Theodore Parker

“ In the afternoon Benzon read aloud to Mr. K., Bergfalk, and myself, an “Essay on the American Mind,” by a Mr. Whipple; it is writted in a lively manner, takes broad views, and is not without marks of genius. It has been very much talked about, and furnished us also with matter for conversation.
In the evening I had a visit from Theodore Parker. I am so great a lover of courage in all forms, and of every unreserved expression of opinion and belief, that I extended my hand to Parker, thanking him cordially for his candour. ”

“ Emerson was saturating the intellectual life of the city, and through it the mind of America, with the nobleness of his thought. Theodore Parker, gigantesque in learning, courage, devotion to mankind, less a man than a Commonwealth of noble powers, was in his pulpit, with a strong and growing hold on the minds and hearts of the people. The Abolitionists were toiling terribly with all their splendid might of conscience, their genius and their eloquence, to rouse the North to a settlement with the Slave Oligarchy. ”

“ Thenceforth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of "lay preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a church. The representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal following. ”

“ Humanity will for ever honour the names of Theodore Parker and those who with him struggled in this the darkest hour of American history, at the cost of social excommunication, at the risk of personal violence, to stem the mingled tide of Slavery, materialism, and political atheism which was overwhelming the moral world, and beneath which, as Parker says in his funeral oration on Webster, everything had sunk, even the steeples of the highest churches, except the ark of God. ”

“ His influence for good is powerful, and he exerts it constantly.
Theodore Parker and Hawthorne both reside in this city. Parker, as I have been told, when he first came here, decided to devote himself to the cultivation of land; but he has drifted again into the rostrum, and twice a week you may see the fair maidens and gallant swains of Spring Garden wending their way to his beautiful little home and garden in the suburbs, where, amid the flowers, he descants to them, in his eloquent way, on life and the attributes of the human soul, and also upon his earth experiences. ”

“ At the death of Theodore Parker, among the many eulogies on his life was one by Ralph Waldo Emerson, highly noted for his humanity, his learning and his philosophy. It contains apples of gold, and richly deserves immortality; for in the worldly strife for effervescent wealth and prominence, a benign consciousness that our posthumous fame as unselfish benefactors to our fellow-men is to live on through the ages, would be a solace for much misrepresentation. ”

“ Let us make every deduction which a candid criticism is compelled to claim, and Theodore Parker stands a noble representative of Republican America. His place is still among the immortals who are not the creatures of an age, but its regenerators. For it is not the life of a great skeptic, but the work of a great believer, which is brought before us in these volumes. This uncompromising enemy of the creeds was the ally of their highest uses. His soul never lacked that dear and personal object of worship which is offered by the Christian Revelation in its common acceptance. ”

“ When Theodore Parker was denouncing the iniquities of any and all slavery, his voice was not as soft and gentle and sweetly modulated as that of Longfellow, yet it played as important a part in the history of the development of mankind and stirred men to higher endeavor on the part of their suffering and down-trodden fellows. ”

“ So long as a man persisted in a wrong attitude before God or man, there was no day so laborious or exhausting, no night so long or drowsy, but Theodore Parker's unsleeping memory stood on guard full-armed, ready to do battle at a moment's warning. ”

“ Theodore Parker, nor is it pertinent to our purpose. We may remark, however, that we do not agree with him in his ideas of the Bible and of religion—in other words, we are not one of his disciples, and never heard him preach but once, though we have read with much interest many of his lectures and sermons. But we would remind these zealous brethren that if his [Parker's] work be of God, they cannot overthrow it, and if it is of Satan, we have no doubt that it will come to nought. ”

“ Yet Theodore Parker was so strong and self-sufficing upon his own ground, he needed so little from any other, while giving so freely to all, that one would hardly venture to add anything to the autobiographies he has left, but for the high example he set of fearlessness in dealing with the dead. There may be some whose fame is so ill-established, that one shrinks from speaking of them precisely as one saw them ”

“ In the other, it is a negative love of truth, which takes the form of a hatred of error, and induces the man to spend his life in stripping his own creed leaf by leaf, like a rose, of its external and more questionable doctrines, while he sees vividly the collateral truths in the creeds of others. Theodore Parker belonged essentially to the first order of minds. None have preached with nobler, manlier faith the affirmative truths of absolute religion. ”

“ For us, this life of Parker must be interpreted by one of the family. He shall best use these precious letters and journals who is spiritually related to their writer, if not bound to him by the feebler tie of blood. And assuming the necessity of a partisan, or, as it might more gently be expressed, wholly sympathetic biographer, there is little but commendation for Mr. Weiss. With admirable clearness and strength he rings out the full tone of thought and belief among that earnest school of thinkers and doers of which Theodore Parker was the representative. ”

“ Theodore Parker related that when he was a lad, at work in a field one day on his father's farm at Lexington, an old man with a snowy beard suddenly appeared at his side, and walked with him as he worked, giving him high counsel and serious thought. ”

“ Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar, an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the temperament of a blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passionate lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out, in Italy. ”

“ One might have said of her that she came near being very handsome. Her complexion was fair, her features were regular, and the expression of her face was very naïf and gentle. A certain want of physical maturity seemed to have prevented her from blossoming into full beauty. It was a great grief both to her and to her husband that their union was childless.
Theodore Parker's reputation had already reached Rome, and there as elsewhere brought him many attentions from scholars, and even from dignitaries of the Catholic Church. ”

“ Parker's own powers of merrymaking appear in his Latin epitaph on "the Doctor" (who survived him by many years) , which is printed in the "Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe."
[107] She used in later years to shake her head as she recalled a naughty mot of hers apropos of Parker's preaching: "I would rather," she said, "hear Theodore Parker preach than go to the theatre; I would rather go to the theatre than go to a party; I would rather go to a party than stay at home!"
A letter to her sister Annie shows the trend of her religious thought in these days. ”

“ John Parker, commanded the company of minute-men that were fired on by the British troops on 19 April, 1775. Theodore was the youngest of eleven children. From the father, a Unitarian and Federalist, he inherited independence of mind, courage, and love of speculation; from his mother, depth of religious feeling. The family were poor, and the boy was brought up to labor on the farm. At the age of six he was sent to the district school, which was then taught by young students from Harvard. ”

“ Parker, Theodore (1810-1860) . -- Theologian, b. at Lexington, Massachusetts, ed. at Harvard, was an indefatigable student, and made himself master of many languages. In 1837 he was settled at West Roxbury as a Unitarian minister, but the development of his views in a rationalistic direction gradually separated him from the more conservative portion of his co-religionists. He lectured on theological subjects in Boston in 1841, travelled in Europe, and in 1845 settled in Boston, where he lectured to large audiences, and exercised a wide influence. ”

“ His passion was all ambition, his calculation only for place and name. With strange fire he sacrificed youth and manhood on this unholy altar. He has not yet won the place he longs for, nor never will. He sets his hungry eye on it, and grows more reckless in the means that seem to lead thereto, "for he knoweth that his time is short," Nothing stands between him and what he aims at. Friendship is nothing; his plighted word is only the oath of a dicer who throws for place. His past life is nothing; he will eat his own words, though hard as cannon-shot. His conscience is nothing ”

“ Some of the Biblical conceptions of the Deity may be found inadequate, but Nature and the human soul are full of His presence and glow with His inspirations. Within the limits of capacity and obedience, every man and woman may receive direct nourishment from God. At length the South-Boston sermon of 1841 separates the position of Theodore Parker from that of his Unitarian brethren. After this, his life belongs to the public. He is known of men as an assailant of respectable and sacred things, a bitter critic of political and social usages. ”

“ Adam, head master at the High School in Edinburgh, he thought himself once more in the class-room.
Parker (Theodore, Unitarian preacher and writer) , 1810-1869. "It is all one, Phillips and Clarke will come for my sake." He meant that Wendell Phillips and James Freeman Clarke would attend his funeral. He died at Florence, where he had gone for his health. The character of Theodore Parker was above reproach. His tone of morality was high. ”

“ There was one at Boston in Faneuil Hall, August 21, 1835, at which a remarkable speech was made by a lawyer who had graduated at Harvard College in 1812, a man no longer young, of large talents and great attainments in the law. He spoke against discussion, and in behalf of Slavery and Slaveholders: he could see no good, but only unmixed evil "consequent upon agitating this subject here." He said:—
"When did fear ever induce a man to relax his power over the object that excited it? ”

“ I tested his poignard; the blade had a good temper, stiff enough and yet springy withal; the point was sharp." [213] After the immediate danger was over and Knight and Hughes had avoided the city, where they had received such welcome from the friends of this Court, such was the tone of the political newspapers and the commercial pulpit that William and Ellen must needs flee from America. Long made one by the wedlock of mutual and plighted faith, their marriage in Georgia was yet "null and void" by the laws of that "Christian State." I married them according to the law of Massachusetts. ”

“ James, the father of her son Thomas. From the "Plantation manners" of her master, the concubine, "foolishly dissatisfied with slavery," flies to Boston, and takes refuge with her Quaker son, who conceals his mother, and shelters her for a time. But let me suppose that his Honor Judge Curtis, while at Washington, fired with that patriotism which is not only habitual but natural and indigenous to his Honor, informs Mr. Nason of the hiding-place of his female slave, thus betraying a "mistress" to her master, no longer, alas, her "keeper." ”

“ But if God had endowed Parker with a noble intellect and he had honestly multiplied his five talents to ten, there was yet a greater gift which he possessed in still richer measure. The strong, clear head was second to the warm, true heart. Parker loved his friends with a devotion of which men in our day so rarely give proof, that we claim it as the privilege of a woman to know its happiness, albeit such love becomes as much the manliness of a man as the womanliness of a woman. ”

“ Parker calls on me, reads my stories, and is very good to me. Theodore asks Louisa "how her worthy parents do," and is otherwise very friendly to the large, bashful girl who adorns his parlor steadily.
Abby is preparing for a busy and, I hope, a profitable winter. She has music lessons already, French and drawing in store, and, if her eyes hold out, will keep her word and become what none of us can be, "an accomplished Alcott." Now, dear Father, I shall hope to hear from you occasionally, and will gladly answer all epistles from the Plato, whose parlor parish is becoming quite famous. ”

“ We saw it in his face, so full of solemn joy as he rose to lead our prayers.”
Perhaps we have dwelt somewhat too fully on these details of Parker's character; but as it is impossible for mankind wholly to refrain from forming an estimate of the root of a man's faith by the product of life which it may bear, it has seemed well thus to display, in some degree, how singularly complete and rounded was that nature which this teacher of Theism displayed. All religions, which have importantly influenced the world, have probably been qualified to produce some special virtue in eminent perfection. ”