Addresses by the right reverend Phillips Brooks eBook

I linger, and yet I must not linger.  Oh, my friends, oh, my fellow-men, it is not very long that we shall be here.  It is not very long.  This life for which we are so careful—­it is not very long; and yet it is so long, because, long, long after we have passed away out of men’s sight and out of men’s memory, the world, with something that we have left upon it, that we have left within it, will be going on still.  It is so long because, long after the city and the world have passed away, we shall go on somewhere, somehow, the same beings still, carrying into the depths of eternity something that this world has done for us that no other world could do, something of goodness to get now that will be of value to us a million years hence, that we never could get unless we got it in the short years of this earthly life.  Will you know it?  Will you let Christ teach it to you?  Will you let Christ tell you what is the perfect man?  Will you let Him set His simplicity and graciousness close to your life, and will you feel their power?  Oh! be brave, be true, be pure, be men, be men in the power of Jesus Christ.  May God bless you!  May God bless you!  Let us pray.

IV.  TRUE LIBERTY.

An earnest appeal to all that enter that Liberty.  May I read to you a few words from the eighth chapter of St. John?  “Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Let us not think, my friends, that there is anything strange about the spectacle which we witnessed this morning.  The only strange thing that there could be about it is that anybody should think that it is strange that men should turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary business pursuits, that they should come from the details of life to inquire in regard to the principles, the everlasting principles and purposes of life; that they should turn aside from those things which are occupying them from day to day and make one single hour in the week consecrated to the service of those great things which underlie all life—­surely there is nothing very strange.  There is nothing more absolutely natural.  Every man does it in his own sort of way, in his own choice of time.  We have chosen to do it together, on one day of the week during these few weeks which the Christian Church has so largely set apart for special thought and prayer and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom we belong.  It is simply as if the stream turned back again to its fountain, that it might refresh itself and make itself strong for the great work that it had to do in watering the fields and turning the wheels of industry.  It is simply as if men plodding along over the flat routine of their life chose once in a while to go up into the mountain top, whence they might once in a while look abroad over their life, and understand more fully the way in which they ought