Tolerance: Two Lectures

by Phillips Brooks, Virtual Voice (Narrator)

I HAVE accepted with grateful pleasure the privilege of meeting you upon two evenings and talking to you upon Tolerance. I chose that subject because I had long vaguely thought of lecturing upon it, and also because it seemed to me as if there were no group of men to whom one could so fitly speak upon it as a gathering of students of theology. To them more than to other men must come the puzzling problems and interesting suggestions which the whole subject of tolerance involves. I want to speak this evening about the nature and the history and the hope of tolerance. In my other lecture I should like to see the applications of what I shall have said to-day to some of the special conditions of our time and of our Church. So we can come nearest to covering the ground. I call my subject Tolerance, not Toleration. Tolerance is a Toleration is the behavior in which that disposition finds expression. A disposition is to its appropriate behavior as a man is to his shadow. The shadow represents the man, but it often misrepresents him. It is larger than he is, or smaller. It runs before him, or it lags behind him, according as he stands related to the light which casts it. We sometimes have to guess at what the man is by his shadow; and so we are constantly having to guess at men’s dispositions by their behavior. But we never can let ourselves forget that the disposition is the living thing; and so to it our thought and study must be given. Therefore I speak of tolerance, and not of toleration.

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Published June 11, 2025

About the author

Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, long the Rector of Boston's Trinity Church and briefly Bishop of Massachusetts, and particularly remembered as lyricist of the Christmas hymn, "O Little Town of Bethlehem".

In the Episcopal liturgical calendar he is remembered on January 23.

Born in Boston, Brooks was descended through his father, William Gray Brooks, from the Rev. John Cotton; through his mother, Mary Ann Phillips, he was a great-grandson of Samuel Phillips, Jr., founder of Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts). Three of Brooks' five brothers – Frederic, Arthur and John Cotton – were eventually ordained in the Episcopal Church.

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) and "The Candle of the Lord" and Other Sermons (1895).

Brooks also introduced Helen Keller to Christianity and to Anne Sullivan.