“If a preacher holds anything to be true and knows that his people think he is unwilling to speak his mind upon that point, he had better preach on it next Sunday morning.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 218)
No Sugar Coating
“Men are not won by making belief seem easy, nor are men alienated by the hardness of belief, provided only that the hardness seems to be something naturally belonging to the truth, and not something gratuitously added to it.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 214
Or He Won’t Know the Way
“He who preaches to the inner life of others must himself have had an inner life.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 196
And Sometimes Really Jealous
“Half a truth is often more jealous of the other half than of an error.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 195
Truth, Not Appearances
“He is saved from one of the great temptations of the ministry who goes out to his work with a clear and constant certainty that truth is always strong no matter how weak it looks, and falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 193
Preaching High and Inside
“Say nothing which you do not believe to be true because you think it may be helpful. Keep back nothing which you know to be true because you think it may be harmful.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 192
The Point is the Point
“The sermon is to be sacrificed to the soul, the system of work to the purpose of work always. It strikes at the root of all clerical fastidiousness and the tyranny of order.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 191
True Doctrine Scans
“Every true preacher must be a poet . . . A belief in the Incarnation, in the divine Son of Man, makes such poets of us all.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 187
The Worth of Souls
“There is a power which lies at the center of all success in preaching, and whose influence reaches out to the circumference, and is essential everywhere . . . Where it is largely present it is wonderful how many deficiencies count for nothing . . . Without this power preaching is almost sure to become either a struggle of ambition or burden of routine. With it preaching is an ever fresh delight. The power is the value of the human soul, felt by the preacher, and inspiring all his work.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 183
The Primacy of Truth
“To claim that men should believe what we teach them because we teach it to them, and not because they see it to be true, is to assume a place which God does not give us and men will not acknowledge for us.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 178