"... as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart"
(Eph. 6:6).
And then the third quality of a creed that a man may keep up to the end is that it is a creed capable of being turned into action. A mere speculation, however true it be, I think you never can be sure that the mind will hold. The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it. Are not both of these true? Those parts of religion which are purely speculative, if indeed such mere speculation is part of religion at all, are the parts in which men most often and most easily change. A hundred men change their views of abstract truth for one who alters his conviction of practical duty. The one may be changed and nothing suffers; a change in the other alters the whole life.
Look at two men holding the same truth--the truth of the Trinity, for instance. To one it presents itself always as a doctrine to be learned, to the other as a law to be obeyed. One's view of it is always theoretical, the other's always practical. They both believe it, but one asserts it, demonstrates it, reasons about it. The other lives by it. Which is the true believer? I can conceive of the first man losing his belief and yet going on much the same. Convince him with a specious argument and he will let it drop, and, except that he talks of it no longer, nobody will know the difference. But take the truth of the Divine Father, the Divine Saviour, the Divine Comforter, out of the other's life, and all is gone. Duty no longer has a zest, nor prayer an object, nor grief a consolation. The whole life falls to pieces when its truth is gone. Is not this last the man who will keep the faith?
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Phillips Brooks was an American clergyman and author, who briefly served as Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church during the early 1890s.
In 1859 he graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary, was ordained deacon by Bishop William Meade of Virginia, and became rector of the Church of the Advent, Philadelphia. In 1860 he was ordained priest, and in 1862 became rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, where he remained seven years, gaining an increasing name as preacher and patriot.
In 1877 Brooks published a course of lectures upon preaching, which he had delivered at the theological school of Yale University, and which are an expression of his own experience. In 1879 appeared the Bohlen Lectures on The Influence of Jesus. In 1878 he published his first volume of sermons, and from time to time issued other volumes, including Sermons Preached in English Churches (1883).
Today, he is probably best known for authoring the Christmas carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem".
He was born in Boston in 1835 and educated at Harvard and at Virginia Theological Seminary. After ten years of ministry at two churches in Philadelphia, he returned to Boston in 1869 and was rector of Trinity Church there until 1891. He was then elected Bishop of Massachusetts, and died two years later.
Phillips Brooks is best known today as the author of "O Little Town of Bethlehem." Former generations, however, accounted him the greatest American preacher of the nineteenth century (and not for lack of other candidates). His sermons are still read.