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 2i8 Later Theology somewhat in advance of the opinion of the churches. When he died in 1918 the New York Evening Post remarked: "Wash- ington Gladden seemed to have an extra sense. . . . In matters affecting religion and church organization, in matters political, in matters social, in matters international, he had an almost uncanny way of anticipating what was to come." The truth of this comment may be tested by a paragraph from his essay on The Strength and Weakness of Socialism, written as far back as 1886. Out of unrestricted competition arise many wrongs that the State must redress and many abuses which it must check. It may become the duty of the State to reform its taxation, so that its burdens shall rest less heavily upon the lower classes; to repress monopolies of all sorts; to prevent and punish gambling; to regulate or control the railroads and telegraphs; to limit the ownership of land; to modify the laws of inheritance; and possibly to levy a progressive income-tax, so that the enormous fortunes should bear more rather than less than their share of the public burdens. He was a strong believer in profit-sharing; he was president of an association for Christian education of the negroes and Indians and backward peoples ; he was the moderator of the Con- gregational National Council; he was the champion of interna- tional peace. He was withal a Christian pastor and conscientious preacher. He said, indeed: » I maintain that good sermons may be and ought to be good literature; that the free, direct, conversational handling of a theme in the presence of an audience makes good reading in a book. If I am permitted to judge my own work, I should say that the best of my books as literature is the book of sermons, Where Does the Sky Begin ? The one man who, in our period, best demonstrated this thesis of Washington Gladden is PhiUips Brooks (1835-93).' He was most fortunately constituted and placed to be a great preacher. Just about the time of his birth in Boston, his family gave up its pew in the Unitarian meeting-house and, as a ^ The volume the writer of this chapter would recommend as an introduction to Brooks's writings is the fourth series of his sermons, entitled Twenty Sermons, published in 1886. The new edition (1910) is entitled Visions and Tasks.