Born, at Lexington, Mass., Aug. 24, 1810: died at Florence, Italy, May 10, 1860. A noted American clergyman, lecturer, reformer, and author. He studied at the Cambridge Divinity School 1834–36; became a Unitarian clergyman at Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1837; became the head of an independent rationalistic society at the Melodeon (1846), and later at Music Hall, Boston; and was a conspicuous advocate of the abolition of slavery. Among his works are “Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion” (1842), “Sermons on Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology” (1853), “Ten Sermons of Religion” (1853), besides a large number of addresses, etc., and “Great Americans” (this was published after his death). His complete works were edited by F. P. Cobbe (12 vols. 1863–65).

Personal

  No doubt my life is to be outwardly a life of gloom, and separation from old associates (I will not say friends). I know men will view me with suspicion, and ministers with hatred: That is not my concern. Inwardly, my life is and must be one of profound peace, of satisfaction and comfort that all words of mine are powerless to present. There is no mortal trouble that disturbs me more than a moment; no disappointment that makes me gloomy or sad or distrustful. All outward evils fall off me as snow from my cloak. I never thought of being so happy in this life as I have been these two years. The destructive part of the work I feel called on to do is painful, but is slight compared with the main work of building up. Don’t think I am flattered, as some say, by seeing many come to listen. Nothing makes a real man so humble as to stand and speak to many men. The thought that I am doing what I know to be my duty is rich reward to me: I know of none so great. Besides that, however, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I have awakened the spirit of religion, of faith in God, in some twenty or twenty-five men, who, before that, had no faith, no hope, no religion. This alone, and the expression of their gratitude (made by word of mouth, or made by letters or by a friend), would compensate me for all that all the ministers in the world could say against me or do against me.

  Parker is a most hardy, compact, clever little fellow, full of decisive utterance, with humor and good humor; whom I like much.

  Saw Mr. Parker for the first time. He was lying in bed with his back to the light. Mrs. Parker brought me into the room. He took my hand tenderly and said in a low, hurried voice, holding it: “After all our wishes to meet, Miss Cobbe, how strange it is we should meet thus.” I pressed his hand, and he turned his eyes, which were trembling painfully and evidently seeing nothing, towards me and said, “You must not think you have seen me. This is not me, only the wreck of the man I was.” Then, after a pause, he added: “Those who love me most can only wish me a quick passage to the other world. Of course I am not afraid to die (he smiled as he spoke) but there was so much to be done!”

  But it was in popularizing thought and knowledge that his great and wonderful power lay. Not an original thinker, in the same sense with Emerson, he yet translated for thousands that which Emerson spoke to hundreds only…. Thinkers might find no new thought in the new discourse, leaders of action no new plan, yet, after all that had been said and done, his was the statement that told upon the community. He knew this power of his, and had analysed some of the methods by which he attained it, though, after all, the best part was an unconscious and magnetic faculty…. Without grace or beauty or melody, his mere elocution was sufficient to produce effects which melody and grace and beauty might have sighed for in vain…. Surcharged with European learning, he yet remained at heart the Lexington farmer’s-boy, and his whole atmosphere was indigenous, not exotic. Not haunted by any of the distrust and criticism which are apt to effeminate the American scholar, he plunged deep into the current of hearty national life around him, loved it, trusted it, believed in it; and the combining of his life with such tremendous criticism of public and private sins formed an irresistible power. He could condemn without crushing,—denounce mankind, yet save it from despair…. His conversational power was so wonderful that no one could go away from a first interview without astonishment and delight…. He lived his life much as he walked the streets of Boston,—not quite gracefully, nor yet stately, but with quick, strong, solid step, with sagacious eyes wide open, and thrusting his broad shoulders a little forward, as if butting away the throng of evil deeds around him, and scattering whole atmospheres of unwholesome cloud. Wherever he went, there went a glance of sleepless vigilance, an unforgetting memory, a tongue that never faltered, and an arm that never quailed.

  When some Americans die—when most Americans die—their friends tire the public with excuses. They confess this spot, they explain that stain, they plead circumstances as the half justification of that mistake, and they beg of us to remember that nothing but good is to be spoken of the dead. We need no such mantle for the green grave under the sky of Florence,—no excuses, no explanations, no spot. Priestly malice has scanned every inch of his garment,—it was seamless; it could find no stain. History, as in the case of every other of her beloved children, gathers into her bosom the arrows which malice had shot at him, and says to posterity, “Behold the title-deeds of your gratitude!” We ask no moment to excuse, there is nothing to explain. What the snarling journal thought bold, what the selfish politician feared as his ruin,—it was God’s seal set upon his apostleship. The little libel glanced across him like a rocket when it goes over the vault; it is passed, and the royal sun shines out as beneficent as ever.

  Mr. Parker, though strong in his convictions, was no dogmatist, and assumed no robes of infallibility. No man was more docile in regard to being taught, even by the lowliest. Mr. Phillips has done him no more than justice, when he said that he was willing and eager to obtain instruction from any quarter. Hence he was always inquiring of those with whom he came in contact, so that he might learn, if possible, something from them that might aid him in the great work in which he was engaged. When the question of “Woman’s Rights” first came up for discussion, like multitudes of others, Mr. Parker was inclined to treat it facetiously, and supposed it could be put aside with a smile. Still it was his disposition to hear and to learn; and as soon as he began to investigate, and to see the grandeur and world-wide importance of the “Woman’s Rights” movement, he gave to it his hearty support before the country and the world.

  He never kept back the truth for fear to make an enemy. But, on the other hand, it was complained that he was bitter and harsh; that his zeal burned with too hot a flame. It is so difficult, in evil times, to escape this charge!—for the faithful preacher most of all. It was his merit—like Luther, Knox, Latimer, and John the Baptist, to speak tart truth when that was peremptory, and when there were few to say it. But his sympathy with goodness was not less energetic. One fault he had: he overestimated his friends, I may well say it, and sometimes vexed them with the importunity of his good opinion, whilst they knew better the ebb which follows exaggerated praise. He was capable, it must be said, of the most unmeasured eulogies on those he esteemed, especially if he had any jealousy that they might not stand with the Boston public as high as they ought. His commanding merit as reformer is this, that he insisted, beyond all men in pulpits,—I cannot think of one rival,—that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals.

  Theodore Parker possessed a power of acquisition, which few men, out of Germany, have had. He knew the contents of all the books in his library. He could take the substance out of a book in an incredibly short time. On that fatal winter which broke down his constitution and determined his fate (the winter which killed him), he was in the habit of filling a carpet-bag, not with novels, but with works of tough philosophy and theology, in Greek, Latin, German, in old black-letter print, and yellow parchment covers; and would study them, Monday, while riding in the cars, to lecture on Monday night; study them, Tuesday, while riding to lecture at another place on Tuesday night; and so on, studying all day and lecturing every night, till Friday. On Friday he would come home, write his Sunday’s sermon on Saturday forenoon, visit the sick and suffering of his society on Saturday afternoon, preach Sunday morning to two or three thousand people, rest a little on Sunday afternoon, receive his friends on Sunday evening, and away again on Monday.

  When Mr. Parker went to Boston, he fitted up the fourth story of his house for a study, by lining the walls with shelves of the simplest description, without mouldings or ornaments, so as to save every inch of space for books. These shelves gradually crept over the door, the windows, and the chimney-pieces, thence into little adjoining rooms, and finally stepped boldly down the stairs, one flight at a time, for three flights, colonizing every room by the way, including the large parlor in the second story, and finally paused only at the dining-room close to the front door. The bathing-room, the closets, the attic apartments, were inundated with books. Unbound magazines and pamphlets lay in chests of drawers above-stairs; miscellaneous matter was sorted in properly labelled boxes; cupboards and recesses were stuffed full. He had evoked this inundating demon, but did not know the laying spell. In the centre of the study floor rose two or three edifices of shelves to receive the surplus which could find no other bestowment. No house was ever so adorned from basement to attic. To his eye, who knew so well the contents of each volume of the twelve thousand, the walls were frescoed with the ages of human thought, and the solemn tragedies of all the great souls, who counted life a little thing to exchange for the liberties of truth.

  This man was an organised conscience. The degree to which he quickened the perceptions of the American people to detect the subtlest distinctions between right and wrong cannot be told to those who did not live under his immediate influence. When the post-mortem examination of slavery takes place, the arrow of Theodore Parker will be found deepest in its heart…. He was not a man who had only fine words for humanity. When he was poor he divided with those who were poorer, and his charities grew with his means. He considered the poor as well as gave to them. He not only pleaded the cause of the hunted fugitive slaves, but protected them in his house, and fed them at his table. The negro of the far South knew his name, and on arriving in Boston after a perilous flight, came by night to his door. Two of these—man and maid betrothed—were concealed for some days in his study, while Parker sat outside the door with a pistol by his side, writing his next Sunday’s discourse. Then he married the two, and giving the man a Bible and a dagger, exhorting him to die rather than let himself or his wife return to slavery, he with some others got them off to an English ship bound for London, where the two now reside.

  At the foot of a cypress-tree, not far from the column of Frederick William, is the simple grave of Theodore Parker. A tangled flower bed inclosed within a stone border, a plain head and foot stone, and the simple inscription:

  While in Florence in the spring of 1883 I visited the old Protestant cemetery, where, under the cypresses and willows, lie the remains of celebrated English writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, and Arthur Hugh Clough, and of not a few almost equally famous Americans, including Theodore Parker, Richard Hildreth, and Lorimer Graham. These exiled graves were generally marked by memorials worthy of the literature their occupants enriched and of the land in which they died, with the then exception of those of Parker and Hildreth, whose rude tombstones certainly did scant credit either to American taste or national gratitude. I then and there resolved to do what I could to change this state of things at least in so far as concerned the grave of the great Boston divine. So shortly afterward I began collecting subscriptions among European friends and admirers of Parker, informing them that the money was to be used in beautifying his last resting-place. The responses were prompt, and the desire to do him honor spread from Europe to America. Among the many European subscribers were Frances Power Cobbe, Miss Jane Cobden, daughter of the great free trader; the late Paul Bert, the French scientist and statesman; M. Renan; the late M. Godin, creator of the Guise Social Palace; Mme. Jules Favre, widow of the celebrated French statesman and to-day Director of the State Superior Normal School for women at Sèvres; Björnstjerne Björnson, the Norwegian author and republican leader; M. Frederik Bajer, of the Danish Parliament; M. H. E. Bener, of the Norwegian Parliament; the Rev. James Martineau, D.D.; Prof. Albert Revillé, of the College of France; Prof. F. W. Newman, brother of the Cardinal; the late Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer, etc. The list of American subscribers contains many well-known names, but I have mislaid it and so hesitate to draw up from memory an incomplete one.

  Those who knew Parker only in the pulpit did not half know him. Apart from the field of theological controversy, he was one of the most sympathetic and delightful of men. I have rarely met any one whose conversation had such a ready and varied charm. His idea of culture was encyclopædic, and his reading, as might have been inferred from the size of his library, was enormous. The purchase of books was his single extravagance. One whole floor was given up to them, and in spite of this they overflowed into hall and drawing-room. He was very generous in lending them, and I often profited by his kindness in this respect…. I cannot remember that the interest of his sermons ever varied for me. It was all one intense delight. The luminous clearness of his mind, his admirable talent for popularizing the procedures and conclusions of philosophy, his keen wit and poetic sense of beauty,—all these combined to make him appear to me one of the oracles of God. Add to these his fearlessness and his power of denunciation, exercised in the community a great part of which seemed bound in a moral sleep. His voice was like the archangel’s trump, summoning the wicked to repentance and bidding the just take heart. It was hard to go out from his presence, all aglow with the enthusiasm which he felt and inspired, and to hear him spoken of as a teacher of irreligion, a pest to the community.

  He was not a master of metaphysical refinements…. The fullness of Parker’s mind and the vigor of his mental operations are, however, less admirable than his moral character, as displayed in all the personal relations of his life, in his unflagging industry, in the exigent interpretation that he gave to his ministerial office, in his courageous dealing with political iniquity, and especially in his devotion of himself with all his gifts and acquisitions to the furtherance of religious truth and social righteousness. His life was one of perfect consecration to the welfare of his fellow men.

General

  The work, “A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion,” concludes with a “Discourse of the Church;” in which Ecclesiastical History is made to yield a series of social pictures, representing the actual agency of Christianity in its successive developments. The drawing has a breadth of boldness, and the colouring a warmth, that might tempt a careless critic to suspect more genius in the design than knowledge in the execution; but traces are not wanting, which show that we are running over the summary results of large reading, reproduced from a philosophical mind.

  I heard that he was “poison.” Then I like poison very well.

  His early writings are much more rich and full than his later ones. His “Discourse on Religion”—his first printed book—remains his best one.

  He was a great and good man: the greatest and best, perhaps, which America has produced. He was great in many ways. In time to come his country will glory in his name, and the world will acknowledge all his gifts and powers. His true greatness, however, will in future ages rest on this: that God revealed Himself to his faithful soul in His most adorable aspect—that he preached with undying faith, and lived out in his consecrated life the lesson he had thus been taught—that he was worthy to be the Prophet of the greatest of all truths, the ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF GOD; the centre truth of the universe.

  He was far less a philosopher than he was a man of affairs, and far less a theologian than he was a practical reformer of society. The huge masses of his knowledge and experience were never organized in a system, or made to revolve in beautiful order about some central thought. The treasures amassed by his acquisitive power, and stored in the several departments of his mind, lay in separate heaps. He was a sturdy Puritan of New England, laden with the erudition of a German professor; but the Puritan could not absorb the professor, nor could the professor absorb the Puritan; nor could the Puritan and the professor combine in a single human consciousness. The Yankee and the transcendentalist could not quite coalesce. The realist by nature and the idealist by culture could not cordially embrace. The elements of opposite systems seemed to be side by side in his mind, and now one and now another of them had a preponderance. Here you would say decidedly that he was a Pantheist, immersing the whole universe of God; there you would say with equal confidence that he was a Theist separating the Maker in essence from his world. There are passages in which he speaks of the controlling influence of law, linking all events in a chain of destiny so closely woven that no room is left for an independent thought or a volition along the whole line of human development; and there are passages that speak of Providence, and the Divine care of the smallest things, with the tender unction of an old-fashioned Christian.

  Mr. Parker was not a man of genius, nor yet of an original mind. The doctrines with which he connected his name were not of his devising. They had come down from former generations of freethinkers. It was the freshness of illustration and the zeal and energy which he brought to their enforcement, together with the strong personal influence that went out from his—what we call in this country “magnetism”—that accounts for the stir he made among the dry bones, and the hold he had and still retains upon living souls.

  His writings are generally strong and rugged in style. He addresses the reason, and makes few appeals to the feelings. But his love of nature was intense, and nearly every discourse has some tribute to the beauty of the seasons, and some illustration of spiritual truth drawn from the visible world. He excelled also in pathetic description, and gave to the ideas of home, parents, children, age, and death, a tender and impressive charm. His chief deficiency as a writer was in taste, the want of which often mars his general literary excellence.

  Mr. Parker’s works have been republished and widely read in England, and have been lately translated into other languages for circulation in other European countries. No one can doubt the immense influence which he has exerted by his vigorous thought, his vast learning, his pithy and telling style, and his intense and unabated zeal, upon the mind of the age; while, however men may dissent from many of his theological views, it will be remembered to his eternal honor, that a Puritan of Puritans in his faith in God and in his strictness of moral character, he was the stalwart and ever faithful friend of wronged and oppressed humanity; rained down blows, thick and fast, upon every giant sin or evil of his day; and, at the time when most Christian pulpits were deaf and dumb to the demands of the hour, “preached righteousness in the great congregation.”

  A born controversialist, who had the challenging chip always on his shoulder, which he invited both his Unitarian and his Orthodox brethren to knock off. There never was a man who more gloried in a fight…. He was the Luther of radical Unitarianism. When the Unitarian societies refused fellowship with his society, he organized a church of his own, and made it one of the most powerful in New England. There was nothing but disease which could check, and nothing but death which could close his controversial activity…. He was among the leaders in the attempt to apply the rigid maxims of Christianity to practical life; and many Orthodox clergymen, who combined with him in his assaults on intemperance, slavery, and other hideous evils of our civilization, almost condoned his theological heresies in the admiration of his fearlessness in practical reforms. He was an enormous reader and diligent student, as well as a resolute man of affairs. He also had great depth and fervency of piety.

  Parker’s writings will not stand criticism so well as Channing’s. If he is sometimes more impassioned, he is often florid, diffuse, and even noisy in his trumpets of revolt. He does not, like Emerson, take up a calm vantage ground of philosophical survey or scorn, “he roars beneath the walls of the Jericho of orthodoxy, and expects them to fall.”

  Early years of excessive bodily and mental toil, of actual privation for one of his mental and physical calibre, of exhausting thought and study, a middle life spent in a desperate struggle for the strength to do his earnest work, and the most intense devotion to the cause of freedom of thought in every path of life, made the days of this great, earnest thinker and worker comparatively short, yet into his fifty years were crowded enthusiasm, the immense acquisition of knowledge, the ripened study of the four-score years of the Psalmist. It was an ideal life in its force and intensity—the spirit of the enthusiast and the exact knowledge of the scholar united in it a singular degree with the devotion to humanity which was so overpowering that the superficial and hasty multitude too often called him iconoclast, atheist, and many more opprobrious epithets because they thought in his love for mankind he forgot the Maker of all…. Thousands of minds feel Theodore Parker’s influence, hundreds of writers and thinkers bear witness to his power; our library shelves teem with works upon his writings and his life, his name is one long to be remembered in our land.

  We may regard Parker as the clearest and most logical interpreter of Transcendental principles. “A Transcendental religion needs,” he said, “a Transcendental theology.” His posthumous essay, “Transcendentalism,” and also his first work, “A Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion,” admirably sum up the doctrines which inspired his whole life, and which he believed destined to become the religion of enlightened minds during the next thousand years. There must not be sought in them a rigorous analysis of the psychological phenomena which serve as the basis of philosophy of intuition. Parker has adopted as a starting-point the methods of the followers of Kant. Henceforth, therefore, he declines to discuss its underlying principles, and contents himself with the application of it, to the search for and the development of religious truth. To be sure, he rejects neither the control nor the support of external observation; but it is above all to internal phenomena that he turns in order to obtain decisive evidence for the existence of God and the doctrine of immortality.

  It is much to be regretted that Parker is not better known here in England. Many of those who are familiar with his name look upon him mainly as an advanced religious thinker, who was more at home in opposing the claims of orthodoxy than in teaching spiritual religion. But as a matter of fact he spoke at times with the voice of an inspired poet, whose words glowed with holy fire.

  There is no more noticeable name, either for ability or for independence, among the American Unitarians than that of Theodore Parker.

  The progress of liberal thought in Boston was greatly aided by him, and Boston’s political conservatism was correspondingly weakened. To sum up his work, it may be said that it was a work of intensely aggressive theism, moving partly on Christian lines, towards religious and civil changes. His theism, in its character and force, is best illustrated in his volume of printed prayers—the only noteworthy contribution ever made in America to this once prominent department of literature. Parker was the last of the preachers whose words and works have had any general effect on American thought, in so far as that thought has concerned itself with movements associated with individual names. Parker was at times superficial, sensational, noisy, and indiscreet; but for mere discretion and prudence he had small liking, while his uproarious method of attack he deemed necessary, in his endeavour to overthrow ancient evils. His superficiality was due to his boundless energy, which prematurely wore out his life, and to his desire to absorb all knowledge. But, after all, he was a characteristic American figure; and his position in the religion and politics of discreetly liberal Boston, before the war, is half pathetic, half comic.

  I shall be happy to have my name figure in an act of homage paid to Theodore Parker. He is, among contemporary thinkers, the one who has treated religious truth in the most elevated manner.

  Parker was much more an orator than a writer; and his published writings, with few exceptions, reflect two lights that flare upon the public stage. They are diffuse in matter, and loosely articulated in their form, in spite of the mechanical arrangement of their parts. What gives to them their greatest charm is a certain vivid homeliness of phrase, shaping itself upon the facts of nature and of our human life. Luther nor Latimer excelled him here. He wrote some beautiful hymns and other poems; but the best of his poetry will not be found in these, but in passages of his sermons, that go very near the tenderest joys and simplest tragedies of our experience. Not only was he so human that nothing human was foreign to him, but his sympathy was as keen as Wordsworth’s with all natural things, and something of nature’s wide inclusiveness and generous toleration was characteristic of his sympathy with universal life. It is suggestive of the homeliness of his affections that ninety-one of his words out of every hundred were Saxon, to eighty-five of Webster’s and seventy-four of Sumner’s; though in the range of his reading and scholarship he was incomparably inferior to either of these men. In praising another for “words so deep that a child could understand them,” he was unconsciously giving a most apt description of his own.

  In real friendliness—of intention or of speech, he could give points to kings and outdo them. As for his intellectual resources, they were prodigious and imposing; but they had serious flaws. In what touched humanitarian questions, he reasoned—with his heart; his tenderness over and over, upset his logic, his tears put a mist into his pleas even at the Court of Heaven. Again, his sharp, keen memory for particular facts made him neglectful of accepted and accredited records; he had exaggerated trust in himself, in his instincts, his memory, his purposes. He looked down on most men; he had his slaps for Paul the Apostle—as for an over-confident boy; he looked up to none—save God.

  There have been few men in New England whose learning has equalled his in range and in vitality. The manner in which his ardent nature impelled him to express himself, however, was so far from what is generally characteristic of scholars that in popular memory his scholarship has almost been forgotten. As a Unitarian minister, Parker is remembered mostly for having carried individual preaching to its most unflinching conclusions. So far as one can judge, this preaching was actuated by unswerving devotion to what he believed true. The range of his scholarship had made him familiar with thousands of facts which seemed inconsistent with many forms of Christian tradition. These he unhesitatingly preached with a fervid eloquence which even in his own days, when New England oratory was at its height, commanded unusual attention. His teaching consequently carried Unitarianism so far from orthodox Christianity, in days when the Higher Criticism was still to come, that he did more than any other man to frighten less daring spirits into the Episcopal communion, which now maintains alliance with the ancestral church of England.