Phillips Brooks (1835-1893) was born in Boston into an old Brahmin family. His parents had been Unitarian but became Episcopalian. Brooks, baptized a Unitarian, was educated at the Boston Latin School (where he later taught without success), Harvard University and the Virginia Theological Seminary in Richmond. He did not feel at home in seminary, scorned "the anti-intellectualism of the Evangelicals," and drank deeply out of Schleiermacher (John V. Wolverton, The Education of Phillips Brooks, University of Illinois, 1995).

An impressive specimen of six foot four and three hundred pounds, he had a kind of pulpit magnetism which quickly catapulted him to highly visible national ministries in Philadelphia and Boston and then briefly as the Bishop of Boston in the very difficult post-civil war years of reconstruction. People felt Brooks was speaking directly to them personally.

Brooks' voice was not strong. The first time he preached in London's Westminster Abbey he could not be heard beyond the first row. Serious voice lessons helped him.

With the sermons of Phillips Brooks virtually unavailable to us for many years except in ancient mildewy collections buried in remote libraries, students of American preaching recently welcomed The Consolations of God (Eerdmans, 2003), an attractive selection of twelve sermons, edited by Ellen Wilbur, a member of Trinity Church in Boston where Brooks preached to eager audiences. His sermons preached at the death of President Lincoln and at the commemoration at Harvard of the end of the Civil War are classic addresses to civic occasions of enormous challenge. (These sermons are not included in Wilbur's collection.)

In delivering one of the early Beecher Lecture series on preaching at Yale, Brooks articulated one of the most famous definitions of preaching ever offered. Preaching as he said is "Truth through Personality" or "Preaching is the communication of truth by man to men." Aptly formulated but quite horizontal. Here is a great preacher who subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, who urged his listeners at Yale to preach Christ and who insisted that preaching must be doctrinal, but the twelve sermons in this collection are virtually devoid of the doctrine of salvation and anything of theological substance. Are they typical? How shall we understand this?

Brooks would be well-known if only for his lovely Christian hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem" (which he wrote a few years after spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem) but it is virtually devoid of serious theology (cf Charles Wesley's "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing"). The thinkers who shaped Brooks were Schleiermacher, Maurice, Coleridge, Carlyle and Ruskin. These are not friends of the historic gospel. His finely honed Bohlen Lectures on "The Influence of Jesus" omit treatment of the redemptive sacrifice of our Lord.