Chapter IV: • Theodore Parker • Transcendental Minister

Theodore Parker was described by one of his biographers as “the best working-plan of an American yet produced,” and by a fellow minister as “a conscience since Luther unsurpassed.” The two comments suggest still another, that he was completely and adequately New England. Yankee and Puritan contributed equally to his making. His rich and plastic mind was two-sided: one-half was wholly English, practical, logical, concrete, lucid; loving fact and tireless in its acquisition; master of everyday affairs and competent in dealing with this world; the other was emotional, mystical, idealistic, deeply and spontaneously religious, living daily with God as a son with the Father, carrying the sorrows of men in his heart and the wrongs of the world on his conscience. One of the greatest of New England ministers, he was shepherd as well as counselor, pastor as well as teacher. “I wish to stand on the earth,” he said with true critical insight, “though I would look beyond the stars. I would live _with men_, but think with philosophers” (Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_, Vol. I, p. 115). The generous amplitude of his nature was too large for the narrow walls of a church; he took all Boston for his parish, all New England for his congregation. Amazingly active and vital, he consumed whole libraries in his pursuit of knowledge. “His mind,” says Weiss, “was like the republican idea itself; it could afford to be hospitable, but could not afford to be exclusive” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 178). Conversant with many fields of knowledge, with a memory extraordinarily retentive, he was master of many languages--nineteen or twenty, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson--and at home in the most abstruse subjects. He spent his vast energy with the prodigality of Cotton Mather, and he achieved what Cotton Mather with his inbred parochialism could not achieve, an intellectual cosmopolitanism that judged Boston by broader standards than it could gauge.

A first-class fighting-man was this child of yeoman New England--none braver, not even Garrison, none more effective; and yet tender-hearted, sympathetic, with the shrewd common sense of his homespun forebears. The son of a Lexington farmer and mechanic, self-trained, endowed with indomitable will, he came of the soundest stock in Massachusetts. His grandfather was captain of the Minute Men who faced the British troops on Lexington Common in April, 1775; and a conscious pride of ancestry broke out frequently in his speech. The words uttered before the Ministerial Conference in May, 1851, in justification of his repudiation of the Fugitive Slave Law, were characteristic: “I am not afraid of men, I can offend them. I care nothing for their hate, or their esteem. I am not very careful of my reputation.” He then goes on:

I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol
in my desk,--loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action.
Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I
have done in Boston; in the midst of the nineteenth century; been
obliged to do it to defend the (innocent) members of my church,
women as well as men! You know that I do not like fighting....
But what could I do? I was born in the little town where the
first bloodshed of the Revolution began. The bones of men who
first fell in that war are covered by the monument at Lexington,
it is “sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind”; those men
fell “in the sacred cause of God and their country.” This is the
first inscription that I ever read. These men were my kindred. My
grandfather drew the first sword in the Revolution; my fathers
fired the first shot; the blood which flowed there was kindred to
this which courses in my veins today. Besides that, when I write
in my library at home, on the one side of me is the Bible which my
fathers prayed over, their morning and evening prayer, for nearly
a hundred years. On the other side there hangs the firelock my
grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried
at the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used at the battle of
Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the
first gun taken in the Revolution, taken also by my grandfather.
With these things before me, these symbols; with these memories in
me, when a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman, pursued
by the kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do less than take
her in and defend her to the last? (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I,
pp. 13-15.)

With his sensitive conscience visited by such memories--a child of ’76 living in the evil days of the Fugitive Slave Law, a devout freethinker borne on the crest of transcendental thought--Theodore Parker became the embodiment and epitome of the New England renaissance. More completely perhaps than any other representative, he gathered up and expressed the major revolutionary impulses of his time and world: the idealistic theism implicit in the Unitarian reaction from Calvinism; the transcendental individualism latent in the doctrine of divine immanence; and the passion for righteousness, to make the will of God prevail in a world where the devil quite openly kept his ledgers. He was an eager and thorough iconoclast, impatient to break the false images--the God of John Calvin with its slanders of human nature, and the god of State Street with its contempt for justice--which New England, he believed, had worshiped too long, forgetting the ideals of the Revolutionary fathers. The mind and conscience of Boston seemed to him stifled by the strait-jacket of respectability. Righteousness like a fugitive slave, was driven into hiding, or must walk the open streets with a Derringer in its pocket. As a free soul loving freedom, and a righteous man loving righteousness, he believed a duty was laid on him to cut away the strait-jacket, to shame the Boston that sold the poor in the gates for a pair of shoes. He must labor to set free the mind and conscience of Boston that they might go forth purified to work a beneficent work in a world that is God’s and not the devil’s. His attack was keen and unsparing; he laid on with gusto; he used homely words; he was just rather than polite. Impatient of humbug and self-seeking he dealt in searching criticism rather than conventional eulogy. At his touch distinguished reputations shrank to the mean and commonplace, and inflated dignitaries collapsed like a pricked balloon. Intellectually honest, he spoke the truth he had been at immense pains to gather, and in consequence those who suffered the sting of his attack--ministers and lawyers and merchants and politicians, men in high position, distinguished leaders of Boston society--were not slack in crying out against him as a demagogue and agitator. Next to Garrison he became the most hated man in New England; and something of that contemporary hatred, fierce and unforgiving, clings to his name still, coloring later estimates of his worth, hinting that his manners were not on a level with his morals.[459] An extraordinarily vital and interesting person, in short, was this Yankee preacher with his Puritan conscience--this transcendental critic with his quiver full of facts; one not to be ignored in casting up the accounts of the New England renaissance.

With his memorable sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity_, preached in May, 1841--a sermon that ranks in the history of Unitarianism with Channing’s Baltimore sermon--the Unitarian movement entered upon its second broad phase. It abandoned supernaturalism established on the sufficient authority of the Scriptures, and adopted the conception of an evolutionary theism, of God progressively revealing himself to the developing faculties of men and speaking through the conscience. Under Channing’s guidance Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism--total depravity, predestination, a God of wrath; it had shifted the emphasis from stable will to boundless love; and by such teachings it had captured the greater churches of Boston. By 1830 it had become securely established as the religion of Boston respectability, with implied bounds set to its intellectual liberalism. As the first ardor abated it fell to defining the new orthodoxy, resting content with what already had been won. It was against this new orthodoxy that held fast to the old supernaturalism that Theodore Parker protested. “The defect of the Unitarians was a profound one,” he pointed out; “ceasing to fear ‘the great and dreadful God’ of the Old Testament, they had not quite learned to love the all-beautiful and altogether lovely [God] of the universe.”[460] He would have no pausing of the movement of adventurous thought, no settling back into the ruts of dogmatism; and so he threw himself with immense energy into the work of liberating Unitarianism from a premature orthodoxy.

For this work he was admirably equipped. The greatest scholar of his generation of New England ministers, deep in German theology and philosophy, with the latest results of higher criticism on his study table, he was critically trained to separate historical fact from ecclesiastical tradition, and establish his theology on a basis of naturalism. He was at once scientific and transcendental. He had translated De Wette’s _Introduction to the Old Testament_ and was intimately acquainted with Strauss’s _Leben Jesu_. He knew the oriental backgrounds of Hebraic thought, had studied comparative religion with its suggestive record of taboos and fetishism, and was gathering materials for a comprehensive history of religion from primitive times. Intellectually acquisitive and curious, he far outran the less informed and courageous of his Unitarian brethren. But he was far more than a critic, he may well be accounted a religious genius. A convinced intuitionist, he tested every authority by appeal to transcendental experience. He frankly abandoned faith in the supernatural, with its corollaries of miracles and its “fetishism of the Bible,” and was far advanced in a theism that compensated for the supernatural by a passionate love of God. Thus established in personal experience his religion issued in conduct. Love of God was more to him than historical faith embodied in an historical church; love to his fellow men was more appealing than dogma. Hence the profoundly ethical quality of his religion, warm, palpitating, generous, that set it apart from the colder and austerer ethicism of the conventional Unitarians. The spirituality of Channing was enriched in Parker by the ardency of his loving nature.

The three major doctrines of his theism, as elaborated in his “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society,” were the infinite perfection of God, the adequacy of man to all his functions, and the sufficiency of absolute, natural religion. In his elaboration of these doctrines the controlling influence of transcendental thought is everywhere apparent. A metaphysical optimism throws a golden light on all his thinking. The trinitarian Godhead, equally with the devil, vanishes in “the infinitely perfect God,” “immanent in the world of matter, and in the world of spirit, the two hemispheres which to us make up the universe”--a universe created “from a perfect motive, for a perfect purpose, of perfect substance, and as a perfect means.” Hence it follows in Parker’s logic, that

there must be a complete solidarity between God and the two-fold
universe which He creates. The perfect Creator is thus also a
perfect providence; indeed, creation and providence are not
objective accidents of Deity, nor subjective caprices, but the
development of the perfect motive to its perfect purpose, love
becoming a universe of perfect welfare. I have called God Father,
but also Mother ... to express more sensibility, the quality of
tender and unselfish love, which mankind associates with Mother
more than aught else beside. (“Letter,” etc., in Weiss, Vol. II,
pp. 470-471.)

The doctrine of the adequacy of man flows logically from the doctrine of the immanence of God, but Parker was not content to rest it on such basis alone. The conception of human perfectibility, as it filtered down to him through different strata of thought, romantic and idealistic, found a high sanction in his transcendentalism; but his practical nature demanded that it be established if possible on a scientific foundation. Anthropology must substantiate philosophy. Parker was not convinced that it could be thus adequately established; nevertheless he would travel the objective path as far as it might lead. Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ was published after Parker was seized with his fatal illness, yet in much of the latter’s thinking he was groping his way toward some similar conception of “the unity of life of the human race,” with its “progressive development” from “the state of ignorance, poverty, and utter nakedness of soul and sense, the necessary primitive conditions of the race, up to the present civilization.” In the deep-buried scattered records of the past, slowly being gathered together and interpreted by science, he found “proof of time immense, wherein man, this spiritual Cosmos, has been assuming his present condition, individual, domestic, social, and national, and accumulating that wealth of things and thoughts which is the mark of civilization.” The doctrine of human perfectibility might not be capable of scientific proof, but it was more than a reasonable hope; it was implicit in all the past.

But this progressive development does not end with us; we have
seen only the beginning; the future triumphs of the race must be
vastly greater than all accomplished yet. In the primal instincts
and automatic desires of man, I have found a prophecy that what
he wants is possible, and shall one day be actual.... What good
is not with us is before, to be attained by toil and thought, and
religious life. (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 471-472.)

Of this slowly and painfully evolving man with his expanding ideals, religion Parker believed to be the highest ultimate expression; and religion, as the eyes of men slowly open to larger truths, will be seen to be answerable to the needs of daily life, to embody the highest ideal of social excellence. The noblest religion he believed was not supernatural, but natural. “The absolute religion which belongs to man’s nature, and is gradually unfolded thence,” “is the idea of humanity, dimly seen but clearly felt, which has flitted before the pious eyes of men in all lands and many an age, and been prayed for as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’” It is forever refashioning its ideal, re-embodying its vision, in every devout soul, in every creative age. “The religious history of the race is the record of man’s continual but unconscious efforts to attain this ‘desire of all nations’” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475). But unhappily every new advance soon crystallizes in dogmas and institutions; taboos and fetishisms are quick to re-imprison the mind that struggles to be free. Old forms, therefore, must be daily broken to make room for evolving experience. Religion must be free; it must rise spontaneously from the depths of life. Christianity has suffered grievously from a fetishism of the Bible, from its worship of the supernatural, from an ungenerous sectarianism beloved of “ecclesiastic skeptics,” who believe “there is no place for the Christian Church or the Bible till they have nullified the faculties which created both, and rendered Bible-makers and Church-founders impossible.” Every age must write a new Bible out of its God-given instincts, permeated with the divine love that is slowly shaping society to the divine purpose.

No more is the atheistic mocker or the ecclesiastic bigot
commissioned to stop the human race with his cry, “Cease there,
mankind, thy religious search! for, thousand-million-headed as
thou art, thou canst know nought directly of thy God, thy duty,
or thyself. Pause, and accept my authenticated word; stop, and
despair!” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475.)

It was this ethical quality of his religion that kept Theodore Parker so sensitive to wrongs and so generous in response to the call of social justice. His religion quickened his social conscience and summoned him to serve the plentiful reform movements of the day. With Garrison and Wendell Phillips he organized the militants of Boston radicalism. His political principles were simple and uncompromising, woven from the strands of English and French libertarianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--from Sidney, Locke, Rousseau, the great leaders of the natural-rights school. One who accepted as axiomatic the nobility of human nature and the perfectibility of man, might be a political romantic, but he was certain to be a liberal. Parker was a primitive democrat, whose democracy was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. But the democracy that answered the needs of his dream of the kingdom was, like Emerson’s and Channing’s, ethical rather than political or economic--it was “the enactment of God’s justice into human laws” (“The Nebraska Question,” in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 327). “The democratic idea has had but a slow and gradual growth even in New England,” he pointed out; nevertheless he was convinced that it was spreading, and “government becomes more and more of all, by all and for all”[461] (_ibid._, p. 33). He hated Federalism with an intensity equaling Jefferson’s, and ecclesiastical Federalism that twisted the authority of the church to the side of wealthy pewholders, using Scripture as a sanction for exploitation, he denounced as scathingly as Garrison. The power of the political state he feared, because he discovered the political state to be the friend of the rich rather than the poor, of selfish advantage rather than of God’s justice. With other Abolitionists he distrusted the machinery of centralization that was being skillfully erected at Washington. “Opposition to centralization of authority is very old in America,” he remarked; “I hope it will be always young” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 29). But he was no partisan to the rule of the majority, if it determined contrary to his conscience. A transcendental individualist, he went for the nullification of an immoral statute in the name of the Higher Law.[462]

Parker was never blind to the economic basis of politics. He saw so clearly, indeed, the close alliance between group interests and governmental statutes, that his political activities were almost wholly determined by that recognition. As a political critic he was the shrewdest realist of his generation. He was one constituent whom politicians talking for Buncombe could not befuddle. He was too deeply read in American history, gifted with too keen historical insight, to be impressed by the glittering rhetoric of the Rufus Choates. He had his own views of the American government, and majestic appeals to the Constitution left him cold. The Constitution, he asserted, “is a provisional compromise between the ideal political principles of the Declaration, and the actual selfishness of the people North and South.” America was not a democracy. It had thrown off theocracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, only to set in their places the “institution of money--the master of all the rest.” The economic basis of society in America he considered to be open and patent. In church and state, money “is this day the strongest power of the nation.” He declined to be deceived by party cries and platforms, either Whig or Democratic; both parties served economics rather than justice.

So there is a party organization about the dollar as its central
nucleus and idea. The dollar is the germinal dot of the Whig party;
its motive is pecuniary.... It sneers at the poor; at the many;
has a contempt for the people. It legislates against the poor,
and for the rich ... the few who are born with the desire, the
talent, and the conventional position to become rich. “Take care
of the rich, and they will take care of the poor,” is its secret
maxim. Everything must yield to money.... With this party there
is no Absolute Right, no Absolute Wrong.... There is Expediency
and Inexpediency.... Accordingly a millionaire is reckoned by this
party as the highest production of Society. He is the Whig ideal;
he alone has attained “the measure of the stature of a perfect man.”

The Democratic party appeals to the brute will of the majority,
right or wrong; it knows no Higher Law.... There is ... no vital
difference between the Whig party and the Democratic party; no
difference in moral principle. The Whig inaugurates the Money got;
the Democrat inaugurates the Desire to get money. That is all the
odds.... There is only a hand rail between the two, which breaks
down if you lean on it, and the parties mix ... a Democrat is but
a Whig on time; a Whig is a Democrat arrived at maturity; his time
has come. A Democrat is a young Whig who will legislate for money
as soon as he has got it; the Whig is an old Democrat who once
hurrahed for the majority--“Down with money! there is a despot!
and up with the desire for it! Down with the rich, and up with
the poor!” The young man, poor, obscure, and covetous, in 1812
was a Democrat, went a-privateering against England; rich, and
accordingly “one of our eminent citizens,” in 1851 he was a Whig,
and went a-kidnapping against Ellen Crafts and Thomas Sims. (“The
Nebraska Question,” in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, pp. 331-335.)

The America of Parker’s day was fast becoming middle class and Parker knew it, and like Lincoln he did not disapprove. Honest thrift he found wholly desirable, and wealth if it were honestly got. But speculation dissociated from creative work he regarded with old-fashioned distrust. “If a man fully pay in efficient, productive toil and thought, he is entitled to all he gets, one dollar or many million dollars ... and if his estate be but what he has thus actually and honestly paid for with service given, equivalent to the service received, what he can virtuously keep or humanely apply and expend, then it will never be too large.”[463] But he believed there were other gods, and greater, than the god of getting on; social justice was more desirable than unearned increment; and he set his face like flint against the common materialism of America. “I come to build up piety and morality; to pull down only what cumbers the ground,” he said; but he had learned that the temples of State Street were not easily leveled; that they would not fall without a mighty crash. A less courageous man would have hesitated, but Parker was utterly fearless. Boston he knew “was a Tory town.” “The Mother city of the Puritans is now the metropolis of the Hunkers” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 111). But the spirit of ’76 was strong in him and he would “appeal from Boston drunk with gold, and briefly mad with hate, to sober Boston in her hour to come.” He would appeal from Whiggish Boston to Revolutionary Boston; from State Street to Lexington common; from the Faneuil Hall of Rufus Choate to the Faneuil Hall of Sam Adams. He would awaken the ancestral idealism of Boston that slept uneasily under the spell of middle-class ambitions--that had sold its Puritan heritage for southern trade profits. Such an appeal Boston had never before listened to, ardent, unsparing, the Hebraic and the Yankee vernacular curiously mingled; and Boston writhed uncomfortably and pronounced the prophet ill-mannered.

When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed, the six New England states lay
fast asleep: Massachusetts slept soundly, her head pillowed on her
unsold bales of Cotton and of woolen goods, dreaming of “orders
from the South.” Justice came to waken her ... and she started in
her sleep, and being frightened, swore a prayer or two, then slept
again. But Boston woke,--sleeping, in her shop, with ears open, and
her eye on the market, her hand on her purse, dreaming of goods for
sale,--Boston woke broadly up, and fired a hundred guns for joy. O
Boston, Boston! if thou couldst have known, in that thine hour, the
things which belong unto thy peace! But no: they were hidden from
her eyes. She had prayed to her god, to Money; he granted her the
request, but sent leanness into her soul. (“The Boston Kidnapping,”
in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 89.)

But he offended the Boston code of good breeding even more seriously. He became personal. He named names. Before vast congregations, in printed books, he pronounced judgment on Bostonians respected in the Back Bay, mighty in State Street. Boston gentlemen had never before suffered such tongue-lashings. How mercilessly he excoriated Commissioner Loring, judge of probate and Harvard professor, for soiling his hands in the Anthony Burns case! How neatly he pricked the empty culture of Edward Everett for his pro-slavery ardor--“a Cambridge professor of Greek, he studied the original tongue of the Bible to learn that the Scripture says ‘slaves,’ where the English Bible says only ‘servants’!” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 115.) What an utterly devastating attack he made on the great Webster for the latter’s subserviency to local economic interests! Much honest realism underlies that criticism, and much honest American history. The “Nebraska Address” and the “Webster Address” are notable historical documents, incisive analyses--rare in those romantic days--done by one who has kept a shrewd eye on current politics, and understands the hidden springs of party policy. Into the Webster address he put his vast knowledge, his power of analysis, his frank idealism. It was “a sad and dreadful day” when duty bade Theodore Parker speak on the man whose uncommon powers he had long admired; but he did his work thoroughly, refusing to shut his eyes to ugly fact, refusing to indulge in commonplace eulogy. It was the eighteenth-century economic realism of Webster that stirred the wrath of the transcendentalist--that and the lapses from integrity. Parker’s text was found in Webster’s dictum that “the great object of government is the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad”; and how starkly it runs counter to his own ideal of government, “the enactment of God’s justice into human laws,” is laid bare in page after page of scathing commentary. To the exacting ethics of Parker, Webster was wanting in principles; he followed expediency rather than justice; and how surely expediency digs pitfalls for its own undoing he discovered tragic illustration of in the career of the great senator. It is a hard fate for a politician, accustomed to the cheap praise of the gullible public, to fall into the hands of a critic who is honest and searching; and Webster had too many weak points to emerge from such an analysis with credit. It is probably the most critical examination of Webster’s career that has ever been made, and withal just.

Surprisingly modern, far more so than Channing, was this brilliant preacher--impulsive, colloquial, natural, whose every arrow was pointed with a fact and feathered to fly true; concerned more with righteousness than with policy; hating the dull commonplace and empty dignity of Tory ways; careless of convention, somewhat spectacular, with a keen relish for combat--a vital, vivid man, the apostle of conscience, the advocate of every unpopular cause. He possessed an amazing gift of words, yet he was too impatient, too practical, to become an artist; preferring immediate ends to more lasting reputation, and spending himself with a free prodigality. He was always the speaker rather than the writer and his printed pages bear the unmistakable marks of impetuous oral discourse. Emerson accounted him one of the four great men of the age. Whether or not that judgment holds, whether he was too eager a militant to become a great transcendental philosopher, the historian sees in Theodore Parker one of the greatest, if not the last, of the excellent line of Puritan preachers.

Footnotes

[459] See Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 348.

[460] See “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston,” in Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_, Vol. II, Appendix II, p. 482. This account of his “Experience as a Minister” constitutes a brief intellectual autobiography, of first importance to the student of Parker.

[461] This phrase of Parker’s was probably the source of Lincoln’s phrase.

[462] See “The Law of God and the Statutes of Men,” in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 181.

[463] Quoted in Weiss, Vol. II, p. 488.