Phillips Brooks

He is honored on the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar on January 23. In addition to his moral stature, he was a man of great physical height, standing 6 ft tall.

• Type — Bishop • Honorific Prefix — The Right Reverend • Name — Phillips Brooks • Honorific Suffix — D.D. • Title — Bishop of Massachusetts • Church — Episcopal Church • Diocese — Massachusetts • Elected — April 30, 1891 • Term Start — October 14, 1891 • Term End — January 23, 1893 • Predecessor — Benjamin Henry Paddock • Successor — William Lawrence • Ordination — May 27, 1860 • Ordained By — Alonzo Potter • Consecration — October 14, 1891 • Consecrated By — John Williams • Born — 13 December 1835 • Birthplace — Boston, Massachusetts, United States • Died — 23 January 1893 • Place of death — Boston, Massachusetts, United States • Buried — Mount Auburn Cemetery • Denomination — Anglican • Parents — William Gray Brooks & Mary Ann Phillips • Previous Post — * Rector, Trinity Church, Boston (18691891) • Rector, Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia (18621869) • Rector, Church of the Advent, Philadelphia (18601862) • Feast Day — 23 January • Venerated — Episcopal Church

Brooks was born on December 13, 1835, in Boston to William Gray Brooks and Mary Ann Phillips Brooks. His father, a Unitarian from a solid, middle-class background, started his career as a hardware and dry goods merchant. His mother was from an orthodox Congregational family. Her father was John Phillips (1776–1820), one of the founders of Andover Theological Seminary. Rejecting the arid Unitarianism of New England, Mary Ann Brooks determined that the family would join St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Tremont St. in Boston. Three of Phillips Brooks' five brothersFrederic, Arthur, and John Cottonwere eventually ordained in the Episcopal Church. Phillips Brooks attended Boston Latin School, where he excelled in classical languages, followed by Harvard University. Here, he encountered literary Romanticism, the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, and the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was elected to the A.D. Club and graduated in 1855 at the age of twenty. After graduation, he took a post at Boston Latin where he lasted only six months before being fired. He felt that he had failed miserably. He wrote, "I do not know what will become of me and I do not care much.... I wish I were fifteen years old again. I believe I might become a stunning man: but somehow or other I do not seem in the way to come to much now." Brooks chose to enter the ministry. In 1856, he began to study for ordination in the Episcopal Church in the Virginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria, Virginia. He struggled with what he perceived as anti-intellectualism of his fellow students but managed to complete his training. While a seminarian there, he preached at Sharon Chapel (now All Saints Episcopal Church, Sharon Chapel) in nearby Fairfax County.

• Illustration — Statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Trinity Church, Boston, dedicated 1910 • Illustration — Memorial to Phillips Brooks in Trinity Church, Boston In 1859, Brooks graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary, was ordained deacon by Bishop William Meade of Virginia, and became rector of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia. In 1860, he was ordained priest, and in 1862, became rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, where he remained seven years, gaining an increasing name as a Broad churchman, preacher, and patriot. During the American Civil War he upheld the cause of the North and opposed slavery, and his sermon on the death of Abraham Lincoln was an eloquent expression of the character of both men. His sermon at Harvard's commemoration of the Civil War dead in 1865 likewise attracted attention nationwide.

In 1869, Brooks accepted the call to serve as rector of Trinity Church, Boston; today, his statue is located on the left exterior of the church. Brooks' ambition was to help build a new kind of Protestantism that incorporated insights drawn from the Romantic and liberal theology of the nineteenth century, particularly its celebration of subjective individual experience. To this end, he worked to create a physical manifestation of that message in stone and mortar. In the 1870s, Brooks became intimately involved in the design and construction of the new Trinity Church on Copley Square in the Back Bay. Architect Henry Hobson Richardson drew on Romanesque architectural language to create an architectural masterpiece. The interior was richly decorated with murals by John LaFarge and stained glass windows by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. A repudiation of the cool, classical aesthetic of New England Protestantism, the church was designed to evoke religious sensibilities in the congregation. Van Wyck Brooks wrote that the new church represented "the break of the Boston mind with its Puritan past." Such was the magnificence of Trinity Church that historian Douglass Shand-Tucci called it "an American Hagia Sophia."

• Illustration — P. Brooks, ca. 1875–1920. Cabinet Card Collection, Boston Public Library Brooks was a gifted preacher with broad appeal. His sermons drew crowds of people, some of whom had never been in an Episcopal Church before. He had no sensational manner, according to listeners, but simply presented the Gospel in his natural style. "There is nothing in his voice, bearing, or look," wrote one frustrated observer, "which can explain his almost unexampled popularity. For popular he is almost beyond precedent." One source of his power as a speaker, according to historian Gillis J. Harp, was his ability to offer congregants an encounter with Christ through a mixture of scriptural truth and personality. Skilled at the use of metaphor to quicken religious sentiment, he was both preacher and poet. Brooks was neither a reformer nor a social conservative, but both groups drew inspiration from his words. Harp noted, "He understood his own ministerial role as primarily exhortative, an inspirational preacher to stir ups he soul, not agitate for social change."

• Illustration — Brooks and Bishop McVicker, 1884; from the Cabinet Card Collection of the Boston Public Library On April 30, 1891, Brooks was elected sixth Bishop of Massachusetts, despite opposition from conservative High Church Anglo-Catholics opposed to his theological liberalism. He was consecrated to that office in Trinity Church on October 14, 1891. Brooks was for many years an overseer and preacher of Harvard University. In 1881, he declined an invitation to be the sole preacher to the university and professor of Christian ethics.

Brooks died suddenly in early 1893, at the age of fifty-seven, probably as a result of diphtheria complicated by a cold or flu. His episcopate lasted only 15 months. His death was a major event in the history of Boston. One observer reported: "They buried him like a king. Harvard students carried his body on their shoulders. All barriers of denomination were down. Roman Catholics and Unitarians felt that a great man had fallen in Israel." Somewhat more critically, Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton noted that Brooks seldom appeared to be troubled by religious doubt or concern about the declining influence of the clergy. "He was quite sincere, for religion was a matter of sentiment not of intelligence with him. His strong sense of right & wrong prevented his optimism from sapping his moral integrity, and from doing much harm to the easygoing public whom he served and pleased. The eulogies of him are sadly extravagant."