Phillips Brooks

Phillips Brooks was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, born in Boston on December 13, 1835, and active during the Gilded Age, when public preaching could draw wide civic attention. He became one of the most popular preachers of that period, known for trying to make the Christian Church more relevant to people of his own time. He was also remembered for his presence in the pulpit and beyond it: he stood six feet four inches tall, and contemporaries often spoke of his moral stature as well as his physical height.

Brooks came from a family shaped by strong religious currents. His father, William Gray Brooks, was a Unitarian from a solid middle-class background who began as a hardware and dry goods merchant. His mother, Mary Ann Phillips Brooks, came from an orthodox Congregational family; her father, John Phillips, was one of the founders of Andover Theological Seminary. Mary Ann rejected what she saw as the arid Unitarianism of New England and brought the family into St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston. Three of Phillips Brooks’s five brothers were eventually ordained in the Episcopal Church.

His education gave him both discipline and range. At Boston Latin School he excelled in classical languages, and at Harvard University he encountered literary Romanticism, the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, and the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After graduating in 1855 at the age of twenty, he briefly taught at Boston Latin, but was fired after six months and felt he had failed badly. He then chose the ministry, entering Virginia Theological Seminary in 1856. Though he struggled with what he saw as the anti-intellectualism of fellow students, he completed his training and preached as a seminarian at Sharon Chapel in Fairfax County.

Brooks was ordained deacon in 1859 and became rector of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia. He was ordained priest in 1860, then became rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia in 1862, where he remained for seven years and gained notice as a Broad churchman, preacher, and patriot. During the Civil War he supported the cause of the North and opposed slavery. His sermon on the death of Abraham Lincoln and his 1865 sermon at Harvard’s commemoration of the Civil War dead brought him attention far beyond his own parish.

In 1869 Brooks became rector of Trinity Church, Boston, the post with which he was longest associated. In the 1870s he was closely involved in the design and construction of the new Trinity Church on Copley Square, working with an artistic and architectural program meant to stir religious feeling rather than repeat the cool classical style of New England Protestantism. He was a gifted preacher with broad appeal, drawing some listeners who had never before entered an Episcopal church. He also wrote the lyrics to the Christmas hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” one of his best-known works.

On April 30, 1891, Brooks was elected the sixth Bishop of Massachusetts, despite opposition from conservative High Church Anglo-Catholics who objected to his theological liberalism. He was consecrated at Trinity Church on October 14, 1891, but served only fifteen months before his sudden death in early 1893 at age fifty-seven, probably from diphtheria complicated by a cold or flu. Honored on the Episcopal Church calendar on January 23, Brooks remains compelling because his words were made for listeners: direct, imaginative, moral, and meant to move the soul without theatrical display.