“The useful Thomas Brooks” by Alexander Grosart

“In characterizing Sibbes generally, we selected the epithet universally applied to him, ‘heavenly;’ and in like manner, the word ‘useful’ is the one word which accurately expresses the position of Brooks among his contemporaries.

His slightest ‘Epistle’ is ‘Bread of Life.’

His most fugitive ‘Sermon’ is a full cup of ‘Living Water.’

The very foliage of his exuberant fancies are ‘Leaves’ of the Tree of Life.

His one dominating aim is to make dead hearts warm with the Life of the Gospel of Him who is Life.

His supreme purpose is to ‘bring near’ the very Truth of God.

Hence his directness, his urgency, his yearning, his fervour, his fulness of Bible citation, his wistfulness, his intensity, his emotion, and that fine passion of enthusiasm sprung of compassion, and Pauline accident of choice words or melody of sentence.

His desire is to be ‘useful’ to souls, to achieve the holy success of serving Christ, to win a sparkling crown to lay at His feet, breathes and burns from first to last.

Everything is subordinated to ‘usefulness.’

And while he gathered around him the cultured and the titled– who all but worshipped the ‘good old man’– it was his chief rejoicing that, like his Master, ‘the common people’ heard and read him ‘gladly.’

In loving association with Sibbes and Sheffield, Baxter and Bunyan, Brinsley and Samuel Richardson, his books were well thumbed in the hamlets of his own England, and, in quaint ‘Glasgow’ editions, among the godly peasantry of Scotland, and gained wide and long-sustained welcome in Germany and Holland, as Brooks gratefully acknowledges repeatedly.

May this complete edition of these inestimable Works be used at this ‘later day’ to cause him, ‘being dead, yet to speak’ for that dear Lord Jesus he loved and served so well!”

–Alexander Balloch Grosart, as quoted in Thomas Brooks, The Works of Thomas Brooks, Volume 6, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1866/1980), 6: vii–viii