been sufficient to put an ordinary body in the grave. You can imagine then what a grand start he had upon his physica! side. On mountain tramps he could out-walk the sturdiest of his companions. As a young man upon his father's farm, none of his fellows could out-work him with the axe and scythe, though, while they slept at noon, he buried himself in a book. Six months before he died, he swung his axe almost as vigorously as in his youth. From his father he inherited a strong and very active intellect, with the disposition of St. Thomas, "not to take things for granted." It was a saying of his father's that " Paley left us no conscience," and he rejected the more startling miracles of either testament. To his mother we must credit the finer and more sympathetic qualities of the man, his eminent piety and intuitional approach to moral truth.

When he was four years old, he raised a stick to strike a spotted tortoise, when something seemed to check his arm, and a voice within him said, clear and loud, "It is wrong!" He did not strike, but hastened home and told his mother what had happened, and asked her what it was that told him it was wrong. With the corner of her apron she wiped a tear from her eye, and took him to her heart and said: "Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer and always guide you right, but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice." And he did heed it well. And that little explanation of his mother's was the nucleus of that whole system which afterward he set to music in the firmament of human thought, the light of which now shines for you and me. Let us not forget the mother in the son. How true it is as he said afterward, speaking of Daniel Webster; "When virtue leaps high in the public. fountain, you seek for the lofty spring of nobleness and find it far off in the dear breast of some mother, who melted the snows of winter and condensed the summer's dew into fair, sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of man in all the city streets."

The father was less farmer than mechanic. The work-shop near the house, you would never guess what it was. It was the old belfry to the church in Lexington, that rocked one April morning with the strokes that summoned the first heroes of the Revolutionary War to do their duty as in God's most holy sight. It was Theodore's grand-father, Capt. John Parker, who commanded the militia on that famous day, and who said to the embattled farmers, "Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Theodore passed many hours in the old belfry shop, fancying perhaps he heard the echoes of the bell that startled Capt. Parker from his sleep at two o'clock of that eventful morn. He little thought that there would come a time when he should set the steeples rocking in more ways than one, when he should say as did his grandsire on the green at Lexngton, "If they mean to have a war, let it begin here." But that was what

he did say to the friends of truth in his South Boston Sermon, and to the friends of Liberty, one night in Faneuil Hall, and again, when Ellen Craft, a fugitive slave, was concealed in his house, and he expected the slave hounds every minute, and so loaded with good powder and ball the old King's arm. that his grand-father had captured on the 19th of April from the British regulars, and, while he wrote his sermon, stood it by his desk, thinking, perhaps, of the ancestral phrase, "If they mean to have war, let it begin here!"

His love of study and his fondness for books began when he was very young, and though he went to school but little, he made rapid progress. Eleven weeks a winter for ten years, two summer terms, when he was eight and nine years old, and one term at the Lexington Academy; that was all the schooling that he had before he entered the Divinity School at Cambridge. If he ever went away from home in summer, he hired a man to take his place upon the farm. He left home, finally, when he was nineteen, and furnished his father with a laborer till he was twenty-one. A good boy, was he not? The first book he ever owned was Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary. He bought it when he was eleven years old, with the proceeds of a huckleberry excursion, the result of which he had carried to Boston and sold. I saw it in his study two or three weeks ago, the nucleus of a library of nearly twelve thousand bound and seven thousand unbound books, which in thirty-five years he carefully selected and thoroughly read, and by which the city of Boston is now at least so much richer for his having lived upon the earth.

One summer day, in 1830, he went away from home, not saying whither he was going. It was near midnight when he returned, and, going to his father's bedside, said: "Father, I entered Harvard College to-day." He had spent the whole day undergoing the examination. "Why, Theodore !" said his father, "you know I cannot support you there." "I know that, father; I mean to stay at home and keep up with my class.' It is safe saying, that no student in the college made such splendid strides as he did out of it. Science after science and language after language were added to his list; Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish and Italian, following each in quick succession. It was no smattering either that he got of them. He was good at Hebrew before he entered the Divinity School, and when Professor Palfrey went South for several months, he took his classes in that language. While at the school, he added Portuguese, Dutch, Icelandic, Chaldaic, Arabic, Persian and Coptic, to his list. Russian, Swedish, Danish and Anglo-Saxon, came also in due time. He entered the Divinity School in 1834. The amount of study that he did while there seems almost fabulous. But during these years, although his mind by no means stood still, it was more bent on getting information than on assorting it and generalizing from it. Much that he wrote at this time is preserved in the "Scriptural Interpreter," a little journal which he edited in company with Dr. Gannett, and which advocated the more liberal side of Unitarianism of which Dr. Channing was the head. Many of Parker's articles are translations from the French of Astruc, one of

the first doubters whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch. The editors were written to and begged to stop such questionable proceedings; and there was talk of blasphemy and infidelity, but Theodore was not disturbed. Prof. Norton at that time was freely criticising the old testament, and setting young men thinking in a way that soon became exceedingly troublesome to many persons, the Professor himself among them. But in the main, Parker, while in the school, found it about as much as he could do to keep up with his professors, they were so much in advance of the outside world in which he had been living. In his writings of this period there are scarcely any indications of the power he was to be. He came to his maturity much more slowly than Channing. But there are beautiful traditions of the piety that even then was warm within his breast, which moved him ever and anon to happy tears. He liked his joke as well as when it came to be more terrible. When Dr. Henry Ware suggested that he shouldn't say "Old Paul," he made amends by speaking of "the gentleman from Tarsus." Studying fourteen hours a day, there were certain interruptions that he could not tolerate, as when Dwight, since editor of Dwight's Musical Journal, and C. P. Cranch, since known as poet-artist to the world, were solacing themselves with pipe and harp or some such instruments. Suddenly a fearful discord smote the air, and, rushing to the door, whom should they find but Theodore, with wood and axe and saw, that he had brought up from the cellar, sawing away most vigorously without a smile upon his countenance. Thanks to the good Father for giving him his great capacity for fun! How could he well have been without it in his later years! How many swelling streams it bridged for his dear feet! How many clouds he scattered with the flashes of his wit!

It was not long after his graduation that he received a call to settle first in Barnstable and afterward in West Roxbury. He hated to say "No" to the good people on the Cape; they had responded so generously to his words during the few months that he had been with them, and his heart had gone out to them with so much love. But he did finally, and was settled in West Roxbury in June, 1837. At his ordination, some one prayed that no "fondness for literature or science, and no favorite studies, might ever lead him from learning the true religion and preaching it for the salvation of men." The prayer was not in vain. No man ever enjoyed study more than he; but no man was ever more willing to give up this enjoyment for the sake of doing some immediate task of human helpfu.ness and love. Everything went on very quietly until 1841. On May 19th of that year, he preached a sermon in South Boston at the ordination of a Mr. Shackford, the subject of which was "The transient and permanent in Christianity." He was not aware that he was doing anything so very strange. There was nothing in his sermon that he had not heard in private conversation from many of his fellow-clergy

men. man.

But from the day he preached it, he was a proscribed and banished Men who had said the same things in their studies, either took occasion to denounce him in their pulpits or quietly gave him notice that they

could not exchange with him. Exceeding great was his astonishment and pain: "That men who differ from me should assert their difference this I expect," he said; "But that men who have been all along agreeing with me should turn and rend me in this fashion-I confess I was not prepared for it." A few were faithful to him, and though differing from his position, vindicated his right to speak his bravest work. But it cost one of them his pulpit, and another a remonstrance from his congregation. He was called an Infidel, an Atheist; a demand was made from certain quarters for his arrest and trial and punishment for blasphemy.

mon.

I wish that I had time to read you every word of that South Boston ser You would not find it very terrible. Hundreds of men all over these United States, who think Parker was a sort of devil, should they hear that sermon, not knowing it to be his, would say it was the very truth of God. No matter where he went, before he had been labelled as a heretic, men listened to his words with sacred joy. Once when he had been preaching for James Freeman Clarke, a good woman waited for him at the church door, and said to him as he went out, "I wish that Theodore Parker could have heard that sermon." With a voice tremulous with emotion, and eyes glistening with tears, he told men of the soul's normal delight in the infinite God, and as they listened it seemed as natural to them also for man to be religious as for the earth to send up grass and flowers. What was the trouble, then, with his South Boston sermon ?

It was not that he believed less in God, less in Jesus, less in the Bible than his fellow-ministers; no, but that he believed in them too deeply, and because he was drawn into discipleship less by logic than by love. "I cannot see," he said, "that Christianity depends on the personal authority of Jesus. He was the organ through which the infinite spoke. If Christianity be true, it seems as useless to look for any other authority to uphold it, as for some one to support Almighty God." His sermon was a great cry of longing for the time when Jesus and the Bible should be better known. "Then will it be seen," he said, "that the words of Jesus are the music of Heaven, sung in an earthly voice; exalt him as much as we may, we shail yet, perhaps, come short of the mark. But still, was he not our brother-the son of man, as we are, the Son of God like ourselves?" It was the old, old story. His crime was not that he believed too little; but that he believed too much. "We have heard," said men, "that there is a God. We guess that there is such a thing as immortality." He said: "I know there is a God; I know that I shall be immortal." It must be remembered that at this time he did not deny that Christianity was supernatural, though he assigned the miracles to a subordinate position. He affirmed the naturalness of religion to the human soul. He insisted on a law of universal inspiration, including Jesus in its operation. Ten years before, it had been said that Christianity was based on prophecy and miracles. Dr. Noyes had done away with prophecy, and Christianity had not been destroyed. The next thought was that miracles

might go the way of prophecy and still leave Christianity intact. But suddenly a reaction began, the result of which was the conclusion, among many, that although miracles are not the corner stone of Christianity, they are the staging without which it could not have been built. Previous to 1841, Parker had not gone farther than this. But then he said, substantially, "The building is completed; it is high time to take the staging down." And then the cry went up that if the staging was removed the building would not stand. The crime of the South Boston sermon was in thinking that it would.

Anon the writer of that sermon came to see that Christianity was not a building but a growth; and that the supernatural was not a staging but a parasitic growth that having well nigh choked it in its infancy was still gnaw. ing at its heart.

From the day of his proscription Parker developed very rapidly. His own little society in West Roxbury stood by him manfully, so manfully that when four years later a few earnest men in Boston came together, and it was resolved, "That Theodore Parker have a chance to be heard in Boston," it was very hard for him to say "Good-bye" to those who had believed in him so heartily. But he felt the need of a more ample field in which to exercise his powers. They surged within him like a great restless sea. Then, too, like Channing, he had had his period of abstract reasonings and sentiments, and it had passed. The time for the concrete had come. Sure of his premises, he longed to draw out his conclusions and apply them to the church and state, society and trade. For he saw that trade was cursed with avarice, that society was smitten with conformity, that the state was given over to be practised on by demagogues and charlatans, that the church, for the most part, let these things alone, winked at the sins of Boston and denounced those of Jerusalem, rebuked the slavery of Egypt, but not that of America, shouted to David, not to Polk or Fillmore, "Thou art the man!" praised the dead saints and heroes, and turned their backs upon such living saints as Channing, such living heroes as Lloyd Garrison. Parker was certain his faith involved a faithful handling of these various subjects, that he could make pointed applications of it to the vices and the follies of his day, and for so doing Boston seemed the one place of all others. There he might get a hearing if no more. In any other city of the Union, he could not hope so much as that. And so it happened that the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society was formed, and he became its pastor, and one rainy day in February, 1845, began his glorious and faithful ministry. In a short time, the Melodeon, where he preached, became too small for those who wished to hear him. But no better place was found until the Music Hall was built in 1852. The great organ that now floods that hall with harmony will never trance men's souls as Parker tranced them with the diviner music of his thought. What if there were sometimes discordant notes? They had their place in his great moral symphonies; they added something to his oratorios of faith and love.