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Today's Devotional

We all know how it is, all along, with the life in which we are living. Sometimes the sky which is above us, which is always radiant with light, opens its supremest depths and lets us see, as it were, into the very city of the throne of God. Sometimes, as we sail on the ocean, some peculiar radiance upon its surface seems to open all its depths and let us see how deeply it mirrors all the world. So it is in the life of men, and so it is especially in the life of the great man who stands as our example, our savior, our guide.

We never see so deeply into the depths of any human nature as when we see that nature lifting itself up by prayer. Prayer is the consummation of the human life, and it is also its spontaneous action. And so, when one prays in the presence of his fellow men, it seems as if those fellow men, looking into his life most deeply, would be able, at any time, to enter into the richness of his consciousness, his communion with God, which must be the fulness of his life. And so we can see that when Christ stood before his disciples and offered up his heart to God, then most deeply did men look into his soul and understand him.

About the author and the source

It is as the author of the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” that Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) is usually now remembered. However, he was also an eloquent champion of the abolition of slavery in the United States, and a well-known and passionate moral reformer.