Phillips Brooks

Phillips Brooks was born December 13, 1835 in Boston, Massachusetts and died January 23, 1893 in Boston at age fifty-seven. He served as Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church for the final fifteen months of his life, succeeding Benjamin Henry Paddock in October 1891.

VTS years (1856–1859)

Brooks graduated Harvard in 1855 and briefly taught at the Boston Latin School before recognizing a call to ministry. He matriculated at the 3737 Seminary Road Place 3737 Seminary Road Episcopal theological seminary founded in Alexandria in 1823 and relocated to its present hilltop campus in 1827. Occupied by Union forces during the Civil War and used as a … in 1856 and graduated in 1859 — the same year Aspinwall Hall, the seminary’s iconic central building with its bell-tower, was completed. (See the local-folklore note in the “O Little Town of Bethlehem” story page; despite a charming Alexandria legend, the carol was not written from Aspinwall’s tower.)

Pastoral career

Brooks was ordained deacon in 1859 and priest in 1860. He served as rector of:

• The Church of the Advent, Philadelphia (1859–1862)
• The Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia (1862–1869)
• Trinity Church, Boston (1869–1891)

His twenty-two-year Boston rectorship at Trinity Church established his national reputation as one of the foremost preachers of the post–Civil War American Protestant church. The 1877 H. H. Richardson-designed Trinity Church on Copley Square was built during his rectorship and is widely regarded as among the finest examples of Romanesque Revival architecture in the United States.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” (1868)

Brooks’s most-remembered work outside the pulpit is the lyric of the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” written in December 1868 in Philadelphia for the Sunday-school children’s choir of his Holy Trinity parish. The lyric was inspired by an 1865 Christmas-Eve horseback ride from Jerusalem to Bethlehem that Brooks made during a Holy-Land pilgrimage; he attended the midnight service at the Church of the Nativity, and the “deep and dreamless sleep” of the starlit town stayed with him for three years before he set it to verse.

The melody most-associated with the carol — the tune known as “St. Louis” — was composed by Brooks’s church organist Lewis Henry Redner, who reportedly woke in the middle of the night before the December 27, 1868 Sunday-school service with the melody in his head and set it down in time for the children’s debut.

The carol’s Alexandria-folklore claim — that Brooks was inspired to write it from Aspinwall Hall’s tower at VTS, looking out over Quaker Lane — is a charming local invention but does not survive contact with the documentary record. See the dedicated story page for the full myth-versus-reality treatment.

Bishop of Massachusetts

Brooks was elected Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891 and consecrated October 14, 1891. He served barely fifteen months — he died of diphtheria at his Boston home on January 23, 1893, age fifty-seven.

He is commemorated in the Episcopal Church’s calendar of saints on January 23 each year, and is honored at the 3737 Seminary Road Place 3737 Seminary Road Episcopal theological seminary founded in Alexandria in 1823 and relocated to its present hilltop campus in 1827. Occupied by Union forces during the Civil War and used as a … as one of the most influential alumni in the seminary’s two-century history.