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That Providential Failure

Phillip graduated from Harvard University at the age of 19 and accepted employment as a teacher in the Boston Latin School in September 1855. This would be the first step in his life-goal of becoming a professor. Shortly after, he wrote to a friend and said,

“Seriously, I like the life. Isn’t there a sort of satisfaction and pleasure in knowing that you are doing, or at least have the chance of doing something. At Cambridge it was all very well, but we had only ourselves to work on. Here we have some twenty, thirty, or forty on whom we can bring to bear the authority and influence of a superior position and see what we can make out of them and watch all their workings.”

He taught Greek, Latin, and French, and all went well for the fall semester, but then at the opening of the winter term, he was transferred to a class of older boys and things began to go awry. It would seem that his students did not like him and began to rebel. “They are the most disagreeable set of creatures without exception I ever met with.” As expected, it took a terrible toll on him. “I am tired, sick, cross, and almost dead,” he said.

The situation came to a head by February 1856, and Phillip was forced to resign—a failure. He is reported to have said:

“I do not know what will become of me and I do not care much.… I wish I were fifteen years old again. I believe I might become a stunning man: but somehow or other I do not seem in the way to come to much now.”

It was a depressing and dark time for Phillip. Humiliated and inconsolable, he wandered the streets of Boston. There was no one he could unburden his heart to, did he even comprehend the burden himself? One biographer wrote of him. “The failure of Phillip Brooks on the threshold of life was conspicuous and complete, momentous also, and, it may be said in view of his later career, providential.”

Phillip awoke to his heritage. He was the son of generations of famous clergyman, and now the faith of his fathers became his. Born anew, he set a course to study for the ministry. He entered the seminary and prepared to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. He graduated in 1859, and was ordained a deacon. In 1860, he was ordained a priest, and by 1869, was called to serve in Boston’s Church of the Holy Trinity. One writer said of the life legacy of Phillip Brooks:

“Brooks quickly became Boston’s first citizen, knowing the sheer adulation of the worshipers who regularly packed Trinity to hear his compelling sermons and to view his serene yet radiant presence. His fame spread. In the entire annals of the Episcopal Church the power of his preaching is unmatched. Invitation after invitation to preach came his way, as did honorary degrees from the nation’s leading universities and England’s Oxford. Greatly admired abroad (he was an inveterate world traveler), he was the first American to preach in the Royal Chapel at Windsor. In 1891, he was elected bishop of Massachusetts, the culmination of a life of nobility. His unexpected death in 1893, caused Lord Bryce to observe that not since Lincoln’s assassination had America so widely mourned the loss of a leader.”

While no one today has ever heard the voice of Phillip Brooks preaching in his powerful, humble, and charismatic way, yet all of us have heard and even sung one of Phillip Brooks greatest sermons.

At Christmastime 1865, Phillip Brooks was rode horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, where he assisted with the midnight services on Christmas Eve. He would later write of that moment.

“I remember standing in the old Church in Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole Church was ringing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices I knew well, telling each other of the wonderful night of the Savior’s birth.”

This sacred experience awakened in Brooks the desire to write his own hymn of praise to commemorate that holy night. Lewis Redner, a friend of Brooks said,

“As Christmas of 1868 approached, Mr. Brooks told me that he had written a simple little carol for the Christmas Sunday-school service, and he asked me to write the tune to it. The simple music was written in great haste and under great pressure. We were to practice it on the following Sunday. Mr. Brooks came to me on Friday, and said, “Redner, have you ground out that music yet….’?”; I replied, “No”, but that he should have it by Sunday. On the Saturday night previous my brain was all confused about the tune. I thought more about my Sunday-school lesson than I did about the music. But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper, I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony. Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

That enduring Christmas Carol—that lasting and most famous sermon by Reverend Phillip Brooks…O Little Town of Bethlehem.

Source:

https://archive.org/details/phillipsbroo1800alle/page/18/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/phillipsbroo1800alle/page/20/mode/2up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Brooks
https://archive.org/details/phillipsbroo1800alle/page/20/mode/2up
https://biography.yourdictionary.com/phillips-brooks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Little_Town_of_Bethlehem