Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/238

 220 Later Theology of ours. . . . Controversies grow tame and tiresome to the mind which has looked on Truth. . . . We walk the bridge of life. Can we not trust its safety on the two great resting-places of God's wisdom? Phillips Brooks was habitually more aware of the back- ground than of the foreground. Occasionally, indeed, it was otherwise. In his Philadelphia ministry he spoke out boldly, at the conclusion of the War, for negro suffrage. In his later life the radical in him showed itself more conspicuously. He rose in his place in the Church Congress to plead for the use of the Revised Version of the Bible in public worship, and in the Convention of 1886 he protested vigorously against the pro- posal to strike the words "Protestant Episcopal" from the title of his Church. On his return from the Convention to Boston, he even went so far as to declare from the pulpit that if the name were changed, he did not see how any one could remain in the Church who, like himself, disbelieved in the doc- trine of Apostolic Succession. But in the main he lived above controversy. He believed neither in "insisting on full require- ments of doctrine nor on paring them down The duty of such times as these is to go deeper into the spirituality of our truths. . . . Jesus let the shell stand as he found it, until the new life within could burst it for itself." His rare bio- grapher, A. V. G. Allen, makes this significant comment upon a Thanksgiving sermon of his : He offers no solution of the conflict between religion and science. But it means something that in the disorder of thought and feeling, so many men are fleeing to the study of orderly nature. He turges his hearers to make much of the experiences of life which are per- petual, joy, sorrow, friendship, work, charity, relation with one's brethren, for these are eternal. For Brooks this was no evasion. It was digging below the questions of the day to the eternal, unquestioned, proven truths of human experience. It was losing one's self in hu- manity. He occasionally looked forward, and increasingly, but he loved best to look from the present backward and up- ward. Just after his graduation from Harvard, we find this in his notebook: