in Brooks’s reading of the larger meaning of the war, one has a preview of the immanentism of his mature theology and of liberal Protestantism in general. In the wartime struggle against slavery, the youthful Brooks thought he recognized the outworking of Christ’s kingdom on earth. He offered his considerable gifts to the cause with gusto. 47

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Brooks was called to the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia even before he had formally entered the ordained ministry. Advent had recently lost its evangelical rector and Brooks had garnered an impressive academic record at the Episcopal Church’s preeminent evangelical seminary. Accordingly, after attending graduation ceremonies at VTS and being ordained deacon in the seminary chapel the next day by founder and bishop William Meade, Brooks moved north in August 1859 to pastor in Philadelphia where he would spend the next ten years. Ordination to the priesthood followed on Pentecost 1860 at the hands of Bishop Alonzo Potter of Pennsylvania. Less than two years later, the young rector of Advent was enticed away to Holy Trinity Church, Rittenhouse Square. The latter congregation was considerably more prosperous than Advent and it would afford Brooks a more prominent public platform for his preaching, which had already attracted considerable attention.

THE ”SACRED CAUSE”: BATTLING TREASON AND SLAVERY Brooks had identified with the Republicans since Fremont’s campaign in 1856. In his first year as rector of Advent, Brooks followed the reaction to John Brown’s raid and, though he did not support Brown’s actions, he privately expressed admiration for his courage. The impressionable young pastor thought he recognized in Brown something of the Romantic hero: Brown’s plans reveal a rash person, he wrote, “and so every rash man is crazy; but his heroic devotion to what he thought was right is surely not to be confounded with the craziness that he showed in judging whether it was really right and best.”6 As the presidential campaign of 1860 edged toward election day, Brooks was clearly excited. “Every body is talking politics,” he wrote to his brother George in September 1860, “and it is the exception when there isn’t at least one political procession within hearing. . . .No danger of a man’s forgetting to vote in such times as these.” As for his new parish, most seemed to sympathize with the views of their freshly minted rector: “Almost all Advent go with the rector,” he told George, “I don’t know but one or two Democrats among them, and hardly a Bell man.”7 When the war finally came in April 1861, Brooks, like many Northern intellectuals, greeted it with enthusiasm.8 At first, the idealist in Brooks was cheered by the general public’s evident commitment to “principle” and was delighted that “feeling” was “deep” with regard to the looming struggle? To one of his brothers, Brooks wrote that “the war is inevitable”

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and effused over the “high religious motives” of his young male parishioners. For Brooks, the “cause” was clearly “sacred” and had the welcome side effect of weakening partisanship: “There can be but one party in the North now. There is but one in Philadelphia,” he wrote at the end of April. But Brooks also drew a larger theological conclusion from the Northern public’s rallying to the cause of the Union: “Doesn’t it prove,” he wrote to William, “that the heroic qualities are true elements in human nature, and will always be developed with the recurrence of any emergency that calls for their exhibition and employment? Doesn’t it renew and enlarge our faith in our race?’l0 As far as Brooks was concerned, the war was “grand “ and very much “needed.”“ Despite the often discouraging news from the battlefield, Brooks remained an outspoken champion of the Unionist cause in the ensuing four years. His colleagues later remembered how Philadelphia society in general and Philadelphia Episcopalians in particular were not always hospitable to Brooks’s views. Lincoln’s war policies were not universally celebrated in the city. R. C. Matlack recalled that “when Mr. Brooks became rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in 1862 he found very few antislavery men among our clergy.” He summarized the outlook of the city’s Democratic establishment as: “The President was vulgar, the administration was vulgar, and the people who urged the war were of a common sort, who would shortly receive a merited castigation from the gentlemen of the South.”I*Yet Brooks and several of his evangelical clerical friends pushed ahead. Brooks and Matlack attended the inaugural meeting of the Union League in the city in February 1863 and the former spoke at this gathering and many others sponsored by the League in the coming months. Never fond of public confrontation, Brooks did not seek out controversy but carefully went about lending his skills as a public speaker and his growing reputation to the Union war effort. Another friend put it this way: “Faction ran high. Brooks did not defy it. He quietly disregarded it, went his ways in spite of it, took his heroism naturally, not tragically, as if men were always true and brave.”l3 Two incidents underline the intensity and increasingly public nature of Brooks’s commitment to the Unionist cause. When Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia threatened Philadelphia prior to the Battle of Gettysburg in June 1863, Brooks was frustrated by the city’s “terrible apathy . . .keeping everybody idle, just waiting to be taken.”14 Brooks promptly met with sympathetic clergy and, in C. A. L. Richards’s words, “drew up a paper offering our services for the public defense.” Along with New School Presbyterian Albert Barnes, Brooks led a large delegation to the office of the mayor. The coordinated effort to shame the Philadelphia political establishment into action

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worked; “The example served its purpose,” Richards recollected. “The sting stung. The city bestirred itself.”15Although Brooks was never actually called upon to dig trenches, he did volunteer to minister to wounded soldiers on both sides at Gettysburg following the three-day battle there in July. Under the auspices of the Sanitary Commission, Brooks spent his time “distributing clothes and writing letters for the men.” He summarized the situation in the battlefield hospitals in one terse comment in his diary: “Terrible need and suffering.”16 His enthusiasm for the Union war effort extended to virtually unqualified support for Philadelphia’s favorite son, General George B. McClellan. Here again, one recognizes Brooks’s fondness for the Romantic hero. Initially, many northerners fell under McClellan’s spell; for a time, he was viewed as the savior of the Union. In September 1861, Brooks wrote his brother William: “When is the great battle coming? Everybody says now before another week is over, but I believe McClellan knows what he is about, and won’t fight until he’s ready, and then will whip them terribly.”” In the spring of 1862, despite the lack of decisive action, he was repeating the same thing: “I wish they would let McClellan alone, to give him a chance. He knows what he is about.”’*But less than two weeks later, the McClellan booster began to show signs of flagging: “I have faith, plenty of it, in McClellan,” Brooks wrote again to William, “but I do wish he’d do something; still we shall see what we shall see to-day or t o - m o r r ~ w . After ” ~ ~ the disaster of the Peninsular Campaign and other failures, Brooks’s assessment of McClellan finally changed. He reluctantly concluded that, contrary to his earlier evaluation, McClellan did not in fact possess the requisite character traits to play the role of savior of the republic. His comments reveal Brooks’s Romantic penchant for reading spiritual qualities into physical attributes; his immanentist theology led him to an unflattering conclusion about the general. “Monday I had to be on hand at our ‘Soldiers’ reading room’ at a little reception to General McClellan,” Brooks wrote in revealing terms in his diary. “I saw considerable of the general, and am not a stronger McClellan man for having seen him. He doesn’t look like a great man. His face doesn’t show, either, special refinement. He is pleasant and affable, and the soldiers collected to greet him were very enthusiastic. He looks like a good, sensible, bright engineer and not much more.”*’ He simply did not look the part of the Romantic hero. From the war’s inception, Brooks held that the struggle was more than about simply preserving the Union. As ending slavery slowly became more prominent among the war aims of the federal government, Brooks’s commitment to the “sacred cause” deepened. As early as the fall of 1861,

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Brooks addressed the question publicly, while also expressing to his family some frustration that he could not underscore more clearly for his parishioners the centrality of slavery to the war. Regarding an address to his congregation, he admitted that his only restraint was a feeling that I could not speak out as fully as I wished on the one great sin which is beyond doubt the chief reason of this calamity being on us, and which has got to be removed before the calamity can be lifted off. It is useless to talk round and round it, when we know and are sure that slavery, its existence in the South and its approval in the North, is the great crushing, cursing sin of our national life and the cause of all our evils. I spoke of it freely yesterday, and so far as I know without giving offence?’ One recognizes this tension throughout Brooks’s war years in Philadelphiaan idealistic eagerness to speak out for principle, coupled with a concern not to unduly offend. Sometimes the idealist appears to have triumphed; sometimes the latter concern muffled the would-be reformer. Within his denomination, the situation was complicated. Following the pattern of liturgical denominations, most Episcopalians tended to vote Democratic and, while they may have found slavery repulsive, they were hardly abolitionists and supported a return to the constitutional status quo antebellum. For them, antislavery agitation represented an inappropriate politicizing of the church-the sort of thing supported by New England abolitionists. Notably, the Protestant Episcopal Church was one of the few denominations that did not split along sectional lines prior to the war?2 Meanwhile, the Evangelical party within the Episcopal Church did number among its membership several outspoken advocates of a strong antislavery position. Following in the trails blazed by evangelical Anglican laymen in England such as William Wilberforce, Northern evangelical clergy in the American church often called for an explicitly antislavery stance on the part of their church and their g0vernrnent.2~When the various evangelical societies met in Philadelphia in the fall of 1861 , for example, leaders like Stephen H. Tyng drew attention to the slavery question and the need for abolition. The party’s leadership seems to have encouraged the young Brooks. Both Stephen H. Tyng and his son Dudley Tyng were outspoken proponents of antislavery views. Brooks wrote to William: “Dr. [Stephen H.] Tyng has been making some splendid speeches, taking the black bull by the horns every time he could get a chance, but I won’t touch on that as we both vented our Abolitionism abundantly last week.’724 A year later, Brooks attended General Convention in New York and was disappointed by the spirit of compromise and accommodation regarding

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slavery and war-related issues among the delegates: “It wasn’t very interesting to see those old gentlemen putting their heads together to make some resolutions that would please the Union people and not hurt the feelings of the dear rebels.”25Evidently, the only bright spot was the Evangelicals. The conservative High Church Bishop of Vermont, John Henry Hopkins, had drafted a cautious pastoral letter on the war but it was replaced by Bishop McIlvaine’s more strongly worded epistle. Brooks was delighted: “Some few men, however, stood out well, [A. H.] Vinton and Goodwin and Clarkson, Randall and others, and the House of Bishops has put out a capital letter, written by Bishop McIlvaine. I am going to read it to my people to-morrow morning. . . . No, don’t give up the old church yet.”26The forthright stance of the Evangelicals heartened Brooks and encouraged him to preach shortly thereafter what he labeled “an anti-slavery sermon at Holy Trinity on [the following] Thanksgiving.’’ But, again, Brooks seemed very aware of his auditors and was evidently concerned about their reaction. It “doesn’t seem to have done any special harm,” he noted to brother William?7 Bishop McIlvaine’s pastoral letter was especially useful among conservative parishioners inclined to defer to Episcopal authority. “The church was very full,” Brooks wrote, “and I had the satisfaction of alluding in praise to the Bishop’s letter.”28 Brooks grew less reluctant to speak out publicly on the slavery issue in the wake of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863. Moreover, the focus now became not only the evils of slavery but also the future place of the freedman in the American republic. Brooks recognized early on that “nuthin’ but freedom” would not be best for the recently freed slaves or for the country at large. Brooks took an energetic part in the new Freedmen’s Relief Association and in a Sunday school for African Americans in Philadelphia, and he preached frequently to black regiments training nearbyF9 The social and political status of African Americans was a divisive political issue in Pennsylvania politics and an attempt to draw the Episcopal Church into the fray in the summer of 1863 got Brooks pretty agitated. State Democrats had managed to have Bishop Hopkins’s tract A Bible View of Slavery reprinted to add fuel to the political fires in the gubernatorial contest. Hopkins, a leading High Churchman, argued that the scriptures sanctioned slavery, though it probably deserved to be abolished at some point?O Diocesan Evangelicals were incensed when the pamphlet hit the streets and appeared to give an Episcopal nihil obstut to slavery. Bishop Potter acted quickly and commissioned a committee to draft a letter of protest. Naturally, Brooks was named to the committee and was so outspoken on the issue that many (both friend and foe) incorrectly be-

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lieved he was the author of the document. Eventually, 160 clergy (a sizable majority of the diocese) signed the remonstrance. The controversy was particularly awkward for Brooks because the Democratic candidate for governor, state Supreme Court Justice George W. Woodward, was a vestryman at Trinity Church?’ Yet Brooks’s youthful enthusiasm for the cause appeared to overwhelm such personal or parochial concerns. After a Republican election victory, he wrote to brother William in the sort of passionate terms that he usually avoided in correspondence with his more conservative father: “If you had been here I think you would have been as much surprised as I have been at the radical character of this campaign which has just closed. And it has been not merely Republican, but antislavery; not merely anti-slavery, but abolition all the way through. If this war hadn’t done anything else so far, at any rate it has made us an antislavery people, and begun the end of this infernal institution.” A few lines down he added poignantly: “Judge Woodward has resigned his seat on my vestry, and advertised his pew for sale. I am sorry, for he is a very pleasant man, and has been one of my kindest friends. I presume we shall get along without him, but I wish he could have stayed among us.”32 Brooks’s growing concern for the freedmen was best expressed in his most political sermon yet on Thanksgiving 1863. In this address, Brooks pressed for full civil equality for blacks in terms that could have alarmed moderate Republicans in addition to most Democrats. He cautioned that the Union’s supporters must not only revel in recent battlefield victories but also rejoice for the sake of the former slaves long held in “cruel bondage.” And one must do more than rejoice in their new freedom; one must also transcend the bigotry that still excluded blacks from full participation in American society. “If the Negro is a man,” Brooks reasoned, “and we have freed him in virtue of his manhood, what consistency or honor is it which still objects to his riding down the street in the same car with us if he is tired, or sitting in the same pew with us if he wants to worship God? Brethren, the world is not all saved yet. There are a few things still that ‘ought not to be.”’33 Additionally, the state of the freedmen prompted Brooks to broaden his scope and reflect more generally on the founding principles and fundamental character of the American republic. Employing the gradual “reoccupation” of the country in the wake of Confederate defeat and retreat as a metaphor, Brooks called upon Americans to simultaneously reenter “into the principles and fundamental truths of the nationality which they inherited.” Victory represented a golden opportunity for “the full occupation of the government of their fathers” and it should not be ~ q u a n d e r e d . ~ ~ The young rector pressed his point further in words that echoed Emerson’s

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paean to American self-reliance: “We have never half claimed our independence.’’ Brooks prayed that God would “give us out of the isolation of our national struggle a larger entrance into the independent life, the separate and characteristic development of government, art, science, letters, practical religion, and social character, which is the wide domain into which he led our nation, and whose splendid size it has taken us almost a hundred years to find.”35 The reaction to Brooks’s bold sermon was mostly favorable, including complimentary words from William Brooks Sr.: “I should have two years ago repudiated much of its doctrine,” his father wrote, “but now go almost the whole of it.” Wendell Phillips was reported to have called the sermon “first rate.”36 But the remaining months of the war revealed that neither the Episcopal Church nor conservatives like Brooks’s own father had been completely won over on these controversial issues. After the Thanksgiving sermon, two important families left Trinity. One parishioner who had earlier criticized Brooks on the race issue (a “Mr. Vaux’l) remarked “that he wasn’t black enough” to continue Brooks attended the Pennsylvanian Diocesan convention in Pittsburgh in the spring of 1864.There, antislavery clergy were unable to get their resolutions passed. “Our Convention was a shameful failure,” Brooks wrote. “We asked that body of Christian ministers and laymen to say that treason was wicked and slavery a sin. They declined and substituted some feeble platitudes done up in wretched rhetoric which meant nothing and said it. I am ashamed of my church. . . . Oh, how I hate this miserable conservatism. I almost cried for the church at Pitt~burgh.”~~ By autumn, he was ready to deliver an even stronger Thanksgiving Day sermon to a congregation now supplemented by newspaper reporters and other visitors. Brooks’s views had obviously gained the young cleric some notoriety. Brooks placed his calls for racial equality within the context of the war, its causes and how it had evolved into something different. Like many Free Soil and Jacksonian antibank polemics in the past, Brooks’s sermon characterized the evil of slavery as demonic and serpentine. “The devil of slavery,” lamented Brooks, “had kissed the strong shoulders of the Republic, and the serpents sprung from her defiling lips were preying upon her life. It was agony to tear them off, but it was death to let them remain. Despite our anguish, we had taken courage to rid us of the abomination.” But having abolished slavery, the work of extending full civil rights to African Americans needed also to proceed. Brooks attacked the exclusion of blacks from Philadelphia streetcars and pilloried the racial prejudice that outlived the institution of slavery. Brooks argued that “we ought to make, not be made by, the spirit of the times” and institutions both secular and religious needed to ~ h a n g e . 3 ~

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Probably the most controversial feature of this particular sermon was its argument favoring the vote for freedmen. This was certainly an advanced position politically in the fall of 1864 and all the more controversial within the usually apolitical confines of the Episcopal Church. As if anticipating his father’s disapproval, Brooks wrote William Brooks Sr. four days before he was scheduled to deliver the provocative sermon. The young Brooks sought to frame his preaching in terms that his conservative father might understand. Refemng to his homily, Brooks wrote: “It is what some people call Politics; what I call National Morals.” In the same letter, he spoke of visiting Washington and seeing there “at once the magnitude and the feasibility of the great work we have undertaken” to integrate blacks into the national political order.@ Yet his father seemed unconvinced and William Brooks’s concerns were twofold. For one, he was worried about the appropriate place and role of the Christian ministry and its relation to public life. The senior Brooks warned his son in revealing terms: Don’t make it too much “one idea,” or you will split on the rock so many ministers have before you, of making your situation as a minister of the gospel a secondary matter. How thoroughly has Ward Beecher done this! Do you suppose his congregation go to hear him as a Christian minister? No, it is all for his allusions and quaint expressions upon his one idea, and they are followed up by applause. It is sad to see the house of God and the pulpit so debased.

Both Beecher’s style and substance seemed out of keeping with a traditional understanding of the chief responsibility of the minister and the place of the pulpit in society. Second, the elder Brooks questioned the wisdom of enfranchising blacks. Tactically, it was an extreme proposal and extremism was always deleterious even for otherwise noble causes. “Don’t go too far,” Brooks’s father cautioned. “How many good causes have been injured, nay ruined, by that.”41As for the idea of extending the franchise, William Brooks showed his nativist assumptions: “I cannot believe,” he declared, “that it is best or advisable to introduce another foreign element into our elections; it certainly cannot raise the standards of our right of suffrage or the character of our candidates. Let us keep the ballot box as pure as we can. However you may argue the point of the races being intellectually equal, yet politically to my mind there is no question. I hope I shall never live to see it, and for the sake of my children I hope it will never be done.”42

The influx of Catholic immigrants had been hard enough, his father implied; why compromise the native “purity” of the American political

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process any further? His son sought quickly to assuage his father’s concerns, although without really retreating from his declared position. “You seem quite troubled by my radicalism,” he noted. “Don’t let it disturb you.” Brooks reassured his father that he only tackled such topics “on rare occasions . . . [otherwise] I preach what I was ordained to preach,-the gospel, nothing else.”43But Brooks added that “as a part of the gospel I accept the rebuking of sins, and public sins as well as private.” His feelings on this subject remained unchanged: “I certainly think the Negro ought to be free, and I am sure he is going to be. And I think he ought to vote, and am sure he will in time.” To his brother a few days later, Brooks put it forcefully within the overall framework of republican selfgovernment: “Republican government does not know such a thing as an unvoting subject. . . .We have got either to eradicate the Negroes or to integrate them. The first we can’t do, the second we must.”44During the war, Brooks did not stifle his progressive views but he sought to strike a balance between his youthful idealism and a confrontational or incautious polemic. The tension is evident in the unusual mixture of words he chose to reassure his father: “My Thanksgiving sermon is not going to be published. It is radical, but quiet, calm, and I think Chri~tian.”~~

A WORTHIER HERO Although Brooks continued to express progressive views on race during and immediately after the war, his focus did appear to be changing. As the war wound down, and certainly during the national mourning over Lincoln’s untimely death, Brooks fastened much of his attention upon the president and the wider meaning of his life and death. While McClellan had not ultimately measured up to Brooks’s idealism, the martyred Lincoln certainly did. From the 1860 campaign onward, Brooks had consistently expressed wann support for Lincoln and his policies. Although he was impatient for an end to slavery, Brooks did not criticize Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as a half measure (as did his cousin Wendell Phillips). Instead, he enthused to William: “We have heard the Proclamation of Freedom promised from the President’s chair. I am sure for once we may go with the ‘Tribune’ and say, God bless Abraham L i n ~ o l n . ”When ~ it came ultimately to choosing between McClellan and Lincoln, Brooks did not sound unduly tom. Writing to his family in 1863, he commented: “It looks as though Old Abe was just as good a general as the young Napoleon after all.”47 Brooks had carried with him the Romantic ideal of the heroic leader at least since his college days. As Allen puts it, “Like Carlyle, he rejoiced in

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the appearance of the strong man in history. ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’ was one of his One can readily see Brooks working out this Romantic image in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. In the days and weeks following Lincoln’s assassination, Brooks delivered several sermons and addresses on the subject of Lincoln. In fact, he conceded to his brother William: “I have thought so constantly about him for the last two weeks that I feel as if he were an old and close friend, and can hardly realize that I never fairly saw him ~atisfactorily.”~~ When he first addressed his congregation on Easter Sunday (less than forty-eight hours after the shooting at Ford’s Theater), Brooks focused on the greater meaning of martyrdom. Nor did he shrink from drawing parallels between Christ’s atoning death and Lincoln’s murder on Good Friday. He observed that some newspapers noted this correspondence between the two deaths “almost with a tone of apology, [and] spoke as if it were a lack of reverence to associate the two, as if [in doing so] there were some degradation to the dignity of Christ’s nature.”50Those who, like Brooks, leaned more in the direction of Bushnell’s interpretation of the atonement as primarily exemplary and moral rather than substitutionary and propitiatory, found this linkage less problematic and were, in fact, more inclined to highlight it. After all, if there was not really a radical difference in kind but rather a difference in degree between Lincoln’s exemplary death and the sacrificial lives that all Christians are called to lead, then this sort of parallel was very natural. Now Brooks did not contend that there was only a difference in degree here but he did certainly stress the analogy: If there has been any high heroism in the world, any triumph over evil and iniquity, it has been only a faint repetition of that great work which the Perfect Man did when He triumphed once for all over sin, in behalf of His redeemed world. If there has been any man setting himself earnestly against iniquity as he found it at his especial time and place, it has been only the rebound from that courage with which Christ set himself against the wickedness that was in the world at his time?’

If the cross was primarily a story about exemplary moral sacrifice then human comparisons were most apposite. As for Lincoln’s death in particular, Brooks asked: “And may we not derive example and inspiration from this new m a r t y r d ~ m ? ’ ~ ~ Although he dismissed the idea of eulogizing Lincoln in this first sermon, Brooks did in fact suggest a few themes that he would enlarge on in other sermons and addresses in the coming days. Lincoln’s exemplary character quickly emerged as the chief focus of these various discourses. “In him, “ commented Brooks to his congregation on that somber Easter

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morning, “was represented the majesty of those simplest virtues which all mankind honor and admire.”53Nor were these virtues purely those of the intellect but Lincoln’s “moral character” was also commendable. Honest Abe was sufficiently independent that he “rebuked the old conservatism and the vast radicalism of our time at once.” Moreover, Brooks took care to reassure his listeners (and Evangelicals in his parish may have needed such reassurance) that Lincoln was indeed a committed Christian. Here Brooks’s way of framing the question is significant: “What are the evidences of the service of Christ? If they be a constant submission to His will, an habitual reverence to His authority, an eye that always looks up in danger for deliverance,-if this constitutes a Christian character, all this there was in him.”54Notably, Brooks declined to seek any personal verbal witness or any doctrinal test; Lincoln possessed Christian character, therefore for Brooks “he was a Christian man, a servant and follower of Jesus Christ .”55 One other noteworthy theme in Brooks’s treatment of Lincoln was his thoroughly American character. “Of all the men,” observed Brooks, “who have ever lived in these United States, and come forth into prominence before the world, he was the man most distinctly and in the best and truest sense an American; and he is to stand so before the nations in coming time.”56When Brooks closed by exhorting “the young men” of the country, it was this American-ness that he exalted and held forth as an example to emulate, along with the slain president’s serious and responsible life. He declared: “Abraham Lincoln has been the noblest type of American character. Abraham Lincoln must be your example and mine, and something of his character must be reproduced in us, or we shall be unworthy of our times.” Such emulation would involve, said Brooks, rejecting “the frivolous, weak, and inefficient lives” led by so many young peo~ l e . Brooks 5~ reiterated this call to moral seriousness when he addressed a special memorial meeting for Philadelphia women on Easter Monday. There, he called upon his female auditors to shun those who supported the slave system and reject the “frivolities and extravagances” that had sometimes characterized metropolitan life during the war years ?* All of these themes came together and were pursued in a more thorough and refined way in Brooks’s sermon delivered at Holy Trinity the following Sunday, 23 April, while Lincoln’s body lay in state in Independence Hall. This sermon was widely reprinted and definitely contributed to the young rector’s growing national reputation. At its outset, Brooks invited his congregation “to study with me the character of Abraham Lincoln, the impulses of his life and the causes of his death.”59He argued that there was a fundamental relationship between these two headings; there was

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“an essential connection between Mr. Lincoln’s character and his violent and bloody death.” Brooks contended that a certain kind of character naturally bore the fruit of a certain kind of life. He believed, Brooks explained to his congregation, in the “destiny of character.”@’ (The subject of character became an increasingly important,even a dominant theme for Brooks in his mature preaching.) He cautioned that Americans should not underestimate the significance of Lincoln’s physical characteristics and his geographical roots. Lincoln worked hard physically and, accordingly, understood those who labored. Again, Brooks stressed that in Lincoln the intellectual and moral were joined together: “In him was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness.” Following the Romantic portrait of children as innocent seers, Brooks described this fusion of the mental and the moral as typical of children but rare in adults: “This union of the mental and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is what we most admire in children; but in them it is unsettled and unpractical. But when it is preserved into manhood, deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend simplicity, which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness.”6’ Brooks also returned to his portrayal of Lincoln as the quintessential American. For Brooks, Lincoln “was the anointed and supreme embodiment” of “the American nature, the American truths .”62 When Brooks aimed to consider the reasons for Lincoln’s murder, he returned to an examination of the roots of the “irrepressible conflict.” Predictably, Brooks saw the Civil War as reducible to a question of character, the ultimate fruit of two irreconcilable character types. The picture he painted was strikingly Emersonian in its themes. One nature, personified by the Railsplitter, was “true and fresh and new” and the other, personified by the Confederacy, was “false and effete and old.”63In contrast to the spirit of the North, “the other nature [was] full of the false pride of blood, [and] set itself to reproduce in a new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the structure of the feudalism which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of the progressing race. . . . In a word, one nature was full of the influences of Freedom, the other nature was full of the influences of Slavery.”@And it was this institution, posited Brooks, and the nature it produced that was responsible for the murder of Abraham Lincoln. Reflecting its fundamental character, the Confederacy had fought the war in a treacherous and barbarian fashion throughout. Therefore, stated Brooks with evident emotion, “I charge this murder where it belongs, on Slavery.”65 Yet while even conservative Democrats in Holy Trinity’s pews might have agreed with Brooks’s analysis thus far, their rector pressed further. The spirit

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of slavery was not entirely absent within the North either. One recognized its silhouette wherever northerners compromised with traitors or sought to appease slaveholders. What is more, Brooks articulated his point about persistent racism in the North in terms that owed more to the language of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural than to a traditional evangelical understanding of human nature. In the former, Lincoln had referred to the “better angels of our nature.” “Here in our midst,” reflected Brooks, “lived that worse and falser nature, side by side with the true and better nature which God meant should be the nature of Americans, and of which he was shaping out the type and champion in his chosen David of the sheepfold. . . . The new American nature must supplant the old.”66Americans were blessed with a God-given spirit of freedom that they could choose to cultivate or not, reasoned Brooks in a construction that sounded Pelagian. Americans were not all bad and could choose which of the two natures they would follow. Brooks warned his hearers that this spirit of slavery was far from dead “while one man counts another man his born inferior for the color of his skin, while both in North and South prejudices and practices, which law cannot touch, but which God hates, keep alive in our people’s hearts the spirit of the old iniq~ity.”~’ If only momentarily, Brooks demonstrated in these (some of his last explicitly political) sermons a recognition of the limits of constitutional or political change that many Congressional Radicals failed to appreciate during Reconstruction. His remarks on race transcended the juridical formalism that hobbled Radical Reconstruction. Although, like most northerners, Brooks appears to have quickly lost interest in the long-term fate of the freedmen, in the spring of 1865, his preaching showed a sincere concern about working toward a genuinely egalitarian biracial society.

EPILOGUE In May 1865, Brooks was invited by Francis J. Child to participate in a special service commemorating Harvard’s Civil War dead. On one level, his participation in the service and the powerful impression he made that morning in Cambridge signaled an end and a beginning. The Harvard service marked out his vocational path, anticipating his return to Boston. Brooks would speak again about racial equality and other Reconstructionrelated public questions, but in some respects, the prayer he offered that morning heralded a transition for the young Episcopal rector. The prayer did not articulate a prophetic critique of northern racism nor did it contain any call to finish Lincoln’s larger crusade. Instead, Brooks’s extemporaneous prayer evoked a sentiment in his audience.

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Brooks was clearly excited about the invitation. He wrote his brother that he had promptly accepted the summons from his alma mater and added: “It will be a great time, I expect.”68On 21 July students, faculty, and alumni assembled in the Harvard Square Church and, before the address by George Putnam, Brooks walked to the pulpit to offer a memorable prayer. Although no accurate text of the prayer survived, it soon became almost legendary among those who were in attendance that morning. Some spoke of the utterance as coming from the speaker’s “burning lips”; William Reed Huntington later recalled Brooks’s “great head thrown back, his face looking as if it might be Stephen’s, while there went forth from his lips a fiery stream of thanksgiving and supplication the like of which I never knew.” The Chief Marshall, Henry Lee, remembered years after that “from that moment the name of that inspired young man, till then unknown, became a household word.” Charles Eliot commented in revealing terms “that one spontaneous and intimate expression of Brooks’s noble spirit convinced all Harvard men that a young prophet had risen up in Israel .”69 Allen correctly notes that Brooks was not an entirely unknown quantity in New England then, for many had read about “his patriotic utterances in Philadelphia.” But this was different. “Now,” writes Allen, “he became known in another way. In speaking before God, he had spoken to the heart of an audien~e.”’~ Perhaps this course was inevitable for an idealistic young man who had been so steeped in literary and theological Romanticism. At some point between the end of the war and his accepting the call to Trinity Church, Boston, in 1869, Brooks turned to focus on preaching as primarily a way to change the sensibility of his listeners, rather than enlist them in the cause of social change.” The shift in focus did not, however, mean that the youthful preacher had made his peace with Evangelicalism.

NOTES 1 . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism,”in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2., ed. Jean F. Carr, Alfred R. Ferguson and Joseph Slater (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1979), 148. 2. Victor B. Howard notes the close relationship between Radical Reconstruction and Protestant churches in the North. “The Northern Protestant church,” he argues, “was the conscience of the Republican party and was recognized as the mainstay of the radical program. . . . The churches made anti-slavery sentiment more respectable in Northern circles.” See Victor B. Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, 1860-1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 1,212.

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3. Howard notes that “the Episcopal Church refrained from condemning secession and failed to adopt radical measures throughout the war.” See Howard, Religion, 2. 4. John F. Woolverton, The Education of Phillips Brooks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 66-69. 5. Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 152-58, 163-68. 6. Phillips Brooks (PB) to William Brooks Jr., 3 December 1859, quoted in Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 337. 7. PB to George Brooks, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 359. John Bell was the presidential nominee of the Whiggish Constitutional Union party. 8. George Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), chap. 5 . 9. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,367. 10. PB to William Brooks Jr., 4 May 1861, in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,368. 11. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,369. 12. Matlack, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,449. 13. C. A. L. Richards, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,450. 14. PB in his diary, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,453. 15. C.A. L. Richards, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,453. 16. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,454. 17. PB to William, 14 September 1861, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,371. 18. PB to William, 22 March 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,400. 19. PB to William, 5 April 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,400. As late as September 1862, Brooks was still describing McClellan as “a very noble man.” See Phillips Brooks to William, 12 September 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooh, vol. 1,414. 20. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,438. 21. PB to William, 27 September 1861, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,372. 22. John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslaveiy Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 165. McKivigan comments here: “The Protestant Episcopal church was another ritualist denomination that attempted to remain neutral on the slavery question. . . . The Episcopal church remained sectionally united until the start of

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the Civil War, and even then the northern branch refrained from criticism of slavery or slave owners.” 23. See McKivigan, War against Proslavery, 273, nll: “Some moderate antislavery sentiment existed among northern evangelical (Low Church) Episcopalians but they hesitated to express their views from fear of losing southern evangelical support in the contest with ritualist (High Church) elements for control of the denomination.” 24. PB to William, 11 October 1861, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,373. 25. PB to William, 15 October 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 , 427. See also: McKivigan, War against Proslavery, 186. 26. PB to William, 24 October 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,428.Account in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,424-27. 27. PB to William, 5 December 1862, Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,430. 28. PB to William, 5 December 1862, Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,430. 29. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,463-64. 30. For a sensitive examination of Hopkins’s views and those of his critics, see Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal VisiodAmerican Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 198-211. 31. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,460-62. 32. PB to William, 17 October 1863, Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,463. 33. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,467. 34. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,469. 35. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,469-79. 36. WGB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,471 . 37. Quoted by David Chesebrough, “The Call to Battle” (Ph.D. diss., Illinois State University, 1988), 117. Chesebrough cites Raymond Albright, Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 105, but there is no mention of Vaux on this page. Although a few prominent Trinity parishioners left over their rector’s outspokenness, most came to support his stance. 38. PB perhaps to brother William, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,511-12. 39. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,520. 40. PB to father, 23 November 1864, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,520-21. 41. WGB to Phillips Brooks, 12 December 1864; quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,522.

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42. WGB to Phillips Brooks, 12 December 1864; quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,522. 43. PB to father, 19 December 1864, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,523. 44. PB to William, 24 December 1864, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,523. 45. PB to William, 24 December 1864, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,523. 46. PB to William, 26 September 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol . 1,417. 47. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,438. 48. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,499. 49. PB to William, 29 April 1865,quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 18. 50. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 10. 5 1. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 11. 52. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 11. 53. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 12. 54. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 12. 55. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 12. 56. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 12. 57. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,13. 58. Summary of reporter as quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2 , 14. 59. Phillips Brooks, Addresses (New York: Saalfield & Fitch, 1893), 140. 60. PB, Addresses, 141. 61. PB, Addresses, 145. 62. PB, Addresses, 159. I have reversed the order of these clauses here but taken care to preserve the original logic and meaning. 63. PB, Addresses, 14748. Cf. William R.Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee; The Old South andAmerican National Character (New York: G. Braziller, 1961),and Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War. 64. PB, Addresses, 14748. 65. PB, Addresses, 158. 66. PB,Addresses, 149-50,161. 67. PB ,Addresses, 161. 68. Letter, PB, 29 May 1865, in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,21. 69. Preceding quotations from Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,2628.

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70. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,28. 71. Howard notes how the churches lost their commitment to Reconstruction after the late 1860s. See Howard, Religion, 212-13. Northern disillusionment with Reconstruction is also explored in Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War, esp. chap. 12.

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The young Phillips Brooks seemed a natural addition to the circle of evangelical Episcopalian clergy in Philadelphia. The twenty-three-year-old Brooks was a star graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, arguably the academic epicenter of the Evangelical party within the Episcopal Church during the 1850s.’ The question of his position within his denomination’s Evangelical party was overshadowed for a time by his political views and his willingness to champion the Northern cause. Evangelical clergy (at least those of Northern sympathies) appreciated Brooks’s public stand. Little known at this time, however, was Brooks’s mostly private ambivalence about Evangelicalism in its classic doctrinal form. Only Brooks’s parents and a few friends knew that he had actually hated his first two years at VTS. A couple of confidants had heard him express serious misgivings about Reformed orthodoxy in general and criticize Virginia Seminary for its lack of intellectual rigor. Brooks admired the religious fervor of many of his fellow seminarians but was sharply critical of their lack of academic discipline.Another recurrent theme in his youthful critique of the seminary was the danger of confessional rigidity or of too precise doctrinal definitions. Brooks’s dislike of dogmatism would color his mature preaching. Still, in many ways, Brooks retained the warm piety of his mother. Although its classical dogmatic formulation often troubled him, Brooks remained loyal to the experiential emphasis of antebellum Evangelicalism. Brooks built upon the Romantic subjectivism of the Evangelicals at VTS while he increasingly balked at what he saw as their confining theological strictures. His divergence from many Evangelicals on the latter half of this crucial dyad (i.e., experience and dogma) would eventually spell separation 67

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from his denomination’s Evangelical party. This crucial period in Brooks’s ministry provides a different vantage point from which to consider the party conflicts raging within the Episcopal Church. Moreover, the 1870s highlight how Brooks’s theological vision transcended denominational boundaries and concerns. His contribution to the design and decoration of Trinity Church in Boston and his cooperation with evangelist D. L. Moody together reflect his larger vision of a new kind of Christianity, one rooted in the past and true to the best in Protestantism but forward looking?

FITTING IN When Phillips Brooks was called to Philadelphia’s Church of the Advent in the wake of the death of their evangelical rector, most observers viewed him as an untried but promising figure. One commentator in the local secular press described him as “a young gentleman of fine attainments” who perhaps lacked maturity and self-confidence? The national organ of the Evangelical party, The Episcopal Recorder, included Brooks in a feature headed “New Clerical Friends.” The Recorder reported in positive, though guarded, terms that “we hear good accounts of the present incumbent [at Church of the Advent], the Rev. Mr. Brooks, who has commenced his work earnestly and zealously, and is listened to by large and increasing congregation^."^ At least two things are clear at this early stage of Brooks’s ministry. First, the local evangelical clergy quickly adopted Brooks as one of their own. Second, despite their willingness to include the young cleric, some had doubts about his doctrinal position almost from the start. Allen describes Brooks’s reception three years later when he accepted a call from the larger and more prestigious Holy Trinity (Philadelphia): “Although a young man of twenty-six [by 18621, he was taken at once into the councils of the mature and venerable men, who were charged with duties to the church at large, the leaders of the Evangelical party. . . . From this time he was a constant speaker at meetings and anniversaries of the American Church Society, the Evangelical Knowledge Society, and to these was now added a third, the Evangelical Education Society.” Yet even Allen, who is eager to emphasize Brooks’s debt to the evangelical tradition, concedes that “these older men must even then have recognized [in Brooks] some difference in the presentation of the truth as they held it.”5 There were, in fact, several Evangelicals who nursed worries about Brooks’s message in the early days; some expressed their concerns, others kept them private. Clerical colleague William Wilberforce Newton re-

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membered that “It was first a question whether this so-called transcendental mind, with a rather thin coating of Evangelical theology laid on by Dr. Sparrow at Virginia seminary, would square itself with the average Philadelphia layman’s standard.”6The young rector’s focus on duty rather than correct doctrine or individual belief plainly did not go unnoticed. At least one of his evangelical parishioners at Holy Trinity, Philadelphia was disturbed enough about her youthful Rector’s approach to mention it in a remarkable letter. She referred to “a change [in Brooks’s preaching] which has pained me more than I can express, . . . I mean your increased tendency to preach duties and to set forth the Christian life in a manner to make it a painful bondage, taking away from the believer the assurance of hope.” It seems that Brooks had expressed skepticism about the Reformed doctrine of assurance (or what Calvinists were fond of calling the “eternal security of the believer” or the “final perseverance of the saints”) and this was one of the chief grounds for this particular parishioner (described by Allen as “a very accomplished lady”) to accuse Brooks of embracing a position that “bordered on unsoundness.” Indeed, she went as far as to declare that “I think the road you are travelling tends to that Church which enjoins penance as the road in which our salvation can be daily earned.”7 Even the Reverend John S. Stone, former rector of Brooks’s home parish, was ambivalent about Brooks’s preaching in these years. Though he never expressed open criticism in a direct way, Stone is described by Allen as being “pained” by it? Stone later summed up well both Brooks’s special appeal as well as the ambivalence he engendered in his initial years. Stone recalled that he had at first had serious qualms about Brooks’s preaching. “You know,” he wrote Brooks frankly in 188 1 , “I always liked to hear you preach; not because, especially at first, you came quite up to my idea of what the preaching of the Gospel requires, but, because I liked you, & the way in which you put thing^."^ Did Philadelphia’s evangelical churchmen have legitimate grounds for their suspicions? After all, most were unaware of Brooks’s case against VTS and his private theological qualms as a seminarian. This is a difficult question to answer because many of Brooks’s sermons delivered at his two parishes in Philadelphia have never been published.’O Nevertheless, the few extant in manuscript form help explain the uneasiness of evangelical stalwarts. Even among Brooks’s earliest sermons at his first charge (the Advent), there is clear evidence that he was not keeping to the well-worn, old paths of his evangelical elders. For example, in one Easter Sunday sermon, Brooks explicitly rejected the traditional apologetical approach to the Resurrection that invoked certain empirical “evidences” designed to appeal to

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the common sense of his evangelical parishioners. Though he took care not to dismiss entirely the need for mundane facts, much of his argument rested instead upon an idealist distinction between such empirical Understanding and the “higher,” more “spiritual evidences’’ (Reason) that were ultimately decisive. His approach here clearly echoes that of Coleridge, whom Brooks had read as a seminarian. Coleridge commented in this regard: “Evidences of Christianity,I am weary of the word. Make a man feel his want of it . . . and you may safely trust it to its own Evidences.”” Brooks referred to the faith of the women who first discovered the empty tomb as “irrational” and he continued: “So it was, for it was in the very face of evidence to which reason could not but bow. But though irrational it was no weak and groundless faith, for back behind reason, on stronger ground than intellectual assent, their faith rested on an intimate knowledge of the life and character of Christ from which they drew sounder premises and surer conclusions than any weighing of merely natural chances could give them.”’* “New kinds of evidence become convincing,” Brooks explained, as one transcends the purely physical and enters the realm of the moral and spiritual. According to Brooks “the nature of spiritual evidence” is “the Lesson Easter teaches.”I3 He expressed his doubts that “critical enquiry can solve all discrepancies in the Bible story” but this recognition did not disturb him. The decisive factor was on a higher spiritual and experiential plane. “I know that he is the Christ” not because the tomb was empty but, significantly, “because I have seen his life and felt it.”14 This sort of subjectivism was popular among many Evangelicals at midcentury but Brooks took it further in a Romantic, explicitly Coleridgean direction. Nor did the young cleric put aside his skepticism about dogmatic systems with which he had wrestled at seminary.At the end of a sermon on the Trinity from about the same period, Brooks commented in a revealing aside: “I told you at the outset the misgivings that I had about preaching on this subject at all-misgivings both for you and me-fears lest we might by dwelling upon systems lose sight of the truths of which they are only the shell. We have seen how history crowds itself with systems, how they pass away but God’s truth remains true through all. . . .No doctrinal system can contain or represent the whole of God.”15Again, Brooks’s remarks were far from radical but what was remarkable was that he made this sort of comment not about some denominational confessional standard (like, say, the Thirty-Nine Articles) but about the early Catholic creeds. Such sentiments would not make Brooks any friends among conservative High Churchmen but neither would his qualifications find support from many Evangelicals. It should come as no surprise that Brooks’s final break with the Evangelical party over a decade later would arise from a debate about doctrinal tests.

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If, then, Brooks could reasonably have been perceived as “unsound” on some fundamental points, one may well question why Philadelphia Evangelicals were apparently so eager to include the young cleric in their counsels. The centrality of individual experience and the importance of conversion in his preaching must have reassured many Evangelicals. Part of the explanation may lie simply in the fact of his popularity, especially among seminarians and young clergy. W. W. Newton vividly recalled how Brooks was the favorite of his class at the new Divinity School in Philadelphia in the mid-1860s. They made a point of going together to hear him preach and, for his part, Brooks seemed to especially enjoy the social company of the seminarians.16More important, the 1860s were a period of conflict and crisis among evangelical Episcopalians and the party badly needed a young, powerful orator.” Some stalwarts seemed prepared to overlook perceived doctrinal weaknesses in some areas if Brooks was willing to stand and speak for the cause in a general way. Especially after Brooks’s “promotion” to the more affluent Holy Trinity in 1862, he represented a formidable weapon for their arsenal. As Allen put it: “They welcomed him for his high position, and the social influence he represented, but chiefly for that fascinating eloquence which gave a new and potent charm to the cause so dear to them. His accession to the cause was simply in~aluable.”’~ For his part, Brooks entered initially into the organizational life of the Evangelical party with gusto. As long as his evangelical allies stuck to what Brooks viewed as nonpartisan essentials,he was willing to lend his winsome voice to the cause. R. C. Matlack remembered with fondness this period in Philadelphia when the two worked “in adjoining parishes.” Because of his “largeness of mind,” Matlack later explained, Brooks “enroll[ed] among his friends those who differed from him most widely on very important matt e r ~ . ”Among ’~ Brooks’s most candid comments about his own party identification in this early period are contained in a letter he wrote to an acquaintance. In it, he described parties as inevitable and not necessarily harmful. “A church so broad & comprehensive as ours,” he reflected, “seems to me to presuppose parties by presupposing differences of opinion which must form themselves into groups.” But then he added in a revealing aside: “For myself I find myself falling in a sort of general coincidence with the Low Churchmen though many of their views I do not hold & many of their feelings I do not understand.”20Significantly, Brooks had not purposefully chosen his allies but had “fallen” passively into a relationship with them. Further, his agreement with “Low Churchmen” was “in a sort of general coincidence,” rather than reflecting a thoroughgoing doctrinal consensus. His differences with his brethren were both cognitive (i.e., “views I do not hold”) and

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emotional (“feelings”). Brooks evidently lacked both theological agreement with “Low Churchmen” and sympathy or appreciation for “many” evangelical concerns. Nevertheless, during the difficult, often mean-spirited party conflict of the 1 8 6 0 ~ Philadelphia ~ Evangelicals could count on Brooks. He supported the Evangelical Education Society (EES) founded in 1862 to support evangelical seminarians and the older Evangelical Knowledge Society designed to publish literature in defense of the evangelical position within the Protestant Episcopal Church. Because of his reputation as an orator, Brooks was often invited to address these societies at special anniversary meetings. One of the hottest party issues of the 1860s was the question of liturgical revision. Many Evangelicals sought greater freedom in how they used the Prayer Book, especially the option to shorten services or allow for more extemporaneous prayer during, say, evangelistic meetings. At the same time, some Evangelicals wanted to go further and carry out a doctrinal revision to remove alleged “Romanizing germs” from the liturgy?’ Though Matlack conceded that Brooks had always been “a man of peace,” he stressed Brooks’s warm support for the idea of some limited rubrical reform to allow for greater liturgical freedom. Brooks never sided with hard-line Evangelicals who believed parts of the prayer book were dangerously “Romish,” but he was concerned about preserving “Gospel liberty” when it came to how the services were conducted. More than just an oratorical “hired gun,” Brooks was also instrumental in helping to save the EES from bankruptcy and extinction in 1869. When the Society’s secretary died suddenly in an accident in 1869, Brooks was persuaded to join a few others and put the EES back on a sound financial foundation, which they managed to do in short order through some aggressive fund-raising?* The one incident during his Philadelphia days that perhaps best illustrates both Brooks’s participation in the evangelical community and his own growing ambivalence about the party was his involvement in the organization of the new Divinity School. With Virginia Seminary being occupied by federal troops and operations suspended, Evangelicals saw it as essential that evangelically minded postulants have access to the right sort of theological training. A kind of informal seminary had been in operation since at least 1861 in the city and, in 1862, the state legislature granted the school a charter. Evangelical Bishop Alonzo Potter led in organizing the seminary and raised a sizeable endowment for its s u ~ p o r t ?Having ~ so many friends who were instrumental in the founding of the new seminary plus his own position as rector of one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious parishes, it was natural that Brooks would be named one of its overseers.

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Then, late in 1863, the trustees elected him to a new chair of ecclesiastical history. Allen suggests that Brooks may have even offered himself to the board. In any case, he soon accepted the position and prepared for the move. His reasons for leaving a plum city parish like Holy Trinity are revealing. In a letter addressed to his father (though clearly also intended for his mother), Brooks argued that Episcopal seminaries badly needed a new generation of younger faculty. “Then the great need of our seminaries,” he wrote, “is young men for professors. We have always had old men. We want younger ones, and I have youth and energy, if nothing else, to give.” His negative experience with the stodgy evangelical faculty at Virginia still appears to have been fresh in his mind. Notably, he did not, like so many of his Philadelphia colleagues, frame the mission of the school in partisan terms. He was not, apparently, going to shore up the position of the Evangelical party in that perilous period. Even to his keenly evangelical mother, Brooks did not take that tack. At the close of his letter, he added that ‘‘I find myself needing a quieter and more studious life,” which he hoped the chair would aff0rd.2~Despite his popularity, it is remarkable that Brooks was not eager to maintain his enviable preaching station at Holy Trinity, nor did he yet appear to understand his calling or gift as primarily that of prea~hing?~ But, if the young rector of Holy Trinity had any doubts about this momentous move to the fledgling seminary, Brooks’s parishioners were eager to feed these doubts and change his mind. Following several congregational meetings, Brooks was persuaded to reverse himself and remain at Holy Trinity. It is clear that the warm protestations of his adoring parishioners influenced Brooks on this matter. He had, after all, admitted in his letter to his parents that the congregation had become quite “dear to” himF6It is equally clear that the cut in salary from $4,000 to $1,800 would have given anyone pause. Yet, in light of the aforementioned differences between Brooks and some partisan Evangelicals, he may have harbored doubts about a closer, long-term relationship with the evangelical establishment in Philadelphia. Notably, Brooks had not been offered a position teaching homiletics or biblical languages (the latter he had taught briefly at Virginia Seminary). Given the doubts of some Philadelphia Evangelicals about him, church history was doubtless the safest appointment to offer the independent-minded Brooks. But the mistrust was mutual. The ethos of the seminary was solidly evangelical from the start and Brooks probably had concerns about its partisan character. Only three years after Brooks was offered a position at the seminary, four students were expelled because of their High Church practices?’ Brooks was no fan of Ritualism but neither did he relish party battles; perhaps he decided closer relations

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with old-line Evangelicals were imprudent at this juncture. In any event, the whole Divinity School incident with its embarrassing reversals reveals how conflicted Brooks had become regarding his evangelical associates; its end result was a sign of things to come.

AN OPENING Phillips Brooks left Philadelphia in 1869 to accept a call from Trinity Church, Boston. This important move facilitated a more open break with the evangelical establishment. Just before leaving Philadelphia to take his position at Trinity, Brooks was invited to preach before the diocesan convention of Pennsylvania. Brooks used the opportunity to take a parting shot at conservative Evangelicals, explaining what he understood were the dangers neat dogmatic systems represented to the church at large. Brooks described and decried the ways in which the church limited “within hard and minute and invariable doctrinal statements the variety of the relations of the human experience of God.” “If,” Brooks went on, “in any such way a church hinders at all the free inflow of every new light which God is waiting to give to the souls of men as fast as they are ready to receive it, just so far she binds and wrongs her children’s intelligence and weakens her own vitality. This is the suicide of dogmatism.”**Brooks’s battle with dogmatism came to a head a year later. The formal, public fracture with the party occurred in 1870 over a controversy arising from attempts by the Evangelical Education Society to set clearer, more stringent doctrinal standards for the ordinands they sponsored. The flap over this arguably heavy-handed attempt by the Society to ensure that its money was going to young men who genuinely shared its theological commitments has not been examined by Brooks’s biographers in any depth. Yet the quarrel reveals a great deal about Brooks’s deepening differences with a certain sort of Evangelicalism, about the concern of some Evangelicals to retain the support of allies like Brooks and, in general, about the crisis of the Evangelical party during the 1860s and 1870s?9

The controversy began when, in the summer of 1870, some church newspapers printed copies of a list of test questions circulated by the EES clearly designed to smoke out closet Anglo-Catholics among their student beneficiaries. Matlack, then secretary of the Society, described the background of the questions later in an unpublished account of the affair: “The professors in the seminaries and large contributors had intimated that there were students on our roll who had no sympathy with Evangelical

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principles, and this was hindering our work, it seemed to be necessary to send a private circular letter to all our students, who were scattered through the country, asking them a few frank questions, that they might declare their position.”30The EES board apparently felt duped by some students who were accepting their largesse while cynically ridiculing the classical evangelical position. Significantly, Brooks had not attended the board meeting at which this course of action was chosen but he heard about the questions and, presumably, how Anglo-Catholics were using the letter to, in Matlack’s words, lampoon Evangelicals as “‘narrow,’ ‘intolerant ,’ [and] ‘inqui~itorial.’”~’ Some of the circular did have a strident, partisan tone. Much of it was simply abrupt and heavy-handed, especially on matters of personal finance. Its vehemence on the period’s hot party issues betrays a certain desperation on the part of Evangelicals?2The document was comprised of sixteen questions that required a detailed written response from EESsupported students. The first four addressed the student’s sense of divine calling to the ordained ministry. Questions nine through fifteen focused mainly on financial concerns. The fifth cut to the heart of the Board’s immediate concern: “Have your Theological or Ecclesiastical opinions undergone any material change since you were first adopted by the Society?”- not an unreasonable query for someone receiving financial aid from a society based upon a particular doctrinal position. The sixth asked the student to affirm “the Bible as the supreme rule of faith and practise”-again, not a strange formulation for Episcopalians who celebrated their loyalty to the Thirty-Nine Arti~les.3~ Thus, a good deal of the letter, though admittedly tactless, was not narrowly sectarian. The circular’s authors waited until the seventh and eighth questions to wave the theological and liturgical “bloody shirt.” Question seven asked: “Are you resolved earnestly to contend against all the errors of Sacramentarianism, Ritualism, and Romanism, wherever found?’ Nor were they satisfied with this general description but added the more pointed: “Are you opposed to all innovations in worship, in respect to posture, gesture, forms, vestments, and other significant symbolical arts?’34Lest any secret Ritualist wriggle out of these strictures, the circular went on in the eighth question to ask whether the candidate’s “views of ‘the truth”’ were accurately reflected in books by evangelical clerics James May and John S . St0ne.3~In seeking to draw hard-and-fast doctrinal lines, evangelical stalwarts actually furnished their Anglo-Catholic opponents with an ideal target. But Ritualists were not the only ones to balk at the easily caricatured document. Brooks’s response was never really in question. He promptly wrote Matlack, tendering his resignation from the EES board upon confirmation

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of its action. “I could by no means continue,” Brooks declared, “to be one of a body which made these questions their test of fitness for the ministry of our Though Brooks’s response is predictable in light of the direction of his recent thinking, what is significant about his letter of resignation is the way he cast the argument. He began, in fact, by attempting to preempt any sustained theological discussion at all. Without explanation, Brooks asserted: “It is impossible to discuss the ‘questions’ in a letter, nor is it of any use to do so.” In response to Matlack’s modest contention that the EES needed a way to ensure that only authentic Evangelicals were receiving financial aid from an evangelical body, Brooks argued that such tests were necessarily narrowing and exclusive. Whereas Matlack had urged Brooks not to give up the evangelical ship now in rough waters, Brooks countered: these are times in which all men truly Evangelical ought to stand firmly together, but I am sure that the way to bring that to pass is not to narrow their standing ground. Do you seriously mean to count no man Evangelical who is not able and willing to answer satisfactorily to these questions of the Society? . . . I am sure that if these questions had been laid as tests upon the Alexandria seminary when you and I were there they would have excluded all the men who have been the most useful in the ministry since?’

Matlack thought with some justification that he was merely restating the old position, but that particular ground had probably never suited Brooks to begin with and it was clearly unacceptable now. Or perhaps Brooks was prepared to work with those who held such views as long as they were not stated too precisely or, more accurately, as long as they were not used to define membership boundaries too precisely and too publicly. In addition to Brooks’s concerns about a sufficiently broad doctrinal platform, his objections seem also to have been rooted in his longstanding squeamishness regarding confessionalism of any sort. He was clearly eager to defend a doctrinal liberty that sought to add nothing to the Bible alone. As Brooks put it: “I cannot help calling your attention to the strange effect which is produced upon one’s mind when in one question he is asked to give up all allegiance to human authority, and fasten his faith on and define his creed by revelation, and two questions later, finds himself called upon to rank himself under the banner of two modern teachers as represented in two of their books.” Despite Matlack’s protestations that the questions in fact never asked students to accept the books by May and Stone without reservation, Brooks contended that “the more faithful will demand of themselves an entire agreement to the books. . . . Their authors would be the last men to desire that we should blindly agree

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with them in every word.”38Neither Matlack nor the questions passed by the Board used this sort of unequivocal language but the controversy had obviously pressed Brooks on a sensitive point. In some respects, Matlack’s dismay at Brooks’s reaction is easy to appreciate. First, Matlack firmly believed that the party was in dire straits. “The work is so discouraging,” he wrote to Brooks, “-every thing tends so strongly to High Churchmanship & Sacramentarianism that I sometimes feel like laying down the work. The professors here [at Philadelphia Divinity School], in Gambier [at Bexley Hall, Kenyon College, another Evangelical bastion], &, I think, in dear old Virginia, are de~ponding.”~~ While acknowledging some sort of crisis was at hand, Brooks clearly understood its character differently and did not have the sort of personal investment in the continuation of the old Evangelical party as did many of his Philadelphia colleagues. Second, the actual content of the test questions did not represent a new departure on the part of the EES. Responding to Brooks’s original letter of resignation, Matlack wrote that his former classmate’s words had “surprised and pained me.” You say that you find yourself “in distinct difference from an important & permanent policy of the Society which has been deliberately adopted by an almost unanimous vote of its membership.” What is this policy? Precisely that upon which we have been acting from your first connection with the Society. We have not changed. We have only declared, made public & secured the endorsement of the Society upon the old policy of the Board. In our declaration of principles we were so careful to introduce nothing rashly that we re-adopted the “statement” which had been prepared by the united wisdom of our Evangelical men twenty years ago.‘“

Indeed, the two books cited approvingly in the questions were both nearly twenty years old!4’ Was not the EES just reaffirming the old evangelical consensus? Matlack certainly thought so: We were so careful to leave room for some modijication of thought & expression of thought that we only asked our young men if in the main they agreed with this platform. That we might not be misunderstood, & that we might show our comprehensiveness [NB], we pointed out what we conceived to be the few leading doctrines on which all Evangelical men agree. This course seemed due to our students, who were generally in doubt as to the principles of the Society & even the meaning of the word

For a while, it looked as though Brooks’s attempts to resign from the EES board might actually be thwarted. The desperation of some evangelical leaders to hang on to “up-and-comers” like Brooks is vividly illustrated in this

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same exchange of letters with Matlack. Initially, the latter reported that a subsequent Board meeting had revised and added to the old list of questions. In an unsuccessful attempt to sweep the entire business under the carpet, Matlack added: “The whole thing is a matter of the past, but I hope ere long to have something prepared for our new applicants & would be glad to have any suggestions from you. We cannot spare you & see no reason for your withd r a ~ a l . Either ” ~ ~ stalwarts like Matlack simply did not understand the nature and seriousness of Brooks’s objections or, more likely, they had chosen not to understand them for the sake of evangelical unity. “It may be,” Matlack wrote a few weeks later, “that you have been misinformed as to our action etc., as the reports of the papers were neither correct nor full.”44Several days thereafter, Matlack informed Brooks that he had reported his resignation to the Board with great reluctance: “I held it back for a time because I had hoped to retain you, & even now I shall hope to see you return to the work, for I know that you must be under some misapprehension as to the real character of our action. We have not changed our course at all.”45Matlack was still writing in this vein in December, while the tone had become even more desperate. “This is all over now. Let it beforgotten. . . . I cannot believe that I am to lose one so loved and justly honored.”&Not surprisingly, this letter was followed by the news that the Board had “declined to accept” Brooks’s resignation.‘“ Brooks responded with a brief note emphasizing that his views had not changed and asking the Board to respect his wishes. “I do not want to be obstinate or ugly in the matter,” Brooks wrote with perhaps some irritation, “but I am so fully convinced that I am right in what I propose to do that I must beg them, with many thanks for their kind remonstrance, to accept my re~ignation.”~~ In short, while Brooks had lent his articulate voice to the Cause, his previous silence on narrowly construed party matters had obviously served to paper over substantial cracks in the relationship. Further, Brooks’s evangelical allies were eager to look the other way in order to retain this popular preacher. Given their recent difficulties, stalwarts like Matlack were prepared to bend over backward for a rising star, but Brooks was no longer willing to play the game. Having long felt the tension, Brooks probably greeted the questions controversy with some relief. He was not prepared to let the opportunity it represented slip past without first securing his escape from this now encumbering alliance.

THE PARTY OF THE PAST The death of Bishop Manton Eastburn only a year later in 1872 afforded Brooks a very public platform to distance himself from the party. In many

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respects, Brooks’s eulogy for the fiercely evangelical Bishop of Massachusetts sounded almost like a eulogy for the Evangelical party within the Protestant Episcopal Church. Eastburn was a favorite of stalwarts for his outspoken evangelical views and the partisan discipline he exercised within the diocese. Accordingly, Eastburn’s approach also earned him the resentment of both the High Church and nascent Broad Church parties. William Reed Huntington, a friend of Brooks, once described Eastburn as “that Bishop who is notoriously the most narrow-minded in the country.”49 Furthermore, Allen notes that Eastburn had serious reservations about Brooks when he first returned to take a Boston parish; Eastburn “was not altogether sure that the new preacher could be ‘sound in his views.”’50When Brooks first came to Boston, the Bishop was in the habit of attending services at Trinity and this continued for a time but, significantly, Eastburn soon moved over to the safer pews of St. Paul’s. Though Brooks’s personal relations with his bishop were cordial, Eastbum was clearly of a different generation. In Brooks’s funeral oration, he stressed this generational divide, speaking of both Eastburn and the movement almost as quaint historical curiosities. He quickly made it clear that he had come to bury both Eastburn and his party. Not only his words about Eastburn but also those about the Evangelical party were consistently in the past tense: The Evangelical movement had its zealous men here and there throughout the land. The peculiarities of that movement were an earnest insistence upon doctrine, and upon personal, spiritual experience,-Man’s fallen state, his utter hopelessness, the vicarious atonement, the supernatural conversion, the work of the Holy Spirit,-these were the truths which the men of those days, who were called “Evangelical” men, urged with the force of vehement belief upon their hearers. They were great truths. There were crude, hard and untrue statements of them very often, but they went deep; they laid hold upon the souls and consciences of men?’

These remarks are consummate Phillips Brooks -they do not attack core evangelical beliefs head on but patronize those who once held them and refer to them with a sort of sentimental, wistful distance. As for the deceased, Brooks remarked that “I need not say how entirely Bishop Eastburn was a man of this movement.”52Again it was a certain narrowness in both the party and the man that irked Brooks. Referring to Trinity where Eastburn had long been rector, Brooks noted that “the teaching of this parish through twenty-six years was most direct and simple. There was a dread, even, of other forms in which the same awakening of spiritual life was manifest. The High Churchman and the Broad Churchman found no

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tolerance .”53 Brooks’s evangelical colleagues in Philadelphia would never have conceded that “the same awakening of spiritual life was manifest” in Ritualist parishes; Brooks’s wording here underlines his alienation from the Evangelical party arising from a very different understanding of Anglican comprehensiveness.Yet his new understanding of doctrinal latitude no longer appeared to include the evangelical old guard. In a private letter written at about this same time, Brooks was franker than in his eulogy. Referring to one recently deceased Evangelical, he remarked “another of that fading school of Evangelicals who are fast passing away. . . . All the old men are croaking and helpless .”54

A NEW PROTESTANT AESTHETIC The architect who builds the perfect Christian church for any age must be a man who believes in the Christian truth which that age realizes, and who is enthusiastic in the desire that the Christian men and women of the age shall do the Christian duty, outward and inward, which the conditions of their age demand and make possible. . . .He must be neither the pious medievalist nor the modem skeptic. He must be the modern Christian. -Phillips BrooksSS

Brooks’s aspiration to construct a new sort of Protestantism expressed itself not only in spoken word and in print but also in stone and mortar during the 1870s. Just as Brooks redefined the sermon as a product of creative artistry, so he sought to create a worship space that was a unified expression of artistic genius. He endeavored to articulate a faith that conserved what he saw as Protestantism’s essential beliefs, while incorporating those insights offered by the Romantic and liberal theology of the nineteenth century. Although he did not always express the connections explicitly, Brooks well understood the symbiotic relationship between individual belief and cultural context, between a theological system and its expression in material culture. Consequently, Brooks was intimately involved during the 1870s in the design and building of the new Trinity Church. An analysis of its design, composition, and decoration can shed considerable light on Brooks’s larger religious and cultural project. In fact, Trinity Church, Copley Square, constituted a fitting symbol for Brooks’s incarnational message that so emphasized the immanence of the divine in the created order. Allen remembered well what was at stake in building the new Trinity:

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But if it were a failure in devising a form of architecture where the central truths of Anglicanism,as distinct from Romanism, should be bodied forth in unmistakable manner, yet it was an attempt at this end under circumstances most favorable and rare. If it were a failure, then the inference would seem close at hand that Protestantism, which has been powerful enough to build up the modern world, and now carries hopes and the possibilities of the world’s future, is driven, in seeking a fitting shrine for worship, to resort to types of architecture that originated in and expressed the spirit of an inferior age, to which the higher forms of Christ’s religion were

Brooks accepted the call to Boston’s Trinity Church with the understanding that a new building and location for the parish were anticipated. The congregation was worshipping in an unadorned stone early Gothic Revival building at the intersection of Summer and Bishop’s Alley that dated from 1828. Its immediate neighborhood had become increasingly crowded, more business oriented, and less residential in recent years. With the popular Brooks, it was clear that larger quarters and a more appropriate location were pressing needs. Shortly after arriving, Brooks helped push through a resolution at a parish meeting to sell their property and move. A little more than a year later, land was purchased in the newly developing and already fashionable Back Bay area and a building committee was struck. The committee soon solicited design proposals from half a dozen architectural firms?’ One of the younger architects to submit a proposal was Henry Hobson Richardson. Although Richardson had not yet established a national reputation, he was well located socially and was completing an important project near the proposed site. Richardson was a Harvard alumnus (class of 1859) and a member of the elite Porcellian Club. Both of these connections would have recommended Richardson to Committee members, many of whom were Harvard graduates. Moreover, parishioners could see Richardson’s design for the Brattle Street Church taking shape close at hand. Further away, Trinity Church, Buffalo, was also a notable recent Richardson building. By June 1872, the Committee had made its choice, hiring the young architect and, in due course, paying slightly over $7,000 for his The building eventually cost nearly $750,000-an enormous sum by the standards of the time.59 The costs were covered by revenues from selling old Trinity and by contributions from the parish’s wealthy membership. Their new rector’s profound commitment to the project was evidenced by his $2,000 contribution to the last stage of the campaign (as Theodore Stebbins notes, this constituted a fourth of Brooks’s annual salary at the time).6O At the outset, the Building Committee had declared their “conviction that our duty to the parish, to posterity, and to God has been clear, to make

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the new church fully worthy of the piety, the culture, and the wealth of our people .”61 What exactly this declaration would mean in three-dimensional reality was worked out mostly by Richardson and Brooks in close consultation with the Committee. While Committee members naturally focused their concerns on the feasibility of the design and potential cost overruns, Richardson and Brooks concentrated on the big picture. Yet unlike Richard Upjohn and Ralph Adams Cram, Richardson did not understand his art as an opportunity to work out certain theological or “ecclesiastical convictions.”62 After his training in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Richardson had been drawn increasingly to adopt key features of Southern French Romanesque design, coupling them with Second Empire and other contemporary elements. Stebbins sums up Richardson’s creative approach aptly: “He distilled out of them [i.e., various historical examples] the organic qualities that made them Romanesque, and produced ordered versions for the nineteenth century. He was indeed not a revivalist, for whether purposefully or by chance, he discarded the basic Romanesque elements of his models and created a new style from them.”63 While Richardson had no larger theological agenda undergirding his fascination with Romanesque, Brooks did. By a happy confluence of interests, both rector and architect were drawn to Romanesque, an architectural language that Brooks found was churchly and historically grounded without the theological baggage of G0thic.6~For Brooks, the Gothic style had become too closely associated with an obscurantist, antiquarian medievalism and, in Anglican circles, with the ascendant Anglo-Catholic movement. Brooks sought a symbolic discourse that distilled the best from the Reformation while affirming progress. But Brooks and his affluent parishioners also sought to break with evangelical cultural Philistinism and its attendant iconoclasm. Their new building had to repudiate the cold, plain aesthetic of classical Protestantism while using light and color to evoke religious sensibilities in the assembled worshipers. It is well to recall that Evangelicalism had first emerged in the eighteenth century and its architectural idiom had been neoclassical. Well into the nineteenth century, evangelical Episcopal parishes in Philadelphia and Virginia were usually executed in Greek Revival style. (Brooks’s home parish, St. Paul’s, was among the best examples of this design.) Just as early nineteenth-century American Evangelicals adopted Scottish Common Sense philosophy, so their church architecture reflected their debt to the moderate Enlightenment. Brooks’s new church would in this way underscore his breach with old school evangelicalism. Van Wyck Brooks noted tersely that the new Trinity Church represented simply “the break of the Boston mind with its Puritan past.”@

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It seemed to Brooks that Romanesque, coupled with appropriate interior decoration, could serve his larger purpose. But, again, in architecture as in theology, Brooks was not a radical innovator but was open to draw inspiration from various predecessors and, significantly, from prominent evangelical trendsetters. Trinity has often been heralded as the trailblazer for Romanesque Revival in American ecclesiastical architecture. As Kathleen Curran points out, however, this claim needs to be qualified. Trinity was certainly an important architectural landmark but its Romanesque style was anticipated by several church buildings. Among the most noteworthy of these was St. George’s Episcopal in Manhattan, home parish of the Evangelical party’s most famous preacher and evangelist, Stephen H. Tyng. The parish hired two European architects to design their new preaching station for Tyng. Leopold Eidlitz and Charles Otto Blesch drew up the plans for the church and supervised its construction until its completion in 1849. Tyng’s emphatically Low Church Evangelicalism determined the shape of the building’s interior space. The rector cautioned his architects to ensure an unobstructed view of the central pulpit. Thus the transepts that were features of most Gothic churches were excluded from the start and iron supports were employed to support the galleries. Further, Blesch built an uncluttered apse whose arched clerestory furnished a perfect setting for tablets containing the Lord’s Prayer, Apostle’s Creed, and Ten Commandments. (Such tablets had been common adornments of the east walls of Anglican churches since the seventeenth century and had been self-consciously retained by Evangelicals since the Tractarian movement.) As for the communion table, it was actually placed behind the central pulpit (as had sometimes been done in colonial churches). Nor was the design of the table itself left to chance. “Make me a table, do you understand,” Tyng directed his architect in no uncertain terms, “a table that I can walk around and see under.”66The result was a beautifully carved wooden table set within a wide apse, a design that highlighted the corporate fellowship in the sacrament. The theological import of such an interior design would not have been lost on midcentury Episcopalians living as they were within the charged partisan atmosphere of their denomination.Devotees of the Oxford movement (and its cousin the Cambridge movement that championed “correct” High Gothic models of design) would have been scandalized by the layout at St. George’s. But Brooks was attracted to the design and, in fact, actually appears to have been largely inspired by St. George’s. Indeed, one could be forgiven for mistaking the apse of Trinity, Copley Square, for that of St. George’s. (See the photograph of Trinity Church on page 87.) Brooks was particularly fond of how the traditional tablets were

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incorporated into the design and he followed the pattern closely at Trini t ~ . 6None ~ of this resemblance was accidental (as Curran has clearly demonstrated); Brooks and a building committee member visited New York twice in the early stages of planning for the new Trinity and assessed up close the design of St. George’s as well as that of James Renwick Jr.’s St. Bartholomew’s Church. In their second trip, they visited only St. George’s and then traveled immediately to meet with their future architect on Staten Island. There, in Brooks’s words, they spent “several hours with Richardson over plans for the new church.” As Curran concludes, “their inspection of both St. George’s and St. Bartholomew’s would prove formative for the design history of Trinity Church.”68 In addition to its internal configuration, the decoration of St. George’s (and that of a couple of similar early Romanesque Revival churches) appears to have influenced Brooks’s thinking about the new Trinity. The Munich school of fresco painting had begun to inspire the interior decoration of a handful of notable churches. Artist Leonard Wood had completed a dramatic decoration of Bowdoin College’s Congregational Chapel between 1844 and 1855. Contrary to the traditional Reformed habit of configuring church interiors according to functional considerations such as acoustics, Wood countered “that a church should be erected according to the laws of optics.”69Later, when St. George’s was badly damaged by fire in 1865, Tyng rehired Eidlitz, who supervised an ambitious mural decoration plan. Although the decoration has not survived, photographic evidence confirms that it was a forerunner in the use of a polychromatic scheme. As Curran summarizes it: “St. George’s interior was almost identical to that of the Church of the Pilgrims. Broad bands of stenciled ornament containing diamonds and other motifs defined the windows and chancel arch. The walls below were uniformly decorated with a repetitive pattern of punched checkerboards (not unlike the original diamond pattern of the Church of the Pilgrims, which was later painted over).” Newspaper commentators by the early 1870s had made note of this dramatic shift away from the whitewashed plainness of most Protestant sanctuaries. “In this country,” observed one reporter, “decoration, we may say, had to educate a public taste for itself; or, what is the same, had to overcome a rooted popular prejudice. Yet, in the last ten years we have made immense strides in that d e c ~ r a t i o n . ” ~ ~ Hence, as in theology, Brooks was not a complete innovator but sought to adopt what he found helpful on the leading edge of church design and apply it to his grand project. There is evidence that Richardson had planned an elaborately painted interior from the earliest stages of the ven-

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ture. He is reported to have declared that he intended to build what he somewhat ambiguously called “a color church” at the new location on the corner of Clarendon Street and St. James Avenue.” As for Brooks, he was predisposed to favor such a polychromatic approach. Brooks was fond of rich colors and recognized the substantial effect they could have upon the mood of the sanctuary. Again, the influence of St. George’s is apparent. Curran notes that “early drawings for Trinity’s polychromy illustrate an absorbed dialogue with St. George’s. Richardson’s original competition scheme, for example, included a colored interior in which a band of stenciled ornament ran around the church below the imposts of the semicircular arches. Above this frieze, a pale blue punched checkerboard pattern spread over the upper wall surfaces. This was a reversal of St. George’s polychromy, where the checkerboarding was below the frieze, but probably on Brooks’s prompting, a “correction” was made in the design development drawings of about April through July that is visible in the transverse Although the Building Committee had originally anticipated only a very perfunctory treatment of the interior, Richardson convinced them to adopt a different approach and hire John La Farge, a French-trained American artist, to carry out an ambitious scheme of his own. As it was finally completed, the impressive and elaborate painted interior of Trinity Church is mostly the product of the collaboration between Brooks and La Farge. La Farge remembered later that, in addition to murals completed by assistants (including Augustus Saint-Gaudens and other notables), “I myself painted several paintings on the wall [of the nave], subjects suggested by Dr. Brooks, in which I was very intere~ted.”~~ Among the scenes proposed by Brooks were episodes from the Gospels favored by Evangelicals such as Nicodemus’ visit to Christ at night (from John’s Gospel containing the constantly cited evangelistic verse John 3: 16) and the interview of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well in John, chapter 4.’4 The building that was finally consecrated on 9 February 1877 reflected, then, a complex mixture of aesthetic and theological concerns. As noted above, Brooks’s Protestant commitments are evident in Trinity’s open accessible chancel with its free-standing see-through wooden communion table and apse wall lined with the traditional tablets containing the Apostles’ Creed and portions of scripture. Moreover, the centrality of the ministry of the Word was underscored by the central placement of the pulpit. Although a more conventional pulpit was later attached to columns on the left side of the chancel, the original arrangement had Brooks speaking from a central platform that protruded into the congregation. Hence, the whole hierarchical medieval structure of a divided chancel with a raised

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stone altar at the east end of the nave was discarded by Brooks and Richardson in favor of an arrangement that emphasized the accessibility of word and sacrament and the priesthood of all believers. Brooks had favored Richardson’s tall, boxy Greek Cross configuration with its short nave for a cluster of reasons, some purely utilitarian and others clearly doctrinal and historical. For one, the boxier structure ensured that Brooks could be heard clearly even by those sitting in the free seats in the galleries (most parishioners rented pews on the floor of the church). Second, it is clear that Brooks was attracted by a floor plan more common in the Orthodox East because of its association with the primitive church, Even among Anglican Evangelicals, High Gothic was problematic, associated as it was with a corrupted medieval Christianity. It had become an even more negative symbol in the wake of Tractarianism and the rise of Ritualism. This invocation of the Early Church was carefully considered, as evident in the configuration of the building and in its decoration. Mural themes favored by Early Christians such as the story of Jonah and the whale (a type of Christ’s Resurrection) and King David as the Good Shepherd (an Old Testament type of Christ) were key features of Trinity’s interior adornment. Brooks thus took pains to connect the new Trinity to the premedieval church, as well as retain certain established evangelical emphases in the building. But there was more at work in Trinity’s design and decoration than simply preserving Protestant principles and restoring Patristic connections. Neither Richardson nor La Farge were simple revivalists; both were creative artists whose work was a dynamic synthesis of old and new. Doubtless, one of the elements that made the new Trinity more than just a recapitulation of the past was the participation of Brooks in the whole pr0cess.7~One of the innovative aspects of the church’s interior was its use of color. Neither Richardson, Brooks, nor La Farge sought to reproduce color schemes reminiscent of Eastern Orthodox churches. Richardson wanted red to be the dominant interior color and Brooks, ever fond of warm colors, concurred. Such a decision obviously broke with the stark plainness of most colonial or neoclassical Protestant churches but it also diverged from the unadorned stone of early Gothic Revival. This breach had a larger significance. “What Richardson wanted,” explains John Russell with regard to the interior decoration, “was that nothing less than the spirit of the age should take up residence in Trinity As Curran explains, red evoked themes that ran through Brooks’s overall message: “Red was the late nineteenth century’s color of artistic but cozy domesticity, and the decision to apply it at Trinity must have been a somewhat defiant gesture by Richardson, with Brooks’s obvious endorsement (or

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vice versa), to render an ecclesiastical space domestic. . . . It was at once homelike, theatrical, and pa~sionate.”~~ Consequently, in addition to the historical and evangelical architectural cues, the interior of the new Trinity was, as Van Wyck Brooks appreciated, very far from a utilitarian meeting-house. But, perhaps most importantly, it was a distinctively religious space that was conducive to worship. The combination of the murals and the numinous lighting evoked a religious or worshipful response, a feeling or sentiment that was understood as part of encountering the divine. In their own different ways, this was what High Gothic and Baroque styles had attempted, but Brooks now sought to achieve a similar effect without contravening classic Protestant priorities. The end result was, in fact, a new Protestant religious aesthetic that embraced a certain form of iconography (as long as it adhered to acceptable biblical themes and characters). It was an aesthetic that was artistic and expansive, warm and suggestive, not cold or crabbed. Protestant tastes were definitely changing by the 1870s. Brooks had attended a seminary where a modest cross ornamentation on its chapel’s wooden pews was considered dangerously Romish and removed by authorities. This sort of Reformed iconoclasm had long been undermined by a Pietism that stressed religious sentiment and had no objections to images of Jesus. It had been weakened by a related Romanticism that celebrated the direct experience of the divine through aesthetic contemplation either of nature or of art. “I like the silent church,” Emerson had written in Self-Reliance, “before the service begins better than any p r e a ~ h i n g . ”In~ ~ the new Trinity, Brooks had helped build a church for such worshipers, a building that could facilitate this sort of higher, intuitive encounter with God. Given Trinity’s murals, perhaps Brooks understood this sort of reverence and contemplation as the elevated true worship referred to by Jesus when he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s Gospel: “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the father seeketh such to worship him” (John 4:23). Nor were contemporary observers of the finished product unaware of its larger theological and cultural import. A commentator in the Boston Transcript understood the subtle balancing act at work in the interior design by noting “the superb beauty of the decoration, rich yet not garish, elaborate and not ‘piled on,’ magnificent in splendors, yet noble and dignified, artistic yet religious and fitting for the place.”79Speaking about how parishioners raised the funds for its construction, a Building Committee member wrote to Brooks: “And surely we must feel more worthy to have it [i.e., the new building] and enjoy it, when we have added so

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largely to make it broad and beautiful and rich.”80 Lest the message be lost, the service of consecration itself spoke to the greater meaning Brooks invested in the new Trinity. Among the invited clergy was Stephen Tyng, who was asked to read (appropriately) the Commandments at the start of the prayer book communion service and, although they sat in the congregation with the laity, leading Unitarian clergy. To drive the point home, Brooks invited James Freeman Clarke to join the Trinitarians at the freshly finished chancel rail. Conservative critics objected in the press to this breach in communion discipline but the Rector of Trinity, Copley Square, made no comment.81

THE PARTY OF THE FUTURE Thus Brooks sought to construct a new sort of Low Church position liberated from some of the old strictures but true to what he understood as the heart of Protestantism. The boundaries were being redrawn all around Brooks but they were not necessarily more inclusive at both ends of the spectrum; implicitly, they excluded the old-fashioned Evangelicals. When stalwart Bishop David Cummins was criticized for officiating at an open communion service during a meeting of the interdenominational Evangelical Alliance in New York in October 1873, Brooks notably did not rise to defend him at the time?* This, despite the fact that Brooks was personally committed to the practice of open communion and would later himself be criticized for allowing Unitarians around the communion table at Trinity, Copley Square, at the consecration of the new edifice. Brooks was no longer prepared to stick his neck out for one-time allies, even as he witnessed the disintegration of the old party during the 1870s. When Cummins engineered the Reformed Episcopal schism in 1873, all Brooks could offer was a bemused private comment about how the renegade bishop must have thrown the Episcopal hierarchy into “a panic,” having stolen “a true bit of their genuine [Apostolic] succes~ion.”~~ Brooks could not resist teasing Anglo-Catholics about their high view of the episcopacy but he expressed no public sympathy for Cummins and his followers. Having openly cut his ties with the Evangelical party, it was soon clear with which group Brooks now identified. Despite public protestations that he did not identify with any party, in private correspondence,Brooks was more candid. As he wrote to Elizabeth K. Mitchell: “Only fourteen years ago when I entered the ministry there were two old-fashioned parties, the Lows and the Highs, over against each other in a quiet, intelligent, comfortable way. Now you can hardly find a representative of either among

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the younger men . . . and the Broad Churchmen and Ritualists divide the field. Let us be thankful that we belong to the party of the future.” In another letter from this period, he referred to “all of us Broad Churchmen” seeking “to keep or make the Church liberal and free.”84By the mid1870s, Brooks was convinced that he had chosen the winning side in the party battles of midcentury and was moving on with few regrets. Brooks’s falling out with the evangelical establishment paints a more complex picture of the demise of the party during the 1860s and 1870s. Its virtual disappearance was due not only to external threats like Ritualism but also to internal divisions over traditional doctrinal shibboleths and to deepening differences with more latitudinarian allies. Some of the party’s former partners proved not to be its true friends when push came to shove. This alienation was often compounded by a generational cleavage; stalwarts appear often to have been older, while many of the younger clergy were not as partisan as their forebears. With young, articulate ordinands drifting away from the old party, Evangelicals would have a hard time building on their past successes. Underlying these differences was a new understanding of Anglican comprehensiveness that excluded the fiercely Protestant evangelicalism of the stalwarts, while it winked at the doctrinal and ceremonial innovations of the Rituali~ts.8~ What is certainly most remarkable in all of this, however, is how fast the end came for old-school Evangelicals. In other denominations with stronger confessional traditions, the marginalization of evangelicalism would not be so precipitous. In this respect, the Episcopal Church anticipated developments in the rest of the Protestant mainline by a couple of decades. When Brooks left Philadelphia in 1869, the party there had recently started a new divinity school to preserve the evangelical creed (jeopardized by the closing of Virginia seminary). Yet only four years later, Phillips Brooks felt free, in what had been one of the most fervently evangelical dioceses, to speak openly about the eclipse of the movement. Perhaps the board members of the Evangelical Education Society understood only too well what the defection of Phillips Brooks meant to their once triumphant movement within American Anglicanism; it was the beginning of the end. Moreover, as the design of new Trinity Church illustrates vividly, the demise of evangelical Episcopalianism had a cultural as well as a narrowly theological dimension. In some important respects, Evangelicals (with their neoclassical churches and their rational dogmatic systems) were creatures of an eighteenth-century sensibility. To the annoyance of Romantics like Brooks, their apologetics owed a lot to the evidential arguments of Bishop Butler. Samuel Johnson had once aptly termed such rationalistic arguments “Old Bailey theology,” and the judicial reference is

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Samuel Snelling years apposite in the case of the evangelical old later recalled Alexander H. Vinton preaching before his congregation in the neoclassical St. Paul’s “clad in his academic gown, he appeared as an advocate, as one who pleaded with the reason of his hearers for the greatest of all cause~.”~’ The cultural shift to a more sentimental, Romantic, and literary style in both homiletics and church design made the more traditional Evangelicals appear archaic and culturally out of step. Clad in their Geneva gowns and starched white preaching tabs, they seemed by the 1870s to belong to the America of knee-breeches and powdered wigs. They were symbols of the simpler producer ethic of the early republic.88 Brooks clearly attempted to preserve some features of the old evangelical aesthetic: he did not wear a surplice in the pulpit and parts of the new Trinity did reflect traditional Protestant concerns. Brooks sought to forge a liberal Protestant aesthetic that affirmed the surrounding culture and was therefore progressive, eschewing the antiquarian.89 In short, he sought to shape a true “party of the future.” Yet outside of the Episcopal Church, common cause with Evangelicals, even those of a conservative stripe, could and did continue.

MAKING COMMON CAUSE During the great revivalist’s crusade to Boston in 1877, Dwight L. Moody was unable to preach one evening and he invited the city’s most famous pulpit orator to take his place. The Boston Daily Advertiser described the evening this way: The announcement that the Rev. Phillips Brooks was to preach was sufficient to fill the Tabernacle [a large brick building erected especially for Moody’s meetings] to its utmost capacity last evening. On no occasion has there been a larger audience, and it was composed of a much different class of people than usually gather. The regular services were opened by the congregation rising and singing, “Just as I am without one plea.” The Rev. W. W. Newton of St. Paul’s [a young clerical friend of Brooks and a leading Broad Churchman] offered prayer, and Mr. Sankey gave the notices for the week, and sang “The Ninety and Nine.” Mr. Brooks read for the Scripture lesson from the twenty-sixth chapter of Acts. The congregation joined in singing the hymn, “’Tis the promise of God full salvation to give.” Mr. Brooks then preached, and the services closed with benediction.

The anonymous author of this account was evidently struck by the social composition of the audience. “It was a congregation,” he emphasized,

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“differing in many respects from the ordinary Tabernacle congregation, and it was evident that many of Mr. Brooks parishioners and admirers were present.’” Nor did conservative evangelical Episcopalians fail to recognize the larger significance of Brooks’s willingness to make common cause with Moody. New York’s Stephen H. Tyng wrote Brooks a warm letter after reading an account of Brooks’s contribution. After thanking Brooks for participating in Moody’s mission, particularly “in the midst of all the prejudices of Boston,” Tyng took pains to reassure Brooks that what he was doing was sound: “I have always united with those faithful brethren, because I have believed them doing God’s work, and in the way which His providence had planned. In all the work which they have done under my notice, I have found much to praise, much to be thankful for, nothing to reprove. . . .That you have given your growing influence to revival movements is to me and to many a call for much thankf~lness.”~’ Given the row over Brooks’s departure from the EES, Tyng may have felt a word of encouragement might promote reconciliation. That reconciliation never materialized but a different alliance with non-Episcopalian Evangelicals did survive the 1870s. Few incidents better illustrate both Phillips Brooks’s broad appeal during the 1870s and 1880s and, concurrently, the inclusivity of Gilded Age Evangelicalism. American Evangelicalism in the late nineteenth century, like a period revival tent, was a commodious if ungainly house that sheltered “all sorts and conditions of men”92-evangelistically minded Calvinists of various sorts; Arminians of different stripes; postmillennialists and premillennialists; paedobaptists and believer baptists; and, perhaps most significantly, both those of a more liberal theological bent and those who were harsh critics of the New Theology. William G. Mchughlin has written that Moody “was the last of the great Evangelical revivalists capable of winning the wholehearted support of all denominations and all classes of people (including Phillips Brooks and Henry Ward Beecher) for his revival campaigns. His successors faced a divided Evangelicalism and virtually all of them took the side of the Fundamentalists in the Awakening which brought the rise of Modernism as a new consensus in American theology.”93More recently, Grant Wacker stresses “the commonalities of the 1880s and 1890s . . . between liberals and evangelical^."^^ The Gilded Age alliance would not last, however. As Leonard Sweet has put it, “Something shattering happened to the evangelical consensus, which was strong in 1855 . . . but a shambles by 1915.”95 Phillips Brooks’s popularity among Evangelicals (including some conservatives) during much of this period affords one an illuminating

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window on the heterogeneous character of American Evangelicalism before the polarization that transformed it at the close of the century. Brooks’s affinities with Moody clarify the common ground shared by Evangelicals before the Fundamentalist/Modemist controversy, while also highlighting the emergent differences that would ultimately spell division. Moreover, Brooks’s abiding appeal among Evangelicals can provide valuable insight into how theological liberals continued to appeal to conservative audiences?6 By the mid- 1870s’ Brooks had broken with conservative Evangelicals within his own denomination. Yet, judging from Brooks’s extant correspondence, the famous Boston preacher retained his appeal among Evangelicals outside of the Episcopal Church and even to some extent within Episcopal circles. Among his correspondents was the staunchly evangelical Stephen H. Tyng of St. George’s (Manhattan), who wrote Brooks several warmly appreciative letters?’ Even a leading figure in the Reformed Episcopal schism of 1873, Charles Edward Cheney, heaped effusive praise on Brooks. Cheney, who was later consecrated a bishop in the REC, wrote to Brooks that he had always found the latter’s published sermons “full of suggestiveness to myself in my work.”98Conservative Presbyterian and defender of Scottish Common Sense philosophy in America, James McCosh, invited Brooks to speak at Princeton in the 1880s. As noted earlier, R. C. Matlack observed that Brooks “enroll[ed] among his friends those who differed from him most widely on very important matt e r ~ . ’ ’Stephen ~~ Tyng may have gotten closer to the heart of the matter when he referred to what he called Brooks’s “peculiarly plastic character.”Im Clearly, despite his own movement away from the evangelical establishment within his own denomination, Brooks retained a substantial popularity in evangelical circles in general. As arguably the central figure within Gilded Age Evangelicalism, Dwight L. Moody represents an illuminating point of comparison with Brooks. Why would Moody have asked Brooks to fill in for him in Boston that March evening? What these two very different men in fact shared delineates the boundaries of the late nineteenth-century’s fragile consensus among Evangelicals. Brooks’s outspoken support of Moody’s Boston mission was by no means inevitable. Many voices of liberal Christianity in Boston were highly critical of Moody. One evening paper that styled itself Boston’s leading cultural custodian, the Transcript, warned Moody. The evangelist’s “appeal to emotion won’t do,” observed the paper. “Our people here are less excitable than in other cities,” because of what the Transcript termed the city’s “intellectual superiority.”10’The Unitarian Christian Register noted during the crusade that, although the untutored may have

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been reached by the evangelist, “the most thoughtful ruling classes” found Moody’s religious views repulsive.Io2 Stirring up emotions was what Moody offered but the city really needed moral exhortation and instruction in community service. Meanwhile, poet Walt Whitman dismissed Moody as “an ignorant charlatan” and ridiculed his “wonderful murder of syntax.”Io3 But what did not escape Brooks’s attention was the broad ecumenical and theological spectrum that was behind Moody’s ambitious campaign. Most of city’s secular dailies hailed the revival meetings and boosted their sales by covering them thoroughly and sympathetically. Among Moody’s key Christian sponsors were Joseph Cook from Andover Seminary, A. J. Gordon of Clarendon Street Baptist, as well as solidly conservative congregations such as Park Street and Mount Vernon Congregational and Tremont Temple Baptist.Io4Even Boston’s Roman Catholic hierarchy had some nice things to say about Moody, though they forbade their faithful from attending his meetings.Io5Brooks’s approach was characteristically pragmatic. Despite some concerns about Moody’s methods, he believed that such a crusade could do much good, especially among the lower social orders. While their class origins were different (Moody from a sturdy but lowermiddle-class family), the beliefs these two popular preachers shared were not insignificant.lo6Neither man had the dogmatic temper; Brooks certainly eschewed dogmatism of any sort. Both men would be criticized by the more confessionally inclined in their respective traditions. For Moody’s part, this lack of theological system was the result of his pragmatic, businesslike personality and his utilitarian understanding of his own ministry. His biographer, James F. Findlay, in particular, stresses “the absence of any logical structure in his thought.”1o7Even Stanley N. Gundry, who is eager to define the theological basis of Moody’s message, concedes “that for good or for ill Moody was short on systematic theological expres~ion.”’~~ Responding to a critic on one occasion, Moody is reported to have quipped: “My theology! I didn’t know I had any. I wish you would tell me what my theology is.” To another, he once cautioned: “You are living a life of formalism-you are living on doctrines.” Moody took pains to stress that Christ “is not a creed, a mere empty doctrine, but it is He Himself we have [as believer^]."'^ One should take care here not to construct a caricatured portrait of Moody from such offhand comments. Moody was neither a gnostic, an antinomian, nor essentially anti-intellectual. Nonetheless, these statements do highlight a revealing animus on Moody’s part against traditional Protestant confessionalism. In addition to his own personal dislike for the abstract or the scholastic, Moody was also concerned that the unique purpose of his evangelistic

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ministry was not to preach the distinctives that divided Protestants but the essentials that all shared. After all, Moody’s evangelistic crusade was built upon a broad theological spectrum reflecting the disparate coalition that was Gilded Age Evangelicalism. The sort of transdenominational alliance that underlay Moody’s efforts would not last long if its aegis decided to accentuate divisive distinctives. “If you can reach a man,” Moody was reported to have said, “by taking him to the Episcopal church, take him to the Episcopal church. If you can reach him by taking him to the Baptist church, take him to the Baptist church. Never mind about the creeds and doctrines. Never mind about these names, they are nothing. What we want is to get him above these party walls.”’1oFor his mission to flourish, it was critical for Moody not to be sidetracked on divisive questions, even those peculiar to Evangelicals. To the voices who demanded that he declare himself on baptism or the five points of Calvinism, he replied that they were not appropriate subjects for his sort of preaching. “I would say to them,” Moody retorted, “‘Why don’t you go and preach them yourselves?’” l l ’ Now Moody usually did not express his qualms about doctrinal systems in terms as strong and sweeping as had Brooks when a young seminarian and in some of his mature essays. In this respect, Brooks was clearly anticipating the approach of later liberals. But, though their positions would develop in different directions, the roots of their critique of stuffy dogmatism were much the same. Both stressed the need for a religion of the heart; both were critical of what they viewed as Protestant scholasticism. Both men also contributed to the shift in Protestant preaching from abstract theological points to a pragmatic moralism (though Brooks more so than Moody). Living as they did during a period of great intellectual challenge and concomitant changes for Christian belief, Moody and Brooks were both forced to confront searching questions about evangelical faith. Again, although Moody’s position was clearly more conservative (i.e., more sharply critical of liberal scholars) than that of Brooks, their ways of handling higher criticism’s challenges were strikingly similar. Moody’s response was characteristically moderate and pastoral. First, Moody’s circle of friends did include those of a more liberal theological bent, such as liberal evangelical Henry Drummond, and Old Testament scholars George Adam Smith and William Rainey Harper. Indeed, Moody allowed these individuals to speak at his Northfield Conferences as long as they did not use the opportunity to highlight their more controversial views.”* Second, Moody stressed how the debate about higher criticism was hurting the church in general and the cause of evangelism in particular. Though Moody articulated this pragmatic objection more toward the close of his

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ministry, its particular formulation was distinctively Moody. Upon hearing George Adam Smith give a sympathetic account of Old Testament critical scholarship, Moody responded: “I think I see your point, Mr. Smith-but after all, what’s the use of telling people there were two IsaSmith iahs, so long as most of them don’t even know there was also recalled that Moody had expressed his concern about the larger deleterious effects of the scholarly controversy. “Couldn’t they [the critics],” the irenic Moody suggested, “agree to a truce and for ten years bring out no fresh views, just to let us get on with the practical work of the Kingd ~ m ? ” ”While ~ staunchly defending the overall reliability of the Bible, Moody was convinced that the laity most needed to hear an evangelical call to repentance and faith, not conflicting theories generated by speculative source criticism. Brooks’s most direct treatment of the challenge presented by critical approaches to the Bible and to Christian doctrine in general was developed in the article “The Pulpit and Popular Skepticism.” Here, Brooks advocated a course similar to that of Moody in that it did not seek to meet the objections of higher critics on their own turf. Notably, Brooks did not advise a searching historical and textual investigation to shore up the Bible’s supports. Rather, Brooks recommended that preachers present Christianity as a relationship with the person of Christ (as Moody always stressed) and a sublime moral calling rather than a bundle of dogmas. This sort of fideism sidestepped most of the tough intellectual questions the skeptics raised and attempted to shift the debate to the ahistorical plane of human feeling and sentiment. “My one great comprehensive answer,” argued. Brooks, “is really this: make known and real to men by every means you can command the personal Christ, not doctrine about Him, but Him; strike at the tyranny of the physical life [i.e., the historicity of the biblical accounts?] by the power of His spiritual presence. Let faith mean, make faith mean trusting Him and trying to obey Him.” Thus Brooks exchanged abstract doctrine for an existential relationship with a person (i,e., fellowship with “His spiritual presence”) and a life of practical obedience. Brooks also evinced an irenic style in his handling of these issues. He explained that “he who is building up health is thereby conquering disease. He who is preaching truth is thereby confuting error. . . . I think the men who confute skepticism are always the positive, not the negative men, not the men who disprove error but the men who make faith.”’15 Both men subscribed to a Christianity that was “conversionist” (to use David Bebbington’s helpful terminology) insofar as it emphasized personal transformation and extolled the primacy of preaching.l16 In part, Moody’s emphasis on individual conversion was rooted in his own per-

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sonal experience. He was profoundly affected by the Businessmen’s Revival of 1857-1 858 and the evangelical subculture of antebellum Boston.”’ Moody came to espouse an evangelical Protestantism that focused on the sudden transformation of the individual.I18His sermons were designed to prompt individuals to repent of their sins and embrace by faith the gospel of Christ’s atoning death. Gundry argues in his analysis of his theology that “regeneration held a place of at least equal emphasis with the atonement in Moody’s preaching.” In fact, Gundry concludes “that Moody never conducted an evangelistic mission without preaching on the new birth.” The divinely appointed means to effect this transformation of individuals was the preaching of the Word. For Moody, preaching was the centerpiece of his meetings and of his theology. As Gundry has aptly put it, “Moody held to what might be called proclamation evangelism in which he was to use every legitimate means to attract hearers to the meetings and maintain their comfort and interest while there.”’I9His primary goal was to confront individuals with a challenging message constructed to evoke repentance and faith, and meetings were designed primarily to facilitate the delivery of the message and its sympathetic reception. As noted elsewhere, proclamation was central to Brooks’s ideal of the Christian ministry. Notably absent from Brooks’s understanding was anything that smacked of the sacerdotal; the Christian pastor was primarily a teacher and a messenger not a mediator or even (primarily) a dispenser of the sacraments. “Let us rejoice with one another,” Brooks remarked to his audience of seminarians at the start of his lectures, “that in a world where there are a great many good and happy things for men to do, God has given us the best and the happiest, and made us preachers of His Truth.”’2o Like Moody, Brooks disclaimed an academic style of preaching and championed a pragmatic, evangelistic or inspirational approach. Brooks observed that there “are many preachers who seem to do nothing else, always discussing Christianity as a problem instead of announcing Christianity as a message, and proclaiming Christ as a Savior.”’21 Yet Brooks’s emphasis on the emotional transformation of the individual, his “conversionism,” was drawn also from extrabiblical sources, especially from Romantic literature. Brooks may, like Moody, have spoken in the language of Victorian sentimentalism, but it was grounded less in scripture than in a Romantic idealism. The actual sermon Brooks preached that March evening in Boston for Moody was built upon his text Acts 26:19, “Whereupon, 0 King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” As such, it referred to St. Paul’s account of his own conversion but Brooks infused it with a Romantic celebration of individual spiritual intuition. “Everything a man does,” Brooks explained in his

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sermon, “that is really worth the doing comes to him in the first place in some kind of vision. The vision comes before the action, if the man’s action is worth anything.” Also, in contrast to Moody, Brooks stressed at several points in his Taberbacle sermon that, despite the Fall, humans retained a natural yearning for God. Even with the “impious” individual, there is “something in his heart that would recognize God, and the Savior who is his brother by the very fact of his being a child of God.”122Brooks contended that the way to preach the good news was to hold forth the heavenly vision, not dwell first on human fallenness or depravity. Repentance, he explained, would follow naturally upon conversion .123 This was not evangelical conversion but Romantic or Transcendentalist enlightenment or idealist intuition. Had their lives extended into the twentieth century, Brooks and Moody might have had to declare themselves more clearly on some of these contested subjects. Given their differences on some critical questions, they would probably have chosen to affiliate with opposing camps; in some sense, they had already done so by the early 1890s. Nevertheless, for a time in the 1870s and 1880s, Brooks and Moody were able to share the same platform under the very broad banner of Gilded Age Evangelicalism.

NOTES 1 . John E. Booty, Mission and Ministry: A History of the Mrginia Theological Seminary (Alexandria: Virginia Theological Seminary, 1995), esp. chapters 3 and 4. 2. My focus on doctrine in this and other chapters when discussing Brooks’s differences with more traditional Evangelicals is designed to clarify those (often subtle) differences. I do not mean to suggest thereby that Evangelicalism was exclusively doctrinal in character nor that it was constitutionally opposed to all aspects of Romanticism. 3. Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 (New York E. P. Dutton, 1900),vol. 1,330. 4. Episcopal Recordel; quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,335. 5. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,387-88. 6. William Wilberforce Newton, Yesterday with the Fathers (New York: Cochrane, 1910), 24. 7. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 122-23. Interestingly, Brooks had been assigned George Christian Knapp’s Lectures on Christian Theology as his systematic theology text at VTS. Knapp was a Lutheran who did not subscribe to a Reformed understanding of the “eternal security” of the believer. See John F. Woolverton, The Education of Phillips Brooks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 75-76.

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8. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 124. 9. John S. Stone to PB, 19 July 1881, Phillips Brooks Papers, bMs Am 1594.1 (530), Houghton Library. Stone was probably referring to hearing Brooks preach when the latter had first returned to Boston in 1869. He then added: “And the more I heard you, the more, it seemed to me, you approached a fair statement of the ‘Truth as it is in Jesus.”’ Stone does appear to have liked Brooks’s Lectures on Preaching. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,313. 10. Allen: “Out of the three hundred and seventy-two sermons which stand recorded in his sermon notebook as written there [Philadelphia], he has deliberately chosen to publish only five” (Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 119). I suspect that Brooks had at least two different reasons for not publishing these sermons. Some (like the two quoted here) may have been more forthright on controversial doctrinal questions than the mature Brooks liked to be. Others owed more to the conventional evangelical approach Brooks had encountered at Virginia Seminary and that Brooks soon associated with the old guard. 11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Professor Shedd (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854), 363. This is probably the edition Brooks read in the VTS library. The philosophical distinction here is derived from Kant. 12. PB, in typed transcript of MS sermon at Payne Library, Virginia Theological Seminary, 2-3. Emphasis in the original unless stated otherwise. 13. PB, in typed transcript of MS sermon at Payne Library, 5. 14. PB, in typed transcript of MS sermon at Payne Library, 6. 15. PB, in typed transcript of MS sermon at Payne Library, 11-12. 16. See Newton, Yesterday with Fathers, 25-27. 17. For perceptive discussions of the deepening crisis for Evangelicals during the 1860s, see Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapters 5 and 6; Allen C. Guelzo, For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), chapter 3. 18. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1, 388. Allen then admits that many “recognized some difference in the presentation of the truth as they held it ,” but stresses that they were confident about Brooks’s position on the essentials. I think Allen exaggerates the stalwarts’ confidence in him here. 19. R. C. Matlack, “Reminiscences,” MS in Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMs Am 1594.1 (630), 1. 20. Letter, PB to Mr. Whitehead, 27 November 1867, in Phillips Brooks Papers, ECUSAArchives, Austin, Tex., 85.78; PP 199. 21. See Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind, 197-99. The subject of prayer book revision was discussed at a meeting of the evangelical societies in Philadelphia in the fall of 1867. Radical calls for wholesale revision were stifled then by Bishops Eastburn, Lee, and McIlvaine. 22. Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 14.

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23. James Thayer Addison, The Episcopal Church in the United States, 1789-1931 (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 174-75. Raymond R. Taylor, “A Century of the Philadelphia Divinity School, 1857-1957,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 26 (1957): 205-08. 24. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,484. 25. Allen notes this also. See Allen, Life and LRtters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,486. 26. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,484. 27. Taylor, “A Century,” 2 13. 28. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,96.

29. The controversy is almost completely ignored by Brooks’s biographers. For example, Raymond W. Albright’s Focus on Injkity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: MacMillan, 1961) spends only one paragraph on it in over 400 pages. See page 159. 30. Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 21. Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 31. Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 21. Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 32. Again, see Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind, chap. 6, for an excellent description of the desperate mood of many Evangelicals in this period. 33. The Churchman, 3 September 1870,296. 34. This sort of language may sound extreme to modem ears but it is worth recalling here that the following year a committee of Episcopal bishops would recommend at General Convention a tough set of new canons to outlaw much of the new ceremonial. The committee sought to proscribe the use of a processional cross, candles on the Holy Table, acolytes to assist at the Eucharist, plus crossings and genuflections, among other things. Though these proposals were defeated after prolonged debate, they confirm that the EES’s liturgical views were still pretty mainstream. See E. Clowes Chorley, Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 376-90. 35. The two books were: James May, Evangelical Religion: In Its Connexion with the English and American Episcopal Churches (New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1851) and John S. Stone, The Contrast: 01;the Evangelical and Tractarian Systems, Compared in their Structure and Tendencies (New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1853). 36. Letters, PB to R. C. Matlack, 15 October 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 22. 37. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,73. 38. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,73. 39. Letter of R. C. Matlack to PB, 15 November 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences ,” 30. 40. Letter of R. C. Matlack to PB, 11 November 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 25. Emphasis in the original. 41. Evangelical Religion was penned by James May, one of Brooks’s instructors at Virginia Seminary. Without knowing the depth of his former classmate’s

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complaints against the seminary, Matlack was understandably at a loss here. The other was written by J. S. Stone, with whom Brooks was friendly. Stone’s The Contrast was one of several anti-Tractarian books published in the 1840s and 1850s with the imprimatur of the Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge. As such works go, it was less strident than many, polemical without being shrill. In fact, Stone conceded that some Tractarians meant well and were in their own (mistaken) way seeking to help the church. Yet the author’s separatist tone in the book’s final pages would certainly have been a red flag for Brooks. Here, Stone argued that Tractarianism had advanced so far within the Episcopal Church in part because Evangelicals had loved church unity more than truth. Tractarianism held little appeal for Brooks and Ritualism even less, but his emerging understanding of Anglican comprehensiveness moved him to reject both the hard edges of the EES’s test questions and Stone’s preference for principle and party over denominational peace. 42. Letter of R. C. Matlack to PB, 11 November 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences ,” 25-26. 43 Matlack to PB in letter of 18 October 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 23. 44. Matlack to PB in letter of 11 November 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 26. 45. Matlack to PB in letter of 15 November 1870, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 30. 46. Matlack to PB in letter of 5 December 1870 in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 33. 47. Matlack to PB in letter of 6 January 1871, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 35. 48. PB to Matlack in letter of 9 January 1871, in Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 35. Matlack was a stubborn soul, however. More than twenty years later, when Brooks had been elected Bishop of Massachusetts, the EES, perhaps craving respectability, elected Brooks an honorary vice-president. Brooks wrote Matlack promptly to decline the honor, explaining: “I have not changed my feeling with regard to it.” Letter, PB to Robert Matlack, 17 February 1892, in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,201. 49. William Reed Huntington, cited in John W. Suter, ed., Life and Letters of W R. Huntington (New York: Century, 1925), 52. 50. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 16. Allen appears to be actually quoting Eastburn here. 51. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,76. My emphasis. Allen rightly observes that Brooks’s words here “have the apparent tone of one speaking from the outside.” Yet Allen then adds that “the tone is also of one who was still within the circle from which he did not seek escape.” I see no evidence in the eulogy to support this assertion and, indeed, as the preceding pages have shown, there is considerable evidence that Brooks had already distanced himself from the party. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,76. 52. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,77. 53. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,77. 54. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,81.

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55. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,327. The passage is from a lecture, “The Teaching of Religion.” 56. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,253. 57. Theodore Stebbins, “Richardson and Trinity Church: The Evolution of a Building,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 27 (1968): 28 1. 58. Stebbins, “Richardson and Trinity Church, 283,289. 59. Helene Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge and the Decoration of Trinity Church, Boston,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974): 353. 60. Stebbins, “Richardson and Trinity Church,” 295. 61. Quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,250. Also cited in Stebbins, “Richardson and Trinity Church,” 289. 62. Latter phrase is from Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,250. 63. Stebbins, “Richardson and Trinity Church,” 292. Stebbins deemphasizes Brooks’s influence on the process but Kathleen Curran’s more recent reassessment -based as it is on new evidence-seems more persuasive. Brooks does appear to have been a key participant.See Kathleen Curran, “The Romanesque Revival, Mural Painting, and Protestant Patronage in America,” The Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 693-722. 64. Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 693. 65. Van Wyck Brooks, quoted in Douglass Shand Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1978), 47. 66. Tyng, quoted in Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 697. 67. Curran: “At St. George’s the high blind walls allowed space for tablets containing biblical texts, an Evangelical practice that Stephen Tyng had implemented during the interior renovation by Eidlitz and Cohn in 1869. Brooks was enamored of the tablets and planned to have some at Boston. Four tablets with gold grounds, visible in the photograph of Trinity’s original chancel, were placed in the panels between the clerestory windows. Two contained communion service extracts, the others were inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed.” See “Romanesque Revival,” 710-1 1 . 68. PB, quoted by Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 709. Curran notes that Brooks also had some exposure to early Romanesque revival at his Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. It had been designed by John Notman and built between 1856 and 1859. 69. Wood, quoted by Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 705. Curran concludes here: “In some ways his aesthetic heir, Phillips Brooks would say the same a generation later about Trinity Church in Boston.” Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 705. 70. Newspaper quoted by Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 706. 71. It is unclear whether Richardson meant here simply the different hues of stone that he contemplated using for the church’s exterior walls, or whether he meant interior murals. See Kathleen Curran’s assessment, “Romanesque Revival,” 7 12-1 3. 72. Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 712.

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73. La Farge, quoted by Weinberg, “John La Farge,” 339, n102. See also Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 712-17. 74. Weinberg, “John Lafarge,” 339. Also, Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 715-17. 75. Cf. Curran: “But Trinity Church must be viewed as a theological turning point as much as an artistic one, which drew from precedent but shifted toward the future. That shift had to do with the formidable Phillips Brooks. An investigation of Brooks’s theological pedigree illustrates the full significance of Trinity as a church with religious roots in the American past but also as a harbinger of the modern secular world.” “Romanesque Revival,” 7 17. 76. John Russell, “Henry Hobson Richardson,”American Heritage 32 (198 1): 55. 77. Curran, “Romanesque Revival,” 7 13. 78. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,’’in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, ed. Joseph Slater (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979), 41. 79. Cited in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 261. Interestingly, Brooks continued to wear a black preaching gown long after others stopped doing so. See Allen Guelzo, “A Test of Identity: The Vestments Controversy in the Reformed Episcopal Church, 1873-1 897,” Anglican and Episcopal History 61 (1992): 303-24. 80. Paine to PB, 9 February 1877, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,264. 8 1. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,265-68. 82. Brooks privately ridiculed the negative reaction of Anglo-Catholics but did not defend Cummins publicly. See Guelzo, For the Union, 130-31. Years later, Brooks did lament in an address at a Church Congress that the Episcopal Church had not been flexible enough to allow Evangelicals to omit reference to “regeneration” in the baptismal office and thus perhaps avoid schism. See “Liturgical Growth,” in Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 100. 83. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,80. 84. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,207-08. 85. One cannot blame David Cummins for being dismayed by this development. See Guelzo, For the Union, 124-38. 86. Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Book 2 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 314. 87. Samuel Snelling, “Memoirs of Phillips Brooks,” in Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, *54M-46 MS Am 1342, p. 7. 88. See Guelzo, “Test of Identity.” 89. T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation ofAmerican Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Lears shows how High Churchmen chose a different path. He argues that Anglo-Catholicism reflected one facet of a larger Jin de sitcle antimodernist revolt: “Anglo-Catholic sacramentalism counteracted feelings of moral impotence by affirming the possibility of mediation between God and man. Long denied by the Calvinist tradition,

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mediation not only broke the endless chain of ‘morbid introspection’; it also restored some tension between the natural and the supernatural. Immanentist theology had relaxed the tension by postulating a Divine plan unfolding in Nature. Sacramentalisttheology, by providing rituals to propitiate a God Who was wholly Other, revived the transcendent dimension of worship. High church theologians believed that Anglo-Catholic services generated ‘an unspeakable awe, derived from realization of the supernatural’which was unavailable in the ‘decorated Humanitarianism’ of liberal Protestantism.” See Lears, No Place, 202. 90. Boston Daily Advertiser, 20 March 1877, 1, column 3. Allen also quotes from part of this article. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 48-49. 91. Letter, Stephen H. Tyng to PB, 24 March 1877, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,275-76. 92. Leonard Sweet concluded in 1984 that “studies in the late Victorian era are our weakest links in reconstructing the evangelical tradition in America.” Sweet, The Evangelical Tradition in America (Mason, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 73. Although strides have been made since the mid-l980s, there is still a lot left to be done in this field. 93. William G. McLoughlin, ed., “Introduction,” in The American Evangelicals, 180&1900 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 25. 94. Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910,” The Journal of American History 72 (1985): 274. I have reversed author’s word order here in this citation. 95. Sweet, Evangelical Tradition, 70-7 1. 96. Brooks’s popularity among some conservative Evangelicals continues today. Fundamentalist Warren Wiersbe wrote in the foreword to a new edition of Brooks’s Yale Lectures on Preaching that “everything useful written on homiletics in America in the last century is in one way or another a footnote to Phillips Brooks.” See Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1989), 7. 97. See, for example, the letter from Stephen H. Tyng dated 24 March 1877 in Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 98. Letter from Charles E. Cheney to PB, 18 May 1891, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. bMS Am 1594.1 (204). 99. R. C. Matlack, “Reminiscences,” 1. 100. Letter from Stephen H. Tyng to PB, 25 January 1877, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. bMS Am 1594.1 (565). 101. Boston Transcript, 27 January 1877, quoted in Bruce J. Evensen, “‘It is a Marvel to Many,”’ New England Quarterly 72 (1999), 264. The phrase cultural custodian here is Evensen’s. 102. Quoted in Evensen, “Marvel,” 265. Originally from Christian Register, 10 February 1877. 103. Walt Whitman, quoted in Evensen, “Marvel,” 267. 104. Evensen, “Marvel,” 257-59.

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105. See Margaret Bendroth, “Rum, Romanism, and Evangelism: Protestants and Catholics in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston,” Church History 68 (1999). 106. See James F. Findlay Jr. Dwight L. Moody, American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 31-35. 107. Findlay, Moody, 227. 108. Stanley N. Gundry, Love Them In: The Life and Theology of D. L. Moody (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 64. 109. Moody, quoted in Gundry, Love Them In, 66-67. 110. Moody, quoted in J. W. Hanson, Memorial of The Life and Works of Dwight L. Moody (Toronto: J . L. Nichols, 1900), 162. 111. Moody quoted in Gundry, Love Them In, 66. 112. Gundry, Love Them In, 2 13, and Findlay, Moody, 4 11. See Gundry, Love Them In, 201-9 for an excellent survey of Moody’s critique of the higher critics. 113. Quoted in Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 39. 114. Moody, quoted in Findlay, Moody, 412. 115. Phillips Brooks, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” Princeton Review 1 (1879): 307-08. 116. See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modem Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1992), 5-10. 117. Scholars have debated whether Moody can be said to have undergone a dramatic conversion experience. See Findlay, Moody, 5 1, n53. Moody himself certainly believed he had undergone a sudden conversion at a particular moment. As he declared in one sermon: “When I was born again, in 1856, then I became a child of God.” Moody, quoted in W. H. Daniels, ed., Moody: His Words, Work and Workers (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1878),413. 118. Findlay, Moody, 67. 119. Gundry,Love Themln, 121,122,81. 120. Phillips Brooks, Eight Lectures on Preaching (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1879), 4. This is the British edition of the Yale Lectures. 121. PB, Eight Lectures, 20. 122. Boston Daily Advertiser; 20 March 1877,l. 123. Boston Daily Advertiser; 20 March 1877, 1. See also Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 149.

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Chapter Four

A Prince of the Pulpit: Phillips Brooks and Nineteenth-Century Preaching

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. -Emerson’

Something extraordinary was happening, At lunchtime on weekdays in the heart of the nation’s financial center, crowds of businessmen were filling an old church to hear one of America’s most renowned pulpiteers. Thomas Alexander Hyde described the scene at Trinity Church on Wall Street for readers of The Arenu in 1890: I reached old Trinity at ten minutes past eleven. The church was then more than half full. At half-past eleven there was not a vacant seat. Then occurred something which seldom ever happens in the Episcopal Church. The people entered the church in dense throngs, and soon every available space in the aisles, choir, gallery, and in the rear of the church was occupied so that it was impossible to get standing-room for the smallest child. Some persons more daring than the rest, in their eagerness to hear Brooks, did what many in the Episcopal church would regard as irreverent, climbed the stairs and took possession of the choir seats, and also stood a dense mass on the chancel, close to the most sacred of places, in some eyes regarded with as much reverence as the holy of holies in the Jewish Church, the space which surrounds the altar or communion table. The people who thus placed themselves were not ministers but laymen, men perhaps who had never been in an Episcopal Church before?

The lunchtime crowds were coming to hear a gifted preacher at the zenith of his powers. The throngs were a remarkable testament to Brooks’s drawing power as an orator. Indeed, Hyde labeled Brooks’s 107

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sermon series in Manhattan as a “great work . . . a work that sounds like what we read concerning the great orators of ancient ages, or the celebrated preachers of more modern times .” Hyde found it astonishing that an Episcopal preacher had managed to “gather together at Trinity Church, every day at noon, a vast audience of men, representing the business, wealth, and intelligence of the great metropolis of the American continent, and held them, as it were, spellbound.” What made this all the more noteworthy was that the crowds were not being drawn by publicity or theatrical antics. “Never, perhaps,” Hyde concluded, “has anything in the way of preaching occurred before to surpass what Brooks has accomplished. He has resorted to no sensational tricks of advertisement nor manner to draw the crowd, but simply presented the Gospel in his natural style. Nowhere can we begin to study Brooks better than in the midst of his grand successful work.”3 The following chapter is divided into two halves. The first seeks to understand Brooks’s preaching within the context of nineteenth-century American Protestant homiletics. It explores the social and ecclesiastical contexts that Brooks faced as a young preacher and the nature of his appeal, as well as how he conceived of his task as a preacher and in what significant ways he departed from the accepted norms for preaching among some Evangelicals. This examination clarifies how Brooks contributed to the transformation of the understanding of both the nature of the sermon and the role of the preacher within American Protestantism. The second half of the chapter scrutinizes Brooks’s social thought. This latter section explores the anomaly of a conservative Brahmin rector with a following that included social reformers of various stripes. Brooks’s understanding of human nature and his buoyant faith in progress account for both his appeal among progressives and the breach that would eventually open up between conservatives like Moody and liberal Protestants like Brooks.

THE EVOLUTION OF PROTESTANT HOMILETICS Just as the pulpit dominated the sanctuaries of most Protestant churches, so the role of preaching and the place of the preacher stood at the center of both American religious life and, arguably, of American culture in general at midcentury. Its position has prompted one commentator to conclude that “preaching was, quite simply, the most influential form of rhetoric in nineteenth-century Ameri~a.”~ This preeminence was rooted in several different (though related) historical and cultural factors. For one, Protestantism since its Reformation beginnings had emphasized preach-

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ing. It had sought in the sixteenth century to redress the imbalance within the medieval church between word and sacrament by restoring the ministry of the word. Systematic biblical preaching and doctrinal teaching were viewed as the best ways to reform the church and purify it of medieval corruptions. Notably, the Anglican Reformers wrote and released the first Book of Homilies (1547) even before they turned to the reformation of the liturgy in what became the Book ofCommon Prayer. Moreover, although liturgical traditions like Anglicanism and Lutheranism retained more of a balance of word and sacrament, many of the denominations that dominated American religious life harbored an antiliturgical bias that further accentuated the centrality of the pulpit. By the eighteenth century, in most Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Unitarian congregations, the sermon so dwarfed the other components of Sunday worship that the latter might be dismissed as mere “preliminaries .” Hence participation in some Protestant worship services became indistinguishable from attending a lecture? Even those eighteenth-century revivalists who rebelled against this dispassionate, didactic model of worship as a lecture nevertheless served to enhance the place of the preacher. The emergence and gradual acceptance of professional itinerant evangelists prior to the American Revolution bolstered the importance of preaching in the minds of most Americans, even though it was disquieting for local pastors. Preaching became all the more crucial and, in the wake of celebrity itinerants such as George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent, the basis of invidious comparisons by congregants. As Raymond Cunningham puts it: “evangelicalism, intensified by the revival system, tended [both] to exalt the preacher and to impose a severe test on him.”6 Beyond the confines of the sanctuary on Sunday morning, antebellum American culture was also enamored of oratory. This oratorical culture obviously reflected the broad impact of Evangelicalism, but other influences reinforced this trait. The fractious partisanship of the early republic evinced a pervasive fascination with political rhetoric, and this love of oratory grew as a mass participant party system emerged in the 1830s and 1840s. Mark Vasquez explains the relationship between preaching and popular politics: “While sermons were the model for rhetorical authority in eighteenth-century culture, by 1800 their cultural power was being persistently usurped by other ‘democratic’ discourses -political, legal, educational, and literary, to name but a few.”7 Politics constituted the great spectator sport of much of the nineteenth century. Thousands habitually gathered to hear stump speeches and stood for hours while candidates debated each other and exhorted the crowds. Just as many daily newspapers

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reprinted lengthy notes from Sunday sermons, a heavily partisan press reprinted full transcripts of speeches or campaign debates? As we shall see below, this interaction with Jacksonian political culture changed the character of American homiletics while it kept both the preacher and the sermon front and center. What were the chief characteristics, structure, and content of this preaching? At the close of the eighteenth century, most Anglo-American Congregational and Presbyterian preachers employed a staid and methodical approach to biblical exposition. The conventional construction consisted of three parts: text, doctrine, and application. After reading the text carefully, the preacher would attempt some minimal exposition and include other prefatory remarks that would summarize the main argument of the oration. The bulk of the sermon usually involved identifying and exploring the particular doctrine raised by the biblical passage. The final section on application focused on practical advice for the faithful in their daily walk. As the nineteenth century began, some argued about whether these sections should be kept as overt divisions and whether doctrinal points should always be neatly separated from applicatory portions. As Lawrence Buell observes: “This scheme was suited for sermons which balanced theological dogma with practical morality, but for a preacher to whom religion was mostly a matter of moral guidelines, such a method was inappropriate.” But Unitarians and other overt liberals were not the only ones affected by change. As antebellum Evangelicalism evolved under a host of influences, its ministers also moved away from this classical dogmatic model. The twin forces of democracy and Romanticism had exercised a substantial influence on American pulpits by midcentury. The egalitarian spirit of Jacksonian America and its concomitant individualism had moved American homiletics away from an abstract academic model. Commentators from several different Protestant traditions stressed the need for sermons to be accessible to the average communicant, for pastors to speak in his or her idiom. Accordingly, the scholastic, doctrinal discourses favored by the Puritans were increasingly avoided. The message needed to be understandable to the archetypal “man in the street” and its thrust had to be demonstrably practical rather that theoretical. Most of those who wrote on the subject of preaching during this era agreed that the intellectual expectations of most preachers needed to be leveled downward. While a pervasive egalitarianism contributed to this result, so did antebellum individualism, which highlighted the power and prerogative of the individual believer. Explains Vasquez, “Religious rhetoric thus became more democratically self-centered, since self-determination was a concept increasingly popular in the wake of national independen~e.”’~

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Romanticism also celebrated the autonomy, authority, and spiritual insight of the individual. The solitary individual could best discover religious truth for him or herself. The individual could experience the divine unmediated, through an exploration of the self, perhaps inspired by a personal, direct encounter with Nature. “In the woods ,” Emerson wrote in Nature, “we return to reason and faith. . . . Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”” This focus on individual intuition in fact approached “the near worship at times of originality and genius.”’* As noted in the preceding chapters, even those who did not become thoroughgoing Transcendentalists were profoundly influenced by this focus on the spiritual sovereignty of the individual seeker.13 These various factors conspired to prompt many American preachers to explore a more emotive and literary style. Several contemporary commentators remarked on how Boston clergy were cutting back on their pastoral care and beginning to invest more hours in sermon preparation during the early nineteenth century. The competition provided by the secular media might be viewed as undermining the place of the sermon, but it could also serve to make preachers into celebrities. By the 1830s, published collections of Protestant sermons (a rarity in previous decades) were increasingly cornmon.l4 One could follow the sermons of local preachers in Boston newspaper accounts, and it was not uncommon for churchgoers to visit congregations simply to hear famous preachers. For various reasons (among them their relative doctrinal freedom and their educated laity), Unitarians were among the first to move in the direction of more imaginative, literary sermons. Nevertheless, trinitarian denominations followed, and many of their leading preachers embraced this Romantic model by midcentury. This shift had less to do with the influence of the Unitarians than with the increased social status of congregants, changes in the theological training of the clergy, and the inroads of Romanticism and theological liberalism within American Prote~tantism.’~ Before the election of Lincoln, then, the ground had been prepared for the emergence of celebrity Protestant preachers in major American cities. As Buell summarizes the development: “The rhetorical achievement of such figures as William Ellery Channing, Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks was made possible by a softening of the dogmatic structure of evangelical Protestantism to the point that the quickening ofthe religious sentiment was widely held to be a better aim for the preacher than the inculcation of a fixed body of doctrine.”16 In short, before the youthful Brooks took the train to Virginia Seminary, the foundation for the type of ministry that would characterize his mature years had already been laid.

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TWO EVANGELICAL EXEMPLARS Though doubtless influenced by the celebration of feeling intrinsic to Pietism and by Romanticism in antebellum culture, some theologically conservative evangelical Episcopalians defended an older doctrinal sort of preaching that sought to cleave closer to the actual words of the sacred text. The Evangelical party within the Episcopal Church laid claim to several powerful preachers prior to the Civil War. Among the most popular and widely emulated were Charles P. McIlvaine (1799-1 873) and Stephen H. Tyng (1800-1885). Neither was immune to the influences noted above, but both were respected as leading authorities on the practice of preaching. McIlvaine was arguably the leader of the Evangelical party during the 1850s and 1860s when Brooks attended seminary and began his ministry in Philadelphia. He had been a classmate of Charles Hodge at Princeton, being converted there during the revival of 1815. During the first half of the 1820s, he was rector of Christ Church, Georgetown, and was part of the circle of Washington Evangelicals who founded Virginia Theological Seminary in those years. McIlvaine was elected bishop of the diocese of Ohio in 1832 where he soon gained a reputation as a dynamic organizer and preacher.I7 One of the era's most widely read tracts on preaching began as an address to the first convention of the diocese in 1834. Reprinted soon after and later expanded to a seventy-two-page booklet, The Preaching of Christ Crucified, McIlvaine's sermon became popular well beyond Episcopal circles among evangelical clergy and laity of various traditions." The refined and articulate McIlvaine presented a well-reasoned and emphatic argument for the primacy of preaching in the Christian ministry and for the centrality of the cross in the church's proclamation. He enumerated the many traps and distractions that often sidelined pastors and kept them from their primary call. His years in the ordained ministry had convinced McIlvaine that his chief clerical responsibility was didactic and prophetic; related pastoral duties should complement and not displace (as so often happened) a minister's role as preacher. Moreover, he argued with evident conviction that the heart of the message to be proclaimed was the atoning death of Christ, preaching Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 1:23). This core teaching should not be supplanted by other truths, regardless of how valuable they might be. To support his argument, McIlvaine emphasized the example of the New Testament church. The apostles' success in fulfilling Christ's Great Commission to make disciples of all nations was grounded in their faith in his word. But the centerpiece of that word was the good news of the Gospel, and the hub of that message was Jesus' death on the

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cross. This “was [the] one thing on which, more than anything else, they very particularly and emphatically d ~ e l t . ” The ’ ~ Bishop of Ohio explained that the apostles’ “sense of the supreme importance in their ministry of the death of Christ, was because they beheld therein the one only and the one all-sufficient sacrifice and propitiation, the vicuriuus atonement, for the sins of the whole McIlvaine’s wording here is significant for he was making not simply an argument for the centrality of the cross in the Christian message but was assuming a particular theology of the atonement that understood Christ’s death as substitutionary (i.e., Christ dying in the place of guilty sinners) and propitiatory (i.e., Christ’s death satisfying the justice of God). This theology of the cross had characterized the teaching of the sixteenth-century Reformers and that of Anglicanism’s Reformation formularies (note the language of Article 11 and of the Homily on Salvation) but had been eclipsed by the moralism of much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglican preaching The Great Awakening in the North American colonies and the Evangelical Revival in the British Isles during the eighteenth century witnessed a return to this classical formulation, and Evangelicals like McIlvaine stood squarely in this tradition. “It is all contained in one verse,” concluded McIlvaine. “‘Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God.” 1 Peter 3: 181And again, ‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law, being made a curse for us. [Galatians 3:13]”’22 Connected closely to these key aspects of substitution and propitiation was the Reformation teaching regarding the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the penitent believer. Luther’s fresh grasp of the Apostle Paul’s understanding of justification was arguably the central issue in the Reformation debate. Most Protestants argued using forensic terms that Christ’s righteousness was external to the believer and that it was imputed or applied by a gracious God through faith, rather than infused into the believer, as the Council of Trent eventually articulated the official Roman Catholic po~ition.2~ Neglected during much of the eighteenth century, the recognition of the importance of Christ’s imputed righteousness was a turning point in the conversions of both Wesleys. Yet while most Evangelicals focused on the exercise of faith, many left behind this classical Reformation teaching regarding irnp~tation.2~ McIlvaine probably garnered a clear appreciation for this doctrine and its larger significance while a student at Princeton, where Old School Presbyterians adhered more closely to Edwards’s classic formulation. In his sermon, he argued that it was essential that preachers clearly taught exactly how Christ’s death saved the believer. He exhorted his auditors to present Jesus “as standing literally in our stead under the condemnation of our sins; all our

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guilt laid upon Him; He the condemned One for us, that we might be accounted the righteousness in Him.7725 McIlvaine wanted to close potential avenues of escape for the clergy who listened to his discourse. He asserted that ministers failed when they only mentioned these themes in exegeting relevant passages. What many clergy left undone in this regard was actually more serious than their many sins of commission. The neglect of these themes was worse “than even the introduction of some positive error.” Instead, the cross had to be “the root and foundation out of which our whole ministry proceeds,” the bishop exclaimed. He spoke of the “awful condemnation” that would be the lot of those ministers who were “thus essentially defective at the very heart of the great work committed to us!” Without this distinctive emphasis, one’s preaching “ministry is all darkness, emptiness and impotence.”26 Stephen Tyng’s series of lectures on “The Office and Work of the Ministry” provides a further illustration of how evangelical Episcopalians conceived of the place and content of preaching at midcentury. Bishop Alonzo Potter of Pennsylvania had asked the illustrious Manhattan preacher to deliver several lectures in Philadelphia at St. Andrew’s church. Tyng delivered the first group in April 1863 and the second the following year?’ Brooks appears to have been in the city during both sets of lectures, and it is hard to imagine him not attending at least some of the sessions. He and his fellow clergy heard an earnest and detailed case for the primacy of the ministry of the word. “I started last year,” Tyng began, referring to his first series, “with the principle-the great and main principlethat the one office and work of the ministry was to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this one purpose alone are we sent into the The distractions are many but “everything beside [preaching] is an impertinent thing to our great business.”29 The content of this preaching was for Tyng the “one great message of truth.” “We are preachers,” he declared, “of the Saviour’s gospel; we are nothing without it, and our scheme of duty and circle of responsibility lie within that area, and travel unceasingly around that one appointed centre.”30More precisely, Tyng defined preaching “as the delivery of a divine message from God to man.” But this divine message was not a collection of attractive principles or a list of duties; rather, it pointed to specific works of God in history. “The message,” Tyng explained, “is a message of facts divinely accomplished, not of things which are to be done-not of things which we desire to have done,-not of things which we wish men to do.” Like McIlvaine before him ,Tyng understood the preeminent fact as Christ’s atoning death on the cross. Although he did not discuss soteriology in his lectures as fully as did the Bishop of Ohio, he developed

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the characteristic evangelical themes. “These facts,” stressed Tyng, “are all component parts of one great scheme of divine redemption, accomplished in the manifestation of God in the flesh, in the perfect atonement which His death accomplished, in the complete acceptance which His righteousness attains.”31Tyng stressed that these facts of redemption were not to be delivered in a dry lecture but “as solemn, authoritative proclamations.” He likened the preacher’s task to that of the person who cries ‘“Fire! Fire! FIRE!’ all the time, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear.”32Moreover, Tyng also highlighted the question of pastoral authority. The preacher should be clear as to who sent him. Christ’s authority, declared Tyng, is “the authority by which I am commissioned” and it is crucial for the preacher to keep this consideration front and ~enter.3~ Finally, Tyng asked to whom the preacher is sent with this urgent authoritative message. He drew a distinction between “a class unconverted” and “a class converted”- groups that for Tyng were readily discernible and who called for a distinctive, though not altogether different, approach. Both needed to hear “what Jesus has done and suffered.” Both needed to hear the preacher “proclaim the fullness of His divine deliverance” but the latter had “an inward life [in them] that is to be fed and nourished by a divine power.”34 Tyng’s approach then was methodical and analytical. Brastow describes Tyng’s “method of preaching” as having “the formal clearness of outline that was in harmony with the homiletic training of his day.”35Although he understood the necessity of a subjective, personal response to the gospel message, Tyng emphasized that the message consisted of a set of propositions that had an external, objective character. In analyzing the preaching of evangelical Anglicans in general during the nineteenth century, Brastow accurately characterizes the approach of both Tyng and McIlvaine: “The dogmatic principle, which, in its fundamental conception, is allegiance to external authority, modifies the experimental principle. The typical evangelical, therefore, while at heart a pietist, cherishing with an inner sense of sacredness the truths that have entered into his religious experience, is also in creed a dogmatist and presses home the truth with a tone of assurance that rests upon an external basis of a ~ t h o r i t y . ”In~ one ~ sense, Brooks’s homiletics, in theory and in practice, served to disconnect the experimental from the dogmatic by denigrating the latter and injecting a new vigor into the former. Brooks’s reaction to this sort of traditional evangelical preaching is instructive. When visiting London for the first time in 1865, he went to hear the great Reformed Baptist preacher Charles W. Spurgeon. Brooks wrote to his father about the experience: “He is not graceful, nor thoughtful, nor

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imaginative, and preached a great deal too long, but he is earnest, simple, direct, and held the hosts of plain-looking people wonderfully. I believe that with all his rudeness and narrowness and lack of higher powers that he is doing a good work here.” 37 While convinced that Spurgeon’s message was a salutary one, the letter contains nothing about the actual content of Spurgeon’s sermon, only patronizing comments about the social composition of his congregation and a concern about the artless form of Spurgeon’s untutored homiletics. As early as 1865, only a few years after graduating from Virginia Seminary, Brooks seems to have already jettisoned the conventional evangelical approach to preaching and had shifted his focus to cultivating a different sort of craft.

BROOKS ON PAPER Phillips Brooks received an invitation in early 1877 to contribute to the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale. The lectureship had been established in 1871 on the basis of a gift from Henry W. Sage. The donor belonged to Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. As one commentator puts it, “Beecher was Henry W. Sage’s beau ideal of the preacher and pulpit orator.”38By the time Brooks was invited, Beecher had already participated in the series on three separate occasions (the only minister to do so). The terms of the lectureship were broadly defined; they stipulated only that the candidate be “a minister of the Gospel of any evangelical denomination” but also, significantly, that he had “been markedly successful in the special work of the Christian ministry.”39 While there were doubtless Episcopalians in 1877 who eschewed the label “evangelical” for their denomination, Brooks’s background was rooted in evangelical soil and certainly his rectorship at Trinity Boston had been marked by numerical success by 1877.Allen describes the “unusual excitement for his parish and for himself when he was writing the lectures . . . because for the first time he was unveiling his own personal experience, as he had felt compelled to review it when he sought to explain the secret and power which made the pulpit effective.”40His lectures proved to be one of the most broadly influential studies of preaching ever penned by an American. Commenting on the character of American preaching in the opening decades of the twentieth century, Ozora Davis of Chicago Theological Seminary argued that Brooks’s 1877 contribution defined with new force the fact that preaching is “truth through personality”; that the preparation of the sermon is essentially the preparation of the

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preacher. During the last quarter-century this truth has been kept constantly to the front in lectures on preaching, in estimates of preaching by preachers, and in sermons where any such affirmation might be pertinent. The first aspect of preaching since 1900 that appears continuously and with growing clearness is the emphasis upon the personality of the preacher and the reality of his own spiritual life and experience as the guaranty [sic] of his message expressed in the sermon.‘“ Brooks used his lectures to press further the above noted changes of the antebellum era and to redefine substantially the meaning of preaching in modern American Protestantism. While retaining its traditional prominence, the ministry of the word became inextricably bound up in Brooks’s system with the personality of the preacher. Such an approach served to augment the evangelical cult of pulpit celebrity as it shifted away from the traditional emphasis on a body of defined propositional truth to be communicated. In this way, a Romanticized Christianity switched the primary focus from an external message (what McIlvaine called the “facts” of redemption) toward the subjective character of the messenger appealing to the religious sentiment of his auditors. Accordingly, the actual mechanics of sermon composition and structure were largely ignored. Brooks, for instance, included scarcely any practical, “nuts and bolts” advice on sermon writing or organization in the 281 pages of the published version of his Lectures. This fundamental change arose from Brooks’s definition of preaching articulated in the opening lecture: “preaching is the bringing of truth through personality.” Brooks believed that such an emphasis on the role of the individual personality in preaching was appropriate since the “truth” contained in the Christian faith “is preeminently personal.”42God did not write his message “on the sky” but used the patriarchs and prophets and, definitively, embodied his message in the very person of his only son, Jesus Chri~t.4~ Christ’s declaration “‘I am the Truth,’ must always ,” noted Brooks, “be best conveyed through, must indeed be almost incapable of being perfectly conveyed except through personality.”“ By contrast, Tyng had listed six different “agencies” or “agents by whom this message is to be carried out, defined, described, delineated.” Among these, he included the “commanding” (i.e., exercising church authority) and the “vocal” (i.e., preaching or speaking informally to one or many). The closest equivalent of personality here was Tyng ’s references to the “exemplary” and “living” agencies as “human example[s]” or personal expressions of the gospel message and these were merely two among ~ i x . 4Therefore, ~ what for his predecessors had simply been one among many factors, the personality of the preacher, Brooks now moved to center stage.

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In some respects, this shift reflected Brooks’s own situation when he became rector of Trinity Church in Boston. Bostonians expressed an intense personal interest in their preachers, on which both the secular and religious press fed. Allen insists that people never “tired of portraying him [i.e., Brooks] or of writing their impressions. Those who wrote were not more eager to rehearse than were the thousands, who had not heard or seen for themselves, eager to read what was written. . . . Thus they loved to describe his appearance as though in this case the symmetry of form and beauty of countenance were in some mysterious way the counterpart of the spirit within.”46Indeed, many of the descriptions of his pulpit style sought to discover the personal habit or characteristic behind his famea feature of his personality or behavior that explained it all. Quipped one reviewer, listeners pondered “the oft-repeated question, What is the secret of Phillips Brooks’s preaching? Where is the hiding of his power?’ Yet “there is nothing in his voice, bearing, or look,” noted another frustrated contemporary observer, “which can explain his almost unexampled popularity. For popular he is almost beyond pre~edent.”~’ Although the cultural groundwork had been laid in the preceding decades for such a ministry, Boston had never seen anything like the Phillips Brooks phenomenon, and his preaching both reflected this new reality and, in turn, shaped it. But what about the message itself? Brooks disdained the tidy distinctions between subject and object of McIlvaine or Tyng and chose to fuse preacher and sermon. Accordingly, Brooks was much less clear about the exact content or character of the message itself. Early on in his lectures, he framed the question in terms of purpose: “And what is preaching for? The answer comes without hesitation. It is for men’s salvation. But the idea of what salvation is has never been entirely uniform or certain.”48 Oddly, Brooks furnished no immediate, succinct answer to this fundamental question but left it dangling and turned then to invoke the historical record. What it means to be saved has changed over time: “If to be saved was to be saved from sin, preaching became spiritual. If to be saved was to be saved from punishment, preaching became forensic and economical. If salvation was the elevation of society, preaching became a lecture upon social science. The first thing for you to do is to see clearly what you are going to preach for, what you mean to try to save men from.”49 Only two sentences later, Brooks ironically bemoaned “the vagueness with which so many of our preachers preach” but his demurral at this juncture is striking. In effect, he obscured the question of the content of the gospel in a historicism that served to relativize the traditional answers advanced by Evangelicals (for example, the “forensic and economical”).50

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Later in his lectures, Brooks returned to the basic question of purpose, but here again his answer reflected little certainty about preaching’s “destination ,” at least not one distinguished by certain theological propositions. The purpose of the sermon, Brooks argued, “is the persuading and moving of men’s S O U ~ S . ”Again, ~~ Brooks begs the question of where they are to be moved. Although Brooks meandered considerably before he stated this point clearly in the Beecher Lectures, he did insist that the object of preaching was to hold forth or commend the person of Christ to one’s auditors. “The salvation of men’s souls from sin, the renewing and perfecting of their characters, is the great end of all,” he declared finally. “But,” he added, “that is done by Christ. To bring them, then, to Christ, that He may do it, to make Christ plain to them, that they may find Him, this is the preacher’s work.”52“Beware of the tendency,” he warned, “to preach about Christianity, and try [instead] to preach Christ.”53But this was not simply a question of exchanging an emphasis on the work of Christ (that Evangelicals, as noted above, were accustomed to highlight) for doctrines about the person of Christ. Rather (and here Brooks was a consistent Romantic), what the preacher offered was an encounter with Christ through the mixture of “truth” and “personality” in the sermon preached. The sermon “has in it two essential elements, truth and personality. Neither of those can it spare and still be preaching. The truest truth, the most authoritative statement of God’s will, communicated in any other way than through the personality of brother man to men is not preached truth.”54 Yet Brooks’s reluctance to define religious truth in external, propositional terms introduced a fuzziness or ambiguity to his writing about preaching that McIlvaine and Tyng had avoided. Brooks, for instance, relegated to the subsidiary level of academic opinion the sort of distinctively Reformed understanding of the atonement that his two forerunners defended as the very heart of their preaching. In discussing the authority and influence of the pastor among his parishioners, Brooks cautioned the seminarians he addressed not to foist all of their theological or philosophical views upon their auditors. Referring to the ideal preacher, Brooks wrote: Surely he does not declare to them [i.e., his congregation] his belief about the method of the atonement, with the same authority with which he bids them repent of sin, and warns them without holiness no man shall see the Lord. Such lines of difference every true preacher draws, and freely lets men see where it runs. If you attempt to claim authority for all your speculations you will end by losing it for your most sure and solemn declarations of God’s will?5

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The substitutionary construction of Christ’s death thus was relegated by Brooks to a “speculation.” It would be hard to find a more vivid contrast with the method of Mcllvaine and Tyng. The latter privileged a particular theology of the Atonement and, in fact, made it the very centerpiece of their message, as had most Evangelicals within the Reformed tradition. Additionally, Brooks’s redrawing of the doctrinal lines here appears to have been rooted in his strategic concern for the overall viability of the essentials of the Christian message in an age of skepticism. Brooks defined moral injunctions here as essential (i.e., repenting of sin and seeking holiness) while seemingly demoting the theology of the cross to a lesser status. In short, Brooks had moved the focal point of preaching that had distinguished his evangelical predecessors. Some of the rhetoric had been retained (“preaching Christ,” for example, though notably not now “preaching Christ crucified”) and the emphasis on feeling might distract the more traditional from the fact that something fundamental had changed. In addressing the more practical questions of sermon composition, Brooks criticized the habit of looking upon preaching as an art in itself and stressed instead the utilitarian function of the sermon. To turn a tool into a work of art, to elaborate the shape and chase the surface of the axe with which you are to hew your wood, is bad taste; and to give any impression in a sermon that it has forgotten its purpose and been shaped for anything else than what in the largest extent of those great words might be described as saving souls, makes it offensive to a truly good taste and dull to the average man, who feels an incongruity which he cannot define?6

Hence Brooks argued that “the ordinary classifications of sermons [i.e., expository, topical, practical, and hortatory] are of little con~equence.”~’ Most sermons had all of these elements and differed only in which element was “prep~nderate.”~~ Although he criticized all of these ideal sermon forms, Brooks especially denounced “preaching which is wholly exposition” as usually “dull and pointle~s.”~~ Despite the work of famous Anglican evangelical expositors such as Cambridge’s Charles Simeon (1759-1836), it is apparent from both Brooks’s theory and practice that he rarely followed an expository approach. “The history of a particular sermon,” observed Brooks in the Lectures, “begins with the selection of a topic. Ordinarily, except in purely expository preaching, that comes before the selection of a text.”60Brooks viewed the expository model as exceptional and usually searched for a particular biblical passage only after the topic or subject had been settled upon.6’ Brooks reminded his hearers that the practice of commenting on a selected biblical passage in the sermon had not been common in the first

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millennium of the Christian Church. “This fact,” said Brooks, “ought to be kept in mind whenever the custom of a text shows any tendency to become despotic or to restrain in any way the liberty of prophesying.”62He pointed to new historical and critical approaches to the scriptures as contributing to new attitudes to the Bible among clergy and laity alike. The internal divisions and variety in sacred scripture were being recognized and “there can be no doubt of the improvement it has brought.” Brooks argued that “it has made the single text of less importance. It has led men to desire an entrance into the heart and spirit of the Bible.” Brooks contended that the classical Protestant approach of “weighing text against text” had thankfully been cast aside in favor of “following the great lines of thought [in scripture], the apprehension of the spirit of great spiritual thinkers who ‘had the mind of Christ.”’63Such a tack brought preachers a greater freedom with their texts that the subjective flights of Romanticism demanded. By the end of his lectures, Brooks demonstrated that he was aware of criticisms of a preaching that was less closely tied to the text or to doctrinal considerations. His conservative instincts prompted Brooks to label as “dangerous” a religion that “disowning doctrine and deprecating law, . . . asserts that religion belongs to feeling, and that there is no truth but love.”64He recognized that this sort of “religion of gush” was merely “sentimentalism,” and this was not what he advocated. “Let them see clearly,” he cautioned, “that you value no feeling which is not the child of truth and the father of duty.”65 Yet such careful qualifications do not obscure the elevated position Brooks accorded feeling and sentiment in his preaching nor the humanism that seemed to eclipse the Augustinianism that had usually characterized evangelical preaching since the Great Awakening. Instead of celebrating God’s graciousness and humanity’s abject inability, Brooks’s homiletical theory was decidedly man-centered. In his final lecture, Brooks identified “the value of the human soul, felt by the preacher” as “a power which lies at the centre of all success in preaching.”66He explained that he meant by this expression “a high estimate of the capacity of the spiritual nature, a keen and constant appreciation of the attainments to which it may be brought.” It is perhaps here that Brooks shows most clearly his debt to Emerson and the Romantic tradition in general. “Here is where the preacher and the poet touch,” observed Brooks. “Every true preacher must be a poet, at least in so far as to see behind all the imperfections of men a certain ideal manhood from which they have never separated, which underlies the life and lends its value to the blurred and broken character of everyone.”67 Similarly, Emerson affirmed the “native nobleness”

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of human beings who must “descend to meet” one another and transact “their habitual and mean service to the world.”68Emerson spoke of the “ineffable . . . union of man and God in every act of the By contrast, it is hard to conceive of Brooks’s Anglican forbears such as Augustus Toplady or William Cowper or George Whitefield identifying this human spiritual genius as the center of all success in preaching. John Newton saw his natural condition rather differently: “Bowed down beneath a load of sin, by Satan sorely pressed, by war without and fears within, I come to Thee for rest.”70

BROOKS IN PRACTICE Brooks’s sermons typically began as a single thought or concept jotted down in one of the notebooks he kept with him at all times. He was almost always thinking about potential topics; preaching ideas were continuously percolating in his thoughts as he traveled, read, or went about pastoral duties?’ Brooks’s habit was to choose a subject that he believed warranted development and then he selected an appropriate biblical text, usually a single verse; occasionally the verse would come first. Later in life, Brooks admitted that as a young pastor he had sometimes competed with his fellow clergy to see who could select the most obscure and arcane verse as the basis of a useful sermon.’* During most of his years at Trinity, Copley Square, Brooks delivered one sermon a week at the main service on Sunday morning; the sermon he usually gave in the afternoon was executed more informally and delivered almost extemporaneously, though with n0tes.7~His preparation for this main sermon actually began on Monday, which he otherwise considered his day off. By the end of the day, he usually had selected his subject. On Monday and Tuesday mornings, Brooks made rough notes about his theme, exploring different aspects of it and settling on his particular approach. On Wednesday, he wrote out a detailed outline in small script filling four pages of about 5” X 7” each. This was a very complete and meticulous outline, which once completed, he would then return to and specify in the margins how many pages he would devote to each section. It was not until Thursday or Friday that he actually began to write out in full the entire sermon, which commonly came to about five thousand words or thirty pages in total. He wrote most of his sermons on paper roughly 6” X 8” stitched together in a kind of homemade notebook that was easy to handle in the p ~ l p i t ?“When ~ Brooks started to write,” analysts have noted, “his pen moved along with rarely a break, so completely had he worked out the details in his outline.”75Allen

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observed that Brooks approached each paragraph as “a work of art, knowing just the limits it should have.”76 Brooks usually read his carefully prepared manuscripts word for word, although in his later years it was not unusual for him to speak extemporaneously at a special event or in a sermon outside of the major Sunday morning service. Perhaps the feature of Brooks’s delivery most remarked upon was its alacrity. Several observers timed him speaking at over two hundred words per minute. Occasionally, this style drew negative comments, as in this early account of the young Brooks from a New York reporter: impassive, almost statuesque in imperturbable tranquility, rattling off in a monotone, so swiftly as to tease and half baffle the most watchful ear, swallow flights of thought, feeling, poetry, philosophy, piety, biblical learning, sociological wisdom, trenchant criticism-in no syllogistic order or sequence, but plainly the legitimate fruition of his theme, held together by a blood-tie of spiritual kinship, striding, lilting along through the spaces and reaches of the inner world, until the great throngs in painful, half-breathed, eager silence seemed beside themselves with a preternatural ecstasy?’

More often, the reaction was closer to the response of the congregation described above; his auditors were enthralled by the almost relentless evocative prose. “It was,” remarked Allen who heard him often, “like a strain of exquisite music which could not be resi~ted.”’~ Many noted his lack of studied rhetorical manner or even physical grace in the pulpit but all commended his evident intense concentration. He looked up occasionally and, with his piercing dark eyes, met the enrapt attention of many worshipers throughout the sanctuary. Occasionally, he stumbled over a word or two and temporarily slowed his almost frenetic pace to find his place in his manuscript. What struck all was his powerful physical presence, his earnestness and the cumulative emotional and intellectual effect of his waterfall of w0rds.7~ Examining two typical examples from his widely reprinted sermons can provide insight into the method, delivery, and content of Brooks’s preaching (and the extent to which he followed his own advice). The first, “The Candle of the Lord,” appeared in Brooks’s second volume of sermons and was therefore preached sometime before 188 1 . It was ostensibly an exposition of Proverbs 20:27: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” Yet it is clear from the outset that Brooks did not intend to offer a traditional commentary on this single verse. The sermon shows Brooks’s characteristic love for metaphor and how he used it, along with other literary forms, to make a favorite theological point. The sermon

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provides no context for the biblical text and most of it involves what traditional exegetes labeled “application.” Like most of Brooks’s sermons, there is little logical development in the conventional sense, as the preacher pursues a particular metaphor or explores an evocative theme. F. R. Webber notes that Brooks “leaned heavily upon analogy and his sermons often show little progressive logical development With such an approach, Brooks attained what one analyst termed “an emotional rather than a logical unity.”81Clearly this was preaching designed, above all, to “quicken the religious sentiment.” Brooks began with a simple restatement of the central metaphor, noting how fire ignites the otherwise dry and lifeless wick of a candle. For the first page or so, he remained in the physical realm but soon slid into explaining the religious meaning of the metaphor (at least implicitly) by noting how individuals can illumine their surroundings by their behavior and character. “And so a man who lives,” exclaims Brooks, “like an inspiration in the city for honesty and purity and charity may be only the candle in whose obedient life burns still the fire of another strong, true man who was his father.”82Eventually, Brooks turned to explain explicitly what these particular symbols represented: “God is the fire of this world, its vital principle, a warm pervading presence everywhere.”83 But having established the minimal meaning of the verse, Brooks proceeded to use it as a springboard to argue for the divine nature of man and his great spiritual potential, returning occasionally to make this general point with the candle metaphor. It is clear from Brooks’s use of the metaphor that he understood the initiative for this spiritual ignition as coming first from God but, at the same time, it was the divine nature in man that always facilitated the flame: “because man is of a nature which corresponds to the nature of God, and just so far as man is obedient to God, the life of God, which is spread throughout the universe, gathers itself into ~tterance.”~~ Brooks extended the metaphor well beyond its original biblical context and meaning. He described individuals who were well schooled and intelligent and who should have exercised a salutary influence but did not. These persons simply did not possess God’s flame; they were unlit candles. Others gave off their own distinctive flame in addition to God’s unique fire. They made their own distinctive religious views as important or even more important than the unalloyed divine flame. “This,” commented Brooks, “is the secret of all pious bigotry, of all holy prejudi~e.”*~ It was acceptable to have such distinctive beliefs but one needed never to make these distinctives paramount. As Brooks put it: “Every Candle of the Lord must utter its peculiar light; . . . [but it should take care] that it always cares more about the essential light than about the peculiar way in which it utters it.”86

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Brooks concluded his sermon by portraying Christ as the ideal candle of the Lord. Pointing to Jesus, Brooks declared: “There is the true spiritual man who is the candle of the Lord, the light that lighteth every man.’’87 Brooks thus holds up Christ primarily as an example of perfect obedience, rather than the unique atoning sacrifice. The importance of personal faith in Christ as the sinner’s substitute is largely absent from the sermon. Indeed, Brooks seems to argue at the close of the sermon that one functions as the Lord’s candle through outward works. “‘You are part of God!”’ Brooks remarks at one point, “And the power by which his [i.e., a person’s] spirit shall become a candle is obedience.”88The sermon is representative of Brooks’s preaching; it employs scripture and imaginative literary reflection to evoke a certain religious response. When Brooks later preached this sermon in Westminster Abbey to a congregation that included Dean Stanley, the latter was reportedly moved to tears, commenting to his sister-in-law that “he could not remember ever having been so deeply moved by any other The sermon does not exposit the biblical passage in any traditional way but is certainly inspirational in character. It breaks with the emphasis on human depravity typical of most evangelical preaching of the era, but does not attack any specific orthodox doctrines directly or explicitly. Brooks’s appeal, therefore, to Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic, citizens of a transitional age that was both traditional and progressive, is not difficult to appreciate. Another popular sermon, entitled “The Law of Growth,” Brooks first preached on March 11, 1877, it was later published posthumously in the ninth volume of sermons. Here Brooks’s text was Luke 8:18: “Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” Again, Brooks extracted a general principle from the biblical passage and used most of his sermon to explore the meaning of this principle and apply it creatively to contemporary cases familiar to his congregation. He began by treating the passage’s immediate context cursorily, noting that three of the four Gospels contain this teaching and that it must therefore be important. Brooks then summarized the universal tenet he thought was implied in the single verse. So often, Brooks observed, those who have an abundance are given even more and those who have little may have that taken away from them. This principle he termed the “law of growth.” Christ’s instruction here is disquieting, Brooks admitted, because Jesus appears to be teaching a variant of what the latter described as “the survival of the fittest.”g0 Brooks often followed a conversational style in his preaching, answering the rhetorical questions he posed to his congregation. On this

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occasion, he moved very quickly to application by asking: Is “this centralization of blessing” really true? He answered in the affirmative, noting briefly how it applied to the realms of business, learning, wealth, and friendship, among others. Such is the way of the world, but Brooks injected another question: “What shall we say about this law?”91This may be the way the world works, but is it good? Brooks argued that material differences or inequality make life interesting. The world would be “very tame and monotonous” without them. The secret to happiness was to accept one’s lot and not to resent what others have been given. One third of the way through his sermon, Brooks had not yet arrived at his main point. He introduced his central theme with another rhetorical question: What is the result “when we apply our law to moral life”?92 Although it can be distressing to reflect upon, Brooks contended that this law of growth also seems to apply to the moral realm. Here Brooks used the examples of a virtuous individual and, by contrast, a person who tended to make immoral decisions. The former grows to become more virtuous, while the latter very often starts on a downward spiral, eventually becoming a confirmed reprobate. Brooks began the final and longest section of his sermon by asking how this law that is both scriptural and natural will “affect our living.”93 Brooks argued that it would have two major effects: one, “it will emphasize individuality,” and two, “it will keep ever vivid the difference between right and wrong.”94 Under the first heading, Brooks noted that God’s creation is filled with an endless variety of individuals, but he observed that most follow their own personal, selfish goals or passions. When one chooses a higher duty beyond oneself, then, argued Brooks, one’s life will be transformed. Choosing duty enables people to tap into this law of growth, and the operation of this law will result in a growth of morality. Under the second heading, Brooks stressed that the law of growth would serve to highlight the divergence between good and evil. But rather than explain this latter point, Brooks shifted suddenly to explore the possibilities for good that come from even a little faith. He urged his listeners not to despair over the small size of their faith but to seek a higher quality of faith. One should ask, said Brooks, “Not how much do I believe? But, how do I believe?”95Here he used the metaphor of a small handful of corn seed to illustrate the potential for great things to form even from a weak or modest faith because of this “law of growth.” As in many sermons, Brooks ended with an exhortation to follow Christ. Jesus was a model of patience with small things. Christ is always patient with us, just as he was with his disciples, noted Brooks. Small faith in Christ, he concluded, will grow if it is fed properly.

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One of the striking features of Brooks’s treatment of this passage is its almost exclusive focus on moral behavior and its relative neglect of the cross and other characteristically evangelical themes. Despite the passage’s focus on the preaching of the Gospel of the kingdom and its right reception, Brooks wandered a considerable distance with the rather general principle that he argued was the “law” embedded in the text. Following the parables of the sower (Luke 8:4-8) and of the lamp (Luke 8:1618)’ Christ stresses that the disciples should be careful about how they receive this teaching. One modern exegete summarizes the thrust of the passage as: “The parables must be heard with care and attention . . .if the disciples have understood the teaching in such a way that they spread it further, [then] they have truly received it.”96By the sermon’s close, there seemed to be only a tenuous link to the original biblical thrust regarding the right hearing of the word. Clearly straight textual exposition was not what Brooks performed in his prea~hing.9~ Perhaps Allen’s description of Brooks’s overall method is the most insightful: “What he was doing in every sermon was to reproduce the personal process through which he himself had passed from the moment when he grasped a truth till he had traced out in his own experience its relation to life and to all other truth. . . . This process kept him natural, sincere, and unaffected, preserving his personality in all that he said, and free from the dangers of conventionalism or artifi~iality.”~~ Ozora Davis’s celebratory assessment of American Protestant preaching in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century praised “the movement away from the artificial or the dogmatic which marked the sermon of half a century ago.” Davis quoted T. T. Munger’s dreary description of nineteenth-century preaching: Everything was viewed through four or five dominant doctrines that prescribed the thought, whatever might be the subject. The Fall gave the keynote, and a constant warning rang in the ears of preacher and people; fear of unsoundness and the system determined the conclusion. The themes were great, but the assumptions and method determined in advance what was to be ~ a i d . 9 ~

Writing in 1906, Yale’s Lewis Brastow agreed: “Preaching that anchors to church dogma, or to propositional theology, almost as of necessity involves itself in monotony.”lm Having earlier highlighted the decisive role of Brooks’s Yale lectures, Davis concluded: The emancipation of the American pulpit from this bondage [to “dominant doctrines,” etc.] was well under way by the beginning of the century; but it

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was far from completed. It is safe to say that the most influential preachers today are those who have broken from the dogmatic fetters and are taking “the direct look” at life. The actual experience of living men and women in their experiment with the principles of Jesus as a way of living furnishes the most and the best of the material that is found in the sermons of today.lol

Through his Yale Lectures, his preaching ministry at Trinity, Copley Square, and his widely read published sermons, Brooks played an important part in this freeing of the American pulpit. The extent of his break with evangelical homiletics was partly obscured by his retention of traditional terminology and his skillful use of personal and sentimental rhetoric long favored by Evangelicals. Given his wide appeal to Americans across the theological spectrum, Brooks was uniquely suited to redefine the nature of the Protestant sermon in America. At the same time, this emergent model of preaching built upon the celebrity culture of Evangelicalism, and of Gilded Age America at large. Both liberals and conservatives had their celebrity preachers; the former making Henry Ward Beecher an extraordinary star, the latter idolizing Dwight Moody or Charles Spurgeon. The media exposure offered by urban America during the late nineteenth century boosted and sustained the celebrity status of these famous preachers. Yet this liberation of the pulpit came at a cost. The more tenuous the connection between biblical text and sermon, the more Brooks and his fellows subtly weakened claims to a unique, divine authority for their preaching. Old-fashioned exposition may have been dull and unimaginative in the hands of some, but if it adhered closely to the biblical text, it could presumably lay claim to a distinctive authority far greater than that of the artless preacher; ideally, it transcended his personality. Conversely, the more the sermon became detached from the biblical text, the more its authority was inextricably bound up with that of the preacher. Brooks appropriately called attention to the link between the messenger and the message preached-the need for an authentic spiritual life on the part of the preacher for the message to be credible. In his relations with Evangelicals, Brooks had often witnessed a pretense that compromised the evangelistic message. But with the general acceptance of (or, indeed, popular demand for) more artful, literary preaching, Brooks’s theory and practice both contributed to this relocation of authority from sacred scripture to Romantic seer. Reproducing a “personal process” (to quote Allen) may have had some affinity with revivalism and the latter’s emphasis on emotional experience, but it was not now centered on either biblical exposition or doctrinal explanation. The result, in the hands of someone outwardly traditional like Brooks, evoked many of the same religious

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sentiments as had more conventional evangelical preaching of an earlier era (and it was probably more entertaining), but the fount of its power appeared to be the imaginative skill and insight of the preacher rather than the unique apostolic witness of holy writ. This widening distance from what was in fact a strange, foreign ancient text also facilitated a greater coziness with the surrounding culture. The more Brooks used a biblical verse as merely a jumping-off point for theological reflection, as the sermon became less of a commentary on a particular passage of scripture, the less this sort of preaching was genuinely prophetic. Brooks’s sort of Romantic and individualistic preaching may have indirectly made it easier for American clergy to uncritically accept the social order that surrounded them. They were freer to assume that material progress reflected divine blessing and to confound the American cultural and economic order with the Kingdom of God. All of this was part of a larger movement from a system of religious belief that was grounded in external authority to a system that sought the special insights proffered by imagination and invention. In a lecture, Brooks himself once described the experience. Although written in the third person, it is hard not to interpret his remarks as in some way autobiographical: A man comes and stands before a multitude of his fellow men and tells them a story. . . .As he speaks, his fellow men who listen begin to change before him. They flush and glow; . . . they tremble in their seats; they almost leap to their feet; tears start in their eyes. It is a most attractive spectacle. . . . One who stands by and gazes, though he may not hear a word, is caught with the thrilling, beating atmosphere, and finds himself trembling with mysterious desires. The voice stops, but the spell is not broken. The people rise and go away exalted.lo2

THE COMFORTABLE PULPITlo3 Given his record of speaking out during his years in Philadelphia, Brooks’s Boston parishioners may have initially found their rector’s silence on public issues curious.’o4For more than twenty years as rector of Boston’s most fashionable church, Brooks rarely took time to criticize from its pulpit what he had earlier termed “public sins.” This significant silence has led some scholars to be sharply critical of Brooks’s social views and even to lump him together with Henry Ward Beecher in this regard. Henry May, although not entirely negative about Brooks, contends that “nothing in his social teaching disagreed essentially with” that of

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Beecher.Io5His conclusion may be in part the product of focusing solely on oratory and neglecting Brooks’s activities outside of the pulpit or the speaker’s rostrum. A deeper look reveals a more complex picture of Brooks’s position on social and political matters. Though by no means a forerunner of the Social Gospel movement, neither was Brooks a simple reactionary. Indeed, he appears to have exercised a significant influence on several important late-nineteenth-century reformers. As in his theology, in his approach to social issues both traditional and innovative elements were at work. Unlike in his theology, however, Brooks’s conservative temperament ultimately prevailed here. An exploration of the struggle between these two impulses can enrich the conventional portrait of Brooks. For one, this tension helps explain the breadth of Brooks’s appeal. Just as a wide spectrum of American Protestants were attracted to Brooks, from evangelist Dwight L. Moody to Unitarian James Freeman Clarke, so both conservative businessmen and Social Gospellers found Brooks inspiring. The churchmen Brooks admired most often entertained progressive social views. Brooks’s fondness for English Broad Churchman and Christian socialist F. D. Maurice may have served to complicate and soften his own understanding of how economic forces operated. Maurice’s emphasis on a shared human brotherhood had prompted the English clergyman to join with Charles Kingsley and others in 1848 to found the Christian Socialist movement. Maurice envisaged the movement as a bridge between concerned Christians and socialists, a link badly needed after the failure of Chartism.Io6 Similarly, Brooks was attracted to the inspiring preaching of Broad Churchman F. W. Robertson (1816-1853), whose posthumously published sermons won Robertson a national following.Although known as an able biblical expositor, Robertson was also a sharp critic of social inequality. “Woe to us in the great day of God,” Robertson lamented regarding his fellow Anglican clergy, “if we have been the sycophants of the rich instead of the redressers of the poor man’s wrongs.” Robertson argued that the church must never function as simply a sanctifier of the social status Just as he eschewed dogmatic theological systems, Brooks seemed less attracted to the laissez-faire dogmas of social Darwinism. The influence of Maurice and of F. w. Robertson may have helped keep Brooks from embracing Spencerianism as Beecher had done.Io8 Brooks enjoyed his greatest popularity when the early roots of the Social Gospel movement were beginning to sprout. The Social Gospel emerged among American Protestants during the late nineteenth century. It represented in part an attempt to apply Christian teaching to the serious

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social and economic problems associated with industrialism. Around 1900, the label was applied most frequently to Protestant reformers committed to modest social change and who tended to be theological libera l ~ .At ’ ~least ~ three important social progressives acknowledged an intellectual debt to Brooks. Like Brooks, W. D. P. Bliss (1856-1926), an Episcopal Social Gospel pioneer, was influenced by Maurice and Kingsley, although Bliss was shaped more by their social thought than by their idealist theology (as Brooks had been). Bliss became friendly with Brooks when serving as rector of Grace Church in Boston. After organizing the Society of Christian Socialists in 1889, Bliss founded the Church of the Carpenter to embody a sort of New Testament or apostolic socialism and speak to the problems of working men and inner-city residents. Bliss was probably more fond of Brooks than vice versa, and wishful thinking colored his portrait of Brooks (Bliss even argued that Brooks was at heart a socialist). Nonetheless, Brooks did speak favorably of the Church of the Carpenter, made donations to the congregation, and visited it. Bliss’s socialism was decidedly churchly in ethos and this, along with Bliss’s liberal evangelical style, may have attracted Brooks.IIo Two other advocates of social Christianity during the Gilded Age who idolized Brooks were Frank Parsons (1854-1908) and Vida Scudder (1861-1958). Parsons was a lawyer, Boston University instructor, author, and reformer. Although his philosophy was built in part on the materialism and evolutionary perspective of Herbert Spencer, Parsons became a sharp critic of Spencerian political economy. Like many Gilded Age reformers, Parsons proposed a kind of cooperative commonwealth to replace the country’s unbridled capitalism. Calling his model “Mutualism,” Parsons put forward a planned economic order modeled on the mutual help that was the basis of good family relations.”’ Parsons credited Brooks with having convinced him that Christianity was “a life not a creed.”’I2A noncreedal sort of church that mostly promoted moral behavior was appealing to Parsons. It was Brooks’s “splendid genius [that] inspired” him, Parsons wrote in one of his books.’13Again, it is unclear to what extent Brooks returned this admiration or subscribed to Parsons’s ideas.I I4 Vida Scudder, meanwhile, had been born into an established Back Bay family and, along with her mother, had become Episcopalian under Brooks’s influence.As it had done for Brooks, reading Maurice had a significant effect on Scudder, but her social conscience did not move beyond a fairly circumscribed Christian philanthropy until she studied at Oxford, where she encountered John Ruskin in the 1880s. Later, as a professor at Wellesley, Scudder explored the social location and function of literature

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and, under the influence of the Fabians, embraced socialism. She was also involved in establishing settlement houses, especially Denison House in Boston, where she often lived during college breaks. Throughout her philosophical and ideological journey, she remained an active and committed Episc~palian.’~~ She explained that Brooks’s brand of liberal Protestantism had preserved her from “the sterility of skepticism.” While her young friends were agonizing over their personal beliefs, Scudder commented: “The gracious teaching of Phillips Brooks, and the thought of F. D. Maurice, so dear to my mother, had saved me. The stern terrors of Calvinism, and the sentimental revivalist ardors into which it rose-or sank-at times, both passed me by.”’16 Some progressives, then, were attracted to Brooks’s moralism, his tendency to denigrate dogma and emphasize altruistic behavior as the heart of the Christian message. Notably, none of the leaders of the Social Gospel movement produced a systematic theology; nearly all stressed praxis over abstract doctrine. Brooks’s habit of distilling the Gospel often into a kind of moralism sustained and buttressed their approach. As Brooks wrote to Endicott Peabody in 1882 (referring to theology narrowly construed and good works that help others): “One grows more & more impatient of any separation of these two things.”’]’ But Brooks’s social concerns were not only expressed indirectly through those he influenced. Brooks did participate in several reform causes, though he rarely championed them explicitly from the pulpit. In the late 1880s, he agreed to have his name appear as a vice president of the Woman Suffrage Festival and Bazaar in Boston. Suffrage opponent Francis Parkman attacked Brooks in a sharply worded letter for his support of the vote for women in municipal elections. Parkman said he had viewed Brooks’s signature on a prosuffrage petition “with much regret” and pointed out to him “the grave nature of the issues Yet Brooks was hardly the only member of Boston’s elite to endorse women voting. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Josiah Quincy, and Charles H. Taylor (editor of the Boston Globe) also supported female suffrage.l19Brooks was concerned both for the poor in Boston and for the baleful consequences of social inequality; he was particularly interested in those poor who were not being ministered to by Boston’s churches. Shortly after being elected bishop in 1891,he issued a circular letter inviting Episcopal laymen to a meeting at St. Paul’s on Tremont Street. There, he called upon Episcopalians to meet the needs of Bostonians who fell between the cracks of formal parochial services. The result of the 11 February 1892 meeting was the creation of a three-member committee to coordinate this lay mission to the city’s poor.’20Perhaps Brooks would have attempted more in this field had he lived longer.

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Some historians consider Brooks’s support of social reform unimpressive because they view the projects he promoted as palliatives or even prudish and Brooks signed the original call for the meeting that created the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (what became the famous Watch and Ward Society) and served as one of several vice presidents from its founding in 1878 to 1892. Brooks’s one-time assistant at Trinity Church, Frederick Baylies Allen, actually founded the society and remained one of its key leaders for many years.’22At first, the Society’s main target was “vile pictures and books” and other forms of obscene literature, but its concerns soon widened to include gambling, prostitution, and the sale and use of narcotics.123Although other Christians participated in the work of the society, liberal Protestants dominated its leadership from the start. By the turn of the century, some of the society’s leaders (though not a majority) had connections with the Social Gospel movement. Evidently, concerns for moral reform dovetailed with the movement’s more conventional interest in political and corporate corruption. The society’s goals thus transcended a limited Victorian prudery and addressed “the commercialization of vice on an institutional level This sort of commercial vice was becoming a prevalent feature of urban life in the 1880s and, because it preyed especially on lower-class women, it was not only the concern of a privatized evangelical moralism. As in Philadelphia, however, when he preached about racial injustice, there was definitely a tension evident in Brooks’s attitude toward the poor. On the one hand, he was aware of their plight and expressed compassion for them. Yet, at the same time, he seemed defensive about his own position and unclear about what could be done beyond simple moral exhortation aimed at motivating powerful individuals to help the poor. Working-class Bostonians were not invisible to him, but what Brooks’s observations elicited sometimes were attempts to justify his own affluence. An acquaintance remembered chatting with him in his rectory and Brooks remarking: I suppose that there are men passing this house every day, wearing overalls and carrying their dinner in tin pails, who, if they happen to know where I live, look up at this house and say with a sneer, “There is that grand house, and a clergyman lives there,-a teacher of the religion of Jesus Christ. A fine sort of Christian teacher he must be to live in a grand house like that.” But I believe that I have a right to live here, with this beauty and luxury about me. I enjoy it all, and I do my work as a Christian minister better for having these surroundings. A man is no better Christian for wearing overalls than for working in a beautifully furnished study. He can be one in either situation, if only he have the spirit of Christ.’25

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He noticed the men with pails; they pricked his conscience but the response did not rise above a certain defensiveness. What finally kept Brooks from moving beyond his personal concern for the poor was his individualism.’26Brooks held that many of the social aggregates in which modern men gathered were “accidental and temporary combinations.” According to Brooks, “the final unit is the man,” which was why socialism and “all the weak idolatry of organic methods fails.”’27 Julius H. Ward, a contemporary of Brooks, best explained his individualism and how it distinguished Brooks from other Broad Churchmen: Frederick Maurice was both an individualist and an institutionalist. Bishop Brooks has intense sympathy with him in his strong appeal to the human consciousness and in his conception of the Person of Christ, but he falls below Maurice in his view of society as an organism and of institutions as the chief agencies by which society is controlled. Nothing which he has written has the constructive purpose which marks Maurice’s “Kingdom of Christ.” He is comprehensive and universal in his view of things. He is quick to see all sides of a question. Humanity as a whole, life as a whole, human activity as a whole, the application of truth to life as a whole, the life of God in the soul of man as a whole,-these expressions represent the flow of his thought and feeling and control his action, but when he looks out upon society, and takes a constructive view of its institutions and regards it as an organism, his expression in word and deed is that of a positive individualist, a confirmed optimist, a man who believes that the movement of ethical thought will lift us above the evils which men undertake to reform, and who trusts more to the renewal of the individual through changes in personal character than to the reform of the world by associated energies. What may be his development as a bishop in laying hold of the constructive agencies, in which people serve God by working together, cannot be anticipated [Ward was writing in 18921, but it would seem as if this limitation were temperamental and constitutional.I2*

Moreover, Brooks believed that much of the conflict between capital and labor occurring in his day would be alleviated by the moral and intellectual self-improvement of the working classes. Class adjustment, Brooks opined in one public address, would be facilitated “if the workingmen of our country can live worthier and nobler lives.” Or, as he exhorted a working class audience at Faneuil Hall, “Try to live nobler, higher lives; do not yield to temptations, but struggle against them, and remember that the strength of Almighty God is behind you.” Such rhetoric sounds patronizing, but Brooks used very similar language when he was speaking to Boston’s business elite. In an address entitled the “Duty of the Christian Business Man,” Brooks, without explaining what sort of sin he had in

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mind, advised: “Stop doing your sin . . . [Do] whatever you can do to make the world more bright and good.” The Christian entrepreneur, Brooks declared, has “an awful and a beautiful responsibility: to prove, if you can prove it, that these things [i.e., various secular vocations] are capable of being made divine More cultivated workingmen “will do something,” Brooks explained, “to make more true the relations between the two great classes, the rich and the poor, though, thank God, there is no fixed barrier between them, because the poor man of to-day is the rich man of tomorrow.”’30For Brooks, Horatio Alger eclipsed any need for state intervention to solve the labor question. Yet exhortation was not the only way to foster reform. Brooks also favored establishing institutions to promote individual moral uplift. But such institutions were not designed to alter fundamentally the relations between the classes or seek the overall transformation of the class system. Further, Brooks’s optimism about the future, his deep faith in social progress, also helped dull his commitment to social change. Brooks believed that the future rested upon the good character of individuals involved in these various, rather modest reform causes. “It is because we believe,” declared Brooks at the dedication of the Wells Memorial Working-Men’s Club and Institute, “that the men who have undertaken this work are such consecrated, manly, noble, lofty-minded, and religious men that we have vast hopes for a great future before us t~-day.”’~’ The Institute was the brainchild of one of Trinity’s vestrymen and a close friend of Brooks, Robert Treat Paine. Paine was one of Boston’s leading philanthropists and had been involved in promoting the construction of affordable housing for working-class Bostonians. The building provided a venue for vocational courses and, eventually,even space for union meetings.I3* Again, Brooks did not react to the violence of the Homestead Strike of 1892 by sharply criticizing unions or by celebrating laissez-faire as did some conservatives. Yet Brooks’s faith in progress led him to insist that the struggle was part of a larger conflict that was gradually resolving itself: “How terrible it is,” he wrote to a wealthy parishioner: all of this Homestead business! And yet how hopeful, for it [the strikes] would have been impossible a hundred years ago, when men did not question the ownership of human creatures in a hundred forms. It is the old battle of man for his true place which has always been going on. Darwin and his folks find it even before man was at all, and nobody has yet begun to know where the end will be. But one of the most puzzling and interesting and distressing of the episodes of the great battle has been given to our age to fight, and, with countless blunders and cruelties such as war always brings, I think that we are fighting it pretty well.’33

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His initial reaction was to recoil from the violence and suffering (“How terrible . . .”), but then Brooks quickly expressed a much more sanguine perspective that was rooted in his Civil War experience. In comparison to the cruelty of slavery, the new labor question seemed trivial and, in any event, appeared to Brooks to be well on its way to its own resolution. His faith in human goodness and in material and moral progress led him to gloss over the need for structural economic change. A couple of weeks later, he wrote similarly to his brother William in revealing terms about the thorny “problem of how the great men are to live with the little men and what is the function of government as regards them both. Only time and events and the slow progress of mankind will settle that.”134Brooks’s patronizing terminology about “great” and “little men” here underscores his elitism. For Brooks, the need of the hour was not social leveling but more class cooperation. In this respect, Brooks’s social vision diverged little from that of the antebellum Whigs who had always celebrated class consensus and mutual aid as the way to achieve social progress and economic p r ~ s p e r i t y . ’ ~ ~ In light of this sort of rhetoric, it is easy to understand the frustrations some reform-minded folk had with Brooks. They admired the man and his gifts but chafed at Brooks’s silence on economic inequality and the need for structural change. Writing in The Arena in 1890, Thomas A. Hyde asked: “The men of our age are not wholly mean and envious . . . but, oh! They do yearn for a more equal arrangement of things, for less poverty, less misery, less suffering. They look at the Titanic stature, the cloudreaching intellect, the heaven-encircling spirituality, and the universeembracing liberality of such men as Phillips Brooks, and ask, What will you do for our cause?”’36 By contrast, economic conservatives, whether they were evangelists or Boston businessmen, latched onto Brooks’s individualism; they liked his tendency to focus on personal moral improvement and shared his reluctance to pursue any sort of systemic economic critique. Nothing in the Rector of Trinity’s rhetoric threatened the received economic order. Marie Hochmuth and Norman Mattis may have put it best: “For members of a comfortable society, vaguely idealistic and practically philanthropic, but quite content with the established order, Brooks was peculiarly well adapted.”I 37 But, while Brooks and, say, the more traditional D. L. Moody may have ended up in the same place with regard to their social views, how they got there was very different.’38Like Brooks, Moody also sought to confront the individual with the claims of the Gospel as the primary way to reform society at large. He put it in straightforward pecuniary terms in some ad-

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vice to Chicago businessmen in the 1880s: “There can be no better investment for the capitalists of Chicago than to put the saving salt of the Gospel into these dark homes and desperate centers from which come forth the criminal^."'^^ Some aspects of society could be reformed and renewed, but Moody usually stressed that it would be done one soul at a time. Certainly his prominent role in the development of the YMCA demonstrates that Moody (like Brooks) was not averse to institutional solutions, as long as these placed the conversion of individuals at the center of their mission. If the church did not stick to this traditional approach, Moody warned that the consequences could be dire: “Either these people [i.e., the urban working classes] are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.”l“O Yet despite their similar ideological and programmatic conclusions, Moody’s individualism and social quietism were outgrowths of an anthropology and an eschatology that Brooks notably did not share. Here indeed are the roots of an essential cleavage that would finally break apart nineteenth-century Evangelicali~m.’~’ While not a Calvinist, Moody imbibed enough New England theology to have a very dim view of human ability and a skeptical view of human commonality or solidarity outside of Christ. Tinkering with reforming individual behavior without first securing religious conversion missed the point entirely. “[Ilf Nicodemus, that moralist in Jerusalem, needed to be born again, so does every man in Boston. This idea, that you who are born in Boston don’t need to be born of the Spirit, comes from the devil; it don’t [sic]come from the Bible . . . the moralist of Boston needs to be converted as much as the drunkard.”142 Furthermore, without this miraculous work of the Spirit, all men were definitely not brothers. “I want to say very emphatically,” he declared, “that I have no sympathy with the doctrine of universal brotherhood and universal fatherhood. . . . Show me a man that will lie and steal and get drunk and ruin a woman-do you tell me that he is my brother? Not a bit of it. He must be born again into the household of faith before he becomes my brother in Moody’s skepticism about social improvement was the logical product of his premillennialism. During the 1860s and 1870s’ premillennial views were making headway among evangelical Episcopalians and many other Evangelicals.’‘’‘’ Moody probably first encountered the dispensationalist hermeneutic among Plymouth Brethren preachers during trips to England. Though scholars debate exactly when Moody first encountered dispensationalism, all agree that it had a profound influence on his approach to scripture and his view of social progress. Unlike antebellum

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postmillennialists, Moody’s view of the immediate future was bleak. One of Moody’s most quoted descriptions of his role as an evangelist reflected this gloomy view. “I look upon this world,” declared Moody, “as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.”’ Or as he quipped more pungently elsewhere, “man has been a failure e ~ e r y w h e r e . ”Stan ’ ~ ~ Gundry stresses that Moody and allies “took a pessimistic view of the effectiveness of human, even Christian, efforts to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. There was no theological reason to hope for the betterment or conversion of the world until Christ Himself returned to inaugurate His personal rule in the millennia1 Kingdom . . . [and] the crises of society at the end of the century seemed to confirm this p e s s i m i ~ m . ” ’ ~ ~ The theological and philosophical roots of Phillips Brooks’s individualism and confidence in social progress contrast vividly with those of Moody. Brooks’s sunnier picture of human nature and accent upon humankind’s creation in the divine image was rooted in a fundamental difference between his theology and Moody’s. Much of Brooks’s preaching was the centrality of the Word having been made flesh. For Brooks, this condescension of God was the most eloquent divine affirmation of human worth. But, what many analysts have neglected in their focus on (and, in many cases, celebration of) Brooks’s incarnational theology is that this also involved a shift away from the centrality of the atonement, a traditional hallmark of evangelical preaching. Both in his preaching and in his writing about preaching, Brooks stressed the need to focus on Christ’s person and teaching. Though he did not explicitly devalue Christ’s saving work, Brooks set aside traditional evangelical formulations of the atonement (i.e., the language of substitution, propitiation and satisfaction). Contrary to C. G. Brown, Brooks’s theology was not specifically “Christocentric” as much as it was generally incarnational and therefore notably not cru~icentric.’~~ Of course, such categories need not be mutually exclusive (i.e., all Trinitarian Christians are in some sense incarnational). While focusing on the person of Christ, Brooks neglected traditional evangelical themes such as Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross as a satisfaction of divine wrath justly provoked by human sin. One might say that the social quietism of traditional Evangelicals like Moody stemmed from their pessimism or (more positively) their faith in Christ’s imminent return; the disinterest in structural economic change on Brooks’s part was rooted, conversely, in his essential optimism, a concomitant belief in human nobility, and a faith that society was inexorably conforming more fully to the Kingdom of God. Moody’s premillennialism highlights the increasingly marginal cultural position of theological con-

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servatives, while Brooks’s confidence in moral improvement dovetailed neatly with a robust late-Victorian faith in progress. Undoubtedly, Brooks was, like Moody and Beecher, an individualist and a social conservative. As Daniel Walker Howe has observed, “the combination of an exalted view of man’s potential with a determination to preserve traditional social values was, perhaps, typical of Christian humanism.”’48Yet he was not a plain reactionary, and it is his theological differences with Moody that illuminate the different positions regarding the social implications of the Gospel that were emerging within Gilded Age Protestantism. Moreover, Brooks’s legacy in the realm of social thought was protean. The mixed, even conflicted character of Brooks’s thinking is underscored by the fact that both social conservatives and reformers drew inspiration from this prophet of the Brahmin class. After his youthful years in Philadelphia, Brooks was content to let his parishioners pursue a wide variety of practical causes while he inspired them from the pulpit. He understood his own ministerial role as primarily exhortative, an inspirational preacher to stir up the soul, not agitate for social change.

NOTES 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,’’ in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2 , ed. Joseph Slater (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1979), 167. 2. Thomas Alexander Hyde, “The Rev. Phillips Brooks,” The Arena 1 (1890): 7 16- 17. 3. Hyde, “The Rev. Phillips Brooks,” 716. 4. William D. Howden, “‘The Pulpit Leads the World’: Preachers and Preaching in Nineteenth-Century America,” ATQ 14 (2000):169. See also Winthrop S. Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & ROW,1953), 157-94. 5. Boston preacher Samuel Lothrop, commenting in 1835: “Much more importance is now attached to the sermon than was formerly the case.” Quoted by Lawrence Buell, “The Unitarian Movement and the Art of Preaching in 19th Century America,” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 171. Buell quotes others as saying that Bostonians no longer referred to attending public worship but, rather, hearing so-and-so preach. 6. Raymond J. Cunningham, “From Preachers of the Word to Physicians of the Soul: The Protestant Pastor in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Religious f f i ~ t o r3y (1965): 333-34. 7. Mark G . Vasquez, “‘Correctly Forming the Public Opinion’: Religious Rhetoric, Social Change, and the Myth of Self-culture” ATQ 14 (2000): 173-74. See also Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).

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8. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). A comparison of transcripts of the LincoldDouglas debates with those from virtually any senatorial debate of recent years provides a vivid (and unflattering) contrast. 9. Buell, “Unitarian Movement,” 180. The material preceding this quotation is taken from Buell and follows his interpretation. Lewis Brastow describes New England preaching in the eighteenth century this way: “The sermon almost invariably had two main divisions, with numerous subdivisions, the first, theoretic, containing the discussion, which was generally argumentative, the second, practical, called ‘improvement’or ‘use.’ Its anchorage ground was the theology of the church or of some school, and even the Biblical material, . . . became a vehicle for conveying this theology. It overvalued indoctrination as the aim of the sermon and correct belief as its result.” See Lewis Orsmond Brastow, The Modern Pulpit: A Study of Homiletic Sources and Characteristics (New York: Hodder, 1906), 125. Brastow’s theological orientation is evident in his dismissive handling of Calvinist orthodoxy here and elsewhere. 10. Vasquez, “‘Correctly Forming,”’ 174. 11. Emerson, “Nature,” in The Collected Works ofRalph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 , ed. Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 10. 12. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Volume 1, 1799-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 52. 13. Obviously, following out the internal logic of this Romantic individualism could endanger ministerial authority. As Vasquez puts it: “The emphasis on religious ‘self-culture’threatened to decenter much of the authority of the preacher.” Antebellum preachers responded with a variety of strategies to come to grips with this potentially destabilizing development. While some reacted against it sharply, most sought some sort of accommodation with it. “Preachers,” reflects Vasquez, “exhorted individuals to act not only by tapping increasingly into the emotive aspects of the audience [an approach favored by Romantics] but also by using the stylistic techniques of analogy, metaphor, parallelism, and the like, all of which emphasized the individual’s own ability to make interpretive comparisons.” Therefore, pulled along by Romantic democracy, Protestant clergy appealed increasingly in their preaching to individual judgment even if they were reluctant to open up their discourse in a radical way that might undermine their spiritual authority. See Vasquez, “‘Correctly Forming,”’ 174. 14. Buell, “Unitarian Movement,” 171-72. 15. Buell, “Unitarian Movement,” 173. 16. Buell, “Unitarian Movement,” 167. My emphasis here. 17. Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chaps. 2 and 3. 18. Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind,67-68; F. R. Webber,A History of Preaching in Britain and America, Part 3 (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Northwestern Publishing House, 1957), 267. 19. Charles P. McIlvaine, The Work of Preaching Christ (Boston: Gospel Book & Tract Depository, 1871), 7.

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20. McIlvaine, Preaching Christ, 9. Also quoted in Webber, History, 268-69. 21. C. FitzSimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury Press, 1966).Allison focuses on developments during the seventeenth century. 22. McIlvaine, Preaching Christ, 9 Also quoted in Webber, History, 270. Horton Davies observes that this was also the central note of the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield. Both subscribed to this forensic understanding of justification. See Worship and Theology in England: From Watts and Wesley to Murtineau, 1690-1900 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 151-52. 23. See Alister McGrath, Zustitia Dei (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chaps. 6 and 7. 24. McGrath, Zustitia, 30648. Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), esp. 1 3 3 4 1 and 170-79. Hatch notes here the rise of vernacular sermons and the eclipse of doctrine in general. Obviously, there was not a single, monolithic position on justification among American Protestants by midcentury. Still, it is illuminating to compare the traditional approach of a leading evangelical Episcopalian like McIlvaine to that taken by Brooks. 25. McIlvaine, Preaching Christ, 35. My emphasis added here. Also quoted in Webber, History, 27 1. 26. McIlvaine, Preaching Christ, 11. Also quoted in Webber, History, 270 27. We only have a stenographer’s report for the second series, though it includes references to the subjects tackled in the first set. 28. Charles R. Tyng, ed., Record of the Life and Work of the Rev. Stephen Higginson Tyng, D.D. and History of St. George s Church, New York to the Close of His Rectorship (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1890), 375. 29. Tyng, Record. 30. Tyng, Record, 376. British spelling in the original. 3 1. Tyng, Record, 377. Charles Hodge and others of the Princeton school liked to speak of redemptive “facts.” See Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (London: James Clarke, 1960 [1872-1873]), esp. 9-16. 32. Tyng, Record, 378. 33. Tyng, Record, 379. 34. Tyng, Record, 381-382. 35. Brastow, Modem Pulpit, 396. Though one might not guess it from his methodical style and careful preparation, the mature Tyng often preached without notes. See Webber, History, 280-81. 36. Brastow, Modem Pulpit, 207. 37. Letter, PB to father, 10 September 1865, quoted by Raymond Albright, Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 112. 38. Edgar D. Jones, The Royalty of the Pulpit (New York: Harper, 1951), xxvi. 39. Jones, The Royalty of the Pulpit, xxiv. 40. Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 301. 41. Ozora Davis, “A Quarter-Century of American Preaching,” The Journal of Religion 6 (1926): 137. Even some conservative Evangelicals today express

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keen admiration for Brooks’s lectures. Radio preacher Warren Wiersbe introduced an abridged version of the lectures by asserting his “conviction that everything useful written on homiletics in America in the last century is in one way or another a footnote to Phillips Brooks.” See Warren Wiersbe, The Joy of Preaching (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1989), 7. Note that Old School Presbyterian R. L. Dabney, in his lectures on preaching published just a few years before Brooks’s contribution, stressed both the piety of the preacher and the necessity of an expository approach. Dabney, Sacred Rhetoric; or A Course of Lectures on Preaching (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee for Publication, 1870). 42. Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1969 [1877]), 5,7. 43. PB ,Lectures on Preaching, 5 . 44. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 7. 45. Tyng, Record, 376 46. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 144. 47. Unidentified reporter, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 146, 144. 48. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,32. 49. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,33. 50. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,33. 5 1. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 110. 52. PB , Lectures on Preaching, 128. 53. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 21. 54. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 5 . 55. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 86-87. 56. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 112. It is at this point that Brooks’s theory seems most to contradict his practice. Clearly Brooks’s sermons reflect a concern for an artful literary style more than strict adherence to the biblical text or to logical exposition of doctrine. 57. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 129. 58. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 130. 59. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 130. 60. PB ,Lectures on Preaching, 149. 61. PB did note the utility of the lectionary for Episcopalians: “How great a help the ancient calendar of the church year is in this respect. The prolonged and connected course of sermons is a safeguard against mere flightiness and partialness in the choice of topics.” Yet he appears to have followed the lectionary little himself, except on chief holy days. Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, 154. 62. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 160. 63. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 161. 64. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 244. 65. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 245. 66. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 255. British spelling in original. 67. PB, Lectures on Preaching, 262. Unlike Emerson, Brooks does affirm his belief in the Incarnation in the following sentence but the approach to human spiritual ability is essentially the same.

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68. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-soul,” in Self-Reliance and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993 [1841]), 56. I have reversed the order of phrases here. 69. Emerson, “The Over-soul,’’ 62. 70. Trinity Hymnal, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Great Commission Publications, 1990) 507 (1779). 71. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,230 72. Marie Hochmuth and Norman W. Mattis, “Phillips Brooks,” in A History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. 1, ed. William N. Brigance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943), 316, nl. Hochmuth and Mattis assert here that Brooks’s “published sermons give no evidence of this early jeu d’esprit.” I would argue that some do. 73. For most of his time in Philadelphia, Brooks prepared two sermons a week. In his first four years in Boston, Brooks repeated these sermons and composed only about forty new ones. Allen is careful to anticipate criticism of Brooks for this shortcut: “There was here no idleness or waste of time. It was an opportunity for large and varied reading” (Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,229). 74. Albright, Focus on Infinity, 51-52. 75. Hochmuth and Mattis, “Phillips Brooks,” 318. 76. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,24041. 77. New York Tribune, quoted in Thomas Harwood Pattison, The History of Christian Preaching (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1903), 383. Allen (in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 113-14) quotes this commentator also but cites no source. I was unable to locate the original reference. 78. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2 , 115. 79. From firsthand accounts reprinted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 141-50; “waterfall” phrase is from a contemporary critic. 80. Webber, History, 422. 81. Hochmuth and Mattis, “Phillips Brooks,” 316 82. Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1881), 3. 83. PB, Candle of the Lord, 3. 84. PB, Candle of the Lord, 4. 85. PB, Candle of the Lord, 14. 86. PB, Candle of the Lord, 14. See chapter 5, this volume, on Phillips Brooks’s mature theology regarding the implications of this approach for Protestant confessionalism. 87. PB , Candle of the Lord, 17. 88. PB, Candle of the Lord, 17-18. Although Brooks does not develop this point clearly, it could easily be construed as Pelagian. 89. Paraphrase in Albright, Focus on Infinity, 214. Taken from a letter of Arthur Baillie to William Brooks, 20 April 1893. 90. PB, “Law of Growth,” in The Law of Growth and Other Sermons, 9th series (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), 2. 91. PB, “Law of Growth,” 5.

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92. PB, “Law of Growth,” 7. Note that for Brooks the religious or spiritual realm is essentially the “moral.” 93. PB, “Law of Growth,” 10. 94. PB, “Law of Growth,” 10. 95. PB, “Law of Growth,” 17. 96. I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1978), 330. Notably, J. C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Luke (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1986 [ 1858]), a popular English evangelical Anglican commentary of the period, does not take Brooks’s route but anticipates Marshall’s emphasis here on “the great importance of right hearing.” See Ryle, Expository Thoughts, 257. 97. For another vivid example of how Brooks broke with conventional evangelical hortatory models, see “The Duty of the Christian Business Man,” in Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips Brooks (New York: Saalfield & Fitch, 1893), 63-87. Despite the evangelistic character of the address, there is no mention of the cross, mostly large helpings of idealistic moralism. 98. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,242. 99. Davis, “Quarter-Century,’’ 140. 100. Brastow, Modem Pulpit, 125. 101. Davis, “Quarter-Century,’’ 1 4 0 4 1 . 102. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,326. The excerpt is from an essay, “The Teaching of Religion.” 103. See Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965). 104. Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 64. 105. May, Protestant Churches, 67. 106. For Maurice, see: Torben Christensen, Origin and History of Christian Socialism, 1848-54 (Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget, 1962); Frank M. McClain, Maurice: Man and Moralist (London: S.P.C.K., 1972); Reginald Farrar, The Life of Frederic William Farrar (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1904). 107. Robertson, quoted in Davies, Worship and Theology in England, vol. 2, 319-20. 108. Albright actually asserts that Brooks became “one of the most eloquent American supporters of Maurice’s Christian social and theological views .” Albright, Focus on Infinity, 259. With regard to social thought, this is certainly an overstatement. Arthur Mann groups Brooks with the “moderates” who were “antagonistic to [both] extreme collectivism and economic individualism.” See Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1954), 78-79. 109. Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 164-74, Gary S. Smith, Social Christianity (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 2001); Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), Part 4.

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110. May, Protestant Churches, 66. On Bliss see R. B. Dressner, “W. D. P. Bliss’ Christian Socialism,” Church History 47 (1978): 66-82, and C. L. Webber, “William Dwight Porter Bliss: Priest and Socialist,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 28 (1959): 9-39. 111. Mann, Yankee Reformers, chap. 6, esp. 133. 112. Parsons, quoted by Mann, Yankee Reformers, 131. 113. Parsons, quoted by Mann, Yankee Reformers, 274, n9. 114. Mann, Yankee Reformers, 142. Mann actually argues that Brooks was “won over” by Parson’s social philosophy but such an assertion is difficult to support. 115. Mann, Yankee Reformers, 217-28. 116. Vida Scudder, On Journey (New York: Dutton, 1937), 72. 117. Letter, PB to Endicott Peabody, 13 April 1882, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University #bMS Am 1418 (68-101). One of the fathers of the Social Gospel, Washington Gladden, wrote to Brooks expressing appreciation for the latter’s preaching. Letter, Washington Gladden to PB, 26 October 1887, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University bMS Am 1594.1 (29 1). Even socialist Laurence Gronlund wrote to ask Brooks to write for his Nationalist Magazine. See letter, Gronlund to PB, 2 April 1890, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University bMS Am 1594.1 (305). 118. Albright, Focus on Injinity, 275. Allen claims, incorrectly, that Brooks “never publicly advocated” women’s suffrage. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, 37 1. 119. Geoffrey Blodgett, “Yankee Leadership,” Journal of Urban History (1982): 383-84 120. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,475-76. 121. Albright blames this critical portrait on Henry May’s Protestant Churches. See Albright, Focus on Injinity, 420, n55. 122. Paul Boyer, Purity in Print (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), 7. 123. J. Franklin Chase, “Remarks,” in Thirty-Second Annual Report of the New England Watch and Ward Society (Boston: n.p., 1910), 26. 124. P. C. Kemeny, “Power, Ridicule, and the Destruction of Religious Moral Reform Politics in the 1920s,” in The Secular Revolution: Power Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Christian Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 16-17. Kemeny notes that key Social Gospel clergy shared such concerns: “Reverend Raymond Calkins . . . in a sermon before the National Council of Congregational Churches in 1919, . . . urged the church to go beyond an ‘individualistic religion’ and embrace Jesus’s social creed ‘of Justice, democracy and brotherhood.”’ The church, he argued, had to expand its “moral aims” beyond “dilettante” charities and address “the burning questions of sexual immorality, undoubted economic injustices, corporate dishonesty.” Calkins’s inclusion of moral reform within his social Christianity suggests that historians of the movement have overlooked this element in the history of the Social Gospel (Calkins, quoted in Kemeny, “Power, Ridicule,” 17-18). 125. Quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,371-72.

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126. May, Protestant Churches, 66. 127. Phillips Brooks, quoted in May, Protestant Churches, 66. 128. Julius H. Ward, “Bishop Brooks,” The Andover Review: A Religious and Theological Monthly 17 ( 1892): 4 4 8 4 9 . 129. Phillips Brooks, “The Duty of the Christian Business Man,” in Addresses by Right Reverend Phillips Brooks (New York: Saalfield & Fitch, 1893), 78, 84-85. 130. PB, Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary, and Social, ed. John Cotton Brooks (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 371. 131. PB, Essays and Addresses, 372. 132. “Paine, Robert Treat,” in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson (New York Scribner’s, 1943), Part 2,7:158. Paine, the social conservative active in charitable endeavors and interested in social progress, probably represented Brooks’s ideal businessman. 133. Letter, PB to Robert T. Paine, 8 August 1892, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,490. 134. Letter, PB to William Brooks, 21 August 1892, quoted by Albright, Focus on Infinity, 385. 135. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 136. Hyde, quoted by Hochmuth and Mattis, “Phillips Brooks,” 309-10. 137. Hochmuth and Mattis, “Phillips Brooks,” 308. 138. Historians have not always recognized these differences. 139. Moody, quoted in William Gerald McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1959), 269. 140. Moody, quoted in Paul Allen Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 197l), 14647. 141. Grant Wacker has argued that for a short period during the late nineteenth century, liberal postmillennialism and “higher life” premillennialism actually evinced a similar spirit. “Although the liberal vision of the future took a postmillennial form, it is, I think, a distinction without much of a difference, for evangelical and liberal leaders were equally convinced of the spiritual maturity of the age.” See Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910,” The Journal ofAmerican History 72 (1985): 58. This is a valid point, but I think Wacker would agree that eschatology does become a significant dividing line. 142. W. H. Daniels, ed., Moody: His Words, Work and Workers (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1878), 411-12. 143. Moody, quoted by McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, 276. 144. Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind,esp. 183-86. 145. Quoted by McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, 257,258. 146. Stanley N. Gundry, Love Them In: The Life and Theology of D. L. Moody (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 182. See 178-82 for the preceding account of dispensationalism.

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147. See C. G. Brown, “Christocentric Liberalism in the Episcopal Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 37 (1968): 5-38. For terminology here, see David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modem Britain (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1992), 14-17. 148. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 121.

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Chapter Five

The Modern Christian

I should carry a broad and simple doctrine with which I might appeal to the faith of devout and reasonable men.

-Phillips Brooks

’

The best way to understand Brooks’s mature theology is to situate it within two overlapping contexts, nineteenth-century American Protestant thought and Broad Church Anglicanism. The former milieu was examined primarily in chapter 1; the latter is one of the chief subjects of this chapter. Brooks’s Broad Church community shared his concern to modernize the Christian faith and bolstered his commitment to shift its locus of authority from externals and to redraw the theological basis of its community. It was in some respects a radical vision, though it was carried out in Brooks’s case not by an innovative theologian but by a popular preacher with a conservative sensibility.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS Being both an American and an Anglican, Phillips Brooks lived and worked within at least two distinct national religious communities.As an American, Brooks functioned within an intellectual milieu shaped by evangelical Protestantism. Yet as an Anglican, Brooks was perhaps more inclined than many American Evangelicals to take an interest in English affairs, in particular, theological discussions within the Church of England. Although the American remnant of the Church of England had reorganized itself in the new republic as an autonomous national church in 149

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1789, Episcopalians naturally continued to look to their mother church. Brooks traveled to England frequently and garnered an enthusiastic following among English Anglicans -an unusual achievement for an American Episcopalian? Those theologians and preachers who have been most often identified as significant influences on Brooks appear to fall naturally into either one of these two camps. Allen identifies two “modern theological books . . . as having contributed to his development,-Bushnell’s ‘Sermons for the New Life’ and Maurice’s ‘Theological Essays.’ These books as they now stand in his library,” Allen wrote in 1901, “show the marks of hard ~ s a g e . ”Obviously ~ these twin circles overlapped- there was, after all, a significant Evangelical party within the Church of England that shared much with various non-Episcopalian Evangelicals in America- but these two distinct “neighborhoods” still represent a helpful way to understand the larger communities of discourse that defined Brooks’s mature thought. While he encountered some of its leading authors while still a seminarian, Brooks’s interaction with the English Broad Church movement is most apparent after his ordination. As noted in chapter 1 , the mid-nineteenth century was a time of considerable theological ferment in American Protestant circles. Across the Atlantic in Britain, the theological scene was also lively but Brooks’s Anglican counterparts were more important participants in the discussion there than most Episcopalians were in America because of Anglicanism’s dominant position as the state church. Significant elements within the Church of England championed the new theology. It was in Philadelphia that Brooks first encountered fellow clergy who identified with what came to be called the Broad Church. “Hitherto,” Allen comments, “he had walked almost alone, emerging from the school at Alexandria with a conscious want of sympathy with his teachers, while yet holding with deep conviction to the sovereign Lordship of Christ over every human SOU^."^ The role of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s religious thought was central to this new English movement, as it had been for Brooks personally. One commentator describes Coleridge as having “a profound religious influence, particularly in the Anglican Broad Church, where his views on the inspiration of the Bible, the nature of the Church, his attitude to science, and his stand for freedom of thought in religion . . . were especially perv a ~ i v e . ”Indeed, ~ if there is a common thread that draws together all of Brooks’s favorite theologians and churchmen, it was undoubtedly Coleridge. V. F. Storr concludes that “the closest disciple of Coleridge was Frederick Denison Maurice. . . . But his influence can be traced all down the century, and more immediately in those called Broad Churchmen, such as [Thomas] Arnold and or [F. W.] Robertson.” Moreover, Brooks’s

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closest English clerical friend, F. W. Farrar, remarked that the “immense theological advance” that had arguably occurred in the Church of England during the nineteenth century was “perhaps more due to Samuel Taylor Coleridge than to any ordained or professed theologian.”6 The Broad Church as a movement is difficult to define. The label appears to have been coined in the early 1850s to denote a disparate collection of mid-Victorian Anglican clerics and academics. Most held theological views characterized then as liberal, though there was considerable diversity within their ranks. Numbered among them were those most cherished by Brooks, including F. D. Maurice, F. W. Robertson, A. P. Stanley, and F. W. Farrar? Although none of these figures were among its contributors, the controversial volume Essays and Reviews came to be seen as the manifesto at least of the more critical side of the Broad Church movement and aroused considerable opposition from conservatives when it first appeared in 1860. All of its seven authors were Anglicans and its most controversial essays were those that championed a higher critical approach to the Bible. Benjamin Jowett, for instance, encouraged the faithful “to read Scripture like any other b00k.”~Meeting at Fulham, Church of England bishops expressed their displeasure soon after the publication of Essays and, later in 1864, Convocation voted its official censure. Yet the outcome of two court cases that arose from the controversy was a Privy Council ruling (also in 1864) that declared that rejecting traditional understandings of biblical inspiration and the final state of the wicked did not violate the formularies of the Church of England? In short, although the Essays provoked a storm of criticism at first, ultimately, its ironic role appears to have been to carve out theological space for the Broad Church movement within the established church. Although these views were novel, by the 1870s, they had earned a certain ecclesiastical legitimacy. Significantly, Brooks’s English exemplars tended to be among the more moderate and constructive within the movement and thus not directly involved in Essays. In the case of Stanley and Farrar, they were conforming churchmen who enjoyed (not coincidentally) some institutional preferment. Stanley served as Dean of Westminster between 1864 and 188 1 and, although Farrar ’s ascendancy may have been slowed by his theological views, he did serve as a royal chaplain, canon of Westminster and, eventually, Dean of Canterbury (1895-1903). One helpful way to understand the Broad Church party in the mid-Victorian era is to see it as composed of two quite distinct groups of theological liberals: the one with ties to Oxford and more inclined to embrace higher critical methods, and the other with Cambridge connections and exhibiting greater appreciation for church tradition. (The division is not a neat one-Stanley, usually a

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moderate, was educated at Oxford, Farrar at King’s College, London, and Maurice had links to both Oxford and Cambridge.) It is notable that virtually all of Brooks’s preferred examples came from the latter, often Cambridge-connected set. Charles R. Sanders designates this half “the Coleridgeans” and incorporates Maurice and Charles Kingsley, as well as Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning- all demonstrable influences on Brooks. As Sanders explains it: “The Cambridge school was predominantly Platonic and Kantian . . . it was favorably disposed towards the use of intuition, or the ‘reason’ of Coleridge and Kant, as a means of perception of truth.”’O Coleridge’s influence within nineteenth-century philosophical and theological thinking was broad and deep. Among his host of Anglican followers was Frederick Denison Maurice (1 805-1872). Because he saw himself as an opponent of a purely destructive criticism, Maurice, like Coleridge, eschewed the Broad Church label. Nevertheless, many Broad Churchmen clearly looked to Maurice as a model and were powerfully influenced by his writings, despite his death at the height of the movement in 1872. It was to a large extent from Maurice that the movement received its dose of Coleridgean idealism and a model of how to apply Romantic categories and perspectives to Christian subjects. Maurice once wrote that to Aids to Reflection he owed a “deep and solemn obligation.”” Brooks had read Maurice’s Theological Essays (1853) as a seminarian and he later summed up the latter’s Romantic method in theology when he extolled Maurice for getting “rid of dead dogmas . . . by filling them with life.”I2 Maurice, like Brooks, had Unitarian roots, his father being a Unitarian minister. Perhaps because of family divisions over religious matters (his sisters left Unitarianism for evangelical Protestantism), a search for unity stood at the heart of his the01ogy.l~Mainly through reading Coleridge, Maurice embraced trinitarian belief and sought Anglican ordination in 1834. He did not, however, seek religious unity through compromise or by “splitting the difference” between extreme positions. One must first recognize, he argued, that all theological positions are only partial truths and thereby always attempt to appreciate the truth in an opponent’s position. Such an approach required an open-minded empathy for others’ beliefs. Brooks, for example, lauded Maurice for “how far he was from being of a controversial ~pirit.”’~ Although sympathetic initially to Tractarianism, Maurice rejected Newman’s “dogmatic principle.” The sort of Catholic “system” that Newman articulated would necessarily exclude a great deal and thus not be truly Cath01ic.I~Arguably, one of Maurice’s most influential teachings centered on the headship or kingship of Christ over humanity. He declared once

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that teaching this reality was the main reason he “was sent into the world.’716Christ is “the actual Head of man”; some understand this truth and live accordingly but many never recognize this fact, yet it remains true despite their sad lack of understanding. Hence for Maurice, baptism did not effect regeneration as Pusey and other Tractarians seemed to teach but it was a symbolic “sign of man’s true state” that a broad and inclusive church administered to whosoever desired it.” Among Maurice’s followers was F. W. Robertson. Like Brooks, Robertson was more of a preacher than a theologian (a fact that probably recommended him to Brooks). In his Yale lectures, Brooks said of Robertson’s sermons “that in all the best qualities of preaching they stand supreme among the sermons of our time .,’I8 Robertson died comparatively young in 1853 and much of his reputation and subsequent influence came from posthumous publications, but it proved to be substantial. William Hutchison rightly notes that, “although his impact seems to have been less sustained than that of either Bushnell or Maurice, it was unquestionably p o ~ e r f u l . Initially ”~~ an evangelical, Robertson drew away from classical Evangelicalism while serving in his first parish. Nevertheless, like Brooks, he retained much of the style and fervor of Being conservative in spirit, Robertson sought not to discard dogma entirely but to present essential religious truths in a winsome, positive way, “suggestively” seeking to appeal to the “whole man.” Following Coleridge, he believed that all higher truth was discerned directly with the religious sense. Accordingly, he rejected preaching that was authoritarian or excessively rationalistic.2l With Bushnell, Robertson struggled with the larger question of doing theology and stressed the limitations of theological language. But he found fault with Bushnell’s ambiguity and abstraction. For Robertson, Bushnell failed “sufficiently [to] show that dogmas express eternal verities” and that they can still be “approximative formulas to truth.”” Nevertheless, like Bushnell, Robertson was highly critical of all theological systems, and his theological emphasis was also deeply Christ o ~ e n t r i cRobertson .~~ recognized that it was no longer possible or desirable to enforce orthodox beliefs about Christ’s person by church fiat. Instead, one must start with the New Testament’s portrait of Christ as the Son of Man; understood properly, this would lead ultimately to worship of Jesus as the divine in human f0rm.2~All of these characteristic emphases of Robertson as well as his Mauricean teaching regarding baptism would find substantial echoes in Brooks’s mature thought. Unlike Maurice or Robertson, Brooks actually knew Stanley and Farrar personally (he became particularly close to the latter) and the two may therefore have served as more compelling examples of liberal-minded

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churchmen with real-world pastoral responsibilities.Arthur Penrhyn Stanley has been called “the typical Broad Churchman of the period.”25As Dean of Westminster between 1864 and 188 1 , Stanley sought to apply his Broad Church views to bring about what he termed “the enlargement of the Church.”26Thus he invited spokesmen from across the widening Anglican spectrum to preach at the Abbey, though with limited success. Like many of his fellow Broad Churchmen, Stanley supported the loosening of the formula for clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles that was passed in the wake of the Essays and Reviews controversy. And like his American admirer, Stanley garnered considerable public outcry when he invited a prominent Unitarian to receive communion at the Abbey. In fact, when an American bishop criticized Stanley for dissenting from the Lambeth Conference of Bishops’ censuring of biblical critic Bishop Colenso in 1867, Brooks took the liberty of writing Stanley personally and apologizing for the bishop’s criti~ism.2~ While usually neglected by Brooks’s biographers, F. W. Farrar was, in his later years, clearly his most intimate English clerical friend. An acquaintance later recalled Brooks telling him “not long before” his death that Farrar “had done more for him and exerted more influence over his life than any other man.”28Though educated by Evangelicals, Farrar came under the strong influence of Maurice. He proved to be a popular religious author with his Life of Christ (1 874) but was attacked in the wake of the publication of Eternal Hope (1878). In the latter book, Farrar expressed doubts about the eternal punishment of the damned. Sometimes referred to as a Broad Church Evangelical, Farrar had a wide influence among middle-class Anglicans, though he disputed with leading High Churchmen .29 While he followed the English scene closely, Brooks made a fairly negative assessment of the Broad Church movement when he visited there in 1883. In part, he was reflecting the pessimistic view articulated by his clerical hosts at that time. “I was surprised,” Brooks commented in a letter to one of his brothers, “to hear how dolefully he [Llewelyn Davies] and other men talked about the prospects of liberal theology in the Church of England . . . [they] declared the whole Mauritian and broad church movement a failure; Farrar said the same thing.”30 Brooks outlined various “things . . . that hamper the mental activity and free thought of the working English clergy” and then concluded with characteristic optimism: “Of course, you will see that I think our ‘P.E. Church’ has all the good things and none of the bad ones which belong to the Church of England, and so I hope the best and brightest things for the future of liberal theology in Her!”31The absence of establishment and its associated problems made

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the American daughter church a friendlier environment for cutting-edge theology. As in other areas, American exceptionalism bolstered Brooks’s confidence in the future of Christianity in the New World. Of course, these two theological communities were not sealed off from each other and the influences did not only flow from Europe to the Americas. Liberals in the Church of England drew upon American sources, including the works of Emerson and Unitarian Theodore Parker. English clergy may have enjoyed a greater freedom in this regard than their American Episcopal cousins. Although Brooks often had complimentary things to say about leading Unitarians, it was more difficult for a Boston Episcopalian to extol their work openly. In the American denominational marketplace, competing churches defined themselves in relation to their neighbors; what set them apart doctrinally was very important. Although Dissenters constituted a significant group in England, the dominant position of a state-supported national church made the religious scene there very different. Especially in the countryside, where Anglicanism enjoyed a virtual monopoly, most agreed that the Church of England needed to be inclusive, even if they disagreed as to where exactly to draw the doctrinal lines and how defined or impermeable those lines should be. In any event, many freethinking Church of England clergy read American theology. Perhaps most significant here for a study of Brooks is the case of Channing ’s following among leading English Broad Churchmen. Channing ’s influence upon Robertson and Stanley was substantial. As noted above, Robertson read Bushnell but he also read Channing’s writings closely and defended him from trinitarian critics, going as far as to declare on one occasion that “no man adored Christ more sincerely than Channing.”32 Meanwhile, Stanley is reported to have admitted that “when he was in America he believed he never preached a single sermon without mentioning the honoured name of Channing.7’33 Other theological influences are evident in Brooks’s later years but they appear not to have altered his fundamental theological assumptions. Instead, they simply deepened certain elements that had been important ingredients since his seminary d a ~ s . Among 3~ his later discoveries on a trip to Germany in 1882 were the writings of two professors at Gottingen, Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) and Friedrich D. Schleiermacher (17681834). Of Lotze’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion Brooks remarked: “it is full of as rich sound meat as any book I have ever read.”35 Lotze’s philosophy was influential among some theologians because of the central place and function of ethical reasoning in his work. His mature thought was a sort of teleological idealism that rejected the pantheism of Hegel and settled on a more traditional-looking theism.36 Yet, despite

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Brooks’s interest in some of the more advanced theological liberals, he remained a moderate Broad Churchman. Commenting to his brother Arthur, he wrote: On the whole I feel as if there were not in Germany just the type of man whom we have in England and America,-the really spiritual rationalist or broad Churchman, the Maurice or the [Edward A.] Washburn. The positive men are dogmatists and their rationalists are negative. Such men there must be somewhere,-successors of Schleiermacher on his best side,-but nobody seems to be able to point them out, and except in vague and casual approaches I have failed to find them?’

Washburn was rector of Calvary Church in New York between 1865 and his death in 188 1 . He became a prominent leader of the Broad Church movement within the American The formative influences on Brooks’s mature thinking were therefore varied, though from the liberal end of the theological spectrum. They ranged from English Broad Churchmen to American Unitarians. One common thread ran through their thinking on religious subjects. Most had been profoundly shaped by Romanticism of one sort or another. They rebelled against the rationalism of the philosophes but also against the more mild-mannered Common Sense realism of the moderate Enlightenment. They celebrated the direct intuition of Reason as the seat of all true religious knowledge and of all genuine religious experience. They approached traditional Christian teaching as critics and even skeptics but they were not destructive rationalists; they sought to build a new, progressive faith largely on the foundations of the old. Charles R. Sander’s description of Coleridge’s mission is apposite for most of Brooks’s favorite thinkers: “He was zealous to conserve all that seemed precious in tradition, but also insisted that the mind should function without shackles in its effort to determine the relative value of these things.”39It was a project that would powerfully affect Phillips Brooks and the shape of liberal Protestantism.

FEARLESS IN BOSTON The first bona fide American Broad Churchman that Phillips Brooks interacted with was E. A. Washburn. Brooks met the Harvard-educated Washburn in Philadelphia in 1863 and pronounced him then “of the best kind of our m i n i ~ t r y . ”Also ~ of Congregational background, Washburn had been received into the Episcopal Church in the 1840s and had become the Rector of St. Mark’s in Philadelphia in 1862. Washburn embraced

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higher criticism and became a significant biblical scholar!’ During the 1860s in Philadelphia, Brooks and the “younger clergy . . . formed themselves into a club, called the ‘Clericus,’ meeting every month, when an essay was read and d i s c ~ s s e d . ”According ~~ to some of the original members, the Philadelphia Clericus sought a third path distinct from either the Oxford movement on the one hand or unbridled naturalism on the other. Their older mentors (mostly Evangelicals of various sorts) faced the twin challenges of what they termed “materialism” or “rationalism,” and “Romanism” with considerable trepidation. But their more youthful apprentices saw things differently. Comments Allen: “Although they were young, living at a time which to their elders seemed to abound with omens of evil, when materialism was undermining faith and a Romanizing reaction [i.e., the Oxford Movement] appeared the only alternative, yet they were fearless, proposing to face science and a critical hostile literature .”43 Such a third option was surfacing in the mother church and Brooks was among a select group of Episcopalian clergy who were its pioneers in the American church. Phillips Brooks’s immediate intellectual circle during the 1870sand 1880s was the Boston Clerical Club. When Massachusetts diocesan clergy founded a clericus in 1870 (the first year of Brooks’s ministry at Trinity, Boston), its shared intellectual project was similar to that of its Philadelphia predecessor. Allen described the “staple element in every discussion” of the Boston club (of which he later became a member) as growing out of the questions: “Why was it that faith had grown weak, and what was the best method of meeting the diffi~ulty[?]”~ These questions framed the discourse of the Clericus and underlay many of the papers on various subjects that Brooks read to his colleagues in these years. It was the Clericus that cultivated and shaped Brooks’s thinking on most theological subjects. “It seems to me,” he wrote to one of the participants in 1882, “that we all owe so much to it; and while we have grown used to it and don’t think so much about it as we used to, it has never been better than in these last years.”45And Brooks himself constituted the club’s linchpin. As a friend and participant later remembered: “It clustered about him in the beginning, and he remained its loved and honored centre to the end. To most of us, however loyal to one another, its meetings have meant primarily an evening with Brooks.”46 In a sense, the club was a microcosm of the larger Broad Church movement that was taking shape around them. In some quarters, the Clericus was viewed with suspicion because of the freewheeling views of many of the members. C. A. L. Richards recalled that “the club has been held, outside, to be a dangerous power, constructed for the active propagation of heresy and the control of the politics of the Diocese. We, within

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it, know how far this is from the truth . . . the key notes of the club [were] . . . perfect freedom and perfect t ~ l e r a n c e . ”Like ~ ~ the approach followed by that larger, emergent party within Anglicanism, the answer these New England clergy most often advanced to the challenge of weakening faith was greater doctrinal liberty. “Their aim,” Allen remarked of the movement in general, was “to escape into a larger freedom from the limitations of an inadequate theology.”48 Among Brooks’s immediate Boston circle were clergy who would take leading roles in the Broad Church wing of the Episcopal Church. They included William Reed Huntington (1838-1909) who, like Brooks, was of Puritan ancestry and a Harvard graduate (1859). Later, as rector of Grace Church in Manhattan (previously a solidly evangelical parish), Huntington would become one of the chief architects of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral-an influential expression of Broad Church ecumenical aspiration~!~The biographies of participants A. V. G. Allen (1841-1908) and William W. Newton (1843-1914) both echo Brooks’s pilgrimage from an evangelical upbringing to liberal Protestantism. Like Brooks of Puritan stock, both of Allen’s parents were committed Evangelicals; his father was an impecunious Episcopal priest who named his son after Alexander Viets Griswold, the fiery first bishop of Massachusetts. Allen was sent to the evangelical Kenyon College and, for seminary, to low-church Bexley Hall. Allen reacted strongly against the evangelical teaching at the seminary and dabbled with advanced theological opinions. Encountering Coleridge’s writings helped the young Allen edge away from a thoroughgoing skepticism and retain core Christian beliefs. Still, Allen finished his theological education at Andover where he found a more open intellectual climate. He married the daughter of stalwart evangelical John S. Stone (the rector who had first welcomed the Brooks family into St. Paul’s Tremont Street) and served as professor of ecclesiastical history at the Episcopal Theological School in Carnbridge?O Similarly, William Wilberforce Newton (it is hard to conceive of names more associated with classical Evangelicalism) was also raised in a rectory, the son of an English-born Episcopal priest of strong evangelical sympathies. His father, Richard Newton, in fact, eventually became a leader of the party in the American church. Second son William was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. His older brother, Richard Heber Newton (184&1914), became a noted theological liberal and advocate of higher criticism; his opponents tried unsuccessfully to bring him to trial twice on doctrinal questions?l Thus, while several of the club’s members shared evangelical rearings, nearly all were moving away from these traditional roots. Not all of the

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participants were theological liberals, however. Included in this coterie of mostly young or middle-aged clerics was the former rector of St. Paul’s, Tremont Street, the indomitable (and now elderly) A. H. Vinton?* Vinton had moved from Boston to Philadelphia to pastor Holy Trinity in Philadelphia between 1858 and 1861 (and thus he was actually Brooks’s predecessor there). Vinton had moved at the same time as Brooks to Boston, this time to be rector of Emmanuel Church from 1869 to 1877?3A committed evangelical of the old sort, Vinton was described by his former parishioner as holding to an unapologetically conservative theological position. “It is easy to see,” Brooks later commented, “how such a dogmatic truth [of the sort Vinton subscribed to] might become in the conception and utterance of a small nature, mercenary, weak, and But Brooks held that Vinton’s noble nature ensured that his preaching never degenerated in this way. Brooks credited his former pastor as an evangelical who, though he shifted his own beliefs little, was genuinely open to considering other views. The presence of Vinton among the younger clergy appears to have made for lively debate at many meetings. “Dr. Vinton and Phillips Brooks differed on many subjects,” recalled one young priest, “and often had stout arguments. But they differed, as friends agreed to differ with mutual respect and good will. His attitude [i.e., Vinton’s] towards convictions or opinions from which he differed was never one of hostility, but of interest and curiosity. He liked to probe into other minds and see the process of their reasoning. . . . What he wanted was a solid arg ~ m e n t . ”Participants ~~ also recalled that the chief source of Vinton’s concern was the heart of the club’s central project-liberal doctrine. “The Doctor to the last was suspicious of Broad Church Theology,” remembered Samuel Snelling?6Brooks described Vinton’s opposition to what he termed “Rationalism” as sharp and sustained, though he added that Vinton “never withheld his friendship and his love from those who were most earnestly in sympathy with” the new teachings?’ But, in his eulogy for Vinton, Brooks argued that his former pastor’s preaching did not represent simply a set of outmoded beliefs against which Brooks and his contemporaries rebelled. Vinton’s message apparently opened the door to a new sort of religious thought. As young men, Brooks and others drank in the emphasis on feeling and emotional conversion that underlay Vinton’s message. Or perhaps it was simply Vinton’s openness to new thought, to ideas that other Evangelicals seemed too eager to dismiss out of hand. “Many of us,” Brooks reflected in 1881, “who listened to Dr. Vinton thirty years ago have seen truth differently now from the way in which he showed it to us then, but we have seen it still with eyes that he helped to open.”58

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A BROAD AND SIMPLE DOCTRINE A complete and clear summary of Brooks’s mature theological position is no simple task.He never claimed to be a theologian and, indeed, his attitude toward doctrinal systems from a very young age would seem to have precluded that calling. The influence of Romantic philosophy and literature was too great and of Protestant scholasticism too slight for Brooks to have followed in the wake of an Edwards, a Taylor, or even a Bushnell. Although his essays and addresses are more lucid and logical than many of his sermons, much of his work suffers from a want of logic, explanation, or development. One historian of preaching puts it succinctly: “His mind was not profound, and he often illustrated his subject without explaining it.”59Nevertheless, the following analysis shows how Brooks used his varied sources, clarifies where and how he broke with classical Evangelicalism, and demonstrates how his ideas shaped liberal Protestantism. It was a system that sought to respond in a balanced, measured way to the myriad intellectual and emotional challenges of the last half of the nineteenth century. Brooks’s response redefined the place and authority of scripture and trimmed back the number and revised the meaning of Christianity’s core beliefs, while it embraced the wider culture, a f f i n g a deep faith in its spiritual progress. “We have seen those things,” Brooks observed, “which seemed essential to Christianity again and again shown to be incidental to Christianity. We have seen how absolutely simple Christianity is.”@’

METHODOLOGY In one revealing sermon delivered in 1876,Brooks provided some insight into his mature approach to Christian doctrine and the hermeneutic he employed in attempting to interpret traditional tenets of the faith for his time. He explained that he sought to treat “all the truths and doctrines of Christianity . . . as essential and not arbitrary.” By this he meant that the former “essential” category is rooted in natural processes and stems “from the nature of things themselves,” while the latter “depend on the arbitrium or choice or will of some person.” Religious processes are often incorrectly conceived of as arbitrary but Brooks contended that the crucial Christian tenets are “in the very essence of things” and thus as “natural” as nonreligious phenomenon Brooks appears to have been building on Emerson’s approach in his seminal essay “Nature.” There, Emerson argued that “particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts” and that, accordingly, “Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”62The gradual recognition

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of this basic truth is partly an outgrowth of “the other habits of our age,” remarked Brooks, “with its love of physical science and its study of nature and her laws. But we must not on that account mistrust it.” When one makes this critical distinction, Brooks explained, one “chooses to look at God, not as a fitful omnipotence, . . . but as essential law in whom all things move by moral necessities, which he cannot change, unless He changes himself and is no longer God.”63 Such an approach raises many related questions but rather than follow these out methodically, Brooks instead pointed quickly to how such a distinction would color the interpretation of specific doctrines. For example, the doctrine of “reward and punishment” would now portray the final destination of the wicked as a natural product of their earthly lives: “the necessary results, the inevitable flower, of the goodness or the sin themselves bound up in their very natures, so that they must come where the goodness or the sin has come.” Meanwhile, Brooks saw the “arbitrary” understanding (and here he appeared to have Calvinism in mind) as focusing instead on “the vengeance with which an angry God has lashed the soul that has offended Him.” Brooks furnished other examples but did not, in any systematic way, work out the implications of this hermeneutic for his theology at large. He insisted that this movement toward treating doctrine as “essential” was a very welcome development: “It is a growth, a something to be thankful for, a truer and a larger knowledge, when in the thought of a period or in the thought of an individual, the essential idea preponderates, when holiness is conceived of as rewarding itself by its own necessary development into happiness.”@Yet the implications of such an approach are not merely un-Calvinist but almost Pelagian. In this same sermon, Brooks reevaluated how God forgives individuals; he noted that “the old belief in election made it arbitrary. God called and welcomed and forgave whom He pleased.” But Brooks replied that there was something ‘‘in their very essential being and their necessary relation to each other,” that prompted God and man to be reconciled. “Man’s repentance and God’s forgiveness are like sound and echo,” he c0ncluded.6~

GOD AND SCRIPTURE A QUESTION OF AUTHORITY The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

-Emerson66 Brooks came to conclude that belief in God was not something that humanity had arrived at through some “conscious process” but was in some

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sense “self-born, a direct impulse of the heart of man.”67When individuals follow the chain of causes back, they arrive quickly at the first cause, which must be the product of a personal will. Much of this tracing back is unconscious and much of it is also directed by the particular tradition within which individuals function. Thus everyone is “led to adhere to or react from the witness which this process bears to the existence of God in their own minds.”68 Given the normative authority of Holy Scripture for Protestantism generally and, in particular, its supreme importance for evangelical Protestantism in the nineteenth century, it was critical for Brooks to define a new locus of authority for a new sort of Protestantism. Here, Brooks’s separation of religion from knowledge, emptying Christian belief of propositional truth, is most evident. Brooks contended that through its individual congregations, the Christian Church represents the personal, spiritual presence of Christ. It is this existential presence in particular communities that constitutes the Church, argued Brooks. The traditional parties had often stressed that something more was necessary. The High Churchmen argued that one also needs “a continuous ministry” [i.e., Apostolic Succession] and, significantly, Brooks noted how some Low Church Evangelicals insisted that “the Church must have a verbally inspired Bible.’769 Although Protestants rejected an infallible institution in the form of the medieval Catholic Church in the sixteenth century (and more recently, an infallible Pope as defined by the First Vatican Council of 1870), they are still “haunted,” said Brooks, by a similar infallibility question?O If “Anglican Protestantism” continues to attempt to be like Rome, he argued (either by way of the Anglo-Catholics or that of the Evangelicals), it will be a failure?’ “The general body of Protestants tried to find,” commented Brooks, “infallibility in the Bible until criticism said to them, in tones that they could not mistake, ‘It is not there.”’72 Brooks based his new, pared-down platform for biblical authority on contemporary higher critical ideas regarding the Bible’s divine inspiration and its accuracy and reliabilit~?~ For instance, Brooks taught his parishioners in an adult class at Trinity that divine revelation was not identical to or coterminus with the canonical scriptures.God’s revelation of himself comes definitively only in the person of Jesus Christ. “The real exhibition of God must be through human life. Books may record that, but their real value is what they record.”74Thus for Brooks, the Bible became not in and of itself God’s revelation but an inspiring but fallible record of God’s unique revelation in Christ. Brooks thereby drew away from the language of Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles that referred to the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments as “God’s word written.” Indeed, echoing

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Channing and others, Brooks took care to set apart what he termed “the story of a revelation, more properly than a revelation itself.”75 Brooks’s approach contrasted sharply with an earlier statement on the subject by a leading evangelical bishop that had received the endorsement of the House of Bishops in 1865. Then, Bishop Charles P. McIlvaine had written (referring to Anglican Article 20): God’s Word is not merely contained in the Scriptures somewhere, but in the Scriptures everywhere; not merely that by his Inspiration parts of Scripture were given, leaving us to say what parts; but that all that belongs to holy Scriptures was so given. This is Plenary Inspiration, in full sense of the words, as opposed to partial. . . . In calling all Scripture “God’s Word written,” she [i.e., the church] gives its inspiration the sense of a supernatural gift of God. l6

Brooks’s stance appears to go beyond even the moderate position of the neoorthodox theologians of the early twentieth century. Karl Barth and others were fond of arguing that the Bible was not identical to the word of God but that it nonetheless contained the word of God. Yet Brooks did not here argue that the canonical scriptures contained all or a portion of God’s actual revelation but rather that they constituted a secondary record of or story about divine revelation to the extent to which they talked about and pointed to that revelation (i.e., to Christ). Nor did Brooks shrink from the force of this important diminution, commenting, “So the Revelation lies behind the Bible, and the Bible is to the Revelation like the sunshine to the sun.”77 Hence, revelation was both more and less than the Bible. Although Brooks always taught that God’s definitive self-disclosure came in the person of Jesus Christ, he was not reluctant to speak about divine revelation in broader terms. Brooks praised Maurice in part because “Revelation became to him not the sending and receiving of a message now and then, but the shining of a perpetual sun. [For Maurice] all History, all Life was R e v e l a t i ~ n . ”Such ~ ~ an approach was rooted in the emphasis on the immanent (rather than the transcendent) that was characteristic of theological liberals during the late nineteenth ~entury.7~ In a journal he kept during a visit to Germany in 1882, Brooks developed a doctrine of revelation that was decidedly man-centered. Human beings arrived at “the Idea of God” primarily through an “examination” of the self. Though this process “is often not called a Revelation,” it is, in fact, the “first revelation,” declared Brooks. “God’s first revelation of Himself must be in human nature itself. All other kinds of revelation would be useless unless this lay behind them all.” Such an approach bore the stamp of Coleridge’s thinking; it was

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Coleridge who had insisted that “All revelation is ub intru [from within] Connected to this internal revelation is some sort of “communication” from or disclosure by God, and Brooks notes (with the air of a professor in comparative religion) that this has historically taken “form in the belief in Visions , Oracles, divinely written Bibles .” Brooks therefore placed the Christian doctrine of revelation within its wider anthropological context and highlighted its locus in human nature. Nevertheless, he added that these different aspects of revelation, and especially the one that was grounded on the “sacred man” who reveals God, all come to their “completeness in Christianity.”8’ All of which meant a different understanding of biblical inspiration was required. Drawing further away from the Old Princeton approach that he had probably first encountered at Virginia Seminary, Brooks suggested his parishioners leave behind them “the old theories of verbal and plenary inspiration.” In their place, he sketched something considerably more limited. Although he spoke elsewhere of Scripture’s inspiration in more lofty terms, Brooks took a decidedly naturalistic tack in his adult class at Trinity. Because they were writing about Christ, addressing “a watching world,” and were writing with “a deep sense of responsibility,” the human authors of the New Testament produced a sympathetic and usually reliable account. “All these [considerations] together seem to make a power of accuracy and faithfulness [in the biblical accounts] which is all we could desire. . . . As the result of all[,] we have a noble certainty gathering about the precious story.” Brooks takes pains to clarify that such an inspiration (no longer uniquely miraculous, apparently) does not imply inerrancy as traditionally understood. “Does it involve unerring accuracy? Answer, ‘No.’ Still, in the historic record there may be misstatements of detail. And in the Apostolic development there may be wrong anticipations (like the anticipation of the end of the world), but yet the picture is true.”82In private, Brooks could be more pointed on this subject. Writing to one of his brothers at about the same time, Brooks attacked the biblicism of conservative Protestants. Brooks there bewailed “the mischief which must come from the obstinate dishonesty of men who refuse to recognize any of the new light which has been thrown upon the Bible, and go on repeating assertions about it which, if there is such a thing as proof, have been thoroughly and repeatedly disproved. These are the men whom the church in future must look back upon with reproach, and almost with contempt.”83Although he did not specify whom he had in mind, it is not hard to imagine Princeton biblical inerrantists such as Charles Hodge being Brooks’s primary targets. By 1878, Brooks be-

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lieved that some of the new findings of Higher Critics were established facts: “To very many Christian men to-day,” he remarked in a revealing aside in one sermon, the Bible stands no longer surrounded by that kind of supernatural authority which establishes the truth of every statement in its pages. It has come to seem to many men what it really is, a gathering of many wonderful books from many times,-the time and authorship of some being doubtfu1,which have been brought together because of their common character and their common bearing on one great religious process which runs through the history of man,-the revelation of the Eternal Father to mankind in Jesus Christ.

The implications of this new view were clear to Brooks: “such knowledge of the nature of the Bible must set the mind free for a treatment of it and a study of its contents such as has not always been possible. . . .The world will never go back again to the old ideas of verbal in~piration.”~~ Having revised substantially the traditional understanding of the Bible’s divine inspiration and unique authority, Brooks was thrown back upon the general question of authority within the church. For the purpose of argument in one address, he defined authority negatively as that power that seeks to enforce in a concerted way correct belief within the church. Following Maurice and employing some of the English cleric’s terminology, Brooks began with an attack on John Henry Newman’s formulation of the problem. Quoting Newman’s argument in favor of the Roman Catholic understanding of authority over the Anglican, Brooks commented that these were “words which never could have been written by any man except one who judged a church wholly by the standard of authority. They mean that he who has been seeking for a Church has sought a body clothed with the power of infallibly declaring what is true.”85But, explained Brooks, “the principle of authority not merely emphasizes . . . [the] fixity . . . [of certain core beliefs] but insists also that the mind of man must stand in an ever-fixed relation to them.”86He termed this “the dogma of authority.” Brooks agreed with his orthodox opponents that such a “dogma of authority is meaningless unless it involves a practical infallibilit~.”~~ In other words, a particular source of authority must be acknowledged as infallible and this acknowledgment must take institutional form in order for the church to truly exercise authority. As Brooks framed things, there were only two, very different, alternatives for those who valued a traditional model of authority in the church-a Tridentine ecclesiology with its infallible teaching authority (a Magisterium replete with Inquisition) or a benighted Protestantism built upon a naive biblicism.

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Striking here in Brooks’s essay was the absence of any real consideration of the sort of middle ground represented by the Magisterial Reformation. There appeared, for example, no place within Brooks’s schema for Protestant confessionalism, either of the Lutheran or Reformed variety. But then Broad Churchmen in England had supported a weakening of the subscription formula for the Articles and in America, clergy had never had to subscribe explicitly to the Articles of Religion per se. Having untethered themselves from the one Reformation formulary that came closest to being Anglicanism’s confessional statement, the options for Brooks and his allies were wide open. Elsewhere in an earlier address, Brooks had dismissed such confessionalism as “the hard method of the hard sort of Protestantism,” and concluded that it was “passing away” for it was the “method of the dogmatist.”88 Indeed, in one sermon outline, Brooks seemed to equate a concern for religious dogma with bigotry. The two appeared to be synonymous in his mind. Whether it was “Roman or Puritan,” Brooks stressed “the evils of bigotry” and how it was “always on the verge of Phari~eeism.”~~ Perhaps even more notable for an Anglican, Brooks made no reference in his argument to the great seventeenthcentury theologian of authority, Richard Hooker. It was common to invoke Hooker’s metaphor of the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in such a context. Like Calvin, Hooker understood the Bible’s authority as supreme and indeed saw the Bible as correcting those church traditions incompatible with its clear teaching, but he did not simply dismiss reason or ancient tradition. The latter two sources of authority carried a certain weight when their teaching was consistent with Holy Writ?O For Hooker, such a godly tradition was represented by the Thirty-NineArticles; for the Lutherans, the Augsburg Confession; and for the Presbyterians, the Westminster Standards. Such confessional systems were understood as secondary, standing under Scripture and subject to biblical correction but authoritative in this circumscribed way. Although Brooks did not state so unequivocally, his stark model implied that all attempts to exercise virtually any sort of ecclesiastical authority as traditionally understood would degenerate into an authoritarianism of one sort or another. Having cut himself loose from both a medieval and a Refonnational understanding of ecclesiastical authority, Brooks forged ahead to embrace the sovereignty of the individual conscience.“In the conscience,” he wrote, “not in authority, must be the final warrant of all Christian truth.”9’Without an infallible church or an inerrant Bible, Brooks asked: “Then what remains? I answer Individualism. Let us not fear that name of which some people have such terror.”92Individual private judgment had long been celebrated within Protestantism, and Brooks believed it all the more important to do so in his

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own era. After all, while authority had tended “to kill enterprise; to cultivate sophistry; [and] to perpetuate error,” Brooks argued that “the principle of conscience, . . . recognizes and values the element of ever-advancing humanity, and in its ripening power expects, not new truth, but new knowledge of truth, to be emerging from the sea of ignorance forever.”93Hence his concern for freeing the individual conscience is linked to Brooks’s deep faith in human progress and in basic human goodness. Yet Brooks was not a Quaker but an Episcopalian who valued order and nursed a certain respect for tradition. Those English Broad Churchmen he most admired functioned within an established church and many defended establishment and esteemed many of its ancient traditions. Consequently, he often drew back from the anarchic implications of his antiauthoritarian rhetoric. One conservative Catholic commentator recognized this tension. Commenting on A. V. G. Allen’s recently published The Continuity of Christian Thought, the anonymous reviewer noted that Broad Church theologians needed to “first settle the question of the compatibility of outward authority and inner liberty.”” When locating authority entirely within the individual conscience appeared impractical, Brooks could sound almost like a Tridentine Roman Catholic. He implied that the governing structures of the church could provide the necessary order. Not unlike the medieval Catholic position, Brooks’s view was tied to his refusal to restrict revelation to the Bible. But his was not a view that tied revelation to sacred tradition as interpreted by a magisterium (the approach favored by Roman Catholics) or bishops who exercise apostolic authority (the position of the Tractarians). Christ’s words to the contemporary church should be considered as authoritative as the witness of the New Testament.” Yet Brooks was vague about the exact institutional locus of this authority. Perhaps church-governing bodies, such as the General Convention, could help their membership discern the Lord’s word for today. “Whatever the Church is and does is an utterance of Him and what He here and now is to her. All raking in the ashes of the past is done with.”96 Ironically, Brooks was compelled to argue for a sort of institutional authority but in strongly antitraditional terms. “The religion of Christ,” Brooks declared, “is to her [i.e., to the Church] not a reminiscence but an experience and a prophecy. . . . That Church does not remember him [i.e., Christ]. It feels him.”97Liberated from both a stultifying traditionalism and a restrictive biblicism, the Christian Church could find its progressive and prophetic voice. Yet Brooks did not ask how such an approach would keep the church from simply echoing the voice of the wider culture; his immanentist theology and confidence in progress kept him from taking that danger very seriously.

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Understanding himself as traditional with regard to essential matters of faith, Brooks understandably sought to maintain the usefulness of such old-fashioned terms as heresy and orthodoxy. Yet Brooks’s recasting of ecclesiastical and biblical authority raised questions about the continued relevance of such conventional distinctions. Nor was this a fleeting concern of Brooks; his essay entitled “Heresy” was delivered to the Clericus he founded in 1870 and the address “Orthodoxy” was one of his last contributions in 1890?8 Brooks argued for the continued relevance of heresy as an appropriate term, even though there were those who used it too readily. Despite the broader theological platform sought by Brooks and others within Anglicanism and Protestantism at large, there was still such a thing as heresy. He began by quoting Augustine’s definition with approval: “He is a heretic, in my opinion, who for the sake of glory or power, or other secular advantages, either invents or embraces and follows new opinions. But he who believes men of this kind is a man deluded by a certain imagination of truth and piety.”99Augustine took care to distinguish the content of the false teaching from the motive of the teacher. There was a subjective moral side of the question in addition to the objective substance of the allegedly heretical ideas. But Brooks chastised Augustine for not always maintaining this balance; in other parts of Augustine’s work, “the formal is seen pressing upon the moral conception of heresy.”‘”’’Brooks then proceeded to elevate the latter moral element as the sine qua non of heresy. Brooks successfully shifted the terms at the very start of his discussion away from the objective content of belief to the idea of “moral character,” which he identified as the heart of his talk. Heresy “is a subjective thing, an action of the will. Here at the very beginning its moral character is stamped upon it.’”O’ A study of New Testament references helps one identify the chief characteristics of heresy. For one, it involves a break with ideas and thus (unlike schism) not institutions. But most important, it “involves personal and willful obstinacy.” Brooks affirmed that “ the heretic is blamed not because he holds this or that opinion, but because he is conceived to hold it willfully.”’o2Most of the church fathers made the mistake of treating heresy as primarily a doctrinal “error” and thus losing the subjective, ethical thrust that Brooks stressed.lo3Similarly, Brooks excoriated the medieval scholastics and the Council of Trent for their “ecclesiastical notion of heresy” that overlooked this critical moral dimension.Io4 The Reformation began to correct this mistaken medieval approach (Brooks provided no concrete examples of this Protestant correction here), but it was not until the work of the “liberal divines of the Church of England of the seventeenth century” that a proper New Testament balance was restored.Io5And developments within the churches

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since the eighteenth century confirmed for Brooks that purely theological definitions of heresy were all the more out of date. “Unless we hold that all truth has been so perfectly revealed that no honest mind can mistake it (and who can believe that?), the dogmatic conception of heresy fails .”Io6 Brooks’s more traditional brethren might have asked whether one had to hold the first part of his syllogism in order to adhere to “dogmatic conception.” That is, could one not be sincerely and honestly wrong about certain substantive articles of belief? Certainly the history of mainline Protestantism since Brooks talked to his Clericus in 1873 suggests that such nondoctrinal construction of heresy could be a centrifugal force and lead to an ultimately incoherent theological diversity. Whether Brooks’s ideal of a “ true harmony of frankly differing but sympathetic minds” was more suited to a debating society than to a Christian denomination is a legitimate question.lo’ In a sense, what Brooks envisaged here was a sort of Christianized version of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s “community of inquiry.” Peirce described this ideal in an essay published in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877. The “irritation of doubt,” Peirce wrote, “causes a struggle” and this struggle he labeled “Znquiry.”’08For Peirce, “the sole object of inquiry is . . . the settlement of opinion.”109But exactly how various communities have “fixed belief’ has changed over time. Peirce criticized several different methods of fixing belief in his article, including the “method of authority” where institutions are created to “keep correct doctrines.” Like Brooks, Peirce cited the Roman Catholic Church as the prime practitioner of this method and leveled sharp criticism at the persecutions it sanctioned. “Cruelties always accompany this system,” he concluded.IIOBut as with Brooks, Peirce sought to offer instead a new sort of community of inquiry where what was shared was primarily a common method of sincere inquiry. “Above all, let it be considered,” Peirce exhorted, “that what is more wholesome than any particular belief, is integrity of belief; and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.””’ To be sure, Brooks had in mind retaining certain core religious assumptions that Peirce would have jettisoned, but they were struggling with much the same question: how to fix belief without institutional authority but at the same time maintain a kind of community. As Brooks declared: “This is the beauty and value of our Church’s Creed. We all believe it, and no two thinking men hold it alike.”’12Critics continue to debate whether Peirce was any more successful than Brooks in building authentic community on these terms. While there is no evidence of Peirce and Brooks interacting while they both lived in Boston and

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maintained various connections with Harvard, it may not be accidental that Peirce remained a nominal Episcopalian throughout most of his life. Like “pragmaticists” of a sort, Broad Churchmen like Brooks “regarded themselves as essentially a party of inquiry, while others were the parties of authority.”’l 3 Brooks waited until 1890 to address the Clericus with his consideration of the meaning of orthodoxy in the modem moment. In familiar fashion, Brooks prefaced his thoughts by first defining his terms. Truth and orthodoxy have not always been properly distinguished. “Orthodoxy is accepted truth,” he observed, or, more precisely, “truth as accepted and registered by a~thority.””~ Hence orthodoxy ideally should be understood as a smaller circle within the larger circle of truth; Brooks believed that this was, sadly, not always the case. Brooks’s definition was historical and institutional rather than strictly philosophical or theological. Given his presuppositions here, Brooks’s construction of orthodoxy was neither abstract nor absolute but historically and institutionally conditioned. Institutions such as the church could affirm such truths but their affirmations might change over time. Hence such orthodox truths were conditional, encased as they were in time and space. Accordingly, one’s adherence to this sort of orthodoxy would necessarily also be limited. Jude in the New Testament does exhort his readers to “contend for the faith” but Brooks reminded his auditors “that the faith of which Jude speaks is more moral than doctrinal, more personal than ab~tract.””~ Yet Brooks’s reading of Jude was one-sided here. The letter in fact describes enemies within the church who deny the faith both by opposing the community’s shared faith (verse 3) as well as by living evil lives (see verses 4,11,12,16). Jude assumes a truth outside or external to the community and preserving and defending that truth had both cognitive and moral implications. Brooks was sharp in his criticism of orthodoxy as it had come to be understood by theological conservatives within the church. “The indictment which can be sustained against it,” he concluded, “is tremendous.”’I6 Indeed, he believed a restrictive understanding of orthodoxy was “responsible for the large part of the defiant liberalism” that he saw swirling around him at the close of the century both inside and outside the church.”’ This kind of blinkered construction of orthodoxy was primarily “born of fear.” Protestantism was supposed to stand for truth, broadly construed, but it had often come instead to handle truth as “a deposit, fixed and limited.””* As Brooks noted elsewhere, “There must be no lines of orthodoxy inside the lines of truth.”’19 Brooks proceeded then to identify five distinct “ideas and impulses” that have usually been “import[ed] into the preservation of orthodoxy, but

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which have little or no place in the pure search for truth.”120These are: authority, utility, unity, security and fixity.12’The first “is always bad” when it is “a substitute for personal judgment.”122Authority should be understood as a road or a journey and not a fixed, completed structure. Defenders of the faith must recognize “that we now are the authoritative Church as much, nay, more, than the Church of any most revered of the old cent u r i e ~ . ’ ”The ~ ~ second, utility, insists that all truths be immediately useful and practical. But this would exclude much of the work of “the Church’s noblest servants . . . [including] Paul, Origen, Tertullian, Dante, Abelard, Luther, Milton, Coleridge, Maurice, Swedenborg , Martineau.” He asserted that “genius is never orthodox, and genius is a very useful thing, just because it does not set out to be As for unity, it is too often confounded with an “identity of ideas,” rather than a general “sympathy of purpose .”Iz5 Brooks here echoed Maurice’s concern that appreciation for what truth lies in an opponent’s position is the most fruitful way forward. The fourth notion of safety is in reality an attempt to rob “truth of its essential peril.” Seeking after truth is dangerous but this danger should “inspire” rather than “paralyze” the faithful. 26 Finally, there is “the disposition of fixity” within orthodoxy. Some insist on a changelessness that transcends the personal aspect of belief entirely. Truth may be “fixed and absolute” but individuals are not and therefore it is unreasonable to expect perfect doctrinal fixity in the real w0r1d.I~’Brooks came thus to conclude that orthodoxy was a “prejudice”-perhaps a necessary one in the church but safe only if it is treated as a “working hypothesis” among the faithful.128 As the pastor of a large, well-educated, and influential congregation, Brooks wrestled with the pragmatic implications of this new pared-down conception of essential belief. Pruning church dogma would not answer all of the contemporary challenges faced by Christianity. Brooks understood the threat of popular skepticism to be a serious one. The problem, Brooks noted in an essay in the Princeton Review, was “very deep and very broad.” Moreover, it affected both the “untaught people” and “the learned scholar.” Rather than simply seeking to tinker with certain problematic doctrines, this new doubt rejected “the whole body of the Christian faith.” There had always been individuals who have had concerns or difficulties with individual doctrines but that was not the dominant dilemma now, Brooks observed. “It is not the difficulty of this or that doctrine that makes men skeptics to-day. It is rather the play of all life upon the fundamental grounds and general structure of faith.”129As such, the new skepticism promoted a sort of complete “despair” that offered no foundation whatsoever upon which to build a meaningful alternative.

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But therein was an opening for Christian apologists: “Offering men no substitute for the religion which it would destroy, it [i.e., skeptical despair] leaves man’s religious nature unprovided for and hungry, and therefore gives to Christianity the perpetual advantage of human nature, if it can only be large enough to see its chance.”’30Following Coleridge and Maurice closely, Brooks focused on the fundamental religious character of human nature and the spiritual hunger it had always manifested. “Coleridge,” observes Bernard M. G. Reardon, “insisted that what justifies Christianity is man’s own felt need of it.”13’The chief way for Christianity to take “advantage” in the current crisis then was to be “large,” and this end could be achieved by moving away from abstract truth and wielding “the power of truth, . . . in and through character.”13*Brooks reasoned that if the questioning was more generalized and arose not always from intellectual objections to specific doctrines, then “the relief from unbelief must [also] come . . . by the power of life.”’33Put simply, the best approach to unbelief for the pastor “must be in his own manhood, in his character [a key concept for Brooks], in his being such a man, and so apprehending truth himself, that truth through him can come to other men.77134 A key part of the way for preachers to effect this sort of personal impact was to be genuine about their own doubts and beliefs and not to set artificial obstacles to trouble the faith or hobble the intellect of their parishioners. Brooks identified three beliefs that clergy might unnecessarily burden their parishioners with despite their own honest misgivings (notably all three subjects were prominently featured in Essays and Reviews): the “verbal inspiration” of the Bible; “the everlasting punishment of the wicked”; and the creation of the world in “six literal Brooks had heard fellow clergymen express private doubts about certain tenets that they would not share with their congregations or, indeed, that they might continue to require of their congregations. Authenticity in the pulpit was one of Brooks’s major themes and he was concerned to stress that insincere orthodoxy was one of the most disastrous ways to combat the currently prevalent spirit of unbelief. The “need of candor” was among the most important requirements in the contemporary crisis.’36 Brooks took care at this juncture to underscore that he was not here arguing that the preacher must discard every difficult, demanding, or troubling traditional doctrine. Despite his calls elsewhere to lay aside those traditional beliefs that were found to restrict the vision of the church (or perhaps out of anxiety over his outspokenness),Brooks answered with vehemence: “I may have seemed in what I have been saying to fall in with a prevalent demand which asks that when it is so hard for men to believe

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they should be asked to believe just as little as possible. . . . There is no greater mistake, I think, than to suppose that in such days men want to have Christian truth made slight and easy to them.”137But, rather than identify those difficult or demanding doctrines that were essential to Christian belief, Brooks remained vague and shifted the line of his argument. He chose instead to discuss the more general need for zeal and coherence in what was preached. With Robertson, Brooks agreed that the faith should be preached “suggestively” in an attractive and coherent package; and, like Maurice, his key word was unity.138“What we need is not more easiness but more simplicity in the doctrine which we preach, and in our way of preaching it. In other words, it is not a smaller amount of doctrine, but it is a larger unity of doctrine. It is a more profound entrance into the heart of doctrine” that was required.139 In order to elucidate how the preacher could communicate effectively and with appropriate zeal this simple and unified message of Christianity, Brooks returned to his emphasis on the power of personality or what he termed “the personal conception of C h r i ~ t i a n i t y “For ” ~ ~ think a moment,” he reflected, “if it is not true that personality is the only power in which mystery can become real and vital and pra~tical.”’~’ Recalling the apostolic church, Brooks pressed his point further: “ ‘Believe in Me.’ That always is the faith of the gospels. They had no creed but Christ. Christ was their creed. And it is the glory of the earliest church that it had for its people no demanded creed of abstract doctrine what~oever.”’~~ Yet Brooks was not unconcerned about the more focused, intellectual sort of skepticism that, along with the popular religious doubt, so affected his time. Once again, Brooks’s interpretation was characteristically optimistic, even sanguine. He showed in his reading of two recent works by John Fiske and Francis E. Abbot his usual reluctance to probe the philosophical or theological presuppositions that fueled the arguments of radical thinkers and, significantly, settled instead on considering only “the results to which the books Indeed, in a revealing aside, Brooks actually contended that the “processes” of these two thinkers “are of small Furthermore, his choice of metaphor at the start of his paper confirms this portrait of Brooks as a theological innovator but one concerned to retain those aspects of tradition that continue to be evocative. He spoke of the “New Theism” as analogous to the Temple Solomon built for the Israelites. Although the spectacular setting was new, the “sacred vessels which ha[d] made the old tabernacle holy” remained unchanged, though they were now able to benefit from a lustrous new setting.145A new structure of belief was taking form and it was natural for many to be distracted by the new

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system and neglect the old elements. But Brooks believed it was crucial to conserve many of the old essentials even if they would soon take their place in this new, less familiar setting. Brooks read Fiske and Abbot as returning to a kind of theism from their earlier, more radical positions Christians, Brooks commented, should eagerly welcome back these wandering pilgrims despite where they had been philosophically, or perhaps even because of where they had been (though neither was, in fact, seeking reception into any sort of mainstream Christian body). Christians should show theists of this stripe every ecclesiastical courtesy; and, indeed, those who have not wandered can actually learn a great deal from those who have drifted far from the orthodox stream. Knowingly or not, both freethinkers were bringing back with them from their travels ideas that assumed a sort of theism. Brooks was encouraged that Abbot held that the development of the cosmos was teleological and that he stressed “There is no such thing as an unconscious t e l e ~ l o g y . ”Meanwhile, ’~~ Brooks claimed that Fiske could bring back to the church “the sense of the liveness [sic]of the Nor was this sort of immanentism just the “old pantheism” dressed up. Christians, Brooks contended, had too long harbored “a tendency to separate the Governor from the world.”’49Moreover, traditional Trinitarianism could help keep the appropriate balance here in the minds of Christians and in the faith of the church at large. In this way, Christianity could correct the excesses of the “new theism” articulated by Fiske and Abbot, but Brooks emphasized that both could contribute something important to an emerging, presumably larger truth. This larger truth held “together the personality of God and the divine life in the Perhaps to calm the anxieties of his auditors, Brooks chose a poignant metaphor to symbolize the sort of open-minded adjustment that he was calling upon Christians to make. If in guiding a small child, you bid him “open his hand so that he may get a better hold. . . . All loosening is preparatory to a better tightening by and by.”15’Yet there appears here and elsewhere in Brooks’s thought little consideration of the larger social and cultural context that may affect the church during such a “loosening.” If both the biblical and dogmatic bases of Christianity are substantially redefined, then what non-negotiable core is the community’s hand of faith going to fix its grip more tightly upon? Brooks would have probably replied that the Incarnation constituted the essential core here, but if this dogma is rooted in an essentially subjective argument, without an infallible bible and/or an authoritative confessional standard, could the center

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THE PERSON AND WORK OF CHRIST

For Brooks, the condescension of God in the Incarnation was not chiefly a sign of God’s gracious mercy (though it was certainly that) but, above all, it was the most eloquent divine affirmation of human worth. He believed that the fact that such a thing could happen, that God could take and had taken on human form, served to underline “the essential nearness of humanity to Divinity.”’53Accordingly, we should not be surprised to find echoes of Jesus’ character in the lives of the great “Thinkers, Poets, and Saints,” for in some sense “God is [also] endeavoring to manifest himself’ in these indi~idua1s.l~~ Here Brooks notably did not turn to reexamine the traditional creedal definitions of Christ’s person (as had Channing,Taylor, Bushnell, and others before him) but focused instead on more contemporary issues such as the relation of God’s revelation in Christ to other world religions and the role and historicity of the New Testament mira~1es.l~~ For Brooks, none of this undermined the uniqueness of the Incarnation nor did it repudiate its essentially miraculous character. Because of the centrality of the Incarnation in Brooks’s thought, many readers of his work have argued for his fundamental orthodoxy and in some respects they are correct; Brooks was unsympathetic to radical higher criticism and those practitioners of the New Theology who sought only to tear down, rather than propose a positive reconstruction. But Brooks’s conservative temperament has misled some scholars. Although the Incarnation was central to his message, Brooks’s Christology represented a considerable departure from the orthodox mainstream. More than once, Brooks argued explicitly for the presence of humanity within the Godhead from the beginning, not as some abstract idea but as a genuine human element as always part of God himself. For Brooks, “this life I now live was part and parcel of the everlasting Godhead . . . the peculiar glory of one of the persons of that Godhead that he has worn forever.”’56While he defended with passion the divinity of Christ against Unitarian views or the more radical contemporary theologians, Brooks understood the divinity of Christ’s person as not unalloyed but actually fused to “an uncreated humanity.”I5’ Typically, he never really followed out the logic of this suggestive idea in a systematic way. He did not explore how humanity (which had always been understood as creaturely by definition) could be in any fundamental sense “uncreated .” Certainly, Brooks’s reading here raised a host of questions for those who subscribed to the traditional definitions of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Given this portrait of humanity’s place within the Trinity, would not God be somehow incomplete until the actual creation of human beings? Some might view this interpretation as constituting a sort of

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bridge to pantheism. Confounding the creator with his creatures, some feared, would break with the sharp distinction commonly drawn in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Brooks was well aware of this concern. He reassured readers in one essay (in terms that theological conservatives probably did not find particularly comforting): “The New Testament is always just on the brink of pantheism,” saved only by its focus on “the intense personality of Jesus,” and by its moralism.’58Furthermore, would not humanity have been but a weak, partial humanity before Christ actually became man? The faithful of the Old Testament would not have been fully human under such a dispensation. Or can one really speak of Christ becoming man when he had already been substantially human from eternity? These and other questions Brooks left largely unanswered as his preaching and writing showed a consistent preference for analogy over argument and evocative phrases over sustained logical analysis. It was an approach he had encountered both in the Romantic literature he had read since his youth and in the Romantic theology he had studied. This focus on the Incarnation represented an important departure from the characteristic evangelical spotlight on the work of Christ and in particular on his atoning death on the cross. The larger significance of this shift was not lost to some conservative Evangelicals. It was, commented Charles McIlvaine, a question of proportion. “Indeed, everything revealed concerning Him [i.e., Christ] may at times be found in our teaching without error,” observed McIlvaine, “and in each particular, as it stands by itself, without serious defect. But there may be still an important deficiency. The proportion oftruth may not be kept. There is a proportion of parts in the whole body of Gospel truth just as in our own bodies. We must omit none of the parts, but put each in its right relation to all the rest.” Such an imbalanced or disproportionate emphasis on the Incarnation was a prime example of such an error, according to the Bishop of Ohio. You may preach the incarnation of Christ in all its truth as a separate event, and yet in great error as regards its relation to other events, making it so unduly prominent that His death shall be made to appear comparatively subordinate and unessential,- the means exalted above the end,the preparation of the body of Christ for sacrifice being made of more importance and more effective in our salvation, than His offering of that body on the cross.159

Again, it was a sometimes subtle matter of relative emphasis; Brooks never ignored the atonement and comfortably spoke of Christ’s death being a sacrifice for sin. Indeed, his focus on the incarnation may have, in fact, served to reassure his more traditional hearers that, despite his ecu-

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menical actions, there was no latent Unitarianism in the great preacher’s theological system. Brooks’s construction of the person of Christ would inevitably have a profound impact on his understanding of Christ’s office and work. Given this central place of humanity within the Godhead, redemption had to be redefined. It therefore became for Brooks, “the perfection of humanity on its own human lines.”’@’ Rather than being saved from divine wrath, Brooks viewed the process “as,” in John Fox’s words, “the fulfillment and completion of the incomplete life of the first Adam and his seed.”16’Although Brooks appears to have been more eager than Bushnell to retain some of the traditional terminology, his mature understanding of the atonement appears to owe much to Bushnell’s controversial interpretation. Brooks argued that suffering and reconciliation were both the logical “results” of the Incarnation.’62But sacrifice was also “an essential element” and represented “the fulfillment of human life.” Jesus’ atonement can be said to have been vicarious because it made “morally possible for us the same consecration and fulfillment of it [i.e., of human life] that he achieved.”’63Brooks was clearly following Bushnell here. “What we call his redemption of mankind,” Bushnell had argued, “must bring them [i.e., Jesus’ followers] to the common standard. Executed by vicarious sacrifice in himself, it must also be issued in vicarious sacrifice in them.”’@Therefore, this “Vicariousnessof Jesus” is echoed and illustrated in the lives of men in whom God is working and who seek to show others how to be reconciled to God. Thus the cross is exemplary more than it is really propitiatory; it is a call to Christians to take up a life of altruistic service and suffering for others, rather than meeting the demands of God’s justice. Yet what may be most striking about Brooks’s interpretation of Christ’s work and its application to humanity is his neglect of the cardinal doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone. One conservative Presbyterian critic wrote emphatically shortly after Brooks’s death: “Of the other hemisphere of salvation, that vast continent of grace across which is written Justification, he seems as ignorant as Europe was of America before ColumWhat is almost entirely absent from Brooks’s sermons is a treatment of exactly how a guilty sinner is reckoned righteous by a gracious God. Gone is the forensic language of the Apostle Paul or of the major sixteenth-century Reformers. The Continental Reformers as well as their English counterparts (Cranmer and, later, Richard Hooker) believed that the correct understanding of the Pauline teaching on this subject was the heart of their message and the doctrine upon which the church stood or fell. Like Calvin and Luther, the Anglican formularies taught that the perfect righteousness of Christ was applied or imputed to the repentant believer and that this perfect righteousness was the sole foundation of being accounted righteous before a holy God and it

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was received solely by the “instrumentum” of faith that was itself a free gift.’% The absence of this subject (and of this classical Protestant understanding of it) is all the more remarkable since Brooks would certainly have been schooled in this formula at Virginia Seminary.’67Not that Brooks neglected the importance of faith; his sermons are replete with discussions of faith and its overall significance. But virtually none treat its peculiar role in justification. Consequently, Brooks sometimes slid easily into language that sounded more Pelagian than Augustinian or Pauline: “You cannot be wholly free from sin until you cease from sin. No taking away of penalties can free you. No, God will give you a new heart if you will be obedient to Him.”’68 Thus regeneration sounds like something earned through obedient behavior. The British monk Pelagius had argued that believers cooperated with God to achieve salvation, while Augustine took pains to emphasize that redemption was a divine work of grace from start to finish. For Brooks, the regenerated heart appeared, at least in this passage, to be a product of the believer’s obedience. One can see why some of Brooks’s evangelical parishioners might have seen his slant as reflecting a covenant of works rather than of grace.’69 In light of the foregoing, it is difficult to agree with those (Allen among them) who contend “that in his presentation of the Atonement Brooks reflected the attitude and spirit of the Anglican Church, with whose formularies he was in full ~ympathy.””~ It is, of course true that Anglicanism’s Reformation formularies do not require church members to accept every tenet of, say, Anselm’s classic interpretation of the atonement. Nevertheless, the Prayer Book, the Articles of Religion, and the two Books of Homilies all teach explicitly the propitiatory character of Christ’s atoning death, that it satisfied the righteous justice of God. The eucharistic prayer of the Prayer Book communion office (that Brooks would have prayed nearly every Sunday at one service or another at Trinity) makes this explicit in its reference to Christ’s “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” Similarly,Article 11 affirms that “we are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not of our own works or deservings” and then points the faithful to Cranmer’s “Homily of Justification” as an authoritative exposition of this core tea~hing.’~’

HUMAN NATURE Brooks’s view of human nature and sin, one recognizes, were both firmly rooted in his Christology. For one who stressed the divinity of humanity, it was difficult for human alienation from God to be so profound as to

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obliterate what Brooks termed “the nativeness [sic] of righteousness to man.’’172In a perceptive essay published a few years after Brooks’s death, Edward Abbott (a former Congregationalist minister and editor who had been received into the Episcopal Church in 1879) contended that Brooks built his theology upon what Abbott viewed as a deficient “view of sin and guilt and of the condition of man by nature.”’73Brooks cited one of the seminal works of the Broad Church movement, John R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865), approvingly as teaching “the grand universal figure which declares that man is the child of God.”174Such an emphasis on the universal fatherhood of God served, Brooks believed, to clarify both positive and negative truths about humanity and its state in relation to its creator. Positively, it proclaimed “the truth of the essential, intrinsic nobility of human life.’’’75With regard to human fallenness, it illuminated how sin was really “an invasion of man’s nature, something foreign to him, that he should be base and mean and low and sordid and Hence the Fall in Brooks’s teaching became a sad break in fellowship between the human and the divine but did not radically change human nature. Brooks’s picture of human fallenness (and of its companion, human ability) was therefore decidedly sunnier than that of Edwards or even of the New England school that followed him but also cheerier than that of contemporaries less firmly in the Calvinist camp and more influenced by Arminianism such as D. L. Moody. Brooks followed Coleridge, who argued that in their doctrine of total depravity, Calvinists overstated “the diseased weakness into an absolute privation of all freedom.”177His framing of the doctrine of original sin accordingly struck some of the orthodox as half-hearted and vague. Brooks rejected explicitly the imputation of Adam’s sin to all humanity and settled on something considerably less concrete: “Original sin means some sort of tendency or possibility of sinfulness. I take it to express nothing more than something vague and indefinite.”’78For Brooks, it was simply the natural tendency to make wrong choices. Nor was it always clear that Brooks was actually rejecting Calvinism on this point or some popular misrepresentation of it. Some conservative Evangelicals recognized the distortion. One reporter for the Congregationalist Christian Zntelligencer described this feature of Brooks’s theology as “a fly . . . in the ointment.” Commenting on a sermon by Brooks in the early seventies, the reporter fumed: He went out of his way to say, “I don’t believe in total depravity,” and then added that he believed there was something good in all men, giving the impression to those who did not know better that the doctrine known as “total depravity” embraced the view that every man is as bad as he can be, or is

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utterly destitute ofwhat is good. Of course all liberals delight in such statements or caricatures, and then quote them as proof of the effect of their liberalism in modifying evangelical doctrines. Mr. Brooks ought to know just what total depravity as a theological doctrine involves, and while the term is confessedly objectionable as now interpreted, yet, like many legal and medical terms, can be explained. 179

Accordingly, Brooks’s grasp of the larger significance of the moral law also seems to have been weak, at least by classic Protestant confessional standards. There was little discussion in Brooks’s sermons or essays of humankind as violators of the moral law and thus subject to the dire consequences meted out by God. Divine punishment of transgressors was rarely explored or highlighted. Indeed, one could argue that such a diluted view of the Law and of divine wrath against lawbreakers removes the need for the sort of legal justification celebrated by the Reformers and most of their followers.180Abbott highlighted the critical connections between Brooks’s anthropology and his soteriology while he contrasted Brooks’s stance with that of his critics: Some of us may not think that he always shows the Cross or the Saviour who hangs upon it in as strong a light as he would have done had he held a different view of sin and guilt and of the condition of man by nature, and had depicted Redemption against that dark background of depravity and condemnation which seems to find its indictment in Scripture and its evidence in human life, and of which he makes so little.’*’ Brooks sought to clarify that his zeal for humankind was not founded on Enlightenment optimism but was “based upon the conviction which Christ implanted, that every man is the child of God.”182Speaking to a Boston meeting of (significantly) the Evangelical Alliance in 1889, Brooks addressed “The Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity.” Here, Brooks explained that he was attempting to stake out a via media between Jonathan Edwards’s classical Reformed understanding of total depravity and William Ellery Channing’s celebration “of the purity and dignity of human nature.”183Yet one is left with the clear impression that Brooks’s main target was a perceived denigration of humanity he found in some evangelical preaching. Brooks caricatured the traditional Calvinist position in one popular sermon when he referred to man as more properly “a son of God on whom the Devil has laid his hand, not a child of the Devil whom God is trying to “We have feared,” Brooks remarked to his evangelical audience, “that man should be a traitor to God . . . [yet] there is a vast danger lest man be a traitor to man.” That Brooks’s para-

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mount concern was the latter danger is confirmed by his invocation of Romantic poetry at this juncture, rather than the Bible. Brooks pressed his central point by quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lines: “This age shows, to my thinking, still more infidels to Adam/Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God.”’85Closing with an exhortation, Brooks demonstrated clearly the connection between his humanism and his faith in social improvement: “Fill yourselves with the enthusiasm for humanity,” he pleaded. “Believe in man because you believe in God. Believe in yourselves and reverence your own human nature; it is the only salvation from brutal vice and every false belief.”186 His faith in social progress was rooted, then, in his distinctive view of human nature but it also grew out of Brooks’s tendency to identify AngloAmerican Protestant culture with the kingdom of God. Many of Brooks’s fellow theological liberals also took this path. As Richard W. Fox puts it aptly, under the leadership of mainline Protestantism, “American secularization [wlas itself a religious Many religious institutions of the Gilded Age actually promoted a new secular culture as they “suspended the suspicion” that had characterized the “old Calvinist gospel” and embraced a broader, more inclusive and eclectic theological and cultural vision.lS8 In addressing the Evangelical Alliance in 1889, Brooks gave eloquent expression to these assumptions: “We live in the completest [sic] theatre of God’s work. We are Americans. I do not know how any man can be a Christian and an American and despair.”’89 At least two important presuppositions were recognizably at work here-one that identified Christ’s kingdom with key developments within American culture at large and a related general faith in social and moral progress. Like many of his fellow liberals, Brooks’s faith in progress was deep and wide. From such a vantage point, the new theology was “not,” declared Brooks, “a thing to fear. If man is really growing nearer to and not farther away from God, every advancing age must have a new theol~ g y . ’ ’After ’ ~ ~ all, mused Brooks, “at what point in history [does] the development of truth” stop?’” Coleridge had believed that humanity was steadily progressing. For Coleridge, “Progress was . . . a law of life. In religion, as in other things, this progress was e ~ s e n t i a l . ” ’ ~ ~

CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOR From several related paths, Brooks’s theology naturally converged on the grounds of moralism. For Brooks, morality was central to the core message of the Christian faith.’93 Brooks, for example, praised Maurice in

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revealing terms: “There has been no great teacher of mankind in whose nature have not met the mystic and the moralist, the seeker after most transcendent truth, and the enforcer of most practical duty. And mystic and moralist never came to more harmonious and perfect meeting than in As James Turner and others have observed, the transition within nineteenth-century Protestantism from the transcendent to the immanent convinced many that religion was ultimately about right behavior, rather than correct belief Moreover, the displacement of propositional content in Christianity by feeling also facilitated this shift to moralism. Finally, the softening of the Fall and of the concomitant doctrine of original sin was both a product of these changes and itself another reason for this embrace of moralism. The understanding of religious faith as preeminently moral duty defined Brooks’s theological thinking from his earliest days. In an 1858 seminary notebook, Brooks quoted with approval Kant’s definition of religion as “the acknowledgment of our duties as divine cornrnand~.”‘~~ By the 1880s, he was if anything more convinced that the development of moral character was the essence of Christianity. The “great characteristic” of God’s revelation in Christ, claimed Brooks, was “that it is positive and not negative.” Brooks explained that “the Idea of Jesus is of a true personal moral life for every man, which belongs to every man as the son of God, to which by his deepest nature every man tends, from which sin hinders him, into which he is to be set free.”197“This personality of Christianity,” he argued, “ is involved in the fact of its being a moral religion, and not a system of ideas or a condition of feeling. It is in moral life, in responsibility and duty, in personal attainment of character and personal suffering for sin, that personality becomes clear.”’98 Brooks was keenly aware that Evangelicals had been fond of inveighing against any reduction of the Gospel to mere morality. We must not “forget here,” noted Brooks in the Princeton Review,“the deep and essential connection between religion and morality. The day is past when they could be set in unnatural hostility. Like soul and body they belong together.”’99Upon reading “in a religious paper” during a European trip that one must distinguish the Gospel from ethical systems, Brooks responded in a notebook: “Do we, then, want to difSeerence the gospel from the ethical systems of the human soul? Is the impulse which makes us want to do so the highest impulse of the soul? Is there not yet a higher and truer impulse whereby we may rejoice to see the gospel sweep into itself all of man’s moral effort?”200 Accordingly, in some of his later writings, a gospel of unmerited divine grace seemed displaced by human moral striving.2O’ The embrace of moralism was also linked to the above noted

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diminution of doctrine. Abstract theological speculation had to give way to the moral outcome of particular beliefs. “I think it is,” commented Brooks, “in the exhibition of their moral consequences and connections far more than in the discovery of their abstract truth or falsehood, or their proof or disproof from the Bible, that doctrines today must be established or refuted in the eyes of men.”2o2 Furthermore, one recognizes in the preceding quotations that Brooks’s moralism was closely connected to his celebration of the power of character. In the antebellum era, thinkers such as Bushnell had criticized American individualism, fearful of the socially disruptive, fragmenting forces unleashed by the Second Great Awakening. As Richard W. Fox observes perceptively, Bushnell sought to “cultivate gradually blossoming organic character, not explosive, centrifugal, atomistic personality. A well-balanced society, in Bushnell’s still classical and ultimately static vision, depended upon wellbalanced Fox notes, however, that by the 1870s, the concern of preachers such as Henry Ward Reecher appeared to have shifted from Bushnell’s particular fear to a different distress regarding “a dessicated formalism that banished feeling and emotion. There was too much head, he decided, and too little heart . . . for Beecher character could be sustained in the modern era only by cultivation and spread of personality.”204This transition was a critical one for liberal Protestantism as it emerged during the Gilded Age. Brooks appears to have entered this discourse at a point somewhere midway between Bushnell and Beecher. “Christ’s whole conception of life is Personal ,” Brooks declared but “that personality becomes clear” through “responsibility and duty,” that is, through the cultivation of individual character.205In this regard, Brooks was following one of his favorite English Broad Church preachers, F. W. Robertson. In a confirmation class catechism he composed, Robertson explained that “what we believe becomes our character, forms part of us, and character is salvation or damnation; what we are, that is, our heaven or our heZZ.”206It was Brooks’s penchant for constructing religion as almost exclusively a pragmatic moral code that prompted this emphasis on character. “Every change of religious thought,” he once observed, “ought to justify itself by a deepened and extended morality.” One must ask “every new form of religious thinking . . . ‘Can you make men better men?”’207If morality was the test of authentic religion, an obedient will was the heart of what Brooks termed character. Preaching to Harvard students in 1884, Brooks explained the crucial connection: There can be no character without will. Fill a man with every kind of knowledge, let him understand the sky and the earth and the sea, let him know all

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that history and all that metaphysics can tell him, that does not make him [sic] character. Those things may all lie in his mind as the apples lie in the basket. Not till a will, a choice, a distinct preference for one thing over another, a distinct approval of this and disapproval of that comes in, not until then has the man any true character.”20R

As morality was the test of true religion, so character was the central goal of religious belief. One of Brooks’s last public addresses contained a paean to personal moral character: “Character and character only, is the thing that is eternally powerful in this world. Character is the divinest thing on earth. It is the one thing that you can put it into the shop or into the study and be sure that the fire is going to burn. Character now, and character forever!”*09 Indeed it was character that represented the most effective way to counter what Brooks termed the “popular skepticism” of his day. Brooks argued that in the minister’s “own manhood, in his character” could clergy find the best counter to the prevailing spirit of unbelief .210 This understanding of character and its critical importance defined liberal Protestantism by the turn of the century. Younger churchmen who had been inspired by Brooks continued his approach. William Lawrence (who was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts in October 1893 following Brooks’s sudden death and was a grandson of Boston merchant William Appleton) often affirmed with apparent satisfaction that he was “no theologian.” Cleveland Amory relates a revealing anecdote about the elderly Lawrence: Once asked by a grandson what to say in a speech the boy was to make on a philosophical subject, the Bishop who, even in his ninety-second year, always began his speeches “with a squaring of the shoulders,” wrote the boy nothing of philosophy but a stern line about posture: “Collect yourself with the thought, ‘Am I standing firmly, easily and naturally?’ for if you are not firm on your feet your audience will feel it and think that what you have to say is weak.”2”

Character and authenticity had eclipsed content; the messenger’s posture had become as important as his propositions. Two critical concerns of the increasingly important Anglo-Catholic movement, vis-&-,is the nature of the church and the nature and importance of the sacraments, held little interest for Brooks and he spoke about them comparatively little. It was in these two areas that Brooks remained most faithful to his evangelical roots, yet, even here, Brooks modified the classical evangelical position in significant ways.

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ECCLESIOLOGY In developing his theology of the Christian Church, Brooks often seemed most concerned to repudiate the hierarchical, bishop-centered model put forward by the Tractarians and their American following. One of the central arguments of John Keble’s “Assize Speech” that had marked the beginning of the Oxford movement in 1833 was its distinctive understanding of the church as a divine institution governed by bishops whose authority was derived by successive consecrations stretching back to the Apostles themselves. This doctrine of “Apostolic succession” had come to be viewed as both a distinctive that made the Protestant Episcopal Church different from other Protestant sects, and, with regard to the historic episcopate in general, an important element in ecumenical discussions with other Christian traditions?12 Rather than articulating a precise theological definition of the church, Brooks underscored “two truths about the Church and its people and its ministry that are very simple.”213For one, Brooks believed that the church consisted primarily of its members. He argued that, historically, the emergence of the church as God’s people gathered was very “simple.” “Out of the crowd of disciples comes the Church,” Brooks de~lared.2’~ Accordingly, “the Church exists before the ministry.”215His view of the ministry was therefore functional not ontological. The offices of the church, including that of the Apostles, were purely instrumental: they “are to build the Church, and to declare the Church. They are not to rule the Church, certainly not to be the Church.”216After all, the historical record showed a variety of forms for the Christian ministry. Indeed, Brooks expressed his concern that the Tractarian view of Episcopal authority could undermine the individual’s direct access to Christ and serve to obviate the necessity of this personal relationship that was the true basis of the church. The second truth Brooks sought to emphasize was that the clergy must be primarily the servants of the church. If “the laity are the Church” and the ordained are not its masters, then the role of the ministry must be that of the servant. It was not the responsibility of the clergy to tell the faithful what to believe. Brooks characterized the relationship between the laity and their pastors as one of friendship and solidarity. He imagined that the initiative in doctrinal matters would often come from the pew. The congregation should address its ministers thus: “We think this; help us, 0 servants and friends of ours, to see if it be true.”217Hence the priest and even the bishop were to be friends and companions of their parishioners, not autocrats ruling over them. Significantly, Brooks’s portrait of the church borrowed from secular political paradigms. He pointed to European political history to argue that

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the hierarchical model was out-of-date. Most European monarchs now saw themselves very differently: What is the world learning after all these years except that the governor is the servant of his people? After centuries of tyranny and subjectship,centuries in which the people seemed to exist only by the ruler’s permission, and to have no power of originating thought and action,-everything is changed. In all of civilized Christendom there is no king who dares to claim that he is anything but the people’s servant, that his power came from them, and that their will must lie behind his everywhere.

Unlike the Tractarians, Brooks was not prone to divide the sacred and secular, and when he applied lessons from secular democratic principles to the Church, he constructed a sort of ecclesiastical immanentism that paralleled his theological immanentism. The laity are the Church in the same way that the people are the Republic, explained Brooks. Moreover, in some contexts, Brooks actually argued that the two spheres were identical: “In other words, the Church is simply the Ideal world. A perfect church would be a perfect world. The church is imperfect so long as it is not coterminous with the world.”218

SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY Brooks’s thinking on the sacraments also followed this immanentist and humanistic line. Like his evangelical colleagues, Brooks eschewed High Church sacramentalism but he also moved away from the Gospel-centered focus of the Evangelicals. There is a clear connection between his democratic ecclesiology and his sacramental theology, as Brooks affirmed in some unpublished notes: “The church therefore possesses no real existence or character except those of the men and women who compose it. The sacraments in their largest view are human rites, that is, they indicate the universal facts of humanity.” Within such a system, baptism became essentially the badge of citizenship in the global fellowship of God’s people. As Brooks put it: “Baptism is the declaration of the universal Fact of the Sonship of man to Here, as in other places, Brooks’s language opens the door to a sort of universalism. Membership in Christ’s church is not limited under such a system to some small, predestined elite. It is almost as though all humanity is part of the church in light of its sonship but many have simply not been told about their membership yet. As for the eucharist, Brooks contended that it taught symbolically the “universal fact of man’s dependence upon God for supply of life” but he was less specific

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about how exactly it was connected to Christ’s death on the cross. God’s “giving himself to man found its completest manifestation” in Calvary’s cross and thus the Lord’s Supper is “associated with the death of Jesus,” stated Brooks; but, wary of any neater doctrinal formulation, he did not pursue the connection any further?20

ESCHATOLOGY Finally, Brooks’s treatment of eschatology evidences a humanistic perspective and steers clear of themes that characterized conservative evangelical teaching in the late nineteenth century. He emphasized that death reminded believers of the “individuality” of life because all must face it alone. In his later thinking, Brooks grounded belief in an afterlife less on the teaching of Scripture and more on the historic consensus of humanity on the subject. “Man believes in continued existence because the burden of proof seems to him to be upon the other side and no one has proved that death ends Moreover, Brooks tied his belief in eternal life to his conception of individual personality and its central place within the Christian faith. “According to the strength and clearness of the sense of personality,” Brooks contended, “will be the strength and clearness of men’s belief in Immortality.” Stated simply, heaven for Brooks was “the soul finding its own perfect personality in God.”222Because of the Platonism that he drew from Coleridge, Maurice, and the Romantics, Brooks’s portrait of life eternal was disembodied and his picture of the end times did not emphasize the bodily return of Christ as did Evangelicals increasingly in these years. Indeed, as in other parts of his theology, Brooks’s eschatology was in some respects a reaction against the position championed by many evangelical Episcopalians during Brooks’s formative years as a young clergyman in the 1860s and 1870s. Diana Butler has noted how Episcopal interest in Premillennialism peaked during these years, led by prominent Evangelicals such as Stephen H. Tyng of New York, Richard Newton of Philadelphia, and even Bishop McIlvaine himself ?23 Influenced by John Nelson Darby ’s dispensationalism, Episcopal premillennialists saw a general moral and religious decline around them and believed Christ’s personal return was imminent. It was easy for evangelical Episcopalians to take this dark view regarding societal degeneration. They interpreted their own increasing alienation within their denomination as evidence of a general decline. McIlvaine, for instance, pointed to the advance of both “Rationalism” and “Romish Ritualism” as clear signs of the end times. “In our

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Church of this country,” he commented in 1867, “there is little to encourage, much to alarm. . . . I get no comfort in looking to the future, except as that future is found in the promises of God.”224Moreover, the gradual social and cultural marginalizing of conservative Evangelicals also served to confirm their pessimism about their earthly future. Yet Broad Churchmen like Brooks stood closer to the cultural mainstream and were accordingly less anguished about the eschaton. Part of this difference was probably embedded in Brooks’s optimistic personal disposition, but the divergence also had theological and cultural roots. Brooks’s understanding of the Second Coming was not premillennialist and in this sense he clearly broke with his evangelical brethren. Brooks remained vaguely postmillennialist in his views, although it is difficult to characterize his position because it was never developed systematically. Much of the postmillennialism of antebellum Evangelicals slipped easily into a Whiggish faith in progress after the Civil War. Brooks diverged from Conservative Evangelicals also in the amount of preaching time he spent on the subject. There is remarkably little space devoted to the Second Advent in Brooks’s published sermons. Usually he took care to affirm his belief in the personal return of Christ, though his choice of words left him considerable leeway. In one sermon, Brooks asserted that Christ would return to judge the world: “Clearly the Bible tells of some such time. Clearly there is to be some close to the present state of things and some new dispensation, to begin with some peculiar manifestation of Christ to men.”225While not rejecting the traditional teaching about a personal return of Christ, it was not the centerpiece of Brooks’s message regarding the end times. In the same sermon, he drew away from the Second Coming as conventionally understood and chose to focus instead on the “times in which His presence becomes manifest. Such comings there are several of. Men discuss which of them the text [Matt 25:13] refers to,-whether to the final coming for judgment, the coming to every man at death, or the coming of the Spirit at a man’s conversion. Let us not try to settle which it means, but let us take all three.”226In addition to defining the subject in the broadest possible terms, Brooks also emphasized that the precise time of Jesus’ return was unknown and that was a good thing. Unlike the dispensationalists, Brooks asserted repeatedly that the future was uncertain. Brooks argued in one sermon that this uncertainty promoted hard work and noble aspiration. We know that the material world is temporary, Brooks reflected, but we do not know exactly when it will end and this ignorance is good for civilization. If men knew precisely when they would die then their “character and culture” would stand to “lose ,” he claimed ?27

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Finally, Brooks’s focus in such sermons was on the human experience of the end; it was humanistic rather than Christocentric. The fact that all material things will come to an end reflected for Brooks a characteristic human desire for closure and completion; in one sermon, Brooks provided several illustrations of such limited human ends. The consideration, Brooks commented, that God is the agent who brings about such earthly ends casts a different “light upon it Brooks was ostensibly commenting here on 1 Cor. 15:24, which reads: “Then comes the end, when he [Christ] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.” Yet he pulled out only the first phrase in the verse and used it as a springboard to reflect on the human desire for closure coupled with a longing for things eternal. Brooks then challenged his auditors whether they were holding on to the truly imperishable things: “‘Any passion for character and love of God?’ Those are eternal. There comes no end to Hence a passage that focuses exclusively on Christ’s decisive role in bringing to an end the old material order and establishing the New Jerusalem became in Brooks’s hands another paean to character and moral striving. Brooks spoke conventionally of believers’ solidarity with their Lord’s sufferings, each Christian coming to terms with their individual crosses. But he went a step further, adopting language that most Protestants had traditionally understood as referring solely to the uniquely substitutionary or propitiatory character of Jesus’ death. Even Christ’s last words on the cross could be appropriated by his disciples, he argued. “We who hang upon the cross [may] cry,” declared Brooks, “‘It is finished,’ with a shout of triumph, counting the finishing but a new beginning, and looking out beyond the cross to richer growth in character, and braver and more fruitful service of our Lord!” In some sense, the human had displaced the divine even on Calvary’s cross and even Christ’s supernatural return had, without Brooks ever denying its reality, become subtly humanized. As conservative Evangelicals grew more pessimistic about the state of earthly affairs, Brooks and his circle articulated a liberal Protestantism that evinced a deep faith in social and moral progress. Perhaps this is the most significant difference between Brooks and his former allies. His ebullient optimism about the human future is striking, especially on this side of the twentieth century. Its origins lay in dissimilar conceptions of authority (both biblical and ecclesiastical) and in a different understanding of human nature and the seriousness and scope of the Fall. Brooks, of course, was hardly alone. Across the street from Trinity Church, George A. Gordon of Old South Church (Congregational) preached a similar optimism about human progress that conflated material with moral

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advance.230One of the most prolific and profound critics of liberal Protestantism, Reinhold Niebuhr, understood this latter difference (regarding human nature and the seriousness of the Fall) as the heart of the matter. Niebuhr identified “the traditional Biblical-Christian doctrine of sin . . .[as] a particularly inconvenient interpretation of evil in a culture which believed in the achievement of good through the unlimited extension of all human powers.” In the hands of a gifted preacher like Brooks, the biblical teaching “could,” to use Niebuhr’s words, “be interpreted to mean exactly what modern culture meant” rather than how the community of faith had traditionally understood and expressed it in the church’s historic confes~ions.2~’ Such an approach to sin was a large part of the liberal Protestant project. Certainly Brooks did not advance his views as far as some of his liberal colleagues and successors did, but the process was well under way in his mature theological thinking.

EPILOGUE Phillips Brooks’s preference for traditional evangelical rhetoric and his usually circumspect handling of contentious issues in his Sunday sermons kept the rector of Trinity Church removed from open controversy during most of his public ministry in Boston. One of his more outspoken friends, R. Heber Newton, was not so fortunate,however. Newton was a seminarian and young priest in Philadelphia during Brooks’s tenure there. Although the son of a conservative evangelical Episcopal minister, Newton came to embrace liberal theological opinions. His book The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible (1 883) sought to introduce higher criticism to a popular lay audience. Pointing to his skeptical handling of the Virgin Birth, critics believed that Newton had stepped over the line and they sought, unsuccessfully, to prosecute him for heresy twice. Brooks supported Newton. While he thought Newton’s methods “were perhaps not the best,” he believed his progressive friend was on the right track. As he commented in one letter: “Certainly no mischief he [i.e., Newton] can do can begin to equal the mischief which must come from the obstinate dishonesty of men who refuse to recognize any of the new light which has been thrown upon the Bible, and go on repeating assertions about it which, if there is such a thing as proof, have been thoroughly and repeatedly disproved.”232Later, Brooks wrote Newton a letter of encouragement and invited him to preach at Trinity Church. “You have done very much indeed,” Brooks commented his friend, “to keep the mind of the Church open to the light. Whatever God may have to say to her, you have made it more possible for her to hear.”233

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Given Brooks’s own theological liberalism, some criticism from conservatives both inside and outside of the Episcopal Church inevitably arose, but Episcopal conservatives waited until his election as Bishop of Massachusetts in April 1891 to mount a concerted attack. Significantly, when the attack came, it was spearheaded not by Evangelicals (who by that date had already been reduced to a small beleaguered minority), but by conservative High Church Anglo-Catholics who were becoming an increasingly powerful force within the church at large. Ritualists within the Diocese of Massachusetts were still comparatively few and had received stern treatment under Manton Eastburn’s episcopacy. Since Eastburn’s death, however, Anglo-Catholic parishes such as the Church of the Advent had been largely left alone to adopt Roman Catholic sanctuary decoration and ceremonial. Moreover, Massachusetts’ Anglo-Catholics found support in their opposition to Brooks’s election by some of their High Church brethren who had a stronger presence in other dioceses. The nature of the questions raised about Brooks’s theology in the debate and the ultimate failure of opposition both testify to the transformation of the Episcopal Church since the 1 8 7 0 ~ . 2 ~ ~ Every Episcopal election in the Protestant Episcopal Church had to be confirmed by a majority of diocesan standing committees and, second, by a majority vote in the House of Bishops. The entire process ordinarily took four to six weeks. Almost immediately, objections to his confirmation were raised in letters to sacred and secular newspapers and in assorted pamphlets that sometimes cited anonymous sources. Yet opponents usually did not target Brooks’s doctrine of sin, his moralism, or his liberal understanding of biblical authority and inspiration. Their comparative silence on these subjects makes clear how the theological ground underneath had shifted in twenty years and how even conservative critics shared some of Brooks’s key assumptions. Initially, they zeroed in on what, in the minds of some, distinguished Anglicanism from the myriad of Protestant sects: a Tractarian understanding of apostolic succession. The attention paid to this particular question revealed the significant gains the High Church view had made even outside of Ritualist circles. Like earlier Evangelicals, Brooks believed that the Episcopal form of church polity was a good feature of their particular communion, but he never held that it was essential to the church truly being the church. As many often argued, it was of the bene esse, not of the esse of the church. Yet such a criticism was easy for his defenders to deflect, since there were still enough with Low Church roots in the Episcopal Church who had not adopted this higher view of the episcopacy. Indeed, one bishop who wrote Brooks with sharp concerns about services at Trinity that had included Unitarian

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clergy, noted in a revealing aside, “On the absurd subject of apostolic succession, I entirely agree with The other objections never appear to have attained a critical mass. Critics do appear to have focused first on the subject of apostolic succession but, later, raised more general concerns regarding traditional Christian doctrine. Some were evidently concerned about the bishop-elect’s relationship with Unitarian clergy and his activities with other, nonepiscopally ordained Protestant ministers (in particular, critics pointed to Brooks’s participation in Lyman Abbott’s installation at Henry Beecher’s church in Brooklyn). Some bishops wrote Brooks asking for clarification or reassurances regarding his views on particular subjects. One rumor even alleged that the Nicene Creed was not recited at Trinity Church because of the rector’s theological misgivings (most informed observers knew that this allegation was patently false). At one point, Brooks summed up the objections succinctly: “The opposition has been thoroughly upon the grounds of admitted facts. Nobody has charged me with theft or murder. I do not believe the doctrine of apostolical succession, and I am sure that Lyman Abbott has the right to preach the The bishop-elect’s clerical friends took umbrage at the challenges to his candidacy. Some interpreted the theological row as a sort of modem Inquisition. Their deep affection for their friend and the impatience with dogma that he had helped inculcate produced a response that was occasionally melodramatic. C. A. L. Richards remarked in a letter to Brooks: “We have talked of the [?I old days of party Controversy, as we have talked of the old days of witch trials & torture chambers & complacently patted ourselves on the back & said these things were in the days of our fathers but how we are enlightened & liberalized: What a thing of the past is persecution for opinion! But scratch us a little & the medieval temper comes quickly to the surface.”237What had not long ago been understood as exercising ecclesiastical discipline by enforcing appropriate doctrinal standards was now portrayed by many as pure and simple “persecution for opinion.’’ Brooks’s tactic during the controversy that followed his initial election (as it had been during the less public controversy over his departure from the Evangelical Education Society) was simply not to enter the debate at all?38He wrote privately to some of his questioners that his writings were a matter of public record. He stood behind all of his published works and characterized their teaching as unequivocal; he believed it inappropriate to defend or explain these writings at this late date. His approach may be partly ascribed to a certain Brahmin frostiness and pride. But there was more behind Brooks’s tack in the unsettled waters that were churning

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around his election. Without the bishop-elect’s participation, there really could not be any substantial theological debate at all. By refusing to engage his critics, Brooks made sure that the discussion would center on the person, on his character and not on his doctrine. Some of Brooks’s High Church brethren also appear to have accepted the new paradigm. Writing to the New York Tribune, self-styled High Churchman John Henry Hopkins explained the new rationale: Had I been a member of the Massachusetts convention, I should never, under any circumstances, have voted for Dr. Brooks. But when he had been elected I should have signed his testimonials with pleasure, rejoicing in the elevation of one who is recognized on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as a preacher now without living superior, and whose high-toned life, stainless life is acknowledged by all. As long as any one of our dioceses wants a Broad Church bishop or a Low Church bishop, it has a right to him.

Had celebrity and character now displaced doctrinal considerations? It almost sounded that way, given how Hopkins constructed the situation.That such had not been the approach in the past was implied a few lines later in Hopkins’s letter: “To try now to return to a narrower basis in order to worry the most distinguished bishop-elect whom the American Church has ever known is all Broad Churchman Allen decided that this was in fact the issue at stake dividing Brooks’s supporters and his opponents. The former, concluded Allen in stark terms, held “that the claims of charity or love were higher than those of faith or hope.”240Despite his evident concern to portray Brooks’s position as essentially orthodox, Allen conceded that core matters were at issue in the controversy: “Every one knew and felt, whether they could trace it or not, that Phillips Brooks stood for some momentous issue in the history of Christianity and of religion, that he could not have accomplished his great work had there not been beneath it some profound and far-reaching adjustment of essential principle^."^^' Although some of Brooks’s supporters were growing nervous when no word from the House of Bishops had surfaced as late as early July, a positive verdict was eventually reported. By 10 July, Brooks’s candidacy received the requisite majority among the bishops (fifteen or more bishops actually voted against confirming his election). Despite his tendency to dismiss opposition to his election as groundless, Brooks clearly understood its larger significance for the history of the church. As he wrote to his brother John in the spring of 1891, “It is indeed a pother that is going on, but it has its advantage, that it is bringing the whole matter out into broad daylight, and the decision when it comes will have its full value, and when a distinct Broad Churchman, thoroughly recognized and

proclaimed as such, is made a bishop.””’ Although Brooks had in the past made his own contribution to obscuring such doctrinal and party distinctions, he now felt sufficiently confident of his party’s strength to allow his election to clarify the new face Anglicanism wore at the close of the century.

NOTES 1. Phillips Brooks, “Sermon on the Nature of Church,” Theology Today 12 (1955): 67. This sermon was unpublished in Brooks’s lifetime and was first delivered in Boston in 1886. 2. See, for instance, Phillips Brooks, Serr?ioti.sPt-eciched in English Churches (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1883). 3. Alexander V. G. Allen, Lifi crtid Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 229. Allen contends that Brooks’s emphasis on human reason came from Hooker and Bishop Butler. “There had come to them [Broad Church thinkers] alike an inspiration from Coleridge and from Maurice, from Arnold and from Stanley. They found satisfaction in Kingsley and in Robertson and Bushnell, begetting a new enthusiasm for proclaiming the Gospel of Christ and the kingdom of God. With these writers Phillips Brooks was familiar and in deep sympathy.” Allen, Life crticl Letters of Phillips Brooks. vol. I , 447. He also notes the influence of J. R . Seeley’s Ecce Hotno (1865-an important Broad Church milestone) and, later, H. Lotze. See Allen, Lzje and Letters of Phillips Brooks. vol. 3. 118. Allen reports that “prominent in his [i.e., Brooks’s] study [in Boston] was the portrait of Maurice. . . .There were also marble busts of Coleridge and [Charles] Kingsley. . . . and a smaller bust of [A. p.] Stanley.” Allen, Life ~ r n dLetters of Phillips Brooks. vol. 3. 347. 4. Allen. Lifr ernd Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1. 447. 5. Dennis G. Wigmore-Beddoes, Yesterclrrv ’sRadicals (Cambridge: J. Clarke, 1971). 89. Allen agrees: “There had come to them alike an inspiration from Coleridge and from Maurice. from Arnold and from Stanley.” Allen, Life and Letter.s of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 , 447. 6. Storr and Farrar, quoted by Wigmore-Beddoes, Yesterday ‘s Racliceils. 154 and n17. 7 . See Allen, L;fe uncl Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 347. Horton Davies rightly stresses that the early Broad Church was more a collection of individuals than a coherent “party.” Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961-1975). 2. 8. Jowett, quoted by John R . H. Moorman. A Histot? o f t h e Church in England (London: Adam and Charles Black. 1953). 379. 9. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3. 66 10. Charles R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Chirrch Movetnent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942). 14. Allen also notes the formative influence of

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neo-Platonic thought on the young Phillips Brooks. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. I , 228-29. 1 1 . F. D. Maurice, quoted in Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 244. 12. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3 , 114; Phillips Brooks, “Preface,” in Faith and Action: From the Writings of E D. Maurice (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1886), iv. Chorley asserts that Maurice “profoundly influenced” Brooks. See E. Clowes Chorley, Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 289. 13. Davies, Worship and Theology, 3:287. 14. PB, “Preface,” iii. 15. Welch, Protestant Thought, 246. 16. F. D. Maurice, quoted in Welch, Protestant Thought, 247. 17. Maurice, quoted in Welch, Protestant Thought, 252. Welch’s comments regarding Maurice’s theology are applicable to much of Brooks’s work as well: “The central problem of his thinking,” says Welch, is that “seminal insights were reiterated again and again but not worked out” (256-57). 18. Phillips Brooks, Yale Lectures on Preaching (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1969 [1877]), 119. More than one person who heard Brooks preach compared him with Robertson. One Scottish academic commented when he heard Brooks preach in 1874: “ Equal to the best of Frederick Robertson’s sermons, with a vigor and force of thought which he has not always.” Tulloch, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 247. 19. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 82. Horton Davies also makes note of Robertson’s larger importance. See Worship and Theology, 31 1-22. 20. Dennis Wigmore-Beddoes attributes at least some of Robertson’s move away from evangelical views to his “study of Unitarian writings.” Yesterday’s Radicals, 96. Similarly, Brooks was raised an Evangelical but was exposed to Unitarianism at Harvard and elsewhere as a young man. 21. Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 161. 22. F. W. Robertson, quoted by Reardon, Religious Thought, 161. 23. Reardon, Religious Thought, 162. 24. Reardon, Religious Thought, 162. 25. Reardon, Religious Thought, 18 1 . 26. Stanley, quoted in Reardon, Religious Thought, 18 1 . 27. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 71-72. In his letter to Stanley, Brooks declared that he and his fellow Episcopalians “owe too much to you for all that you have sent us in your books.” Letter, PB to A. P. Stanley, 29 November 1867. 28. Letter, Raymond H. Arnot to F. W. Farrar, 10 October 1898, F. W. Farrar, Canterbury Cathedral Library. 29. See Reginald Farrar, The Life of Frederic William Farrar (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1904). Farrar wrote a warm tribute to his friend Phillips

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Brooks in “Leader of Religious Thought and Action,” Review of the Churches 3 (Feb. 15, 1893): 269-73. 30. PB to Arthur Brooks, 29 July 1883, quoted by Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 20. 3 1. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3 , 20. 32. Wigmore-Beddoes, Yesterday’s Radicals, 99. The author is quoting a Robertson biographer here. 33 Stanley quoted in Wigmore-Beddoes, Yesterday’s Radicals, 101. Stanley preached at Trinity Church, Boston, on 22 September 1878 and his sermon was later published. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 290. 34. As Allen puts it: “There was no break in his experience, only the continuation in bolder fashion of the principles which had hitherto given him freedom and power of utterance.” Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 119. 35. PB in letter to brother, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,468. In the same letter, Brooks admits that he “knew nothing” of Schleiermacher “before” this particular European trip. 36. Henry Jones, A Critical Account of the Philosophy ef Lotze, the Doctrine ofThought (New York: MacMillan, 1895). 37. .PB to Arthur, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 469. 38. One contemporary described Washburn as the Broad Church’s “acknowledged head and master” in America. See Chorley, Men and Movements, 301; “Washburn, Edward Abiel” in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 10 (New York: Scribner’s, 1996), 498. 39. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, 22. 40. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,44&47. I am indebted to C. B. Brown’s excellent account of the Broad Church movement in America in “Christocentric Liberalism in the Episcopal Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 37 (1968): 5-38. 41. Washburn’s Dictionary of American Biogrpahy (DAB) entry describes him as “Next to Phillips Brooks, . . . the leading representative of broad churchmanship in the Episcopal communion.” DAB, 10:498. Washburn took a church in New York after only three years in Philadelphia; he and Brooks do not appear to have had a close relationship. 42. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 85. Brooks’s contemporary, Heman Dyer, had a slightly different account of the emergence of the Clericus. He maintained that a national Clericus was formed “after the [General] convention of 1871” but that “as the club grew, it was thought best to divide it, locating one part in Boston and the other in New York.” See Dyer, Records o f a n Active Life (New York: Whittaker, 1886), 414-15. Dyer also credits “those who had a leaning to what is technically termed broad Churchism . . . [as] the leaders in the movement.” Records of an Active Life, 414. 43. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 85-86. 44. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 322, 321. 45. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,463.

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46. C. A. L. Richards, Reriiriiihmtii~c,.sof Phillips Brooks h y Thw of His Friends (Boston: Clericus Club, 1893). 34. Author uses British spelling here. 47. Richards. Rerii~~tiihrcrtic~r.s. 36, 35. Last phrase came first on p. 35; I have reversed the order here. 48. Allen, L i p m i l Letters ofPhillips Brooks. vol. 3 , 65; again, 1 have reversed the order of the phrases here. 49. “Huntington. William Reed,” in Dictiotitrry of’ Aiiierican Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Scribner’s, 1938), 5:420421; Lesley A. Northup. “William Reed Huntington: First Presbyter of the Late Nineteenth Century,’ Anglican atid Episcwpril History 62 ( 1993): 193-2 1 3. 50. “Allen, Alexander Viets Griswold,” DAB 1: 184. 51. “Newton, William Wilberforce,” DAB 7:478; “Newton, Richard,” in DAB 7:474; “Newton. Richard Heber,” DAB 7:474-75. 52. Samuel Snelling says the Clericus “took its rise” from Phillips Brooks’s “Monday evening talks” with Vinton. See “Memoirs of Phillips Brooks,” 3 1-32. Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1342. 53. “Vinton, Alexander Hamilton.” DAB 10:280-81. 54. Phillips Brooks, Alexmticler Hatnilton Vinton: A Meriiorial Sertnoti (Boston: A. Williams, 1881). 13. 5 5 . Snelling, ”Memoirs,” 32. 56. Snelling, “Memoirs,” 32. 57. PB, Alexiiridt~t-Hutniltoti Vititoti, 30. 58. PB, Alexuricler Hurnilton Vititoti. 23. 59. T. Harwood Pattison, The H i s t o y of Christirrti Preaching (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1903). 384. 60. PB, quoted in Allen, Lifo atid Letters ofPhillips Brooks. vol. 3 , 70. Originally from Phillips Brooks, E.sstiy.s und Addre.sse.s: Religious, Litemry und Social (New York: E. P. Dutton. 1894), 148. 61. PB, quoted in Julius H. Ward, “Bishop Brooks.” The Andover Rr\Gew: A Religious uncl Tlieologicul Monthly 17 ( 1 892): 439. 62. Emerson. “Nature,” in The Collected Works ofRalph Wuldo Eiiwrson. vol. I , ed. Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge Belknap Press, 1971), 17. 63. PB quoted in Ward, “Bishop ,” 440. 64. Ward, “Bishop Brooks,” 440. 65. Ward, “Bishop Brooks,” 441. 66. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in The Collected Works ofRalph Waldo Etnerson, vol. 2 , ed. Joseph Slater (Cambridge, Ma 174. 67. Allen, Life und Letters of Phillips Brooks. vol. 3, 472. 68. Allen, Lrfe und Letters ofPhillips Brooks, vol. 3 , 473. 69. PB, “Sermon on the Nature,’’ 60. 70. PB , “Authority and Conscience ,” Es.sriy.s rind Addressrs: Religious, Literu r y und Social (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 107. This address was first delivered before the Church Congress in 1884. 7 1. PB, “Authority and Conscience,” 106.

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72. PB, “Authority and Conscience,’’ 107. 73. Allen argues that just because Brooks did not cite them in sermons, one should not conclude that he did not read the Higher Critics. There is evidence that Brooks read Wellhausen and some others. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,93. 74. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,95; emphasis in the original. 75. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,95. Cf. Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 234. 76. McIlvaine, quoted by Chorley, Men and Movements, 309. 77. PB in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,95. 78. PB, “Preface,” Faith and Action, iv. 79. Bernard Reardon notes how idealist philosophy helped Christian thinkers deal with the new expanding claims of science but “at a price.” Along the way, they had to accept “the idea of the divine immanence.” See Reardon, Religious Thought, 10. 80. Sinclair Ferguson and David Wright, eds., New Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1988), 151. 81. PB, quoted by Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,472-73. 82. PB, in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,95. 83. PB to Arthur,quoted in Allen, Lqe and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,4. 84. PB in 1878, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,87. 85. PB, “Authority and Conscience,’’ 105. 86. PB, “Authority and Conscience,’’ 116. 87. PB, “Authority and Conscience,’’ 109. Note how Brooks assumes that authority must somewhere involve infallibility, but he does not explain why this is the case. 88. PB, “Teaching of Religion,” Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 37-38. 89. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 236. Phillips Brooks was using 2 Cor. 6:3 as his text here. 90. See Philip E. Hughes, “Introduction,” in Faith and Works: Cranmer and Hooker on Justijication (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse, 1983). 91. PB, “Authority and Conscience,” 117. 92. PB, “Authority and Conscience,” 111. 93. PB, “Authority and Conscience,” 116. 94. Anonymous, “The Broad Church,” Catholic World 43 (April 1886): 108. See also: Alexander V,G . Allen, The Continuity of Christian Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884). 95. See PB, “Sermon on the Nature,” 62. 96. PB, “Sermon on the Nature,” 65. 97. PB, “Sermon on the Nature,” 66 (emphasis in the original). 98. Raymond W. Albright dates its delivery to the Clericus 2 June 1890. See Focus on Infinity (New York: MacMillan, 1961), 340.

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99. Augustine, quoted by Phillips Brooks, “Heresy,” in Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 12. 100. PB, “Heresy,” 12. 101. PB, “Heresy,” 8. 102. PB, “Heresy,” 9-10. Brooks’s understanding of heresy appears to have been shaped by his reading at seminary and changed little since then. In 1858 he had written out the following passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’sAids to Reflection in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Professor Shedd (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854):“The man is more & other than his belief: & God only knows how small or how large a part of him the belief in question may be for good or for evil. Resist every false doctrine: & call no man heretic. The false doctrine does not necessarily make a man a heretic; but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.” Phillips Brooks, 1858 Notebook, p. 27, Phillips Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 103. PB, “Heresy,” 10-1 1. 104. PB, “Heresy,” 13. 105. PB, “Heresy,” 14. 106. PB, “Heresy,” 19. 107. Phillips Brooks, “Orthodoxy,” Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 190. As Horton Davies puts it cogently, Broad Churchmen held that “the real basis for unity was not in the intellect but in the heart and in the will.” Davies, Worship and Theology, 3:285. 108. Charles Saunders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 10. Emphasis in the original. 109. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 10. I reversed the word order here. 110. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 13. 111. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 21 . 112. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,97. 113. The description here is Horton Davies’s. See Worship and Theology, 3:286. See John Patrick Diggins on Peirce’s understanding of truth as the temporary, imperfect consensus of a community of inquiry. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 114. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 184-85. 115. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 187. 116. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 194. 117. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 194. 118. PB, “Orthodoxy,” 196. 119. Phillips Brooks, “The Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” The Princeton Review 1 (1879): 299. 120. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 187. 121. PB, “Orthodoxy,” 192. 122. PB, “Orthodoxy,” 188. 123. PB, “Orthodoxy.” The idea of progress is, of course, implicit in this statement.

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124. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 189. 125. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 189. 126. PB , “Orthodoxy,” 190-9 1. 127. PB, “Orthodoxy,” 191-92. Again, Brooks seems to echo Peirce’s description of the necessary struggle arising from the “irritation of doubt” and the constant search for “fixed belief.” 128. PB, “Orthodoxy,” 193 (emphasis in the original). 129. PB ,“Orthodoxy,” 296. 130. The preceding quotations are from Brooks, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 295. Christianity must presumably be “large” or “broad’ to take advantage of this weakness. 131. Reardon, Religious Thought, 7. 132. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 298. 133. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 298. I have reversed the order of these two phrases here but taken care to preserve Brooks’s meaning. 134. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 298. Here, Brooks is echoing his own remarks about character in his Yale lectures on preaching published two years before in 1877. 135. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 299. He sought to cover himself here with the aside: “Remember I am not speaking now of whether these ideas are true or not. I am speaking of whether we think that they are true, and of what our duty is with reference to our belief.” It is actually pretty clear from the rest of the essay (if not from Brooks’s other writings) that he was skeptical about all three of these traditional doctrines. 136. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 300. Brooks added in what sounds like an autobiographical vein: “The lack of frankness in his seminary teachers has cost many a poor minister years of uselessness, and at last a dreadful and unnatural struggle into the light and freedom which ought to have been his at first, won bountifully in these nurseries of clerical life.” 137. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 301. 138. Reardon, Religious Thought, 161. 139. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 301. 140. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 306. 141. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 305. 142. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 306. 143. Phillips Brooks, “New Theism,” Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 153. John Fiske’s Idea of God as Affected by Modem Knowledge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886) and Francis Ellingwood Abbot, ScientiJic Theism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1885). 144. PB, “New Theism,” 154. 145. PB, “New Theism,” 150. 146. Brooks’s reading of Abbot here was wishful thinking. Abbot firmly rejected the Romantic idealism that had so influenced Brooks and sought instead to ground a very minimal theism on science alone. John Fiske did appear in his later writings to focus more on the solace provided by belief in an immanent deity di-

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recting cosmic evolution. See Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 33 1-32, 35. For Fiske, see Milton Berman, John Fiske: The Evolution of a Popularizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); George P. Winston, John Fiske (New York: Twayne, 1972). 147. F. E. Abbot, quoted in Brooks, “New Theism,” 155. 148. PB, “New Theism,” 156. 149. PB, “New Theism,” 156. 150. PB, “New Theism,” 158. 151. PB, “New Theism,” 160. I reversed the order of the sentences here. 152. But then Brooks and his fellow liberal Protestants were not prone to be wary of the influence of the broader culture because they themselves so identified that culture with the kingdom of God. 153. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,474. 154. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,474. 155. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,475. 156. Phillips Brooks quoted in John Fox, “Phillips Brooks as a Theologian,” Presbyterian and Reformed Review 6 (July 1895): 397. My treatment here owes much to Fox’s analysis. He comments that this “very definite and tangible Christology, . . . furnishes a key to his whole thinking . . . [and] dominated his whole ministry.” Fox, “Phillips Brooks as a Theologian,” 397. Fox was a Presbyterian minister trained at Princeton Seminary (1877) and pastor of several churches, including Second Presbyterian in Brooklyn (1893-98). See E. H. Roberts, Biographical Catalogue of the Princeton Theological Seminary, 1815-1932 (Princeton: Trustees of the Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church, 1933), 31 1. I am also indebted to the analysis found in C. G. Brown, “Christocentric Liberalism in the Episcopal Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 37 (1968): 5-38. See also Jerome F. Politzer, “Theological Ideas in the Preaching of Phillips Brooks,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 33 (1964): 157-69. 157. Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 397. 158. Phillips Brooks, quoted in Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 399. 159. Charles P. MacIlvaine, The Work of Preaching Christ (Boston: Gospel Book &Tract Depository, 1871), 17-18. 160. Phillips Brooks, quoted in Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 401. 161. Fox, “Phillips Brooks as a Theologian,” 401. 162. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,476. 163. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,477. 164. Bushnell, in H. Sheldon Smith, ed., Horace Bushnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 283. 165. Fox, “Phillips Brooks as a Theologian,” 412. Fox may have overstated his case here but his vehemence on this point is revealing. 166. See Article 11 here in the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles. 167. Notably, Bushnell had explicitly rejected what he termed this “mysterious act of imputation” in his controversial The Vicarious Sacrijke. See Smith, Horace Bushnell, 282.

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168. PB, quoted in Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 405. Although Fox is correct that it is hard to “reduce” Brooks’s language here “to any consistent doctrine,” too many commentators have simply left it there. I think it is important to follow out the implications of Brooks’s approach. 169. Cf. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 122-23. 170. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 117. 171. Allen, following Brooks, sets up a straw man here, implying that critics of Brooks demanded that he endorse all of Anselm’s theory or that of Grotius. As I have shown, Brooks did not teach explicitly the classic Reformational understanding of the atonement- this was the issue, not whether he tied himself explicitly to Anselm. Moreover, Allen fails to explain in what specific ways Anselm’s views or the classical Reformed position were “speculative .” Luther believed he had returned to the original Pauline understanding of how the atonement “worked” (i.e., justification) that was more fully biblical than some medieval speculations had been. See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 117. All of which is not to argue that there was a single Anglican view regarding the atonement by the later nineteenth century; there was, in fact, a wide variety of views. I am simply contrasting Brooks’s approach with that expressed in the Anglican formularies (and adhered to by most conservative Evangelicals) in order to clarify the critical differences. 172. PB, quoted in Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 401. My analysis here follows Fox’s. 173. Edward Abbott, Phillips Brooks: A Memory of the Bishop, an Impression of the Man, a Study of the Preacher, with a Digest of his Theological Teachings (Cambridge, Mass.: Powell, 1900), 45. Abbott (1841-1908) was the brother of liberal Congregationalist Lyman Abbott. See National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 8 (New York: James T. White, 1898), 179. 174. Phillips Brooks, “Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity,” in National Needs and Remedies: The Discussions of the General Christian Conference Held in Boston, Mass., December 4th, and 6th, 1889 Under the Auspices and Direction of the Evangelical Alliance f o r the United States (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1890), 298. 175. PB ,“Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity,” 300. 176. PB ,“Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity,” 298. 177. Coleridge, quoted in Sanders in Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, 79. 178. PB, quoted in Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 405. 179. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 141. 180. PB, quoted in Fox, “Brooks as a Theologian,” 404,406. 181. Abbott, A Memory of the Bishop, 45. British spelling used here. 182. Some recognized the larger significance of this Broad Church anthropology. One Catholic reviewer firmly rejected A. V. G. Allen’s similar claim that humans had a “constitutional kinship with God.” “There is no kinship,” he explained, “where there is no common nature. Kinship supposes the same nature;

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the same or common nature supposes equality of nature.” See Anonymous, “Broad Church,” 101. 183. See my treatment of this subject with regard to D. L. Moody in chapter 3, this volume . 184. Phillips Brooks, “Light of the World,” 9, quoted in Abbott, A Memory of the Bishop, 30. Abbott calls this remark “a caricature . . . of some from whom he [i.e., Brooks] differed which was hardly worthy of his dignity and magnanimity, and one which it was not like him to make.” Abbott, A Memory of the Bishop, 30; notably, Maurice made similar comments. To him, Evangelicals seemed “to make sin the ground of all theology, whereas it seems to me that the living and holy God is the ground of it, and sin the departure from the state of union with Him, into which He has brought us. I cannot believe the devil is in any sense king of this universe. I believe Christ is its king in all senses.” FDM quoted by Welch, Protestant Thought, 248, n13. This portrait of Evangelicalism as centered on sin and not on God was common in some circles by midcentury. While not a fair characterization of the Princeton theology, it was an understandable reaction against other developments. For example, antebellum revivalists made sin their main focus because of the centrality of the altar call to their purely evangelistic message. Moreover, theological discussion in New England Congregational circles had often focused on the question of the imputation of Adam’s sin (note especially the debate of Nathanael Taylor and Moses Stuart regarding this question). As Arminianism expanded within American Evangelicalism, a caricature of Puritanism and of Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism gained popular acceptance. 185. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,726-27. Again, the influence of Romanticism is evident here. 186. PB, “Enthusiasm,” 311. Allen wrote that Brooks “could not separate his conviction of progress from his faith in humanity.” See Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,80. 187. Fox, “Culture of Liberal Protestantism,” 645 n6. 188. Fox, “Culture of Liberal Protestantism,” 646. 189. PB, “Enthusiasm,” 301. 190. PB, “Authority and Conscience,” 115. 191. PB, “Authority and Conscience,” 110. 192. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, 55-56. 193. Brooks’s maternal great-grandfather, Judge John Phillips (1719-1795), was an orthodox Calvinist whom Allen quotes as attacking “the tendency to reduce the Christian religion to a mere system of morality.” Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1 , 15. 194. PB, “Preface,” Faith andAction, v. 195. Cf. James Turner, Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 196. PB, 1858 notebook, Brooks Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Box #23,23. 197. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,478. 198. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,479.

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199. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 304. 201. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,492. Emphasis in the original. 202. Cf. C. FitzSimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury Press, 1966). 203. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 304. 204. Fox, “Culture of Liberal Protestantism,” 648. 205. Fox, “Culture of Liberal Protestantism,” 64849. 206. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2, 479. I have reversed the order of the phrases here. 207. F. W. Robertson, quoted in Reardon, Religious Thought, 161. 208. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 129. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 123. 209. PB, quoted in Boston Herald and in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3 , 5 15. 210. PB, “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 298. 211. Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 88. 212. See the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, 1886-1888, in The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Hymnal Corp./Seabury, 1979), 876-78. 213. Phillips Brooks, “The Christian Church,” in The Light of the World and Other Sermons (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1890), 178. 214. PB, “The Christian Church,” 179. 215. PB, “The Christian Church,” 181. 216. PB, “The Christian Church,” 181. 217. PB, “The Christian Church,” 190. 218. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,480 (1882). (Capitalization here as in original text.) When addressing the final consummation of all things, these two spheres appear in Brooks’s thought to be fused completely: “The Church of the Millennia1 days shall be nothing less, nothing else than a regenerate and complete humanity.” See Brooks, “Christian Church,” 192. 219. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,480. 220. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,480. 221. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,480. 222. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,481. 223. Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 184-86. 224. McIlvaine, quoted in Butler, Standing against the Whirlwind, 186. 225. Phillips Brooks, “Power of Uncertain Future,” in The Law of Growth and Other Sermons (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), 47. First delivered on 22 November 1874. 226. PB, “Power Uncertain,” 46. Actually, the context makes it pretty clear that the verse refers primarily to the first of these options. As elsewhere, Brooks’s exegesis here is doubtful.

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227. PB, “Power Uncertain,” 53. 228. Phillips Brooks, “The Certain End,” The Light of the World and Other Sermons (New York: E. P. Dutton, l890), 369. 229. PB, “Certain End,” 37 1 . 230. Hutchison describes Gordon’s optimism as thoughtful and not jejune. It is difficult, however, to say of Brooks what Hutchison concludes of Gordon (i.e., that he did not “minimize human sinfulness”). Certainly Gordon was more of a theologian than was Brooks. See Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 189. Gordon was a keen admirer of his neighbor and had Brooks officiate at his wedding. See Albright, Focus on Infinity, 329. 23 1 . Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 31-32. 232. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 4 (ca. 1883, no other particulars provided here). Note how traditionalists had come to be portrayed not just as simply mistaken or benighted but actually unethical (“dishonest”) in continuing to defend old positions. One is reminded of what Peirce labeled the “immorality” of an unexamined belief. 233. Letter, PB to R. Heber Newton, 14 February 1885, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 143. 234. Allen’s reaction to the controversy is predictably defensive, even confusing. He acknowledges that some believed that “the Episcopal Church had been called to go through a crisis in its history,” but prefaces this observation with: “The controversy which now took place over his election was not important, nor were the sources influential or representative from which it proceeded; but their importance was rather a reflected one, gaining significance from the unique greatness of the man.”(Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 417). Nevertheless, a few pages later, Allen concedes “that there was a crisis here, and a grave one, in the history of the Episcopal Church, in which also all the churches had a vital interest” (Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,428). 235. An unnamed bishop, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,421. 236. Letter, PB to John C. Brooks, 27 May 1891, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,438. 237. C. A. L. Richards to PB, June 1891 (no day given), Brooks Papers, Houghton Library #bMS Am 1594.1 (492). 238. One bishop quoted Brooks as saying privately about the calls from several comers to explain himself “I will never say a word, or allow you to say a word, in vindication or explanation of my position. I stand upon my record, and by that record I will stand or fall. I have said what I think and believe in my public utterances and in my printed discourses, and have nothing to retract or qualify.” Quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,430-3 1 . 239. Hopkins, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,422. 240. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,429. 241. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,429. It is in their treatment of the election controversy that the official historians of Brooks become

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most unapologetically partisan. Allen writes that “there was danger, then, of his being engulfed in the tragic experience of life which awaits those who rise above conventional standards” (Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3, 429-30). Allen refers effusively to “the tide of joy that swept from one end of the land to the other” when Brooks’s election was ratified (Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,431). Biographer Albright simply refers to the debate as “this monstrous episode” (Albright, Focus on Infinity, 368). 242. Letter, PB to John C. Brooks, 27 May 1891, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3,438.

Conclusion

What an excitement there is all through the theological world. It is all good, and in the end we are to have a larger Christian life. Certainly it is impossible to conceive of things going back to what they were twenty years ago. -Phillips Brooks'

THE LARGER CHRISTIAN LIFE IN RETROSPECT This concluding chapter examines the implications and explores the legacy, in the decades since his death, of the ideas Brooks championed. The perspective provided by more than a century makes clearer the problematic legacy of the path blazed by Brooks and his contemporaries. No one, of course, can foresee all of the implications of his or her teaching, nor could Brooks have predicted the social and cultural changes that would push and pull these ideas in unanticipated directions. As a young adult, Brooks saw the evangelical form of the Christianity his parents bequeathed him as parochial, needlessly off-putting, and constricting. Though his criticism of Virginia Seminary was a little one-sided, his concerns about American Evangelicalism, especially its incipient antiintellectualism, were well founded. As a young cleric, he sought a Christianity that was not a crabbed or blinkered creed. And yet, while Brooks sought an enlargement of Christian belief that would broaden its base and place fewer barriers in the way of sincere seekers, the end product of the liberal project has seemed to some more of a diminution of the faith. Nor has liberalized doctrine been successful at stemming the retreating tide of 207

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membership in the Protestant mainline. The following analysis draws together the three central themes of the preceding pages -the modernization of Christian belief and of the church both theologically and culturally, the transformation of homiletics, and the role of Brooks in the denominational changes that reshaped the Episcopal Church in the last third of the nineteenth century. Although they took new forms, many of the issues outlined below continued to define discussion and debate within the Protestant mainline for decades thereafter.

A FLOWERING OF SUBJECTIVITY Phillips Brooks’s story underlines how profound an impression Romanticism had on Anglo-American Christianity. While historians have rightly highlighted the crises of faith produced by Darwinism and higher criticism, some scholars have given short shrift to the enormous impact that Romanticism in its various forms had on Anglo-American Protestantism? Religious belief in the nineteenth century was depleted of its propositional content and left mostly with the affective sphere. Romanticism played a crucial role in this redrawing of the cognitive landscape. Among other things, Phillips Brooks embraced Romanticism’s celebration of the subjective experience of the individual. Brooks absorbed the emphasis on “self-culture” so important in much of New England thought in the antebellum period. The Transcendentalists had shifted the source of religious truth to the intuition of the individual and, although Brooks was hardly a Transcendentalist, he drank deeply from the works of Emerson and others while at seminary and, earlier, at Harvard, where the influence of this sort of idealism was pervasive.3 Brooks managed to avoid some of the excesses of Romanticism. Horton Davies observes that a “strong ethical emphasis protected” F. W. Robertson “from mere aestheticism,” and the same may be said of Brooks. One of the features of Anglo-Catholicism that repulsed Brooks was its fussy medieval aesthetic. But Brooks was not the biblical scholar that Robertson was and, accordingly, was less closely connected to the biblical text in his preaching. What Davies aptly describes as “the chief peril of an emphasis on experience . . . sheer subjectivity . . . a luxuriating in the emotions-a ‘feeling for feeling’s sake”’ became in fact a genuine danger for Brooks and the scores of ministers who emulated him? Subjectivism and individualism were far from unknown within American Evangelicalism. In fact, antebellum Evangelicalism’s Pietist roots made it especially vulnerable to a kind of Romanticized Protestantism. While a com-

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mitment to confessional standards and ecclesiastical discipline may have insulated eighteenth-century evangelists like George Whitefield from it somewhat, the revivalism of Charles G. Finney and others in the early nineteenth century represented an important shift toward belief in the sovereign, freewheeling individual. In some of its manifestations, Revivalism made (at least implicitly) the individual’s subjective religious experience the ultimate source of authority. Romanticism and Revivalism were cousins in some respects. The influence of Revivalism made Evangelicals more susceptible to the focus on subjective experience and also to the stress upon sentiment in Romantic literature and philosophy. American Protestants still wrestle with a descendant of this subjectivism today, although it comes from different sources. Advanced theological liberals, influenced by postmodernist approaches to truth, often reduce the theological to the personal. Hence discussions of traditional moral principles are not framed with reference to external normative reference points such as the New Testament or natural law, but traditional positions are instead portrayed by critics (who in the Protestant mainline are often denominational leaders) as censuring or excluding particular individuals. As Jean Bethke Elshtain has elucidated, the personal is always now the political? The subjective, interior experience of the individual, not some external authority, has become central. Accordingly, sentiment trumps external standards be they ecclesiastical, confessional, or scriptural. When everything is brought to the bar of individual experience, the result is a predictable diminution of traditional authorities. Of course, Brooks’s moralism (as Charles Eliot Norton appeared to understand) would probably have made him shudder at such a development, but his generation nevertheless prepared, sometimes unknowingly, the theological ground for it. Of course sentiment, or perhaps more accurately sentimentalism rooted in individual subjectivity, has long been a key part of American Revivalism and it was an aspect of Revivalism that Brooks himself criticized. However, the emphasis upon subjective experience so important to Romanticism facilitated this pivotal transition from external to internal standards. As Ken Myers has noted with acuity: “Sentimentality is as rampant in the culture of Evangelicalism as it is in popular culture outside the church. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Evangelicalism adapted itself to popular culture so readily. The friendliness of it, its lack of ambiguity, its sense of familiarity, its celebrityism-add to these qualities sentimentalism, and one realizes how much the two cultures have in common.”6 Indeed, this affinity is one reason charismatics, pietists, and theological liberals have been able to coexist within the same mainline denominations

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(at least until quite recently with the emergence of the divisive sexuality debate- significantly, a debate more about ethical behavior than about doctrine per se). For theological liberals and some conservatives, experience, not doctrine, has become the decisive consideration. If one shares similar religious experiences, doctrinal positions or church policies become less important.

A DIMINISHMENT OF DOCTRINE Such a Romanticized Evangelicalism has had grave implications for doctrinal systems generally and Protestant confessionalism in particular. Here, the influence of Congregationalist theologian Horace Bushnell was substantial, though often forgotten today. As noted above, Bushnell argued in several works that, imbedded within traditional theological systems, there were great, timeless truths, but that these old systems had become restrictive forms that held Christianity back. Moreover, the old formulas did not communicate the subtlety or the transcendent beauty of Christian truth. Bushnell and his followers argued that Christians needed a different language to express these ancient truths, and they sought it not in the propositional statements of doctrinal systems but in the language of literature and art. The Christian message needed to be communicated in terms that were aesthetic and symbolic, not in forms that were abstract or mechanistic. It was this attitude toward doctrine, as noted above, that eventually prompted Brooks to distance himself publicly from the Evangelical party. When the Evangelical Education Society (EES) sought to tighten doctrinal tests for the seminarians they supported, Brooks promptly resigned from the EES Board, leaving their conservative secretary R. C. Matlack quite perplexed. Like many, he had heard Brooks’s earnest preaching and had naturally assumed that this rising star was one of them. Brooks retained much of the traditional terminology and his sentimental tone was not unlike that of many evangelical preachers. But Brooks contended that the church should not be restricted by rigid doctrinal lines or hamstrung by the usual party shibboleths. And thus he broke with traditional Evangelicals. Yet because of his conservative style and emotive language, he retained the support of many Evangelicals inside and outside the Episcopal camp. Brooks, to be sure, did have doctrinal limits in mind, many unstated and assumed, some stated and explicit. Despite his openness to hgher criticism, he was not a rationalist and he often defended the miraculous character of the

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Christian faith in general terms, even if he understood less of the biblical record in those traditional terms than did others. “Christianity,” he declared, “is supernatural or it is n ~ t h i n g . ”For ~ Brooks, the final, non-negotiable bedrock doctrine was the Incarnation. God the Father sending his eternal Son, the Logos, to be born a man in first-century Palestine was the heart and soul of the Christian message; without the Incarnation, there really was no gospel to preach. Yet others, pressing further on ground prepared by their predecessors, did not always respect Brooks’s commitment to the supernatural in general or to the Incarnation in particular. With few theological or ecclesiastical boundaries to contain them, the demythologizers systematically excluded the miraculous, and even the Incarnation itself came under fire within Anglicanism by the 1970s.8 John Hick’s sensational Myth of God Zncarnate (1977) included Anglicans among its contributors and relegated the Incarnation to the category of fable. Don Cupitt, one of the Anglican contributors, discarded theism itself in Taking Leave of God (1980). Nor were such positions only open to academic theologians. By 1999, an Episcopal bishop could explicitly reject both the Incarnation and traditional theism without fear of ecclesiastical discipline. In some respects, Bishop John Spong’s writings represented a logical culmination of this long process? As with traditional doctrine, so traditional ethics followed the same path. Roughly a hundred years after Brooks’s death, a church court of the Episcopal Church could rule that monogamous heterosexual marriage was not part of “core doctrine” in the Chstian faith.’O At the hands of his successors, Brooks’s model of the church as a community of inquiry directed by “devout and reasonable men” has indeed become something like a community of inquiry.” Without defined boundaries and with constant redefinitions of what constitutes “core doctrine,” the church’s message has become, in the eyes of many, incoherent.12 Having turned away from ecclesiastical discipline based upon a confessional standard or some other external authoritative criterion, liberal Protestantism enjoyed little insulation from the culture within which it was immersed. There were inadequate barriers to keep the church from simply echoing the voice of the wider ~u1ture.l~ Moreover, the immanentist theology of Brooks, by neglecting the transcendent, facilitated this easy conflation of American progress with the Kingdom of God. As H. Richard Niebuhr has pointed out, this sort of “cultural Christianity” has always struggled with the Pauline or Augustinian emphasis on free grace. “The Christ-of-culture believers,” Niebuhr notes, often: incline to the side of law in dealing with the polarity of law and grace. By obedience to the laws of God and of reason, speculative and practical, men are

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able, they seem to think, to achieve the high destiny of knowers of the Truth and citizens of the Kingdom. The divine action of grace is ancillary to the human enterprise; and sometimesit seems as if God, the forgivenessof sins, even prayers and thanksgivings,are all means to an end, and a human end at that.I4 The woman parishioner who chastised Brooks in one of his Philadelphia pastorates for emphasizing duty over grace in his preaching may have recognized a genuine peril.

SOFTENING THE FALL Brooks and theological liberals like him also painted a rather sanguine portrait of human ability. He appears to have reacted against the dour Calvinist preaching he had heard in Boston as an adolescent with its emphasis upon the profound and pervasive effects of the Fall. Brooks’s zeal for humankind was not founded on Enlightenment optimism but, as he explained, “upon the conviction which Christ implanted, that every man is the child of God.”I5 “The infinite value of the human soul” became, as H. Richard Niebuhr notes, “a commonplace of liberal Protestantism” despite its rather thin biblical warrant .I6 Old-fashioned Evangelicals who held to fallen humankind’s total depravity and understood Christ’s death as satisfying divine wrath were less inclined to accept this sunnier view of human potential. Similarly, these traditional emphases also discouraged confessional Evangelicals from moving in the direction of an easy moralism. As many commentators have noted, the rise of moralism was a central development in the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Protestantism and it was an important thread running through much of Brooks’s message.17 It was bolstered after Brooks’s death by the Social Gospel movement that stressed good works over fine points of theology and, more recently, by the ecumenical movement that has often viewed doctrine as inherently divisive. If, as many asserted, “doctrine divides,” then why be a stickler for such arcane points?

FROM CALVARY TO BETHLEHEM The upbeat portrait of human nature and its concomitant accent upon creation in the divine image was rooted in a fundamental difference between the new theology and classical Evangelicalism. This shift away from the cross and from classical theories of the atonement was not unique to Brooks; it had been under way among some Evangelicals for years. Horace Bushnell’s

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reworking of the atonement in The Vicarious Sucrijice (1866) was perhaps the most influential example of this larger trend. And Brooks drew upon more than just Bushnell’s controversial theology of the cross. Indeed, several of Bushnell’s themes surface constantly in Brooks’s preaching. Historian William G. McLoughlin highlights “three essential features” of the Romantic Evangelicalism of midcentury; all three evoke both Bushnell and Brooks. They are: “emphases upon the intuitive perception of truth through the feelings . . . upon a Christocentric theology in which the ‘personality of Jesus’ became more important than the moral order of God, and upon a concomitant sentimental idealization of women, children, and parenthood.”” By contrast, the crucicentrist approach so characteristic of Evangelicals in the past had always assumed the seriousness of sin and thus underscored the need for God’s righteousness to be satisfied. Yet the champions of the new theology evinced a warm piety. As Richard Wightman Fox observes, liberal Evangelicalism (of the sort preached by Brooks) initially retained much of the evangelistic and pietistic thrust of orthodoxy. For instance, Walter Rauschenbusch, despite his focus on social reform, believed, like Brooks, in the importance of traditional habits of personal piety (prayer, bible study, evangelism); like Brooks, he held that personality was central to religion; and, like Brooks, he supported D. L. Moody’s campaigns. For Rauschenbusch, as for Brooks, “there was no transformation of society that did not also [properly] entail a transformation of individual personality.” World War I and the Scopes Trial (among other developments) served to trim liberal Protestantism of these traditional devotional elements. By the 1930s, liberal Protestantism was gradually being eclipsed (at least in the cultural mainstream) by secularism. By the 1960s and 1970s, declines in mainline church attendance worsened as many Americans followed the logic of liberal Protestantism’s “validation of secularism” and discarded formal religious affiliation altogether, while others moved to conservative denominations that embraced the tran~cendent.’~ One recent study (which focused primarily on mainline Presbyterians) confirms the contribution liberal theology has made to the decline of the Protestant mainline. It demonstrates that “the single best predictor of church participation . . . [is] belief -orthodox Christian belief .” Researchers discovered a strong correlation between active church membership and traditional beliefs. “Lay liberalism,” conclude these scholars, “supports honesty and other moral virtues, and it encourages tolerance and civility in a pluralistic society, but it does not inspire the kind of conviction that creates strong religious communities.” Moreover, the general decline did not begin suddenly in the 1960s but has been evident in subtle ways “for at least seventy years .”*O Brooks’s brand of pietistic liberalism was for many a sort of halfway house between orthodoxy

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and secularism but, by the 1930s,it seemed a compromise as quaint and constrictive as Victorian corsets.

PREACHING: FROM FAITHFUL EXPOSITOR TO ARTISTIC PERSONALITY Romantic individualism and subjectivism, the celebration of the preacher as artist and seer, and the general skepticism about doctrinal systems all had a damaging impact on traditional expository preaching. No doubt, the preaching of Brooks’s evangelical predecessors was not strictly expository. Many were fond of topical sermons and frequently used scripture more as proof texts to argue a theological program. But their program (at least those within the churches of the Magisterial Reformation) was essentially confessional, and when these doctrinal boundary markers were removed, preaching changed. The evocative, literary merit of the sermon became the primary focus. Brooks’s popular published sermons illustrate this characteristic fondness for the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the sentimental. Tone and mood often became more important than doctrinal content; an appealing metaphor with literary resonance might be more sought after than sticking close to the original meaning of a particular text. Preachers not infrequently neglected the hard exegetical labor required to reconstruct the original context. Argument by analogy rather than by logical reasoning was common. Accordingly, they sometimes employed, in Robert Dabney’s apt phrase, “a fragment of the Word as a mere motto.”2’ Brooks was fond of this approach, often taking a single verse and using it as a springboard to make some emotive comments about a similar subject but without attempting the arduous work of reconstructing the scriptural context. This Romanticized model of the preacher and its concomitant assumptions regarding the centrality of personality to preaching have come to have a broad influence even among fundamentalist Christians.22“In the Romantic movement,” as George Marsden explains, “this exaltation of the self was supposed to bring out greater access to the transcendent, as in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s apotheosis of the artist.”23It seems also to have brought a new focus on the preacher and a new conception of the sermon.

ECCLESIOLOGY Of course, Brooks’s continued popularity among Evangelicals, even those as conservative as Moody, illustrates the attraction of many believers to his

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pared-down, Romantic Evangelicalism. As noted above, Gilded Age Evangelicalism was a diverse coalition of believer^?^ But Brooks’s catalogue of doctrinal essentials eventually grew modest, even minimalist, and so, in time, did the standards of his denomination. Significantly, greater latitude with regard to churchmanship paralleled this development. Clergy were given more freedom to reject some theological positions previously defined as central and unchanging. At about the same time that Brooks and others were beginning to redefine Anglican comprehensiveness (an effort that would later produce the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886-1888 notably the brainchild of Brooks’s friend, William Reed Huntington),AngloCatholic clergy were successfully introducing changes in worship that would undermine the received interpretation of the Articles and the historical understanding of the Book of Common Prayer. General Convention defeated proposed ritual canons in 1871 and again in 1874 that were unequivocally Protestant, even though leading bishops supported them?5 In a sense, it was a two-pronged assault: Anglo-Catholicism subtly undercut Anglicanism’s Reformation formularies,while the Broad Church erected a new, simpler and more inclusive doctrinal basis. Allowing greater doctrinal diversity within the church and revising its confessional foundation during the late nineteenth century helped to prepare the ground for these subsequent changes. The conflict between High and Low Church parties at midcentury purchased what peace the Episcopal Church enjoyed by 1900.The consensus celebrated by church historians like Chorley and Addison was bought at a price-paid mostly by the sort of Evangelicals who had founded VTS in the early nineteenth century?6 The absence of intense party conflict by the end of the century was not the result of some organic synthesis but of the defeat and repudiation of the evangelical churchmanship that had enlivened a major part of the antebellum church. While Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals were engaged in their internecine battles, a new generation, with articulate leaders (who, like Brooks, invested traditional religious language with new meaning) quietly took its position within the councils of the American church. The largely private struggles of the young Phillips Brooks provide a poignant portrait of both the failure of evangelical Episcopalianism to build upon its successes at midcentury and a picture in microcosm of the ascent of liberal Protestantism.

PREFERRING PEACE OVER PRINCIPLE Finally, there is the complex question of maintaining institutional cohesion in the midst of a growing theological incoherence. How can the

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church accommodate both innovators and those who wished to adhere to the old paths? Should it? Brooks favored a modest amount of prayer book revision, mostly rubrical changes that would have mollified the consciences of some Evangelicals. What Brooks viewed as the narrowness of some High Church teaching disturbed him, but he never advocated strong punitive measures to deal with it. Brooks was a keen believer in open communion yet, as noted earlier, he never rose to defend Bishop George David Cummins when the latter was harshly criticized for his participation in an ecumenical communion service. Notwithstanding his sympathy for some of the concerns of the Evangelicals, Brooks chose the institutional path of least resistance in the 1870s. Brooks was popular and influential and perhaps reluctant to jeopardize his future within the Episcopal Church. In short, in this instance, Brooks chose denominational peace over principle. It is a choice that Protestants in the American mainline have often made in the past century. Many simply left. The Modernists who stayed did not accept J. Gresham Machen’s invitation in Christianity and Liberalism (1923) to depart and found new bodies. They remained and reshaped their denominations in their image; some of their conservative brethren stayed too. Yet, with the theological and ethical debates of the past thirty years, liberal Protestantism and the kind of open ecclesial community that Brooks envisaged may have reached their natural limits. Certainly the contested issues today cannot be dismissed as niceties of churchmanship but strike at the foundational questions of whether Christianity makes moral demands that are distinct from or even at odds with contemporary culture and whether the Christian scriptures should have any normative authority at all. It would be absurd to attribute all of these current dilemmas to the teaching of Phillips Brooks or even to that of his circle. Nevertheless, they did in some sense help set the course. While Brooks’s motives were laudable (i.e., seeking denominational peace, removing needless barriers to belief), in retrospect, the cost for doctrinal coherence and authentic unity has been high. A few of Brooks’s former evangelical allies foresaw some of these dilemmas. The Rev. John S. Stone, a longtime friend of the Brookses, wrote about a perceived crisis in the Episcopal Church a hundred and fifty years ago: “In loving unity, and dreading schism,” he argued, the Episcopal Church certainly has, thus far, the mind of Christ and his apostles.And yet, it reveals what may prove one of her greatest dangers: for, if, upon this ecclesiastical sentiment, this strong love of unity, this sacred dread of schism, she does not

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hang its proper counterpoise, a still stronger love of truth, a still more sacred dread of error, she will lack the one thing needful, under God, to keep any church steady and safe in a world of sin and falsehood. On this point, ecclesiastical history furnishes abundant testimony. When love of unity overmasters the love of truth, the hope of a safe church is gone. The first step from this fatal disturbance of the scriptural balance is, to confound the true idea of Christian unity with that of merely outward, visible, secular consolidation: and then, for the sake of maintaining this kind of unity at all hazards, comes the gradual result of making the Church one vast compound;a mixture of truth and error, superstition and corruption; . . . mak[ing] the whole mass unsavoury to God and unsaving to man?’

Phillips Brooks and his circle sought “a broad and simple doctrine,” a goal they achieved in large measure in their own day; their hope to build a lasting institutional expression of this “larger faith” at the center of American culture has, however, proved to be more

NOTES 1. Letter, PB to John C. Brooks, 27 May 1891,quoted in Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 3 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900),438. 2. See, among others: Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. chapter 5 ; Gillis J. Harp, Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1 920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 10. 3. Daniel Walker Howe, Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 4. Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Vol. 3: From Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690-1900 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996 [1962]), 318. 5. See, for instance: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, CBC Massey Lectures series, 1993. 6. Kenneth Myers, All GodS Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1989), 84-85. 7. PB, quoted in Edward Abbott, Phillips Brooks: A Memory of the Bishop (Cambridge, Mass.: Powell, 1900), 43. 8 . Of course some works of radical theology by Anglicans predated the 1970s. Among others, see Joseph F. Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966); John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963).

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9. See, among others: John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die (San Francisco: Harper, 1999). For an opposing Anglican view, see C. FitzSimons Allison, The Cruelty of Heresy: An Afirmation of Christian Orthodoxy (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse, 1994). 10. Episcopal court ruling quoted in Gustav Niebuhr, “Absolved in Gay Ordination,” New York Times (19 May 1996),4:2. 11. PB, “A Sermon on the Nature of Church,” Theology Today 12 (April 1955): 67. 12. Carl E. Braaten, “The Problem of Authority in the Church,” in The Catholicity of the Reformation, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 59-60. My overview here draws upon Robert Hannaford’s perceptive analysis in “The Legacy of Liberal Anglican Theology,” Theology 103 (2000): 89-96. Hannaford comments: “A theology which leads some of its exponents not only to reject the idea of revelation, but also-as in the case of Cupittthe reality of God himself, has long since abandoned the Christian frame of reference. . . . Classically liberalism takes the form of a reaction against received tradition and authority [as it did often in Brooks’s time]. At its best it comes as a corrective; in this form it marks a rejection of much that is perceived as fundamental to Christian theological identity. Including it within the mainstream of Anglicanism tests the idea of comprehensivenessto destruction” (93). 13. Of course, some Fundamentalists were not immune from a kind of cultural Christianity either. As H. Richard Niebuhr put it: “The mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents. The movement that identifies obedience to Jesus Christ with the practices of prohibition, and with the maintenance of early American social organization, is a type of cultural Christianity; though the culture it seeks to conserve differs from that which its rivals honor.” See H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951), 102. 14. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 113. Theological liberals were involved in redefining those “laws of God” and so their moralism looked rather different from that of Brooks and very different from the moralism of many conservative Evangelicals. 15. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 2,726-27. 16. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 17. Niebuhr argues that “the idea of ascribing ‘infinite’or ‘intrinsic’value to the human soul seems wholly foreign to Jesus. He does not speak of worth apart from God. The value of man, like the value of sparrow or flower, is his value to God.” See 17-18. FitzSimons Allison notes that Harnack “took the ‘Fatherhood’ that was given by the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and claimed it as an innate human right.” See The Cruelty of Heresy, 160. 17. See, for example, C. FitzSimons Allison’s superb The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury Press, 1966); James Turner, Without God, without Creed: The Rise of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

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18. William G. McLoughlin, ed., American Evangelicals, 1800-1900 (New York: Harper, 1968), 14. 19. Richard Wightman Fox, “Experience and Explanation in Twentieth Century American Religious History,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry s. Stout and D.G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40 1,404. 20. Benton Johnson, Dean R. Hoge, and Donald A Luidens, “Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline,” First Things 31 (March 1993): 15, 16, 17. 21. Robert L. Dabney, Sacred Rhetoric (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee for Publishing, 1870), 75. 22. See, for example, Warren W. Wiersbe, introduction to Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1989). This is an updated edition of Brooks’s Yale Lectures. 23. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 89. Referring to Roger Lundin’s The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World, Marsden concludes: “The question is one of authority. Traditionally in Christianity God was thought of as the author of the universe and of history. In the modern West, however, the elite champions of high culture have urged throwing off any authority external to human beings themselves. . . . Human beings, according to [W. H.] Auden, having rejected external authority, inevitably make either the mind or the body their supreme lord.” The shift from the centrality of the Word to the centrality of the preacher may be understood as an earlier step in this larger process. 24. See Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910,” Journal of American History 72 (1985): 45-62. 25. E. C. Chorley, Men and Movements in the Episcopal Church (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 376-92. As we have seen, conservative Anglo-Catholics were not friends of Brooks but their redrawing of the Episcopal Church’s self-understanding ironically aided the cause of Broad Churchmen like Brooks. 26. See Chorley, Men and Movements, 42443, for the classic formulation of this “synthesis” interpretation. Chorley stresses the continuity between the nineteenth-century Evangelical party and the small group of liberal Evangelicals who emerged in the early twentieth. Addison’s celebratory treatment of prayer book revision in the early 1900s is another vivid example. He concludes that the process that culminated with the revised 1928 BCP was “a tribute not to the strength of any party but to the comprehensiveness of the Church.” Nevertheless, he concedes that “orthodox Protestant dogma was plainly defied when prayer for the departed was approved” (James Thayer Addison, The Episcopal Church in the United States, 1789-1931 (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 306. One variant of this synthesis approach is to leave out the REC split altogether. David Locke’s The Episcopal Church (New York: Hippocrene, 1991) does not even mention the REC. 27. John S. Stone, The Contrast (New York: Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1853), 210-1 1. A Roman Catholic commentator writing

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more than thirty years later agreed with Stone: “The fact is, the Broad Church seems to think that the necessity of certainty is not one of the great necessities. With Maurice and with [A.V.G.] Allen the great necessity is compromise-that is, a readiness to sacrifice essential dogmas for peace’ sake. Among BroadChurchmen compromise is taken from the region of non-essentials and from the category of makeshifts, and is written at the head of the book of dogma.” See Anonymous, “Broad Church,” Catholic World 43 (April 1886): 104. 28. PB, “A Sermon on Nature of Church,” 67.

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Manuscripts F. W. Farrar Collection, Canterbury Cathedral library, Canterbury, G.B. Papers of Phillips Brooks and the Brooks Family, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Phillips Brooks Collection, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas. Phillips Brooks, assorted manuscript sermons, Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Alexandria, Virginia.

Books and Articles

Abbot, Francis Ellingwood. Scientijk Theism. New York: Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1885. Allen, Alexander V. G. Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks. 3 vols. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1900. Allen, Alexander V. G. The Continuity of Christian Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884. Anonymous. “The Broad Church.” Catholic World 43 (April 1886): 101-1 1. Brooks, Phillips. “Sermon on the Nature of Church.” Theology Today 12 (1955): 57-67. Brooks, Phillips. The Law of Growth and Other Sermons. 9th series. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910. Brooks, Phillips. Lectures on Preaching: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 1878. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907. Brooks, Phillips. Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social. Edited by John Cotton Brooks. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894. 22 1

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Brooks, Phillips. Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips Brooks. New York: Saalfield & Fitch, 1893. Brooks, Phillips. “Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity.” In National Needs and Remedies: The Discussions of the General Christian Conference Held in Boston, Mass., December 4th, and 6th, 1889 under the Auspices and Direction of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States. New York: Baker & Taylor, 1890. Brooks, Phillips. Preface to Faith and Action: From the Writings of E D. Maurice. Boston: D. Lothrop, 1886. Brooks, Phillips. Sermons Preached in English Churches. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1883. Brooks, Phillips. Alexander Hamilton Vinton: A Memorial Sermon. Boston: A. Williams, 1881a. Brooks, Phillips. The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1881b. Brooks, Phillips. The Light of the World and Other Sermons. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1990. Brooks, Phillips. “Pulpit and Popular Skepticism.” Princeton Review 1 (1879): 295-310. Chase, J. Franklin. “Remarks.” In Thirty-Second Annual Report of the New England Watch and Ward Society. Boston, Mass.: n.p., 1910. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Aids to Reflection. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by W.G.T. Shedd. New York: Harper & Bros., 1884. Dabney, R. L. Sacred Rhetoric; or A Course of Lectures on Preaching. Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee for Publication, 1870. Daniels, W. H., ed. Moody: His Words, Work and Workers. New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1878. Dyer, Heman. Records of an Active Life. New York: Whittaker, 1886. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2. Edited by Jean F. Carr, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Joseph Slater. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1979. Farrar, F. W. “Leader of Religious Thought and Action.” Review of the Churches 3 (February 15,1893): 269-73. Fiske, John. Idea of God as AfSected by Modern Knowledge. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1886. Hanson, J. W. Memorial Life and Works of Dwight L. Moody. Toronto: J. L. Nichols, 1900. Hodge, Charles. “The Theology of the Intellect.” In Essays and Reviews. New York: R. Carter, 1857. Hyde, Thomas Alexander. “The Rev. Phillips Brooks.” The Arena 1 (1 890): 7 16-29. Lawrence, William. Memories of a Happy Life. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1926. Lawrence, William. Fifty Years. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. May, James. Evangelical Religion: In Its Connection with the English and American Episcopul Churches. New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1851.

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McIlvaine, Charles P. The Work of Preaching Christ. Boston: Gospel Book & Tract Depository, 1871. Newton, William Wilberforce. Yesterday with the Fathers. New York: Cochrane, 1910. Peirce, Charles Saunders. “The Fixation of Belief.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover, 1955. Richards, C. A. L. Remembrances of Phillips Brooks by Two of His Friends. Boston, Mass.: Clericus Club, 1893. Scudder, Vida. On Journey. New York: Dutton, 1937. Stone, John S. The Contrast: 01;the Evangelical and Tractarian Systems, Compared in their Structure and Tendencies, New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1853. Suter, J. W., ed. Life and Letters of William Reed Huntington, a Champion of Unity New York. New York: Century, 1925. Tyng, Charles R., ed. Record of the Life and Work of the Rev. Stephen Higginson Tyng, D.D. and History of St. George’s Church, New York to the Close of His Rectorship. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1890. Ward, Julius H. “Bishop Brooks.” The Andover Review: A Religious and Theological Monthly 17 (1892): 433-52. Warfield, B. B. “Spiritual Culture in the Theological Seminary” (originally published in 1904). In Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warjield, edited by John E. Meeter. Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970.

SECONDARY SOURCES Abbott, Edward. Phillips Brooks: A Memory of the Bishop, an Impression of the Man, a Study of the Preachel; with a Digest of his Theological Teachings. Cambridge, Mass.: Powell, 1900. Addison, James Thayer. The Episcopal Church in the United States, 1789-1931. New York: Scribner’s, 1951. Ahlstrom, Sydney. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Albright, Raymond W. A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church. New York: MacMillan, 1964. Albright, Raymond W. Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Allison, C. FitzSimons. The Cruelty of Heresy: An Afirmation of Christian Orthodoxy. Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse, 1994. Allison, C. FitzSimons. The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter. New York: Seabury Press, 1966. Amory, Cleveland. The Proper Bostonians. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947. Barth, J. Robert. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.

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Bebbington, David. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1992. Bendroth, Margaret. “Rum, Romanism, and Evangelism: Protestants and Catholics in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston.” Church History 68 (1999): 62747. Berman, Milton. John Fiske: The Evolution of a Popularizer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. Blodgett, Geoffrey. “Yankee Leadership in a Divided City: Boston, 1860-1910.” Journal of Urban History 8 (1982): 371-96. Booty, John E. Mission and Ministry: A History of the Virginia Theological Seminary. Alexandria, Va.: Virginia Theological Seminary, 1995. Bowler, Peter J. The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Boyer, Paul. Purity in Print. New York: Scribner’s, 1968. Braaten, Carl E. “The Problem of Authority in the Church.” In The Catholicity of the Reformation, edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996. Brastow, Lewis Orsmond. The Modern Pulpit: A Study of Homiletic Sources and Characteristics. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Brown, C. G. “Christocentric Liberalism in the Episcopal Church.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 37 (1968): 5-38. Buell, Lawrence. “The Unitarian Movement and the Art of Preaching in 19th Century America.” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 166-90. Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1 765. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Butler, Diana Hochstedt . Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Carter, Paul Allen. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971. Cashdollar, Charles D. The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Chesebrough, David. “The Call to Battle: The Stances of Parker, Finney, Beecher and Brooks on the Great Issues Surrounding the Civil War and a Comparison of Those Stances with Other Clergy in the Nation.” Ph.D. diss., Illinois State University, 1988. Chorley, E. Clowes. Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church. New York: Scribner’s, 1946. Christensen, Torben. Origin and History of Christian Socialism, 1848-54. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget, 1962. Clark, Bayard S. “Phillips Brooks in Biography.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 31 (1962): 54-57. Cunningham, Raymond J. “From Preachers of the Word to Physicians of the Soul: The Protestant Pastor in Nineteenth Century America.” Journal of Religious History 3 (1965): 32746.

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Index

Abbot, Francis E., 173,174 Abbott, Lyman, 192 Abelard, 171 abolitionism, 12,51 African Americans, 52,54 Alger, Horatio, 135 Allen, Alexander Viets Griswold, 158, 167,193 Allen, Frederick Baylies, 133 American Church Society, 68 Andover Theological Seminary, 13,94 Anglicanism, 13,23,33,81,90,109, 149,150,155,158,162, 166,168, 178, 191,194,211 Anglo-Catholicism, 17,23,208; Anglo-Catholics, 74,75,82,89, 162, 191. See also ritualism Appleton, Nathan, 12 Appleton, William, 18-19, 184 architecture. See gothic-style architecture; Trinity Church, Boston The Arena, 107,136 Aristotelians, 28 Arminianism, 33-34, 179 Arnold, Thomas, 150 Articles of Religion (or Thirty-Nine Articles), 70,75, 154, 162, 166, 178

atonement, 16,25,26,35,57,79,97, 113,115,119-20,138,176-78, 212-13 Augsburg Confession, 166 Augustine, 168,178 authority, religious, 161-69 Baptist Church, 95, 109 Barnes, Albert, 49 Barth, Karl, 163 Beecher, Henry Ward, 2-3,28,32,33, 55,92,111,116,128,129-30,139, 183,192 Bliss, W. D. P., 131 Book of Common Prayer, 72,109,215 Book of Homilies, 109 Boston Latin School, 20,22 Brastow, Lewis, 115, 127 Brattle Street Church, 16, 81 Broad Church movement, 4-5,37,38, 79,90,130,134,149-51,154, 156,157,158,159,167,183,188, 193. See also Essays and Reviews Brooks, Edward, 14 Brooks, George (brother), 48 Brooks, Mary Ann Phillips (mother), 13,14,15,22,33,37 Brooks, Peter Chardon (great-uncle), 10, 19

23 1

232

Index

Brooks, Phillips: building of Trinity Church, Boston, 80-89; death and funeral of, 1-2; Episcopal election controversy, 191-94; ministerial training, 28-38; parents, 13-20; Philadelphia years, 47-60; schooling, 20-23; and the split from Evangelical party, 74-80 Brooks, Phillips, topics addressed: “The Candle of the Lord,” 123-25; “Duty of the Christian Business Man,” 134; “Heresy,” 168-69; “The Law of Growth,” 125-26; “Lectures on Preaching,” 117, 120; “The Need of Enthusiasm for Humanity,” 180; “New Theism,” 173; “Orthodoxy,” 169-7 1;“Pulpit and Popular Skepticism,” 171-73 Brooks, Van Wyck, 82,88 Brooks, William G. Jr. (brother), 15, 50,52,53,56,57,136 Brooks, William G. Sr. (father), 12, 13, 14,15,16,17-21,31,34,54, 55 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 32, 152, 181 Brown, John, 48 Bushnell, Horace, 25,26,32,33,57, 153,155,160,175,177,183,210, 212-13; Discourses on Christian Nurture, 25; “Sermons for the New Life,” 33, 150; The Vicarious Sacrijce, 25 Butler, Bishop, 90 Calvin, John, 166, 177 Calvinism, 14,23,24,27,33-34,69, 95,161,179,212 Cambridge movement, 83 Carlyle, Thomas, 21,35,56, 152 Catholic immigrants, 12,55 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Chalcedon, 175 Channing, William Ellery, 14,25-27, 111,155,163,175,180

Chartism, 130 Chauncy, Charles, 27 Cheney, Charles Edward, 93 Child, Francis J., 60 Christian Intelligencer, 179 Christian Socialist movement, 130-3 1 Christology, 16,26, 175, 178 Church Congress. See Protestant Episcopal Church Church of England, 149, 150,151, 154,155,168 Church of the Advent, Boston, 29, 191 Church of the Advent, Philadelphia, 29,36,48,68 Church of the Carpenter, 131 civil rights, 54 Civil War, 12,28,33,47,59,60, 112, 136,188 Clarke, James Freeman, 89,130 Clericus Club, Boston, 157,169,170 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 25,28,32, 70,150-52,153,158,163-64,171,

172,179,181,187 Common Sense philosophers. See Scottish Common Sense philosophy Comte, Auguste, 35-36 Confederate, 53 confessionalism, 24,26,32,79,94, 166 Congregational Church, 13,15,22, 24,25,26,27,109,110 Council of Trent, 113, 168 Cowper, William, 122 Cram, Ralph Adams, 82 Cranmer, Thomas, 177, 178 Cummins, Bishop George David, 89, 216. See also Reformed Episcopal Church Dabney, Robert L., 214 Dante Alighieri, 171 Darby, John Nelson, 187 Davies, Llewelyn, 154

233

Index

Democratic party, 12,48,51,52,53, 59 Denison House, 132 dispensationalism, 137, 187 Drummond, Henry, 95 Eastburn, Bishop Manton, 78-79, 191 ecclesiology, 184-86 Edwards, Jonathan, 24,27,113,160, 179,180 egalitarianism, 11,60, 110 Eliot, Charles W., 17,61 Emancipation Proclamation, 52,56 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19,26,27, 41,53,59,88,107,11,121-22,

155,161; Nature, 111,160 Enlightenment, 17,28,82, 156, 180 Episcopal Church. See Protestant Episcopal Church The Episcopal Recorder, 68 eschatology, 187-90 Essays and Reviews, 151,154,172. See also Broad Church movement Evangelical Alliance, 89,180,18 1, 202 Evangelical Education Society (EES), 68,72,74-77,90,92,192,210 Evangelical Episcopalians, 13-17,20, 22,24,30,33,37,38,51,71,92, 112,114,140, 187. See also Evangelical party Evangelical Knowledge Society, 68, 72 Evangelical party, 12,13,15-17, 20-22,23,24,27-28,30-31,33, 35-38,51,68,70,71,73,74,77, 79-80,83,89,112,150,210. See also Evangelical Episcopalians; Low Church party Evangelical Revival, 92, 113 evangelicalism,45,61,74,82-83,90, 92-93,95,98,109,153,158,160,

209- 10 Everett, Edward, 12

Fabians, 132 Faneuil Hall, 134 Fmar, Frederick W., 151-54; Eternal Hope 154; Life of Christ 154 Federalists, 11 Filmore, Millard, 12 First Church, Boston, 14, 15 First Vatican Council, 162 Fiske, John, 173-74 Free Soil party, 12,54 freedmen, 47,53,55,60 Freedmen’s Relief Association, 52 Fremont,48 Frothingham, N. L., 14, 15 Goethe ,Johann Wolfgang von ,28, 35-36 Gettysburg, 49,50 Gordon, A J ., 9 4 Gordon, George A., 189 Gospel, 25,36,55,56,69,72,97, 108, 112,114-15,116,118,127, 176,181,182,186,192 gothic-style architecture, 8 1-83,86, 88 Great Awakening, 113 Griswold, Bishop Alexander Viets, 13, 158 Harper, William Rainey, 95 Harvard College, 13,16,17,20,22, 25,27,29,30,35,60,61,81 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrick, 155 heresy, 157,168-69,190 heroes, heroism, 21,47-50,56-60 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 132 High Church Party, 31,52,70,73,77, 79, 154,162,186,191,193 Higher Criticism, 37,95, 157,158, 175,190 Hodge, A. A., 24 Hodge, Charles, 24,26,33,164 Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, 29, 48,49,52,53,54,58,59,68,69,

71,73

234

Index

Homestead Strike (1892), 135 homiletics, 16,73,91, 107-29 Hooker, Richard, 166,177 Hopkins, John Henry, 52,193 humanism, 17,36,121,139,181 Huntington, Frederick Dan, 16 Huntington, William Reed, 61,79, 158 Hyde, Thomas Alexander, 107-8,136 immanentist theology, 4,50, 167 Incarnation, 4,80,138,174, 175-77, 211,212-13 individualism, 27,32, 110, 134-38, 166,208-9 Irish immigrants, 11-13 Jacksonian America, 11,54, 110 Johnson, Samuel, 90 Jowett, Benjamin, 151 justification, 25,113,177-78 Kant, Immanuel, 28,35,152,182 Keble, John, 185 Kenyon College, 77,158 Kingdom of God, 4,47,96, 129,138, 181,211-12 Kingsley, Charles, 130, 131, 152 La Farge, John, 85-86 latitudinarian, 17,20,90,215 Lawrence, Amos A., 12 Lawrence, William, 18, 184 Lee, Henry, 61 Lewes, George Henry, 35-36 Lincoln, Abraham, 47,49,52,56-60 Lotze, Hennann, 155 Low Church Party, 13,17,22,38, 71-72,83,89,158,162,191,193. See also Evangelical Party Lowell, Francis, 10-1 1 Lutheranism 109, 166 Luther, Martin, 113, 171,177 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, 116,119, 127-28

Machen, J. Gresham, 216; Christianity and Liberalism, 216 Martineau, James, 171 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 130-32,

134,150,151,152-53,154,156, 163,165,171,173,181-82,187; Aids to Reflection, 152; Theological Essays, 33, 150,152

May, Henry F., 2,129 May, James, 75,76 McClellan, George B., 47,50,56 McCosh, James, 93 McIlvaine, Bishop Charles P., 24,52, 112-20,163, 176,187; The Preaching of Christ Cruc$ed, 112 Meade, Bishop William, 48 Memorial Working-Men’s Club and Institute, 135 Milton, John, 171 Mitchell, Elizabeth K., 89 Moody, Dwight L., 68,91-98, 108, 128,130,136-39,179 moralism, 35-36,95,113,131-33, 181-84 Munger, T. T., 127

nativism, 55 Negroes. See African Americans New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, 133 Newman, John Henry, 152,165 New Theology, 92,175,181 Newton, John, 122 Newton, R. Heber, 158,190; The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible, 190 Newton, William W., 68,71,91, 158 New York Tribune, 193 Nicaea, 175 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 211-12 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 190 Origen, 171 orthodoxy, 16,19,33,34,36,37,67, 168, 170-1,172,175

235

Index

Oxford movement, 83,157,185. See also Anglo-Catholicism Paine, Robert Treat, 135 Park, Edwards Amasa, 24,26,31 Parker, Theodore, 27,155 Parkman, Francis, 132 Parsons, Frank, 131 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 169-170 Pelagianism, 60, 161, 178; Pelagius, 178 Peninsular Campaign, 50 Phillips, Mary Ann. See Brooks, Mary Ann Phillips Phillips, Wendell, 54,56 Pietism, 88, 112 Platonism, 28, 187; Platonists, 28 Plymouth Brethren, 137 Popular Science Monthly, 169 Porcellian Club, 8 1 Potter, Bishop Alonzo, 48,52,72,114 premillenialism, 137, 187 prayer book. See Book of Common Prayer Presbyterian, 24,93, 109,110,113; New School Presbyterianism, 49; Old School Presbyterianism, 24, 113 Princeton, 24,26,93, 112, 113,164 Princeton Review, 171, 182 Protestant Episcopal Church, 2-3,5, 13-20,22,23,24,29,30,31,33, 51,68,72,79,90,91,93,95,107, 112,158,185,191,214-17 Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, 22,23,24, 28,31,32,34,35-38,67,69,72, 73,77,90,111,112 Protestantism, 3,5,20,23,24,26,32, 36,37,47,68,80-81,82,89,97, 108,111,117, 132, 139, 149,152, 156,158,160,162,165,166,168, 169,170,181, 182, 183,184,189 Puritanism, 14,82 Puritans, 10,13, 18, 158

Pusey, E. B., 153. See also Oxford Movement Putnam, George, 61 Quincy, Josiah, 132 Rabaut ,Paul, 2 1 rationalism, 16,27,28, 156, 157, 159 Reconstruction, 60 Reformation, 82, 113,166,168,178 Reformed Episcopal Church, 89,93 Reformed theology, 24,26,33,34,69, 88,120,180 Renwick, James Jr., 84 Republican party, 11,12,48,53 revivalism, 17,91,92, 128,209 Richards, C. A. L., 31,49-50,157, 192 Richardson, Henry H., 81-82,8486 Rittenhouse Square, 48 ritualism, 73,75,86,90. See also Anglo-Catholicism Robertson,F. W., 130, 150,151,153, 155,173,183 Roman Catholicism, 72,75,86,90 Romanesque, 82-84 Romanticism, 9, 13,16,21,27,28, 47,48,50,56-57,59,61,70,80,

88,91,97-98, 110-12,117, 121, 128,129,140,156,208-10,214 Ruskin, John, 131 sacramentarianism,75,77 sacraments, 15,83,86,97, 109, 184, 186-87 Sage, Henry W., 116 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 155, 156 Scottish Common Sense philosophy, 24,82,93, 156 Scudder, Vida, 131-32 Second Great Awakening, 183. See also revivalism Simeon, Charles, 120 slavery, 29,47,49,50-54,56,59-60, 136

236

Index

Smith, George Adam, 95-96 Snelling, Samuel, 16,17,91,159 social class, 10-1 1,29-30 Social Darwinism, 130, 135 Social Gospel, 130-33 Sparrow, William, 34,37,69 Spencer, Herbert, 130,131 Spurgeon, Charles W., 115-16,128 St. Bartholomew’s, New York, 84 St. George’s, New York, 83-85,93 St. Paul, 97,113,171,177 St. Paul’s Church, Tremont St., Boston, 9,14-20,22,30,37,79, 82,91,132,158,159 Stanley,Arthur Penryhn, 151-52, 153-54,155 Stanley, Dean, 125 Stone, John S., 15,17,19,69,75,76, 158,216 suffrage, 47,55-56 Swedenborg, 171

Turner, James, 32,35,182 Tyng, Stephen H., 51,83,89,92,93, 112,114-15,117,118,119,187; “The Office and Work of the Ministry,” 114-15 Union League, 49 Unitarianism, 9,13,14,15, 16,17, 19,25,26,27,28,32,34,89, 110, 111,152,155,156,175,177,191, 192 Upjohn, Richard, 82 Victorianism, 36,97; Victorians, 125 Vinton, Alexander H., 17,19,20,21, 22,29,31,52,91, 159 Virginia Theological Seminary. See Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia

Taylor, Charles H., 132 Taylor, Nathaniel W., 24-25,27 Tennent, Gilbert, 109 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 9,21,32,36, 152 Tertullian, 36,171 Thirty-Nine Articles. See Articles of Religion Toplady, Augustus, 33, 122 Tractarianism, 83,86, 152. See also Anglo-Catholicism Transcendentalism, 16,69,98,208 Transcendentalists,27,32, 111 trinity (doctrine of), 25,26,70,175 Trinity Church, Boston, 1,29,61,68,

Walker, James, 22 Ward, Julius H., 134 Warfield, B. B ., 24 Washburn, Edward A., 156 Wayland, Francis, 35 Wesley, John, 33, 113 Westminster Abbey, 125 Westminster Standards, 166 Whig Party, 11-12,29, 136 Whitefield, George, 109, 122 Whitman, Walt, 94 Wilberforce,William, 5 1, 158 Winthrop, Robert, 12 Woman Suffrage Festival and Bazaar, 132 Wood, Leonard, 84 Woodward, George W., 53

118,122,128,157,162,164,178, 189,190,191,192 Trinity Church, Buffalo, 81 Trinity Church, New York, 107

Yale Divinity School, 24,25 Yale Lectures on Preaching. See Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching

74,79,80-91,87,107,108,116,

About the Author

Gillis Harp received his doctorate in American history at the University of Virginia. He has taught at McGill and Acadia universities in Canada and is currently professor of history at Grove City College. He is also the author of Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920. His work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Church History, and other publications.

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