Who Was Phillips Brooks? The Boston Preacher Behind "O Little Town"
Phillips Brooks was an American Episcopal preacher who lived from 1835 to 1893. For twenty-two years he was rector of Trinity Church in Boston, and he was the best-loved preacher in the city and one of the best known in the country. Today most people know him without knowing it: he wrote the words of the Christmas carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem." Preachers know him for something else, his Lectures on Preaching, which gave the world the most quoted definition of preaching there is.
Here's a fuller look at his life, what he preached, and which of his books to read first.
A Boston boy
Brooks was born in Boston on December 13, 1835. His father was a merchant. His mother came from a strongly Christian New England family, and she brought her children into the Episcopal Church. She was a praying mother with a large family of boys, and several of her sons became ministers.
Phillips went to the Boston Latin School and then to Harvard, where he graduated in 1855. He tried teaching at his old school, and it went badly. Within months he had left the job, and he wrote to friends that he felt he had failed. Out of that low point he turned to the ministry. In 1856 he went to the Episcopal seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, to train for ordination.
Philadelphia and the war years
Brooks finished seminary in 1859 and became rector of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia. In 1862 he moved to the Church of the Holy Trinity in the same city, and there his name began to grow. These were the Civil War years. Brooks stood firmly with the Union and against slavery, and when Abraham Lincoln's body lay in Philadelphia in 1865 his sermon on the dead president was widely printed.
That same year he traveled to the Holy Land. On Christmas Eve he rode out from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and worshiped there. A few years later, back in Philadelphia, he wrote a simple carol for the children of his Sunday school, and his organist set it to music. That was "O Little Town of Bethlehem."
Trinity Church, Boston
In 1869 Brooks came home to Boston as rector of Trinity Church. He stayed until 1891. When the old church burned in the great Boston fire of 1872, he led the building of a new one on Copley Square, and it became one of the famous buildings of America. It was always full. People who had never been in an Episcopal church came to hear him.
He was a giant of a man, about six feet four, and he spoke very fast. Listeners said there was nothing theatrical about him. He simply stood up and talked about Christ and the human soul as if nothing mattered more, and they believed him.
In 1877 he gave the Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching at Yale. Two years later he gave the Bohlen Lectures in Philadelphia, printed as The Influence of Jesus. He was invited to preach in England more than once, and he preached at Westminster Abbey. Harvard asked him to become its preacher and a professor, and he said no. He would not leave his pulpit.
In 1891 he was elected Bishop of Massachusetts. He served only fifteen months. He died suddenly on January 23, 1893, at fifty-seven. He never married. Boston mourned him as it had mourned few men, and Harvard students carried his coffin.
What he preached
Brooks's whole message was the closeness of God to man in Jesus Christ. He believed that every person was made for God, and that no one is truly himself until God lives in him. His best-known sermon takes the proverb "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord" and shows the human spirit as a candle waiting to be lit by God's fire.
He said the same thing in other ways all his life. In one sermon he puts the reason people stay away from God very simply:
The real reason why men do not love God is that they do not really believe that God loves them.
The Light of the World and Other Sermons, The Priority of God
He wanted people to see Jesus as a real, living person, not a figure in a dead book. In The Influence of Jesus he wrote:
We must think of Jesus as a soul, undergoing experiences, living a life all through those years, or else the Gospels are a very dead and barren book.
The Influence of Jesus, On the Social Life of Man
And he loved to set the cross at the center of the Christian life:
Christ was crucified with man that man might rejoice in being crucified with Christ.
Sermons, A Good-Friday Sermon
He was also a preacher of courage and duty. His most famous lines come from a sermon on Christ setting His face to go up to Jerusalem:
Do not pray for easy lives. … Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks!
Twenty Sermons, Going Up to Jerusalem
Truth through personality
What preachers remember Brooks for is a single sentence from his Yale lectures:
Preaching is the bringing of truth through personality.
Lectures on Preaching, The Two Elements in Preaching
He meant that God's truth doesn't change, but He sends it through men, each one different. A preacher has to be a real man who has taken the truth into his own heart, or he is only passing along a message he hasn't received. The rest of the book shows what that means for the preacher's character, his study, his sermons and his people. It ends with the thing Brooks thought mattered most: seeing the worth of every human soul the way Christ saw it.
Some readers in his day thought Brooks was too broad in his views and too little interested in controversy. He was not a systematic theologian, and he didn't try to be one. He was a pastor and a preacher, and his books read like it: warm, searching and full of hope.
Why he's still read
Brooks is still read because few preachers have written so well about the inner life. He saw how ordinary days, small duties, sorrows and new beginnings all open onto God. His sentences are long and full, but they carry you along, and every so often one stops you cold. Ministers still read Lectures on Preaching in seminary, and many have said it changed how they thought about their work.
Where to start
TheWay Library has ten of his books, all free to read. If you're a preacher or a teacher, start with Lectures on Preaching. If you want to hear Brooks preach, start with The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons, which opens with his best-known sermon. Sermons, his first volume, begins with "The Purpose and Use of Comfort" and is a good choice for anyone going through a hard time. For his picture of Christ, read The Influence of Jesus.
Our guide to Phillips Brooks's books describes all ten, and our collection of Phillips Brooks quotes gathers his best lines with their sources. You'll find all his books on the Phillips Brooks author page. For more great preaching from his century, see our guide to the best classic sermon collections.