Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/239

Phillips Brooks 221 A spark of original thought . . . strengthens a man's feeling of individuality, but weakens his sense of race. It is an inspiring, ennobling, elevating, but not a social thing. But what a kindly- power, what a warm human family feeling clusters around the thought which we find common to our mind and to some old mind which was thinking away back in the twihght of time. ... So when we recognize a common impulse or rule of life ... we must feel humanity in its spirit, bearing witness with our spirits, that it is the offspring of a common divinity. His native conservatism lived through the awakening years of the Seminary. We find these musings in his notebook : Originality is a fine thing, but first have you the head to bear it? . . . Our best and strongest thoughts, like men's earliest and ruder homes, are found or hollowed in the old primaeval rock. . . . Not till our pride rebels against the architecture of these first homes and we go out and build more stately houses of theory and specula- tion and discovery and science, do we begin to feel the feebleness that is in us. As his biographer keenly says: "Nowhere in these note- books does Brooks regard himself as a pioneer in search of new thought. . . . He does not test truth by individual ex- periences but by the larger experiences of humanity." He told the Yale theological students in his middle life that a part of the Christian assurance lies in the fact that the Chris- tian message is "the identical message which has comedown from the beginning." Part of his satisfaction in preaching lay in his confidence that he was in his proper communion. He rejoiced "in her strong historic spirit, her sense of union with the ages which have passed out of sight. ' ' The insignia of spiritual truth to him were largely antiquity and catholicity. He had profound faith in the people. He believed in prophets when they had been accepted by the people; that is, usually some ages after they have lived and died. Few prominent men have let their friends and the public decide in their crises more than Brooks— and in nearly every case against his own original instinct. He relied on the heart of humanity as the supreme judge. Out of this primitive conviction of his grew his one essential message, that every man who has ever lived is a son