Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/242

 ^24 Later Theology seeches Londoners to take heart because the modem city is so Christian, though unconsciously. The Giant with the Wounded Heel is one of the finest and most characteristic of his sermons. He believes the giant, man, is constantly crushing the serpent, and he is content to see a pretty large wound in his heel. This largeness and poise of view is the most distinctive characteristic of Phillips Brooks. It stamps him with the mark of intellect. Occasionally he seems to value the mind for itself and to ascribe to it standards of its own. "The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs." Once he admits, without catching himself, that the mind is "the noblest part of us." In the sermon where this admission is made. The Mind's Love for God, he declares: "You cannot know that one idea is necessarily true because it seems to help you, nor that another idea is false because it wounds and seems to hinder you. Your mind is your faculty for judging what is true." But these are isolated sayings. Ordinarily he refuses to think of the intellect as a thing apart from the entire man, and he finds truth, as did his Master, inherent in life, a personal quality, discovered, determined, and determinable by personal ends. When he first began to think, Socrates was almost the ideal figure. But later, Socrates seemed thin in compari- son with Christ. "Socrates brings an argument to meet an objection. Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nature; a whole being which the truth has filled with strength to meet another whole being, which error has filled with feebleness." In his sermon on the death of Lincoln he discloses his inner thought : A great many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual man or not, as if intellect were a thing, always of the same sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's nature and weigh by itself. . . . The fact is that in all the simplest characters, the line between the mental and moral nature is always vague and indistinct. They run together, and in their best combination you are unable to dis- criminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and how much is intellectual. In his student days he confides to his notebook: "A fresh thought niay be spoiled by sheer admiration. It was given us