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What was the message with which he made the Melodeon and the Music Hall resound? Was it a mere torrent of negation? So it has been asserted many times. I claim that it was not. Though if it had been, since truth is one and error manifold, it would not have been strange if, in bulk, there had been more denial than there was affirmation. But it was his affirmations that received his emphasis and weight. Those that were central were not man certainly not so many as if he had affirmed something different every day, as many persons do who get much credit for their affirmations. They were not many, but they were great. Every book he ever wrote was full of them, and every sermon that he ever preached. Some of them were as follows: First, the infinite perfection of God. And when he said this he meant it. He did not assert it in general and deny it in particulars, but he asserted it consistently on every plane of life. His second affirmation was that man is adequate for all his functions; that as there is food for the body, all nature ready to serve it on due condition, so there is satisfaction for the spirit, truth and beauty for the intellect, human beings for the affections and God for the soul; that man can as naturally find satisfaction for his soul that hungers after the infinite God as for his mouth that hungers after daily bread. His third great affirmation was the fact of absolute religion, the natural relation of the whole man to God and of God to the whole man; the normal use of every part of the body, according to the body's law, the intellect according to its law, and the affections according to a law of their own. This religion upon its man-side is morality, upon its divine side is piety. There is no falser conception of Parker than that he was a rigid moralist and nothing more. His soul was fairly steeped in God. The thought of God was more to him than all his thoughts beside. His criticism of the Unitarianism or his day was this: "Most powerfully preaching to the understanding, the conscience and the will, the cry was ever duty, duty; work, work!' It failed to address with equal power the soul, and did not also shout, joy, joy! delight, delight!"""Spinoza not believe in God?" said Schleiermacher; "my friends, he did not believe in anything else." Theodore Parker did believe in something else; but he believed in God with all his might. The earth he walked was full of him; there was no brook that did not babble or him, no flower that was not fragrant with his love, no bird that did not sing his praise. His God was no tradition and no probability. He was a sweet and awful certainty. The revelation of him was within. Man knows instinctively, he said, that God exists; he knows instinctively that there is a Moral Law and he must obey it; he knows instinctively that he shall never die. He was not more certain of his own existence than he was of these eternal truths. His heart was full of them, and every day brimmed over in melodious speech. They may seem bare enough, as I have stated them, but they trooped across his pages arrayed in all the beauty of the heavens and the earth. The shop, the field, the ways and haunts of men furnished him all-sufficient illustrations.

But, besides affirming much, he also denied many things, the Trinity among them, and eternal hell, the doctrines of atonement and depravity. But all this Channing had done before him. But Channing had rested his denial of these things on the New Testament, though practically his argument almost always was, "The New Testament cannot teach these doctrines, for it is the Word." "But if it does teach them," said Parker, "what then?" Channing was gone to his reward or I am certain that he would have answered: "Then it is not God's word." But the answer of the churches was, in effect, "Then we must believe them." Within the last few years, an organ of the Universalist denomination has said, "If the New Testament taught the doctrine of eternal hell, we should believe it." " I would not believe it," said Parker, "though twenty, yea, a thousand New Testaments declared it to be true." Thus he insisted that the Bible was amenable to the decisions of the soul. He had accepted Channing's principle of Free Inquiry in all its breadth, and in the use of it he soon discovered that the Bible often missed the truth of history and science and morality. And then went up the cry of "Heretic!" and "Put him out!" But was this free inquiry? Not exactly; but then it was said, "The difference between Channing and his persecutors was a difference inside of Christianity. Mr. Parker is outside." But didn't those who persecuted Channing say that he was outside? has not the persecutor always said this of his victim? Who shall decide what is outside and what is not? Is not the assumption that I have a right to do so the essence of all bigotry? "If a man is permitted to decide that he is inside anything he may put his head through his own assumption, and others will appear to him outside." The trouble is exactly this there is no more fellowship between Christ and Belial than between religious liberty and supernatural authority. Liberty, with a slip-knot round your neck, ready to choke the life out of you the minute that you pass a certain bound-what sort of Liberty is that? For this reason, then, if for no other, Parker was justified in breaking with the supernatural. Other reasons he had in great abundance. But this one was enough. He seceded from a dogma which he could not believe; his persecutors from a principle which they accepted and affirmed.

It is regretted, not infrequently, that Parker did not live to raise a building in the place of that which he destroyed. Such a regret betrays a doleful ignorance of what he did and tried to do and was. It is not true that he was negative, that his negations occupied him so that he had no time to affirm. He was positive first, negative afterward. He did not burn his old furniture before getting any new. He got the new to start with, and then found that he had no use for the old. He did not tear down his hut of straw and stones and live nowhere in particluar, while proceeding to build up a more comfortable abode. He entered his ancestral halls at once; took possession at the start of the great roomy mansion that his Heavenly Father had bequeathed to him, and lived and rejoiced in it all his life long, and, finding

no use for the aforesaid hut, finding it to be a blot upon his premises, he tore it down. He had no need of it himself, and it was not like him to offer anybody else a building that he would not himself be content to live in. And every one of us, dear friends, did we but know it, have just such a divine inheritance waiting to be claimed. How long shall we allow these heavenly mansions to be thus unoccupied and meanwhile pay so dear for living in the huts of superstition, the caves and holes of the ecclesiastical theologies, places so little worthy of our high descent ?

Judging from Parker's printed works, it might have been inferred (until quite recently, when a selection has been made from his unpublished sermons,) that he spoke little of the individual private virtues of men. But, in fact, these were his constant themes. His sermons upon public social virtues, though many, were not the rule but the exception. Great as these sermons were, they did not embody the whole man. His inflexible sense of justice was in them, his hatred of oppression, his undying hope and resolution, his dauntless courage and his matchless scorn. But these were but a part of his great qualities, and if you have read these sermons and hence imagine that you know the man, you are mistaken. Not till you have read his letters and his prayers, and the selections from his unpublished sermons, that have recently been given to the world, will you begin to know him as he was, a true master of pathos, the tenderest of men, a great heart of love, with an eye for all the holiest little things of life, holding a reverent ear to nature's beating heart, transported by the melody of human life. So much you might gather from his printed books, and then you might begin to know his greatness, but you would but begin. The proverb is that no man is a hero to his valet. This man seemed most heroic to the men who knew him best.

But while he was pre-eminently fond of dwelling on the individual side of life, no other preacher of his time did half so much for the benevolent and reformatory enterprises of the day. It will never be known how much he did in these directions, because he would not let men's hatred of his name damage the cause he had at heart, and therefore would not publicly connect himself with enterprises of which he was the private inspiration. They seemed all right when viewed impersonally; they would have seemed all wrong had it been known that Theodore Parker was the motive energy behind the scenes. Thus, without knowing it, his enemies often rendered him. assistance in his work. Still it was unavoidable that such a man, so just, and at the same time so merciful, should publicly connect himself with every great reform. No motive of expediency could make him hold his peace when he saw great wrongs casting their blight on the community, or great mistakes diminishing the sources of its power. It was only in the fulfilment of specific aims that he saw the need of silence if he would not damage his own cause. He worked not for the glory of the thing but for the good of it, and if the good could come without the glory, it was all the same to him. So it was that in public and in private he labored faithfully in every noble cause,

fighting against drunkenness and poverty with all his might, against covetousness and party spirit, against false modes of punishment, and falser modes of education, against the folly that deprives the arts and trades, the Church and State, of woman's helping hand. In all these enterprises and in many others, his interest was vital, strong and deep; his counsel wise and firm, his words half battles, his presence a continual spur to new exertion, and his radiant hope a certain sign of "victory at last."

But all his other labors in the cause of public virtue sink into insignificance in comparison with his labors against slavery. The proposed annexation of Texas made the din that roused him to a sense of the impend. ing danger, and from the moment of his first awakening onward to his death he never ceased to lift the voice of warning and rebuke. Speaking straight to the point from the commanding height of his own pulpit, lecturing to sixty thousand persons every winter throughout the towns and cities of the North, corresponding with the great party leaders and statesmen in Congress and out, one of the Vigilance Committee for the more effectual disobeying of the Fugitive Slave Law, more than once making his house the refuge of the fugitive, saying in Faneuil Hall, when Boston court house was in chains, and Anthony Burns on mock trial for his liberty, if not in just so many words, still in effect, "Don't fire, unless fired upon, but if they mean to have war, let it begin here," saying, "Amen!" when John Brown at Harper's Ferry began the second revolution as his own grand-father had begun the first, prophecying that if Buchanan was elected the Union would not hold out four years, an earnest, tireless, hopeful, unconquerable man, the part he played in our great drama of emancipation was surpassed in grandeur and significance only by that which Sumner, Phillips and Garrison have done upon the same great stage; and when the redeemed America, that is to be, raises a fitting monument to celebrate that sublime victory of justice and equality which is even now, through great discouragements, approaching to its final consummation, she will set the form of Garrison upon its summit, and at the four corners of its base, Phillips the mighty agitator, Sumner the prince of statesmen, Lincoln the good President, and Parker the great prophet of all righteousness.

Perhaps I ought to speak in this connection of what are called "his terrible denunciations of his enemies." But they were not denunciations of his enemies, but of the enemies of man. Personal enemies he had enough-persons who did not know him-for no one ever knew him and was still his enemy. Such, it must be remembered, he did not rebuke, did not retaliate upon. They flung their poisoned shafts at him, and he went home and wept, took out their shafts and put them with his curiosities, and never hurled them back. Perhaps he thought that even these were not his enemies, that what they hated was not him, but something they had fashioned out of their own troubled wits; something quite different from the reality. The man they hated was an atheist. But his whole nature was alive with his belief in God.

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The man they hated said that Jesus was no better than anybody else. But he said no such thing. He said he was the wisest and the best of men. "Still a mere man!" was the rejoinder, if he ventured to explain. No, not a mere man, but a MAN. "Men speak of mere morality," says Emerson. "'Tis like saying Poor God! with nobody to help him.'" "Mere man" is an expression equally absurd. When Parker said that Jesus was a man, it was not that he thought less of Jesus, but because he thought more of man; because he levelled up humanity, not because he levelled Jesus down. And surely it was no idle satisfaction that he took in human nature. It did not tend to make him satisfied with mean performance. It was because he wanted great performance and felt that he must and would have it, that he jumped at once to the conclusion that man's nature must be great in order to be equal to his claim. He that allows himself to be a worm," says Kant, complain if he is trodden on."

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But whatever the motives were that determined Parker against using the weapons that he had at his command upon his personal enemies, it is certain that he never did resent a personal injury. It was injury done to humanity that he resented. It was the enemies of the race that he attacked. And some of his attacks were very personal. It is one thing to regret and another thing to blame. Regret we may that he impaled so many with the sharp bodkins of his scorn, and left them in the cabinet of our remembrance, dried specimens of inhumanity, but blame him we cannot. The men he so impaled were symbols of a great and dreadful wrong; as such he spoke of them. What he arraigned in general was an imperfect moral sense. If he went farther than this it was his respect for men that carried him; his generosity, which led him to suppose that everybody's conscience was as quick as his. Perhaps it was a fault of his philosophy that it left no place for a mean man to stand upon. He expected and demanded nobleness of all. Then, too, he saw that if complacency is not a sin it is a most stupendous error, and the biggest of all stumbling blocks in the reformer's path. In time of public danger, a giant error may expect no better treatment than a giant sin.

To turn from Parker's work and his capacity, from what he did, to what he was, the first thing that strikes us is the immense quantity of his life. He was immense in everything; immense in his earnest and also in his fun ; immense in intellect, and also in affection; immense in conscience, and also in religious sentiment. I have said already with what a generous amount of physical life he was originally dowered. America has not scen another understanding so capacious. What stores of information and reflection it contained! It went out on every side; gathered the sweetest and the best of every land. Your great reader is not often a great observer. Parker was both. When traveling about the country on his lecture tours, the carpet-bag he carried was well stuffed with books. But it was as if he only read them with one eye and had the other for the landscape and for everything there was to see, and his ears were free at the same time to take in everything

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