Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/241

 Phillips Brooks 223 And yet, notwithstanding his anchorage in the past, he believed in a port ahead, for each individual primarily, but also for the race. Even his ecstatic and unreserved loyalty to the incarnate Christ did not serve as an iron door let down athwart the highway of progress. He intimated that his teaching regarding divorce was determined by temporary circum- stances and that his scheme of punishments is not an essential factor of his religion. It is true, naturally, with his strong belief in immortality and in the individual's sonship to God, that he held that society is here for the sake of the individual and not the individual for the sake of society. But in the later years we find almost a new note in his writings. ' ' Life may become too strong for literature, ' ' he says. "It may be the former methods and standards are not sufficient for the expression of the grow- ing life, its new activities, its unexpected energies, its feverish problems. ... A man must believe in the future more than he reverences the past. " In a speech before the Boston Chamber of Commerce he is reported as having said that " the world was bound to press onward and find an escape from the things that terrified it, not by retreat but by a perpetual progress into the large calm that lay beyond." In the sermon which gives the title to his volume The Light of the World (1890), — wherein is succinctly set forth his gospel, "the essential possibility and richness of humanity and its essential belonging to divinity," — we have these majestic words: It is so hard for us to believe in the mystery of man. "Behold man is this," we say, shutting down some near gate which falls only just beyond, quite in sight of, what human nature already has attained. If man would go beyond that, he must be something else than man. And just then something breaks the gate away, and, lo far out beyond where we can see, stretches the mystery of man, the beautiful, the awful mystery of man. To him, to man, all lower lives have climbed, and, having come to him, have found a field where evolution may go on for ever. Such passages are rare in his writings, for usually his gaze takes in the past with Christ resplendent in it and does not lose itself in the future; then gratitude gets the upper hand of strug- gle. He rarely preaches an entirely " social " sermon. In The Christian City, wherein he departs from his custom, he be-