Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/237

 Phillips Brooks 219 compromise between its Unitarian and Congregational strands, took one in St. Paul's Episcopal Church, its freedom and strength becoming tinged with mystery and wrapped about in dignified historicity. And when Phillips Brooks, after an unsuccessful experiment in teaching in the Boston Latin School, hesitatingly determined to be a minister, his mind seemed to rest in the solidarity of humanity, in the perpetual and abiding emotions, conceptions, and satisfactions which underlie all change. The strong conservatism, so often noted in college students, seemed to remain with him long after the under- graduate years and to be a constitutive element of his character. With the great controversies of his times he was not unac- quainted. He took the gradually prevailing view with regard to them all. He believed the great books of other religions to be "younger brothers" of the Bible. He travelled with sympathetic interest in India and Japan. "No mischief," he thought, "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." When Heber Newton was threatened with a trial for heresy because of his belief in the methods and some of the more radical conclusions of the higher criticism, Brooks invited him to preach in his pulpit. He says remarkably little regard- ing the Darwinian controversy. He had but a superficial acquaintance with science. He finds his comfort in believing that "the orderliness of nature must make more certain the existence of an orderer, " and suggests that "Christ's truth of the Father Life of God has the most intimate connection with Darwin's doctrine of development, which is simply the continual indwelling and action of creative power." He added, however, but little to the controversies. Save where, as in the problem of comparative religion, they came into close contact with his own gospel of the universal sonship of man to God, he was not fundamentally interested in them. His sympathetic sermon on Gamaliel, who left the upshot of controversies to God, is characteristic. In the Theological Seminary at Alexandria he wrote in his student's notebook: Truth has laid her strong piers in the past Eternity and the Eternity to come and now she is bridging the interval with this life