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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
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FROM THE RIGHT/ REV- 
 EREND PHILLIPS ^BROOKS 
 DOCTOR OF DIVINITY AND 
 BISHOP OF MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 BOSTON / 
 
 J. G. CUPPLES COMPANY 
 THE BACK BAY BOOK STORE 
 
 250 BOYLSTON STREET 
 
 Y 
 
Copyright, 1892, 
 By J. G. Cupples Company. 
 
 A II rights reser7jed. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE . 
 
 Education . . , . . i 
 
 The State 7 
 
 War 13 
 
 The Church . , .27 
 
 Scepticism 49 
 
 Life . 55 
 
Vacation . 
 
 j|HE true future does not re- 
 peat but enlarges the pres- 
 ent. And every present 
 which accepts this law ac- 
 cepts with it its appointed work, to 
 gather the stones and the timbers for 
 the temples which the future is to 
 build. It makes this the principle on 
 which it proceeds in training a new 
 generation. It disciplines the child 
 with reverence, as destined to a com- 
 pleter life than the parent. It tran- 
 scends selfishness, and prejudice, and 
 jealousy, and, with a large and lov- 
 ing hope, a complete faith in human 
 progress, it imagines no perfection for 
 CO 
 
2 ITnepiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 itself except this relative one of perfectly 
 filling its place in the gradual perfection 
 of the whole. 
 
 You will see how this truth, which 
 makes the teacher in this great world- 
 school always recognize that the scholar 
 is to have larger work than his to do, 
 will make all education of necessity a 
 profound and thorough thing. It insists 
 on teaching principles and truths, and is 
 not satisfied with just imposing forms. 
 
 We look back over history, and we 
 see the same sight always. Wherever any 
 age has given its successor nothing but 
 forms and institutions ready-made, the 
 new age has not merely made no ad- 
 
JEfcucation* 3 
 
 vance upon the old ; it has invariably 
 shrunk and shriveled till it lived a life 
 too small even to fill the narrow limits 
 which its father claimed. But wherever 
 any age has given its child an education 
 in any vital truths, the child has always 
 taken those truths, developed them into 
 an effectiveness and built them into a 
 beauty that the father never guessed. 
 
 THE Jew was so used to the sublime 
 thought of human life held fast in the 
 hands of the Divine authority, shaped 
 into gradual rectitude by the continual 
 pressure of command and prohibition ; 
 the decalogue so supremely represented 
 to him the first thought of religion, that 
 his prayer for a new generation's relig- 
 ious life touched of necessity first of all 
 
4 ITnspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 upon the moral side, the keeping of the 
 commandments of the Lord. And here, 
 I take it, the Jew simply conceives the 
 course of all successful culture. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 The order of the Testaments is not an 
 accidental, but an essential order. Cal- 
 vary, in its idea, in its divine conception 
 was "from the foundation," long before 
 Sinai ; but in man's apprehension of 
 them, Sinai antedated Calvary by fifteen 
 hundred years. The conscience must 
 bow itself to the supreme " Thou shalt " 
 and "Thou shalt not" of authority, be- 
 fore grace can enter in to win the heart 
 with the gentle persuasiveness of its 
 "Believe and live." John the Baptist 
 must preach repentance before Christ 
 can proclaim regeneration. 
 
Education. 5 
 
 God wastes no history. In every age 
 and every land He is working for the 
 elucidation of some moral truth, some 
 riper culture for the character of man. 
 
Zbe State* 
 
 GOVERNMENT is an incor- 
 porated, an embodied truth. 
 Get any high idea about it, 
 get beyond the thought that 
 a nation is just a multitude of men 
 who have happened to come together 
 in a certain country, and who have 
 bargained among themselves not to 
 hurt each other, not to rob and kill 
 each other, and you must come to 
 this, that every nation is a divine utter- 
 ance before the world of certain prin- 
 ciples, of providence, of brotherhood, 
 of justice, of the divine and human lives. 
 The highest conception of the state, as 
 of the world, is that it is an uttered 
 thought of God, a certain colossal utter- 
 ance of truth. 
 
 (7) 
 
8 Inspiration anD ftrutb* 
 
 The healthy state, like the healthy 
 human body, can tolerate nothing within 
 it that will not become part and parcel 
 of itself, ready to share its fortunes, 
 ready to do its work. A scholarship 
 which tries to live in the state and yet 
 not be of it, setting itself apart, fastidious, 
 critical, captious, however thorough or 
 elegant it may be, is mischievous. The 
 politician who lives the life to which all 
 politicians tend, of isolation from the 
 common public interests, thinking that 
 the state and government are things for 
 him to use, and not that he is their 
 instrument ; that they exist for him, not 
 he for them, — he is a terrible curse 
 always. May God rid us of him speed- 
 ily. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 A GREAT public life moving healthily 
 
£be State* 9 
 
 will warn us of any coming dangers, as 
 the ocean itself rings the storm-bell that 
 tells of its own tumults. 
 
 The time has . . . passed when a Sun- 
 day-school book need count it unworthy 
 of its pages to help some boy in the city 
 or on the prairies to gather up, with the 
 love of the Lord who is to save him, a 
 love of the land he may be called to die 
 for, and of all the great race to which, 
 if he lives at all worthily, his life is to be 
 given. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 I PLEAD with you for all that makes 
 strong citizens. First, clear convictions, 
 deep, careful, patient study of the gov- 
 ernment under which we live, until you 
 not merely believe it is the best in all 
 
io 1Fn6pf ration and £rutb* 
 
 the world, but know why you believe. 
 And then a clear conscience, as clear in 
 private interests, as much ashamed of 
 public as of private sin, as ready to hate 
 and rebuke and vote down corruption in 
 the state, in your own party, as you 
 would be in your own store or church ; 
 as ready to bring the one as the other 
 to the judgment of a living God. And 
 then unselfishness : an earnest and ex-' 
 alted sense that you are for the land, 
 and not alone the land for you ; some- 
 thing of the self-sacrifice which they 
 showed who died for us from '6i to '65. 
 And then activity : the readiness to wake 
 and watch and do a citizen's work un- 
 tiringly, counting it as base not to vote 
 at an election, not to work against a bad 
 official, or to work for a good one, as it 
 would have been to shirk a battle in the 
 war. Such strong citizenship let there 
 
Cbe State. 1 1 
 
 be among us ; such knightly doing of 
 our duties on the field of peace. 
 
 i 
 
 A STATE is not merely an idea, or an 
 accident, or a machine, but is a being 
 with the privilege of force. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 SOMEWHERE, sometimes, it will assert 
 itself strongly in the action of the world. 
 Busied mostly within itself, in its own 
 self-regulation, in the development of 
 its own resources, and in the extension 
 of its influence through the peaceful 
 machineries of commerce and negotia- 
 tion, there must be in it a power to 
 enforce itself at the call of justice upon 
 the unwilling action either of its own 
 
i2 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 subjects who separate themselves in re- 
 bellion from it, or against other nations 
 who wantonly set themselves in the way 
 of its just growth. 
 
 Since truth lives in outward struc- 
 tures, and embodies itself in govern- 
 ments, it has not merely its spiritual 
 relations to wills, but its physical rela- 
 tions to actions. It is hindered not only 
 by unconverted hearts, but by armed 
 rebellions. And so it has a right and 
 need to say not merely to the will 
 " Believe," but to the action " Submit." 
 It has not merely its higher functions of 
 persuasion, but its lower functions, too, 
 ol force. 
 
Mar. 
 
 H, how alike all history seems ! 
 How old, and yet eternally 
 how new, these elementary 
 emotions are ! How the 
 first instincts that make men fight for 
 freedom, and good government, and 
 truth, last on from age to age ! old and 
 yet ever young, like the eternal skies, 
 the ever self-renewing trees, the gray 
 and child-like sea ! 
 
 DISPERSING armies and hanging trai- 
 tors, imperatively as justice and necessity 
 may demand them both, are not the kill- 
 ing of the spirit out of which they 
 sprang. 
 
 (13) 
 
H inspiration anfc XTrutb* 
 
 It is not the least of the debts that 
 we owe to our Union soldiers that their 
 very graves are vocal — that though dead 
 they speak to us still. 
 
 THE men who from the bloody shore 
 of the Rebellion embarked into the other 
 life have left their foot-prints inefface- 
 able upon the margin where they planted 
 them, and made it recognizable and dear 
 forever. 
 
 It is because in them, in what they 
 were and what they did, the best of our 
 national character shone out, that these 
 soldiers have won a dearness and a per- 
 
War, 15 
 
 manent memory that do not belong 
 merely to their personality. The nation 
 honors in them its truest representatives. 
 The real life of the land sees in them the 
 ideal life which is the true outcome of its 
 institutions. They were the flower of its 
 principles, and so it sprinkles its memo- 
 rial flowers on their graves. 
 
 It was a noble gift of Providence that 
 in one man [Washington] should be 
 comprised and pictured, for the dullest 
 eyes to see, the majesty and meaning of 
 the struggle that gave our nation birth. 
 
 Oh, the mysterious power of a death 
 for a noble cause ! The life is truly 
 given. It passes out of the dying body 
 into the cause, which lives anew. 
 
1 6 Inspiration anD Grutb* 
 
 WHEN the great ship had hardly 
 rounded into port; while, standing on 
 the shore of peace, we felt the solid earth 
 still rocking under our feet with the re- 
 membered heaving of the sea, they who 
 had watched and labored for her safety 
 through the nights and storms out on 
 mid-ocean, one by one, as if their work 
 was done, began to pass to their reward, 
 and to what other tasks we cannot know, 
 awaiting them in other worlds. What 
 have they left behind them, they and the 
 humbler dead whom votive monuments 
 and tender hearts remember still in every 
 town and hamlet of their land? Not 
 only what they did, not only even what 
 they were, but new tasks like their own 
 for us who stay behind them. They did 
 not merely clear the field of treason. 
 By the same labor they built up a new 
 possibility of national character and life. 
 
War* 17 
 
 They were like the men who, in these 
 stony pastures of Andover, clear the 
 rough field of stones and build the gray 
 wall that is to surround and shelter it, 
 out of the same material, at the same 
 
 time By purer social life, by finer 
 
 aspirations, by more unselfishness, by 
 heartier hatred of corruption, let us be 
 worthy of them, and in our quiet duties 
 build the true memorial to the characters 
 of those who found their duty in the 
 camp, the prison and the field, and where 
 they found it did it even to the death. 
 They saw that their country was like a 
 precious vase of rarest porcelain, price- 
 less while it was whole, valueless if it 
 was broken into fragments. What they 
 died to keep whole, may we in our seve- 
 ral places live to keep holy ! So may 
 we be worthy of them. 
 
1 8 ITnspiration anD XLxutb. 
 
 As the merchant, the scholar, the 
 statesman, the diplomatist represent the 
 other elements of power in the state, by 
 which she impresses her will upon other 
 wills ; so the soldier represents the ele- 
 ment of force by which she must be 
 ready to rule action without ruling will 
 when the clear need shall come. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 A MERCIFUL Providence kept our first 
 history from becoming a military history. 
 And if we ask how Providence did this 
 good work for us, the answer can be only 
 in the way in which God made the 
 thought and the devotion of the time so 
 strong that force was always kept in its 
 true place, — their servant. 
 
War, 19 
 
 His [the Puritan soldier's] was the 
 great, homely, intelligible utterance of 
 strength, ringing out clear and sharp in 
 the midst of the often thin and over- 
 subtle theologizings of the time, as the 
 dazzling and bewildered atmosphere 
 compresses and discharges its electri- 
 city in the piercing lightning and the 
 pealing thunder. 
 
 When we look at Washington, we are 
 at once struck by seeing how in him, 
 who represented as a military man the 
 force of the new ideas which were at 
 work, we have also as a thinker, as a 
 statesman and political philosopher, the 
 clearest example of the reason of which 
 that force was the expression. Often 
 the two are disunited. One man does 
 the thinking, another man does the fight- 
 
20 Inspiration anD ZTrutb* 
 
 ing. One man develops the idea in the 
 closet, and another makes it forcible 
 upon the field. Rarely have the two so 
 met in one man. Washington was at 
 once the clearest thinker and the most 
 effective soldier of our Revolutionary 
 struggle. 
 
 NEVER was there a fighting-man with 
 less of the purely military passion. He 
 was the armed citizen, armed for a cause 
 that belonged to the very essence of his 
 citizenship. When that cause had tri- 
 umphed on the field of battle, he laid 
 down his arms and was the unarmed 
 citizen, — the citizen, the same man still 
 contending for precisely the same cause 
 on the field of statesmanlike debate for 
 which he had fought at Trenton and 
 suffered at Valley Forge. 
 
max. 21 
 
 TRUTH in her armor is apt to be a 
 very clumsy giant. Men will forget or 
 deny what must be our belief all through, 
 that the divine mission of force implies 
 that force has no mission save for divine 
 tasks, none for the mere brutalities of 
 selfishness, or ambition, or jealousy, or 
 worldly rage ; none for the mere punc- 
 tilios of national dignity. 
 
 % 
 
 FORCE has no right here in the world 
 except as it is simply truth in armor. 
 
 THE presence of the distinct military 
 element, the ruler of, or the slave of, but 
 not a part of the nation, not bound up 
 in the nation's fortune, nor sharing the 
 nation's feeling, not springing from the 
 
22 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 nation's heart, this is what has made the 
 weakness, and at last brought the death 
 of many a noble nation, both of the old 
 and of the modern times. May God 
 save us from it forever. 
 
 « 
 
 It is not necessary to excuse all our 
 people's early or later treatment of the 
 Indian. From earliest to latest — from 
 the Pilgrim times down to the Indian 
 policies of these last days — there is too 
 much that never can be excused. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 We are suffering to-day [June 5, 1864], 
 whatever be the secondary causes, for 
 the violation of two of God's great moral 
 laws, the law of the sacredness of govern- 
 ment and the law of the brotherhood of 
 
TKflar* 2 3 
 
 man. Gradually, grandly, from between 
 these fearful wheels that drip with blood, 
 are being ground forth into shapes which 
 men's eyes, quick-sighted with anxiety, 
 must see, these two eternal ordinances 
 of God, that government has a divine 
 right to be honored, and that man has a 
 divine right to be free. Those two 
 truths, burned into the very fibre of our 
 people as they walk the fire, are to be 
 the great moral acquisition of American 
 character. 
 
 Is there one of us that can look about 
 him and think without a shudder of an- 
 other generation of our people working 
 out this same education that we are go- 
 ing through? What! all these fearful 
 years again? Again these battles that 
 the eye cannot count or the heart re- 
 
24 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 member? Again this waste of precious 
 blood, this bitter hatred, these wild 
 blazings-up of the devilish in man, this 
 land with State on State where the har- 
 vests find no room to grow for the 
 crowded graves? Must it all come 
 again, this dark Egyptian Passover- 
 night of history, wherein God leads the 
 bondmen out, and, in all the stricken 
 land that held them slaves, leaves in 
 their deliverance " not a house where 
 there is not one dead"? We have no 
 right to leave a chance behind us that 
 this work will have to be done again. 
 But it must be, unless we can bring out 
 of it all, clearly and definitely and forever 
 settled, and lay down before the next age 
 of Americans, the truths of national au- 
 thority and human liberty, to be the 
 materials out of which it is to build the 
 future. 
 
TOar, 25 
 
 A TRUTH starts on its way across the 
 world, sent by God to possess the world ; 
 and that truth meets its obstacles, — ob- 
 stinate and resisting men. It lays itself 
 against the wills of those men. By 
 every method of approach, through the 
 affections and the conscience and the 
 sense of beauty, and in every other way, 
 it tries to get power over those wills and 
 make them yield to it. It tries to rule the 
 will and so to reach the actions which 
 will be spontaneously obedient when the 
 will has once submitted. It largely suc- 
 ceeds. That is the success it most de- 
 sires. But when its efforts of persuasion 
 and conviction have failed to remove any 
 one obstinate enemy out of its path, 
 what then? Surely, unless physical 
 force be of a wholly immoral nature, we 
 must believe that God has so arranged 
 his universe that this beleaguered and 
 
26 ITnepiratton anfc ftrutb* 
 
 hindered truth may claim the powers 
 that can compel the action even when 
 they cannot turn the will, and force out 
 of its way an enemy who will not turn 
 into a friend. 
 
 
Zbc Cburcb* 
 
 O ! it dawns upon you that the 
 Church is not to be made, 
 that the Church is here al- 
 ready. In the aggregate of 
 all this Christly life you have the 
 Church of Christ, just as truly as in 
 the aggregate of human existence you 
 have humanity. One has no more 
 to be made than the other. Both exist 
 in their components. 
 
 The Romish idea is that the Church 
 thinks and struggles and receives help 
 and revelation. The Protestant idea is 
 that thought and struggle and help and 
 light come to the Man. 
 (27) 
 
28 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 The living souls must go before the 
 living Church, which has no life except in 
 them. . . . Churches live in their souls. 
 O, the old struggles, so endless and so 
 fruitless, that history has to show, of men 
 and times that tried to keep a Church 
 alive without caring for the life of souls ; 
 men and times which seem to have 
 strangely fancied that there was a certain 
 power of vitality in the very Church it- 
 self, so that every soul on earth might 
 cease to receive inflow of Christ and yet 
 somehow the Church live on ! It is the 
 danger of the ecclesiastical spirit. It is 
 the danger for all Churchmen and all 
 Church times to fear. 
 
 The Church, whose purpose in being 
 is merely to feed her children's life and 
 
XLbe Cburcb* 2 9 
 
 so increase her own, may harm the very- 
 life that she was meant to cultivate. 
 This is nothing strange. Nothing is so 
 likely to stop a stream of water as 
 the broken or displaced fragments of 
 the very earthen pipe through which it 
 was meant to flow. 
 
 If a Church, in any way, by hindering 
 the free play of human thoughtfulness 
 upon religious things, by clothing with 
 mysterious reverence, and so shutting 
 out from the region of thought and study, 
 acts and truths which can be thoroughly 
 used only as they are growingly under- 
 stood, by limiting within hard and mi- 
 nute and invariable doctrinal statements 
 the variety of the relations of the human 
 experience to God, if, in any such way, 
 
3° Inspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 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 
 blinds and wrongs her children's intelli- 
 gence and weakens her own vitality. 
 This is the suicide of Dogmatism. 
 
 If, again, a Church, in any way, sets 
 any technical command of hers to stand 
 so across the path, that a command of 
 God cannot get free access to the will of 
 any of the least of all God's people ; if 
 there be, as there has been again and 
 again, a system of ecclesiastical morality 
 different from the eternal morality which 
 lies above the Church, between the soul 
 and God, a morality which hides some 
 eternal duties and winks at some eternal 
 
ftbe Cbutcb* 3 1 
 
 sins, just so far as there is any such ob- 
 liquity turning aside the straight, bright 
 ray that is darting right from the throne 
 of the God-soul to the will of the Man- 
 soul, just so far the Church maims and 
 wrongs her children's consciences, and 
 weakens her own vitality. This is the 
 suicide of Corruption. 
 
 AGAIN, if the symbols of the Church, 
 which ought to convey God's love to 
 man, become so hard that the love does 
 not find its way through them, and they 
 stand as splendid screens between the 
 Soul and the Love, or have such a pos- 
 itive character of their own, so far forget 
 their simple duty of pure transparency 
 and mere transmission, that they send 
 the Love down to the Soul colored with 
 
3 2 Ifnsptration anfc Grutb* 
 
 themselves, formalized and artificial; if 
 the Church dares either to limit into 
 certain material channels, or to bind to 
 certain forms of expression, that love of 
 God which is as spiritual and as free as 
 God, then yet again she is false to her 
 duty, she binds and wrongs her children's 
 loving hearts, and once again she weak- 
 ens her own vitality. This is the suicide 
 of Formalism. 
 
 The time must come when Religion 
 shall no longer make artificial virtues 
 and vices of her own, and when with more 
 unsparing tongue she shall detect and 
 praise or denounce those virtues and 
 vices which are essential and eternally 
 the same. Then a thousand rills of life 
 will be open into her which are closed 
 to-day, and she will live a thousand-fold. 
 
XTbe Cburcb* 33 
 
 Of the essential life of the Church, of 
 the truly living Church, what can we say 
 but this, that it is that which most com- 
 pletely feels that it was made for men, 
 not men for it ; which, therefore, lives 
 only as it lives in them ; which strives for 
 nothing but to open more and more the 
 channels of life from Christ to them? 
 In such a church and such a church 
 alone can be real unity. To be full of 
 such a care for, and spirit of servantship 
 to, the human soul, is the only power 
 that can keep our own Church one in 
 the midst of all her distractions. No 
 outer bond of history or government can 
 permanently hold her. Only this com- 
 mon purpose, freely working in the 
 Church at large, can keep the true or- 
 ganic unity of life, which is the only 
 unity worth having. The live pome- 
 granate holds itself together with no 
 
34 inspiration anD Grutb* 
 
 string tied round it. The dead pome- 
 granate cracks and breaks. No tight- 
 est string can hold it. The Living 
 Church of truth, obedience, and spiritual 
 love, will guard its own integrity. The 
 disintegration of error, corruption or 
 formalism, what compactest system can 
 withstand ! 
 
 THE Church does not become the 
 world's savior by furnishing it with a 
 powerful police. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 The true relations between moral law 
 and religious life are certainly not so 
 difficult as men have made them. Moral 
 action is, in one sense, the end ; that is, 
 it is the necessary result of religion, not 
 its final purpose. In another sense, 
 moral law is the means by which the 
 
Gbe Cburcb, 35 
 
 religious impulse steadies and supports 
 itself, and mounts to higher spiritual 
 heights. In this last sense, it is the very 
 highest order of machinery, but it is 
 machinery still. So that even if the 
 Church were, what she has tried to be 
 often, and has sometimes been to some 
 extent, the great Reformer, breaking 
 down sins, turning wrongs into rights, 
 ruling men's actions everywhere ; glori- 
 ous as such a sight would be, it would 
 not be the Church communicating life. 
 She would be purifying and cultivating 
 her own life. She would be making the 
 world ready for the life she had to give 
 it, but not giving it yet. 
 
 Wonderfully adapted to be the 
 channel of the highest devotion, the 
 
3 6 Inspiration an& £rutb* 
 
 deepest utterance of faith, submission 
 and repentance, the very perfect ma- 
 chinery of Christian living, the Church 
 system is dead without some power of 
 Christian life. 
 
 So again of every sacred rite which, 
 through the senses, opens a way for 
 power to reach the heart. It is ma- 
 chinery still. The sensuous impression 
 may make the soul receptive, no doubt 
 it does, to some of the more external 
 messages of God. But the impression 
 itself is not soul-life. It is not a new 
 birth, though its frightened or ecstatic 
 shiver is easily enough mistaken for an- 
 other Genesis. 
 
Gbe Cburcb* 37 
 
 WHO of us has not seen, nay, who of 
 us in the deader moments of his parish 
 life has not done, Church work enough 
 — Sunday-schools, Bible-classes, night- 
 schools, parish visiting, mothers' meet- 
 ings and reading-rooms and all that — 
 which he knew was only the mechanical 
 whirling of the spindles by hand, with 
 the vital fires utterly gone out in the 
 furnaces below. 
 
 What shall we say of Preaching? 
 Only that if men can preach, and preach 
 the very truth of Christ, year after year, 
 and yet souls, thirsty for the water of life, 
 sit at the dry mouths of their well-built 
 channels and thirst in vain for help and 
 salvation, then it must be that the mere 
 telling the Truth as the mind can under- 
 
3 8 Inspiration anD Grutb* 
 
 stand it and the lips can speak it, is not 
 necessarily the communication of the 
 Gospel Life. 
 
 The Church . . . needs more of the 
 Lord ; more knowledge, more obedience, 
 more love of Jesus Christ. Unless we 
 get that, and make that bear upon men's 
 hearts and souls, we may chant our own 
 sweetest praises in their ears, and our 
 appeal for sympathy will be only very 
 piteous. It will sound to the world as 
 the plaintive cries of the Church do 
 sound to many men under their windows, 
 like the beggars violin, which neither 
 claims tribute by the right of a gov- 
 ernor, nor wins acknowledgment by the 
 skill of an artist, but only extorts charity 
 by the forlornness of the mendicant. 
 
Zhc Gburcb* 39 
 
 If behind muscles, and blood, and 
 brain, you know that there is a vital 
 force, which utters itself through them, 
 but which is another thing than they, 
 which would live even if they were dead, 
 then it is not strange to say that behind 
 all morality, and order, and rites, and 
 work, and preaching, there is a vital 
 power of the Church, which utters itself 
 through them, but which is another thing 
 than they, without which they were dead, 
 but which might live though every one 
 of them should die. That life-power is 
 Christ always entering into the Church, 
 as truth, and guidance, and love ; and 
 always passing out from the Church into 
 humanity by the otherwise dead func- 
 tions, vitalized by Him, of teaching and 
 government, and active work. 
 
4° ITnspiration anfc ftrutb* 
 
 Ac in the world of science men fear 
 materialism which would crowd spirit 
 and vital force out of the universe, and 
 make all life exist and spread itself in 
 the mechanical arrangement and re- 
 arrangement of material atoms ; so there 
 is always fear, and never more fear than 
 now, of an ecclesiastical materialism, 
 which shall make little of spiritual force, 
 and try by the mechanical arrangement 
 and re-arrangement of ecclesiastical 
 atoms, of dioceses, and conventions, 
 and canons, and rubrics, and the like, 
 to make the dead world live the life of 
 God. Such a materialism turns ma- 
 chineries from being the homes into 
 being the tombs of force, and makes us 
 dread each step we see it take in ad- 
 vance. 
 
Gbe Cbutcb* 4 1 
 
 If ever our Church goes back, and 
 cumbers herself with the precedents, and 
 submits herself to the influence or author- 
 ity, of the English Church, her power in 
 this land is gone. She must be part and 
 parcel of this people. She must be in 
 heart and soul American, or she is noth- 
 ing. She must have her sympathies 
 here, and not across the sea. She must 
 have her gaze and enthusiasm fixed upon 
 the future of America, and not upon the 
 past of England. 
 
 We can conceive of a parish going on, 
 the same parish still, though thought 
 shall change and all religious speculation 
 flow in new channels. But if men's souls 
 cease to repent, and trust, and live by 
 the divine communion, all is gone ; the 
 
4 2 ITnapiration anD ftrutb* 
 
 Church is dead ; the spiritual building 
 crumbles in decay. 
 
 I KNOW that you will more than ac- 
 cept under the great, glowing, all-em- 
 bracing hospitality of this bounteous 
 roof [that of Trinity Church, Boston], 
 you will enthusiastically assert, that such 
 a Church as this has no right to exist, or 
 to think that it exists, for any limited 
 company who own its pews. It would 
 not be a Christian parish if it harbored 
 such a thought. No, let the world come 
 in. Let all men hear, if they will, the 
 truths we love. Let no soul go unsaved 
 through any selfishness of ours. 
 
 THIS is the modern notion of a Church, 
 - not luxury, but work. 
 
Cbe Cburcb* 43 
 
 ANY man or any institution which 
 attempts a great religious work in behalf 
 of the growing generations of a country, 
 must undertake, as preparatory to it, and 
 as a necessary part of it, a great moral 
 work as well. A faithful ministry, we 
 hold, must not merely declare the Savior, 
 but must attack and beat down those 
 special sins which stand in the very door- 
 ways and keep the Savior out of the 
 hearts of men. 
 
 THERE are cases in which the move- 
 ment of the will is everything ; where to 
 move action without moving will is to 
 fail entirely. In such cases there can be 
 no room for force. This is why our 
 Lord, founding a religion whose whole 
 life was to be in converted wills, found 
 
44 Inspiration anfc ftrutb* 
 
 no place in its establishment or propaga- 
 tion for the sword. 
 
 The Church has been spread by force, 
 but Christianity never. To try to think 
 of extending a faith by force, is to try 
 to think a contradiction. It is like 
 thinking of raising enthusiasm with levers, 
 or crushing genius with sledge-hammers. 
 The tools have no relation to the mate- 
 rial or the task. 
 
 I LOOK round on the work to do, and 
 I do not believe that either Episcopalian- 
 ism or Methodism or Presbyterianism 
 or Baptism is going to assert the victory 
 of Christianity over sin, the opening of 
 the barred citadel of wickedness in this our 
 
Gbe Cburcb* 45 
 
 land. The Church of Christ, simple, un- 
 impeded, armed powerfully because 
 armed lightly, the essential Church of 
 Christ must make the first entrance. 
 Then let us have up our methods of de- 
 nominational government, and each, in 
 the way that he thinks most divine, strive 
 for the perfected dominion of our one 
 great Lord. 
 
 Just as in God's great sea there is a 
 tide-power and a wave-power, and both 
 are the outputtings of the one same 
 force; just as neither denies the other, 
 each lends the other impulse ; and the 
 quick waves, which fall like lashes, and 
 the slow, heaving, laboring tide, have 
 both their work to do in the eternal bat- 
 tle of the sea upon the land : so it is not 
 inconceivable that in the Christian world 
 
4 6 ITttsptration and Grutb* 
 
 there may be a church-force and a de- 
 nomination-force, which yet are both the 
 expression of one same purpose and de- 
 sign of Deity. 
 
 The waves that crest themselves with 
 angry foam, and beat and beat and beat 
 from sunrise round to sunrise endlessly 
 upon the stubborn beach, are the most 
 visible agents of the work that is done. 
 But who will find anything but thankful- 
 ness, if once in every world-day the great 
 hand of the Maker and the Watcher is 
 put down under the great mass of the 
 sea itself, and the deep tide of Christian 
 law and Christian truth, with all the 
 waves running their eager races on its 
 bosom, is driven, mightily, silently, far- 
 ther up than any wave had reached upon 
 the conquered shore? Who will com- 
 
TLbe Gburcb* 47 
 
 plain if Christian union, for certain pur- 
 poses, in certain efforts, develops a new 
 sort of power that the narrower individu- 
 ality of denominational life has not at- 
 tained ? 
 
 THE everlasting principle remains, that 
 no moral authority or doctrinal correct- 
 ness or spiritual impulse can last from 
 generation to generation unimpaired, un- 
 less it incorporates itself in some recog- 
 nized manifestation, and yields to the 
 crystallization which its essential life de^ 
 mands. 
 
Scepticism* 
 
 BHE countless assaults of a 
 speculative time, testing 
 every approach, bringing 
 the manifold artillery of 
 modern knowledge to bear, calling 
 both Ihe frivolity and the earnestness 
 of our strange age to its aid, enlisting 
 an internal treason as well as an exter- 
 nal enmity — no wonder that they 
 make the boldest fear sometimes. The 
 rain is descending, the floods are coming, 
 the winds are blowing and beating, and 
 when loose houses are sliding off the 
 slippery sand on every side of them, no 
 wonder that the dwellers in the house 
 
 (49) 
 
5° 1Ttt0ptration anD Grutb* 
 
 upon the rocjc, with dazzled eyes, think 
 sometimes that they see their own foun- 
 dation waver. And yet the case does 
 not seem hard to understand. 
 
 Christianity is one and everlasting. 
 Its work of salvation for plan's soul is 
 the same blessed work forever. But its 
 relation to the world's life at large must 
 be forever changing w r ith the changes 
 of that world's needs and seekings. 
 The larger applications of Christianity 
 must of necessity be from time to time 
 readjusted, and in their readjustments its 
 power may be temporarily obscured or 
 unrecognized as it passes into new forms 
 of exhibition. Is it strange, then, in a 
 day of readjustments such as ours, when 
 so many forms are going to pieces, so 
 
Scepticism* 5 1 
 
 many old relations broken up and 
 changed for new ones, when so many of 
 the accidents of Christianity are being- 
 taken down, that men should be ready 
 enough to think that Christianity itself 
 is worn out and obsolete? 
 
 We feel no doubt of the eternal issue. 
 Our faith in Christ comes not from 
 seeing how men treat Him, but from 
 reading what God says of Him and feel- 
 ing how He works. We are sure of the 
 end ; that all this overturning, overturn- 
 ing, overturning, must bring at last the 
 day of Him whose right it is. 
 
 Meanwhile, what can we do but 
 keep alive by earnest and continual 
 
5 2 Inspiration anD arutb* 
 
 utterance those truths which we believe, 
 no matter how utterly men may disown 
 their names, are doing the work of the 
 world all the while ? This is one of the 
 great values of such a time, that it sifts 
 and ordinates truths, and makes us find 
 out which are the few precious ones 
 that we will not let go at any risk. 
 
 And when we look about and ask, 
 How can we best preserve these truths ? 
 I think there can be but one answer. 
 The highest truth has always found its 
 own best guardians. Christ Himself 
 pointed to the younger generation that 
 was growing up about Him, and declared 
 its hands to be the place where His gos- 
 pel would be safest, purest and most 
 fruitful. Other years have their work to 
 
Scepticism* 53 
 
 do — old age, and middle manhood, and 
 the fresh enterprise of originating youth. 
 But, after all, these are not the surest 
 guardians of truth. 
 
 THROUGH the life of every people 
 winds an endless procession, which ap- 
 pears to totter with its feebleness, which 
 again and again is lost out of sight 
 among the hurrying crowd that seems to 
 tread it under foot, and yet whose tiny 
 hands bear safest and most pure forever 
 the sacred treasures of all time. And 
 if you once get a truth into the circle of 
 that endless childhood, it makes its way 
 to unfound hearts, and, through the 
 crazy passions and cold bigotries of life, 
 wins for itself an influence which men 
 feel because they do not fear. 
 
54 Inspiration anfc XLxutb. 
 
 It was not far from the time when 
 this Church [Trinity Church, Boston] 
 was founded, that Bishop Butler wrote 
 in England words which seem strange, 
 I think, to us as we read them now. 
 He said, " It has come to be taken for 
 granted, by many persons, that Christi- 
 anity is not so much a matter of inquiry, 
 but that it is now at length discovered 
 to be fictitious. " And, after all that, see 
 what life came out of what men called 
 dead. A great many people are saying 
 now what people used to say in Bishop 
 Butler's day, but it is no truer now than 
 it was then. 
 
Xife. 
 
 1HERE are two souls in the 
 world, the soul of God and 
 the soul of man ; no other. 
 .... The God-soul is the 
 centre of all things. The souls of men 
 stand around and gather all their culture 
 and their growth from it. 
 
 No enumeration of qualities or facul- 
 ties of matter accounts to us for physical 
 vitality ; and no description of man taught 
 and ruled and loved by God, makes clear 
 to us that life of God imparted to man 
 which we call holiness. Only this we 
 are sure of, that all Spiritual Life, whether 
 
 (55) 
 
5 6 ITnsptration anD XLxutb. 
 
 in these its elements, or in this subtle 
 force which blends the elements into a 
 true vitality, is an inflow from the soul of 
 God into the soul of Man. 
 
 Life can only be truly communicated 
 by truly living methods. Nothing else 
 will do. This takes all power away from 
 mere machineries from the highest to the 
 lowest. 
 
 THAT is what we want, — strong, deep 
 convictions which are unshakable, and 
 then a glad and constant expectation of 
 new and richer light from God forever ; 
 a perfect assurance of the safety of the 
 ship in which we sail, and then a perfect 
 willingness to sail into whatever new seas 
 
%ife. 57 
 
 God may open to us ; an absolute cer- 
 tainty of the sufficiency of Christ, and 
 then a passionate desire that no Christ 
 of our own fancy may satisfy us, that He 
 may show Himself to us more and more 
 completely as He really is ; the rock un- 
 der our feet and the limitless air over our 
 heads. 
 
 THROUGH our fathers' wisdom and 
 devotion, we must become wiser and 
 more devoted than they. Friends, we 
 must rise to thoughts beyond our fathers, 
 or we are not our fathers' worthy chil- 
 dren. Not to do in our days just what 
 our fathers did long ago, but to live as 
 truly up to our light as our fathers lived 
 up to theirs, — that is what it is to be 
 worthy of our fathers. 
 
5 8 Inspiration anfc ftrutb* 
 
 THOSE be our prayers: — More 
 strength ; more light. More constancy ; 
 more progress. 
 
 The man of the nineteenth century 
 thinks very differently -from the man of 
 the eighteenth, but the love with which 
 he worships God, is the same love. The 
 Evangelical has different dogmas from 
 the old Georgian Churchman, but they 
 bow before the same mercy-seat, and 
 resist the same temptations by the same 
 grace. 
 
 A MAN is always more precious than 
 his work. 
 
 Everywhere, always, good culture 
 
%ite. 59 
 
 and the championship of principles be- 
 long together. 
 
 i 
 
 That men should be true to their best 
 convictions, and to their simple duty, 
 this is the blessing that gives all bless- 
 ings with it, and is the fountain of all 
 charity and progress. 
 
 It is Truth that we want in every de- 
 partment of our life. In State and 
 Church we need it, at home and on the 
 street; in the smallest fashions and in 
 the most sacred mysteries ; that men 
 should say what they think, should act 
 out what they believe, should be them- 
 selves continually without concealment 
 and without pretense. When we have 
 
60 Inspiration anD XTrutb* 
 
 that, then we shall have at least a solid 
 basis of reality on which to build all 
 future progress. It is the benefit of 
 great and solemn crises that they give us 
 some characters which manifest this sim- 
 ple Truth, that they make it to some ex- 
 tent the character of all the time. 
 
 ONE period collects materials, the 
 next period builds the palace. The long, 
 hard-working winter gathers with infinite 
 toil the conditions of growth, stores them 
 about the dead unanswering seed, then 
 dies like David, and the spring-time, its 
 successor, bright as Solomon in all his 
 glory, comes and finds the preparation 
 made, and, in the sunshine, builds the 
 temple-plant. 
 
Xife, 6 1 
 
 You have seen fathers, not cultivated 
 or educated men, who just accepted it 
 as their task to gather the materials of a 
 cultivated and educated life for their 
 children. Not for them to build the 
 gracious beauty or the massive strength 
 of scholarly attainment ; but they were 
 content to get everything ready, and 
 then lay the work of construction into 
 their children's hands, in whose fulfil- 
 ment of their wise ambitions they them- 
 selves should live again. And so it is in 
 human history. Age gathers materials 
 for age. One century with slow and 
 painful labor beats out a few crude ideas, 
 which lie like David's logs of wood and 
 blocks of stone and seem merely to 
 cumber the ground. A new century 
 comes, and, inheriting the unfinished 
 plan, it takes these crude ideas, and, lo, 
 they are just what it needs. It finds 
 
62 Inspiration anD ftrutb* 
 
 Ihem hewn to fit each other, and out of 
 them it builds the compact and graceful 
 beauty of its institutions. 
 
 TRUTHS are the roots of duties. A 
 rootless duty, one that has no truth below 
 it out of which it grows, has no life, and 
 will have no growth. 
 
 Men talk about morality as one thing, 
 and religion as another. Sometimes 
 they pit them one against the other, 
 as if there were some sort of natural an- 
 tagonism between the two. We take a 
 higher ground, insisting that there can 
 be no such thing as morality without 
 religion, and that morality becomes more 
 
and more genuine just in proportion 
 as religion becomes more and more 
 sound and true. We do not believe 
 in any reform which finds its whole 
 motive within the region of human 
 relations. We look for the permanent 
 success of no effort, however noble its 
 appointed aim may be, which does not 
 draw its impulse from some association 
 of humanity with a power and a will 
 above its own. 
 
 WITHOUT settling detailed judgments, 
 which it is not our place to do, we feel 
 sure, in general, that God has bound our 
 whole nature into such a perfect unity 
 that no man can hold wrong opinions 
 without incurring, just so far, danger of 
 injury to his moral life. 
 
6 4 ITnepiration anfc Grutb, 
 
 Once accept this supreme importance 
 of truth, and every part of our nature 
 becomes anxious for the preservation of 
 the testimonies of God. The great doc- 
 trines of our faith become the great pil- 
 lars of our life. 
 
 All union between such complicated 
 individualities as men involves surrender, 
 the temporary stripping off of non-essen- 
 tials that the essential may go on and do 
 its work unhindered. Afterward, in the 
 later stages of its labor, each portion of 
 the union may resume its non-essentials, 
 which are not therefore non-importants. 
 
 It is the great boon of such characters 
 as Mr. Lincoln's, that they reunite what 
 
God has joined together and man has 
 put asunder. In him was vindicated the 
 greatness of real goodness and the good- 
 ness of real greatness. The twain were 
 one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes 
 who stood and looked up to him for 
 direction with such a loving and implicit 
 trust can tell you to-day whether the wise 
 judgments that he gave came most from 
 a strong head or a sound heart. If you 
 ask them they are puzzled. There are 
 men as good as he, but they do bad 
 things. There are men as intelligent as 
 he, but they do foolish things. In him 
 goodness and intelligence combined and 
 made their best result of wisdom. 
 
 THE simple natures and forces will 
 always be the most pliant ones. Water 
 
66 ITnspiratton anfc Grutb* 
 
 bends and shapes itself to any new chan- 
 nel. Air folds and adapts itself to each 
 new figure. They are the simplest and 
 the most infinitely active things in nature. 
 So this nature, in very virtue of its sim- 
 plicity, must be also free, always fitting 
 itself to each new need. It will always 
 start from the most fundamental and 
 eternal conditions, and work in the 
 straightest even although they be the 
 newest ways to the present prescribed 
 purpose. In one word it must be broad 
 and independent and radical. 
 
 Perfect truth consists not merely in 
 the right constituents of character, but 
 in their right and intimate conjunction. 
 This union of the mental and moral into 
 
Xtfe. 6 7 
 
 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 a manhood, deepened 
 into reliability and maturity, it is that 
 glorified childlikeness, that high and 
 reverend simplicity which shames and 
 baffles the most accomplished astuteness, 
 and is chosen by God to fill his purposes 
 when he needs a ruler for his people of 
 faithful and true heart. 
 
 It is inevitable, till man be far more 
 unfeeling and untrue to his convictions 
 than he has always been, that a great 
 wrong asserting itself vehemently should 
 arouse to no less vehement assertion the 
 opposing right. 
 
6$ ITnapiratton anD ftrutb* 
 
 When shall we learn that with all true 
 men it is not what they intend to do, but 
 it is what the qualities of their natures 
 bind them to do, that determines their 
 career? 
 
 With a reverent and clear mind to be 
 controlled by events, means to be con- 
 trolled by God. 
 
 Truth and justice are in their very 
 nature mighty and intolerant, and must 
 fight with and conquer falsehood and sin 
 in any region of this many-regioned uni- 
 verse where they may meet. 
 
 It is not possible until the need comes, 
 I suppose, that we should feel how legit- 
 
imate and true an accompaniment of 
 every perfect nature is Force ; that is, 
 the ability to clear its field and do its 
 work even by the violent destruction of 
 the hinderances that block its way. 
 
 SHALL we say that force, or compul- 
 sion, is something that is so low that it 
 can belong to the devil only? that God 
 can have nothing to do with it, and so 
 that great truths and causes, high prin- 
 ciples, which are the angels of God, his 
 Michaels, have no right to strive; that 
 they must not fight with their dragons ? 
 Very important it seems to me that we 
 should understand the opposite. 
 
 The more we see of events the less we 
 
7° Inspiration anfc Grutb* 
 
 come to believe in any fate or destiny 
 except the destiny of character. 
 
 We make too little always of the phys- 
 ical. . . . Who shall say that even with 
 David the son of Jesse, there was not a 
 physical as well as a spiritual culture in 
 the struggle with the lion and the bear 
 which occurred among the sheepfolds, 
 out of which God took him to be the 
 ruler of his people? 
 
 There is a certain wide-spread nerv- 
 ousness and fear of giving force any true 
 place in the world. It seems a horrible 
 intruder, soon, we pray, to be cast out. 
 And yet force is as truly the companion 
 
Xife. 7 1 
 
 of reason as body is of spirit. Righteous 
 force is the reaction of truth upon oppos- 
 ing matter. 
 
 This great and gracious nature tempts 
 me with all her alluring motherliness to 
 bow my will to hers and use her only in 
 obedience to her own laws. But if I re- 
 fuse, she flings her tempest at me, or 
 she sinks my ship, or scorches my un- 
 shielded head with her fiery suns, or 
 paralyzes me with disease, and compels 
 me back into the obedience from which 
 I foolishly and arrogantly tried to escape. 
 
 Any baby may set his will against the 
 will of Mother Nature, and refuse to 
 listen to her reason ; but the most colos- 
 
7 2 Inspiration anfc Zxutb. 
 
 sal giant must yield his actions to her 
 requirements and submit to her majestic 
 force. 
 
 I CANNOT draw my picture of the per- 
 fect and perfectly effective man or state, 
 unless I lodge the tenderest sympathy 
 and the wisest judgment in a strong, 
 healthy body that shall compel respect 
 and demand obedience when the higher 
 powers fail. 
 
 FROM his boyhood up he [Abraham 
 Lincoln] lived in direct and vigorous 
 contact with men and things, not as in 
 older states and easier conditions with 
 words and theories ; and both his moral 
 convictions and his intellectual opinions 
 gathered from that contact a supreme 
 
%ife. 73 
 
 degree of that character by which men 
 knew him — that character which is the 
 most distinctive possession of the best 
 American nature — that almost indescrib- 
 able quality which we call in general 
 clearness or truth, and which appears in 
 the physical structure as health, in the 
 moral constitution as honesty, in the 
 mental structure as sagacity, and in the 
 region of active life as practicalness. 
 
 Everywhere this earnestness of de- 
 sire that truth should work, should move, 
 should go. And what then? Why, of 
 necessity, that if in going it should meet 
 perhaps some obstinate resistance which 
 will not yield, then it must break down. 
 The brute circumstance must not tyran- 
 nize over and stop the progress of the 
 spiritual essence. 
 
74 Inspiration anfc £rutb* 
 
 In all the simplest characters the line 
 between the mental and moral natures is 
 always vague and indistinct. They run 
 together, and in their best combinations 
 you are unable to discriminate in the wis- 
 dom which is their result, how much is 
 moral and how much is intellectual. You 
 are unable to tell whether in the wise 
 acts and words which issue from such 
 a life there is more of the righteousness 
 that comes of a clear conscience or of 
 the sagacity that comes of a clear brain. 
 In more complex characters and under 
 more complex conditions, the moral 
 and the mental lives come to be less 
 healthily combined. They co-operate, 
 they help each other less. They come 
 even to stand over against each other as 
 antagonists ; till we have that vague but 
 most melancholy notion which pervades 
 the life of all elaborate civilization, that 
 
Xffe. 75 
 
 goodness and greatness, as we call them, 
 are not to be looked for together, till we 
 expect to see and so do see a feeble and 
 narrow conscientiousness on the one 
 hand and a bad unprincipled intelligence 
 on the other, dividing the suffrages of 
 men. 
 
 This truth comes to us more and 
 more the longer that we live, that on 
 what field or in what uniform, or with 
 what aims we do our duty, matters very- 
 little, or even what our duty is, great or 
 small, splendid or obscure. Only to 
 find our duty certainly and somewhere, 
 somehow do it faithfully, makes us good, 
 strong, happy, and useful men, and 
 tunes our lives into some feeble echo of 
 the life of God. 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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