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‘ [225] to work in and to live by. . . . It will give its blessing to us only on its knees. From this point of view, thought is as holy a thing as prayer, for both are worship.’ The best description, perhaps, of his own mind is to be found in his enumeration of the ‘intellectual characteristics which Christ's disciples gathered from their Master,’ namely: ‘A poetic conception of the world we live in, a willing acceptance of mystery, an expectation of progress by development, an absence of fastidiousness that comes from a sense of the possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into the essential.’ These peculiar intellectual characteristics, rooted in their passionate reverence for humanity, for its ideals and its achievements, determine the place of Brooks among the great preachers of the world. He is at his best when he preaches by indirection. Enlargement is his effect. A man sees his own time in relation to all time, discovers his greatness by the greatness of which he is a part. Brooks's mission was not to advance the frontiers of knowledge, not even of spiritual knowledge, but rather to annex the cleared areas to the old domains. His abiding preoccupation—fatal to the scientist, detrimental to the sociologist, fortunate for the fame and immediate influence of the preacher—was to hold the present, changing into the future, loyal to the past. He was not the stuff of which martyrs are made, but his soul was of that vastness which kept the public from making martyrs of the truthful. He seems to watch and bless rather than to urge forward. His great service to his age was that of a mediator. Standing himself as a trinitarian and a supernaturalist, rejoicing in the greenness of the historic pastures, he discovered at the base of his doctrines the same essential spiritual food which others sought on freer uplands and less confined stretches. He ministered to orthodox and unorthodox alike beneath their differences. He did much to keep spiritual evolution free from the bitterness and contempt of revolution.
Cambridge University. Press, 1917-1921.
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