Maxioms by Phillips Brooks
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do no pray for tasks equal to your powers. read more
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do no pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for power equal to your tasks.
Commemoration of Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, spiritual writer, 1893 Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in read more
Commemoration of Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, spiritual writer, 1893 Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for his temple.
Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's read more
Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.
Feast of Luke the Evangelist No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has read more
Feast of Luke the Evangelist No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.
Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer read more
Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet, earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but behind there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God... Leave out the foreground, let there be no expression of the will of him who prays, and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background, let there be no acceptance of the will of God, and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two are there together, the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire, is the picture perfect and the prayer complete.