The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Preface by the Editor
PREFACE
BY THE EDITOR.
The progress of religious belief, from a less to a more enlightened stage, is carried on apparently by a series of waves of thought, which sweep over the minds of men at distant intervals. There are periods of comparative calm and stagnation, and then times of gradual swelling and upheaving of the deep, till some great billow slowly rears its crest above the surface higher and still higher to the last; when, with a mighty convulsion, amid foam and spray, and “noise of many waters,” it topples over and bursts in thunder up the beach, bearing the flood-line higher than it had ever reached before. A great national reformation has been accomplished.
In the eyes of those who have watched intelligently the signs of the times, it seems that some such wave as this is even now gathering beneath us, a broader and a deeper wave than yet has ever arisen. No partial and temporary rippling of the surface is it now, but the whole mass of living thought seems slowly and steadily upheaved, and the ocean is moved to its depths. Such a phenomenon, if true, bears the highest promise ever held out to humanity, and we cannot but hail it with faith and joy, conscious that the sudden uprising of even the purest reforming sect, carrying us forward for the moment with earthquake violence, would afford no such reason for hopeful confidence in the future.
But this universal upheaving of thought, along with its vast promise of good, brings with it also forebodings of changes which it is impossible to contemplate without grave anxiety. When this wave breaks, if break it will, it will reach a point which has never been disturbed hitherto, and in whose conservation or engulfment some of the most sacred interests of the human race are concerned. The old temple of Traditional Religion, the religion which rests primarily on external evidence of certain supernatural events, stands front to front with the advancing waters, and needs must bear the whole force of their incalculable weight. Already the venerable fane in which our fathers worshipped so long, seems menaced with destruction, while one after another its bulwarks and corner-stones are sapped and submerged, and the sands on which it is built are shifting on every side. In the judgment of many its doom seems inevitable, unless not merely some partial lull and subsidence of the waves takes place, but the whole tide of human thought for ages turns back and sets in an opposite direction.
These solemn forebodings are not unnaturally scorned by those whose trust in the old creed has remained hitherto undisturbed. Every man's peculiar Church must needs be to his mind “founded on a rock,” and impregnable to “the gates of hell.” But to others equally naturally the creed they have themselves found untenable seems sure to prove in the end untenable to all who bring to its examination equal freedom and earnestness, and they note how as years go on every advance in philosophy and every discovery in science seems to bear in one and the same direction. Looking back over a few decades, the change in the state of all controversies on religion becomes remarkable, and the wild raids of professed “infidels” and timid attacks of latitudinarians in past times were found to be superseded by an orderly and resolute invasion, all the more formidable that the hostile bands approach from the most opposite quarters. It seems to be but a question of time, when the leaguer will be complete, and after outposts and trenches have fallen one by one into the hands of the enemy, the old towers themselves will fall, undermined by a deeper philosophy than their builders knew, and shattered by shot and shell from every cohort in the camp of knowledge. Underground, there works the ever-progressing conviction that a supernatural revelation, miracles, prophecies, infallible books, and infallible churches, are things in themselves nearly, if not utterly, incredible. And overhead there hurtle in the air (so fast that we can scarce note them as they pass) the missiles from every battalion of science, striking deadly blows wherever they can be brought to bear on the defences of the supposed revelation. The astronomy, the geology, the chronology, and ethnology of our time have at least seemed always to contradict, and never to corroborate, the Book which is yet claimed to come directly from the Great Author of Nature; and instead of external authentications and internal verifications of its various parts, every critical explorer brings us back new specimens of anachronisms, contradictions, and difficulties without number, till the authorship and date of all the more important histories are involved in hopeless obscurity. Everywhere and on all sides the results of inquiry are the same, or if now and then the besieged regain with much shouting some vantage ground too lightly claimed by the enemy, they are soon driven back from whole lines of trenches in another direction. Though books appear every month to assure us that “Scripture and science” are “not at variance,” and that the “Testimony of the Rocks” is in favour of the Mosaic Cosmogony; yet the urgency with which the asseveration is reiterated and the wildness of the hypotheses to which their authors have recourse to reconcile what ought to require no reconciliation, leave us an impression the direct contrary to that which they intend. Why are there, we ask, no volumes pouring from the press, corresponding to the rapid stream of advancing knowledge, and calling on us to observe “triumphant verifications of Scripture from the recent discoveries” in this, that, or the other science? It is certainly not for lack of will that no such books are written, or written only to bring corroboration to histories no more doubted than that of Thucydides.
The truth is, after all, simple enough. Those grand and noble books which make up the Bible and constitute the “Great Sheaf” in the whole harvest of human thought, even those books cannot be weighed in the balance, or measured by the standard of God's omniscience. Call them human and fallible, and they seem almost divine. But call them divine and infallible, and seek to find in them that knowledge of nature which, when they were written, only Nature's God possessed, and we do them wrong and despite, and obscure all their rightful claims to admiration. Nay, to try them as even historically accurate, according to our philosophy of history, is an injustice and anachronism. It is an anachronism to expect that men, who in the very extreme of their piety and reverence attributed every remarkable occurrence, every thunder-storm, or victory, or cure of disease, or wise legislation, or composition of noble poetry, to direct Divine interposition—men to whom secondary causes were nothing and first causes everything, should, in the capacity of historians, supply us with statements of facts unrefracted by the coloured media of their imaginations; and detail for our cautious scepticism evidences which they never dreamed of requiring for their own simple-minded and ever ready belief. And passing beyond the Bible to the creeds of the churches, we find it equally impracticable to fit the thoughts of one age into the faith of another. The theological scheme which men composed when they believed the earth to be a plane, the centre of the universe, finds no place for itself in our modern cosmology, and the tremendous drama supposed to have been acted on that mighty stage, before the appalled and gazing Hosts of Heaven, becomes inconceivable played upon our little planet, one of the smallest of the many worlds revolving round one of the millions of suns of the unknown myriads of starry clusters. Modern Astronomy has not so much contradicted isolated statements in the Hebrew Scriptures as left the whole Nicene Theology without standing-room.
In every direction it would seem as if the battle of Traditionalism were lost, nor will the one great compromise offered by its noblest defenders suffice to save it. It will not be enough to abandon the infallibility of sacred books, and claim only Divine Inspiration and perfection for the moral and spiritual part of Christianity. Divinely true, divinely perfect as is much of that moral and spiritual part; there also the human and the fallible are to be found, and weightier than the blows which are struck at either the philosophy or the science of the Bible are those directed against doctrines offensive to the conscience and paralyzing to the heart. Nor are these morally objectionable doctrines only matters of unimportance and detail, such as Old Testament stories and precepts of earlier ages, corrected afterwards by a purer teaching. The deepest denial of all rises from the heart of humanity against fundamental dogmas, whose elimination from Christianity would almost identify it with Theism—the dogmas of the Fall, the Atonement, a Personal Devil, and an Eternal Hell.
So wide and vast is this upheaving wave of thought of which we have spoken, that other traditional creeds beside Christianity seem simultaneously threatened by its advance. Mahometanism is visibly running out the last sands of its existence; Judaism itself is undergoing a change; and the vast faith of India, whose origin is lost in the night of time, will probably before another century is over have fallen to rise no more. Not from external causes are these and the other religions of the East perishing away. The outward energies at work against them, the European missions and efforts at proselytism, are almost ludicrously inefficient to move a feather of their gigantic weight. But from within the change everywhere appears; the old life is gone, a new one is gradually arising, and that not by the formation of purer sects,[1] but by the gradual enlightenment of the masses. Now, this vast movement throughout the world may possibly be of a more transitory nature than it now appears. The wave by which we are ourselves upborne is hardly in our power to measure aright, and it may be within the compass of events that it may subside ere long, leaving things everywhere nearly as they have been in the centuries gone by. In particular, as regards Christianity and the English branch thereof, it may be that all that is true in modern criticism and philosophy may be capable of adaptation, in ways we see not now, to its fundamental ideas; and the Church, by enlarging its formularies, may be found capable of absorbing them all, and arising with renewed life like a giant refreshed. These things may be so, we say, but it must be admitted that it is hard for us to see how any such reconciliation can take place. The tendency observable is all the other way. At the very utmost, so vast a modification of the popular creed must in such case ensue, as to render it hardly recognizable by its present adherents, while the interval of transition must be one of danger and difficulty, almost equal to that of the entire destruction of the old and reconstruction of a new belief. To enable men to pass through such transition with safety, an independent standing ground for faith in God and duty would be as needful as in the case of the most complete cataclysm and reformation.
But if the contrary prove true, if (as to all human prevision seems most probable) it be found impossible to achieve any compromise between the old and the new, then it is clear that a catastrophe of vast importance is inevitably approaching. The Churches of Christendom, and above all the Protestant Churches, have hitherto stood upon the honest belief of intelligent men, Whatever hypocrisy or pious frauds may at any time have been used for their support, we are persuaded they have hurt rather than helped them. But if the time ever come when this state of things can go on no longer, when there must be a defect either in the honesty or the intelligence of the adherents of the Churches, then a fatal change will pass over them. The tree whose root is dead, or whose stem is hollow, may continue to put forth leaves for a few years, but it must wither at last. The symptoms of such approaching decay in the Christian Churches will doubtless follow in natural sequence; and the refusal of the higher class of minds to adopt the ministry as a profession will be succeeded rapidly by the further and further depreciation of the mental status of the Church, and by a growing public sense of its hollowness and incapacity to meet the problems of the age. When this deteriorating process has reached a certain length, all the public and private interests involved in the Churches' conservation, all the vast vis inertia of such an institution, so long solidly established on English soil, and rooted alike in English prejudices and English sacred affections—all these securities, so often quoted as guaranteeing its immutable maintenance, must give way at last and fail. There is no durable foundation for a religion whatsoever, save the sincere belief of its adherents.
If these things be true of Traditional Christianity, then, as we have said, a solemn catastrophe is slowly, but surely, approaching. The great Ship which has been the Ark of humanity so long, and which even now unfurls its sails so proudly to the winds, that great and noble ship is, perhaps, in our own time settling slowly down and sinking under the waters of an unfathomable sea. A mournful and a terrible sight it would be, were we not assured that all the souls it bears are for ever safe, and that all its freight of precious truths will float up again with unerring safety, even from the forgotten depths of time.
The task of him who would most essentially benefit his race in a time like this, must be to prepare men to meet unharmed the inevitable future. He must supply them with a faith which will remain undisturbed when the great change arrives.
The perils of finding ourselves standing alone without a God to love or a law to obey, while the frail structure of the creed of our youth fell around us, like a tent on Lebanon, before the blast of the storm—these perils may be known to many of us, and happy are they who have survived them in full spiritual and moral life. Happy are they who slowly and painfully have built up stone by stone for themselves from the foundation a shelter for their souls; who have begun perchance with naught, save the resolution
“I will be just and wise and mild,
Since in me lies such power,”
and then have found that in the hard struggles of the higher self after victory over temptation, they have become conscious that there was One present at the fight—One who could aid them with Almighty help, “strengthening them with might by His Spirit in the inner man”—One who when the battle was done would take His soldier to an eternal home. Happy are they who have learned such things; but they know best through what dangers they have passed, and to which they were consigned by the teachers who bade them hold by a creed full of contradictions and difficulties, or else abandon all hope that God would hear their prayers. To them, above all, it will seem terrible that the masses of men, the uneducated, the over-tried sons of toil, should have to pass through such perils; not one by one as now, but, as it may soon be, by thousands and millions, enhancing all each others' difficulties, and liable to the most fearful aberrations. In view of such a cataclysm, many would fain, with cowardly hearts, strive to put off the evil day and keep away from men's minds all such questions. But it is not in their hands to do so. The tide cannot be stopped by any Canute's decree. It is the great divinely-ordered progress of thought which has brought us to this pass, and we may take courage from the knowledge that He who caused it will guide us through. We must not, dare not, doubt that it will be to a larger, higher, purer truth the human race is being led onward; and that that truth is safer even than all the well-tried errors of the past. The old Ragnarok, the “Twilight of the Gods,” in which our heathen forefathers believed, may be coming now; but there will be a glorious sunrise afterwards. The true “Ages of Faith” are not behind us, but before.
The task, then, as we have said, of the religious teacher of our time, is to prepare and strengthen men for the future; to give them such faith in God and reverence for His law, independently of traditional creeds, as shall avail when these creeds are overwhelmed. He must enable every man to say with the brave Bishop of Natal, “I should tremble at the results of my inquiries, were it not that I believe firmly in a God of righteousness and truth and love. Should all else give way beneath me, I feel that His everlasting arms are still under me. That truth I see with my spirit's eyes, once opened to the light of it, as plainly as I see the sun in the heavens; and that truth, more or less distinctly apprehended, has been the food of living men, the strength of brave souls that yearn for light, and battle for the right and true, the support of struggling and sorrow-stricken hearts, in all ages of the world, in all climes, under all religions.” The lesson for ever repeated by Christian teachers that, save within the shadow of their churches, no prayer can be offered with hope of acceptance on high—that false and fatal lesson must be disproved and for ever discarded. The very opposite teaching must be given,—that in the solemn search for truth, to which every strong soul must sooner or later betake itself, the help of God, regarded as simply the Lord of Truth, and not the Patron of this or that theological system, is the one thing needful for our success. When we most of all want God's spirit to guide us, and God's law to keep us in that path of duty wherein alone the mental eye is unclouded, we shall not then be left to lament that we have lost them hopelessly. We shall rather find, on the contrary, with relief indescribable, that the hands from which the fetters have fallen for ever are those which rise the most freely in supplication to heaven. Our teacher must do this for us, he must accomplish the task which Rénan lays down as the especial one of our age, “Transporter la religion par delà le surnaturel, séparer la cause à jamais triomphante de la religion, de la cause perdue du miracle.”[2] In a word, the teacher whom we need must find for us the true foundation of faith, and must build thereon a fortress within, and behind the old tottering walls of tradition, so that whensoever these may crumble and fall the souls of men may dwell secure, viewing the ruin around them without dismay, while their faith in God and in His righteous law remains undisturbed for ever. Thus shall that teacher prove himself a Preserver and Renovator of Faith, a Builder, not a Destroyer. Incidentally, and to make his work secure, he must needs dig deep and clear away much rubbish; but he does it for the purpose of restoration. The destructives are his antagonists, who would fain leave humanity with no faith, save the one which all their efforts can never repair, and who for its maintenance would deprive us of that reliance on conscience and the religious sentiment whereon alone the ultimate ground of any faith, even of their own, is to be found.
While contemplating, however, the noble task which might belong to such a teacher as we have supposed, we are arrested by a singular difficulty which it is clear would meet him from the side of those who ought naturally to be his allies. The wide-spread upheaving of thought of which we have spoken has brought out, along with its great and deep benefits, a phase of feeling which may now be traced pervading the higher order of minds of all nominal sections of opinion, orthodox no less than heterodox. Beside the counter-revolution of those who hold tenaciously by the past in proportion as they perceive it to be slipping away from them; beside the far more deplorable error of those who in every religious reformation of the world make an advancing creed the pretext for a retrograde morality; beside all these, there exists a class of minds who have impatiently carried beyond the limits of reason the tendencies of the age, who have abandoned, not only a definite faith, but the hopes of finding any definite faith whatever. Very great and very true is the impression which has been felt in our day of the mystery which surrounds human life on all sides, of the fallibility of all human knowledge, and of the ineffable, impenetrable Majesty of that awful Being whose nature our forefathers presumed to parcel out and analyze as a chemist might do the water or the air. We no longer look on the different creeds of the world, as the martyrs did of old, as being absolutely true or absolutely false, the service of God himself or of the Devil himself. We perceive them to be only steps upward in an infinite ascent, only the substitution for a lower of a higher but still all imperfect ideal of the Holy One. Doubtless we are nearer to the true judgment now. Doubtless also it was well that of old, in the days of the stake and the rack, men should have seen these things differently, for few indeed could have borne to die clearly discerning their persecutors to be only partially mistaken in their own creed; the creed for which they were enduring torture and agony,—only one of the thousand “little systems” of earth
“Which have their day, and cease to be,”
a “broken light” from the inaccessible Sun of Truth. If a few sublime Socratic souls might have been found contented thus to bear all things sooner than renounce that one ray of purer light which had been granted to them, yet never could ordinary men and timid women, the rank and file of the army of martyrs, have fought the good fight under such banners. It was needful for them to discern in outward objective dogmas a distinction of good and evil, which in truth existed subjectively in the fidelity or unfaithfulness of their own souls to such light as they possessed. For them our modern breadth of thought would have seemed culpable latitudinarianism, and our habit of pouring the new wine of our own ideas into the old bottles of sacred formulæ a mockery and a snare. Ignatius and Polycarp, Latimer and Hooper, would have bitterly despised the alchemy which can “distil Astral Spirits out of dead churches,” and find something in Paganism and something in Popery transmutable at will into Christianity and Protestantism. But we in our day have reached a different pass. We seem to have quitted the region of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, and to have come to a land
“Where it is always afternoon.”
There is among the highest order of minds a disposition to accept finally a condition which may be designated as one of reverential scepticism. They doubt not only whether any true religious creed has yet been found, but whether a mind penetrated with due modesty should seek to find one. While the age vaunts itself of being peculiarly one of religious earnestness, it has thus come to pass that it is peculiarly one of religious despair. We have ceased to think that a great intellect can possess a great faith.
A sort of direful fashion has set in to praise whatever seems vaguest in doctrine and weakest in faith, as if therefore it were necessarily wisest and most philosophic. We look distrustfully on any one who has not dissolved away in some mental crucible all solid belief in a Personal God, and a conscious immortality into certain fluid and gaseous ideas of Eternities and Immensities. We assume it contentedly as proven that the “limitations of religious thought” make it as hopeless for us to find a faith which will keep alive our souls as an elixir vitæ to keep alive our bodies. We wander to and fro hopelessly through the wilderness of doubt, and if any come to tell us of a land flowing with milk and honey, the glory of all lands, which they have found beyond, we dismiss them with a complacent sigh, even if they bring back from their Canaan the noblest fruits.
There is surely great error in this state of feeling. Though infallible knowledge is not for man, though we have neither faculties to receive it nor language to convey it, yet it is far indeed from established, that our powers fall short of attaining such a share of knowledge of Divine things as may suffice for the primary wants of our souls. We need such knowledge for the higher part of our nature, as much as we need bread and clothing for the lower. It is the greatest want of the greatest creature, and if it indeed have no supply, then is the analogy of the universe broken off. There is a presumption of incalculable force, that these cravings which arise in the profoundest depths of our souls, which we can never put away, and on which all our moral health depends, are not to be for ever denied their natural satisfaction, while the ravens are fed and the grass of the field drinks in the dew. We have, indeed, asked hitherto for too much. We have called for whole systems of theology, dissecting with blasphemous audacity the mysteries of our awful Maker's nature and attributes. We have cried like children for the moon of an unattainable infallibility. But because these things are denied us, are we therefore to despair of knowing those fundamental truths which we must either gain or else morally and spiritually die? It would be to assume the main point in question, to argue that a Father in Heaven must needs make Himself and His righteous law known to His children. But it is a simple induction from the order of the universe, to conclude that the soul of man is not the only thing left without its food, its light, its guide, its sole-sufficing end and aim.
If, then, it be not improbable that a religion is to be found supplying us with such knowledge, but on the contrary, a thing to be predicted from man's nature and the order of the world; then, he who comes forward to tell us he has found this needful knowledge is not to be hastily dismissed as a dreamer. His special faith may be true or false, but some such faith as his is what we have to look for with well-grounded hope of success.
It is in this light, then, as a teacher of those cardinal truths of religion which are needful for our souls' higher life—those truths which we have reason to trust are within our powers to know,—as a builder up of faith—that faith which will remain unshaken upon the rock of human nature itself, when time shall have levelled every edifice built on the shifting sands of tradition; it is thus that Theodore Parker claims to be heard.
A few brief words concerning his doctrines and his life may, perhaps, be useful, by enabling the reader hitherto unacquainted with his writings to apprehend their bearing more perfectly. These writings, however, are so clear and honest, and that noble life was so simple in its absolute devotion to its holy purpose, that small space will suffice to speak for both.
There are four bases logically possible for a religion,—a living inspired Head, an infallible Church, an authoritative Book, an individual Consciousness. Of these four, Parker chose the last, leaving such creeds as Mormonism and Lamaism on the first, Romanism on the second, Calvinism on the third, and scores of intermediate churches shifting illogically between all four. The reasons for his rejection of the first three bases of religion are set forth at length in his writings, as also for his reliance on the veracity of Consciousness, corroborated for the individual by the consciousness of the wise and good of all ages.[3]
Standing on this ground of Consciousness, he preached the great doctrine of Theism, the Absolute Goodness of God. Every man is conscious of revering and loving certain moral characteristics, and of hating and despising certain others. Here, then, we find the assurance that He who made us to feel such reverence on one side and such contempt on the other, is Himself all that He has caused us to revere and love, and never has been or can be aught that by the constitution of our nature we hate or despise. The difference between the characters ascribed to God by traditional creeds and by Theism lies in this, that the traditional creeds, though attributing every epithet of honour to Him, yet in effect neutralize them all by delineations of His dealings with mankind wholly at variance with the natural sense of such epithets, insomuch that the words “Good” and “Merciful,” when applied to God, have often come to bear as conventional a sense as the titles of honour appropriated to the petty royalties of earth. Theism, on the contrary, confessedly rests its conception of the Divine character on such consciousness as He has Himself given us of what is Good and Just. This consciousness is as yet all imperfect and incomplete. God must be more good than our conception of goodness, as the heavens are higher than the earth. But so far as it goes, our consciousness is true, and negatively it must be absolutely true. God's character—could all its awful splendours be revealed to us, God's dealings with His creatures—could all their scope and purport from eternity to eternity be unveiled before our eyes, might never bear one blot or contain one act which in our heart of hearts we could regard as cruel or unjust,—nay, that we could fail to adore as infinitely good and merciful.
Thus Theism teaches that God is absolutely, infinitely, eternally good, in our sense of goodness; not good only to angels, Jews, and Christians,—a few elect out of a lost world; not good only in Time, and tremendous in the Day of Wrath, when Time shall be no more,—but good to all, good for ever, able and willing to bring back every creature He has made to be folded at last in His eternal love.
And in the most awful of all mysteries, the mystery of Sin and its forgiveness, this same Absolute Goodness of God is our hope and our refuge. We need no other, and (as Channing said well) “a broader and a surer the universe cannot supply.” Theism teaches that God, the Just Ruler, must punish sin, but it also assures us that God, the Good One, can only do so in the highest love. In His government, Retribution and Correction are one and the same. The sins of a finite being—finite in number and graduated in degree—are necessarily finite also, and deserving of finite retribution. The sins of a creature of God, made by Him in His own image, are necessarily capable of correction and susceptible of final purification. The repentant sinner seeks the restoration of his soul to the peace of Divine love, but he leaves the punishment of his offences to God's wisdom and God's justice. No “substitute” can ever bear it for him, no “conversion” of his own can evade it. The doom of sin is not an infinite risk with a large margin for escape. It is the certainty of a complete, albeit finite, retribution.
In God, the “Parent of Good, Almighty,” we have both parents in One. All the power and care and forethought and inexorable loving severity which we attribute to the Fatherly character is fulfilled in Him. And all the inexhaustible forgiving love and tenderness which a mother's heart reveals, is His also. Like a father, He supplies our bodily wants and the spiritual food for the higher needs of our souls. Like a mother, He bestows on us the flowers and fruits of earth and all the thousand innocent joys, which are needless for mere existence, but are given to make us happy, to win our hearts to confidence and thankfulness. Too long has the Catholic Church separated off this Mother Side of Deity into another object of worship; and more fatal still has been the error of the Reformed Churches, who in rejecting the Madonna, have rejected all that she imaged forth of the Divine mansuetude and tenderness. God is Himself and alone (as Parker often rightly addressed Him in his prayers) “The Father and Mother of the World.” Theism bids us adore Him with the mingled sentiments of reverence and love due to both relations. Nay, it bids us behold in His sole ineffable Unity all that men have dimly shadowed out in the creeds of the past, the “Lord of Light,” the “Mover” of all things, the “Greatly Wise Lord,” the “All-Father,” the “Eternal One,” and, above all, the triune God of Christendom, the God who in Himself alone is to us Creating, Redeeming, and Sanctifying God.
Such is the first great doctrine of Theism, the Absolute Goodness of God.
And the second is like it and flows out of it.
God is ever present in the souls of His creatures. He presides over and governs the world of matter, and He is no less present and active in the world of spirit. As He influences and constrains unconscious matter, so He inspires and helps free and conscious man. There is but one kind of inspiration possible, albeit many degrees thereof. It is the action of the Holiest on the souls of His creatures, affording moral help through the conscience, and spiritual light through the intellect. We call the first Grace, the second Inspiration, but they are one and the same; “the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”—the power by which we are “strengthened with might by God's Spirit in the inner man.” This Divine action cannot be accidental or miraculous, but normal and universal as gravitation itself; the most natural of all things, a fact implied in the relation of the Father of Spirits to His children; of the Creator to the creature which lives and moves and has its being in Him.
This is the second great doctrine of Theism, the Immanence of God in the Soul, or, in other words, the normal character of Inspiration. It is the key-stone of Parker's peculiar theology, and from it he deduced all his further propositions.
Thirdly, Inspiration being natural and universal, it is a thing of all nations and ages. Every good and perfect gift has come down from the Father of Lights, whether it was bestowed three thousand years ago or to-day, in Palestine or England. It was a real inspiration of God which taught Isaiah and Paul; and we may accept all their holy words which touch our consciences and kindle our piety as being truly God's teaching, worthy of all reverence and love. And it was also a real inspiration which taught Plato and Milton; and whatever words of theirs were great and holy, and touch our consciences and kindle our piety, they also we may take as God's teaching with reverence and love.
“The same great Inspiration through all the ages roll'd,
“Breaking through Moses' tardy lips and Plato's mouth of gold.”
Thus the world is not robbed of its Divine Scriptures, but every good and true and helpful book becomes for us a Divine Scripture.
Fourthly, Inspiration is limited by the capacity and by the faithfulness of the souls which receive it. “As we draw nigh to Him so He draws nigh to us,” said Seneca. As the soul is large by nature and education, so large can its inspiration be. “The cup of ocean is full as the harebell.” But none can be infallibly, universally, absolutely inspired. Perfect inspiration could be received only by perfect beings fulfilling absolutely all the laws of mind and morals. In man there must always remain somewhat merely human, personal, fallible. The light which comes pure from the Sun of Truth is refracted as it enters the atmosphere of our thoughts, and receives from it colours of all kinds—doubly refracted when it is reproduced in human language. There is somewhat of Divine and somewhat of human in the noblest thoughts and words of man. As God aids him morally by His grace, and yet never makes him impeccable, so He aids him intellectually by inspiration, yet never makes him infallible. Thus all the limitations and errors of the Bible are explained without either destroying its value or forcing us to do violence to reason and our moral instincts; they are recognized as the human element which inevitably blended with the Divine. And thus also is it explained how he, who of all the human race most perfectly fulfilled the conditions under which inspiration is granted to man; he, the best beloved of all the sons of God, whose coming was to the life of humanity what regeneration is to the life of the individual, may have erred concerning many things, concerning demoniacs, and the end of the world, and the prophecies he connected with himself, and yet may have spoken, on the Mount of Olives and by the well-side of Samaria, the deepest truths God ever taught to His creatures; lessons as immediately Divine as any voice of thunder from the sky could have proclaimed.
Fifthly, From the universality of Inspiration, Parker deduced the corollary of the trustworthiness of all facts of consciousness, which can be shown to be common to the human race under normal conditions of development. Such truths are necessarily given to the consciousness by Divine aid, they are written on the soul of man by that hand which writes no falsehood.
Thus, our Moral Intuitions are Divine. They reveal to us the immutable and eternal laws which are resumed in the righteous will of God, and which He has taught to His rational creatures, that through voluntary obedience to them we may attain to the highest end of our being, even an eternal approach to holiness and to Himself.
And the idea of an Immortal Life is Divine. It is a fact of consciousness given in the nature of man, and appearing under every circumstance of race and creed and age. We may trust to it as God's implanting, the promise of a world wherein our ideal of God's goodness, so often tried with mysteries of evil and sin and suffering here, will be fulfilled and overpassed beyond our highest dreams.
Sixthly and lastly, From the doctrine that God is for ever present and active in the souls of His creatures, it follows that it is possible for man to obtain communion with Him at all times. Prayer (for spiritual blessings) is no self-acting delusion. It is a real drawing nigh of the soul to God. There is “One who heareth prayer,” and who is ever near us waiting to hear and bless it. The relation between the creature and the Creator, unconscious in the material part, and at best a dim sympathy in the intellectual love of truth and the æsthetic sense of beauty, becomes conscious and vivid in the moral and spiritual when the will of man bows itself freely before the will of God, and the finite and infinite spirits meet in the awful communion of intense Prayer. It is the most sacred of all mysteries,—the most solemn thing in all man's life, the greatest reality of his existence. The help and light to be gained through such prayer is a natural thing, not a miraculous one. We do not ask God to change His laws, but to fulfil them. It is the law of spirit, that as we draw to Him so He draws to us. The magnetic bar which has lost its power, regains it when we hang it in the plane of the meridian. The plant which was sickly, weak, and white, growing in the shade, acquires health and verdure in the sunshine. If we bring our pale, faded souls within the rays of God's warmth we may say with confidence, “Heal us, O Father! for we know that it is Thy will.”
The creed which we have now summed up so briefly has few articles:
An ever present God who is absolutely good.
A moral Law written in the consciousness of man.
The immortality of the soul.
The reality of spiritual Prayer.
This is the entire theology of Theodore Parker. It contains no doctrines of a Fall, an Incarnation, a Trinity, an Atonement, a Devil, or a Hell,—no Original Sin, and no Imputed Righteousness. Its Morality is summed up in the Two Great Commandments of the Law, and its “Theory of Reconciliation” in the parable of the “Prodigal Son.”
To this religion, at once spiritual and rational, Parker gave the name of Theism,—a name antithetic to Atheism alone, and comprehensive of every worshipper of God; a name not understood, like the elder Deism, to signify the exclusion of Christianity, but the inclusion of it in one great Absolute Religion.
Theism differs thus, on the one hand, from all such Atheistic, Pantheistic, or Deistic systems as either tell us that there is no God, or that He is an Impersonal Power, or that He is a Great First Cause removed from all reach of human prayers. All such systems as these, even such as admit the existence of God and assume the name of Religions, yet eliminate from religion that which is its vital element—the belief in a real intercourse of prayer and assistance, of repentance and forgiveness, of obedience and guidance, between man and God.
And Theism differs, on the other hand, from all such Christian creeds as profess to tell us of an ever present God, yet affirm all our certain knowledge of Him to be derived from the evidence of tradition concerning long past supernatural events. All such creeds, while admitting a spiritual intercourse between God and the soul, distort and trammel such intercourse by false and unnatural representations of our relation to Him, and by setting at variance the emotions of piety and the dictates of reason. Thus while the popular creed (albeit nourishing in its disciples the purest spirituality) opposes itself continually to their intellects and moral instincts, and Pantheism and Deism (albeit professedly meeting the claims of the intellect and moral instincts) exclude spirituality—the religion which Parker taught combines all that is noblest in both systems,—the spirituality which springs from belief in a real intercourse between God and the soul, and the intellectual and moral harmony of a creed confessedly founded on human consciousness.
In so far as it can be proved to do this, in so far does Parker's creed command our highest consideration, for it is precisely to the union of a Rational and a Spiritual faith that the hopes of men are directed now in a manner hitherto unknown. We have learned, at last, to recognize that the Intellect is a Divine gift, even as the Religious Feelings are Divine gifts, and that it is not only a senseless but an impious endeavour to sacrifice the one for the other. And, on the other hand, we have learned that a conscious communion between man and God is the essence of religion, and that any creed which excludes it,—be it never so philosophic in all beside,—is of less value than any creed which enables men to attain it,—be it never so poor and irrational in all beside. Thus then, for religion's own sake, we ask for an intellectual faith; and for all the dearest interests of the soul, we ask that that intellectual faith shall ratify the spiritual part of our religion. Hitherto, with the exception of a few philosophers, men have commonly sought and found in their traditional creeds the means of attaining such spirituality as they desired, and have been content to give up reason for it's sake. Every religion, perhaps, has enabled some of its votaries to attain to a real intercourse with God, and, like the churches of Latin and Copt, Greek and Maronite, clustered around the Holy Sepulchre, each opens into the true sanctuary, which not one of them all can claim as its own, or monopolize for itself. But for us, in our time, it has come to pass that there is no entrance possible into the fane, save through the vestibule of a creed which shall preserve inviolate all the rights of the intellect and the moral instincts. When we have found this way to the Holy Place, we may press forward with God's saints of every age and creed, even into the innermost shrine of a conscious communion with Him. When we have arrived there, even the way we came will become indifferent.
Such then, in brief, is the Theology expounded in these volumes. Parker never claimed for it, and none will claim for him, that it is a perfect system, absolutely true and complete in all its parts. Such things are not for man, and the sooner we dismiss the pretenders to them the better. It will still be the best and wisest of existing theologies if it afford us a chart of the great ocean of thought, to be more and more fully filled up by explorers for ages to come, and yet sufficient now to enable us to steer our barks to the haven. We believe that there are signs enough within the churches, and without them, to justify the anticipation that such a theology will do a noble work; that those who have abandoned all existing creeds in despair, will be able here to find a reasonable and a welcome faith; and that it will legitimatize to their own minds the aspirations of thousands more, who are yet within the pale of traditionalism, but daily find that it is the Theism in Christianity which is their bread of life; and that all beyond is a difficulty and a stumblingblock. Reville says well, “Pour nous aussi, au moment où les edifices et les traditions séculaires menacent de s'écrouler, quand on se demande avec anxiété s'ils n'écraseront pas sous leurs décombres et ceux qui les ébranlent et ceux lui les défendent, un homme tel que Parker est un prophête de consolation et d'espérance.”[4]
In the hope that thus it may prove, these Works of Theodore Parker are published in England.
The chief interest of these books is, of course, a theological
one; and to discourses immediately directed to that subject,
the first three volumes of the present series are devoted. It
was, however, a leading principle of their author, that religion
was no concern for the church and sabbath-day alone, but for
all the pursuits and affairs of man. Accordingly, we find him
applying his faith to every good work which his hand found to
do. In his own pulpit, and over the whole country, he laboured
to arouse the consciences of his countrymen to their national
sins, their unjust wars, their, unrighteous politics, the miseries
of the poor, the degradation of women, and above all, the one
monster crime of slavery, from which America is now purging
herself through seas of blood. Among the sermons and
lectures he delivered on these topics, three volumes of the present
series have been arranged as Discourses of Politics, of Slavery,
and of Sociology. Beyond these, again, as a man of vast learning
and fine literary taste, Parker wrote a variety of papers
on matters of scholarship and history, collected in two volumes
of Critical and Miscellaneous Writings. The first of these is
already known in England; the second will consist of articles
now first collected from various sources, many of them of great
interest and beauty.
As in this long series of work's the greater part consists of detached addresses, it will be anticipated that the great fundamental truths, which it was the task of his life to enforce, were frequently reproduced. A large portion of the matter now collected was taken down by shorthand writers from extempore sermons and orations. These facts will account for occasional repetitions, and for the expressions, perhaps, sometimes all too vivid, of sarcasm and scorn, against the errors of Calvinistic theology and pro-slavery politics. To the congregation, whose prayers he had led with profoundest reverence, the eloquent outbursts of his subsequent discourse would naturally assume a wholly different character from that they bear to us, who read coldly the notes of the same discourses, unaware how it was the very greatness of his reverence for things truly holy, which inflamed his Luther-like soul with iconoclastic zeal.
As to the extraordinary clearness and didactic lucidity of Parker's style (strangely resembling that of old Hugh de St Victor, in his monkish Latin), there is no need to apologize for it. “I always think,” said he, “that I am addressing, not the highest minds, but the simplest and most uneducated among my congregation; and I strive to say everything so that they may understand me.” Thus truly did he preach his great gospel of God's goodness to the poor; and in a way, perhaps, which would be safe to few theologians. Always we find him stating the major term of his syllogism, “God is infinitely good. Now, what follows?”
It would seem as if there were two forms of the love of truth among men. In the one it is an affirmative love, a forcible grasp thereof, which affords a fulcrum strong enough to move the world; yet often leaves the holder without any accurate sense of the limitations of his creed, and without much power to appreciate the creeds of others. 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. In treating of the popular theology, it must be avowed that, to the majority of Englishmen, his wide human sympathies will seem to fall short in this one point, and that he has sometimes appeared to confound the Christianity of the churches generally with Calvinism, and to have drawn Calvinism itself either from the grim treatises of the old Puritan divines, or from living exponents of their doctrine, not to be paralleled on this side the Atlantic. It is due to one so great in his simple integrity as Parker, that even those who owe him most of gratitude should thus avow where they find his limitations.
On the side of some of the deeper mysteries of experimental religion, of repentance and regeneration, Parker said and wrote but little. He ever strove to give his hearers the fullest, richest faith in the infinite love and goodness of God; and then he left that divine alchemy to do its work and infuse a holier and purer life into their souls. Even to those who came to him for counsel he commonly acted thus; he lifted their eyes to God, and then bade them in His light behold their duties.
Happily for those who might regret that he had told us no more of his thoughts on these matters, we possess in Newman's Book of the Soul, the noblest exposition of the practical doctrines of a deeply spiritual Theism.
Such, then, are the writings of Theodore Parker now presented to the public. It will be for the reader to judge for himself of their prophetic power and truth, their glowing eloquence, their profound and varied learning, and of that supreme honesty of purpose which made Lowell say of him,
“Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced
“In the blast of a life which has struggled in earnest.”
Of the life and actions of Parker little need here be said.
The concluding volume of this series will contain his few
autobiographical remains, and possibly the Memoir shortly to
be published by his friends in America. A few words may,
however, be not inappropriately prefixed to his writings; for
of him, more than of most men, might it be said that his
doctrines and his life were one. What he preached to the world
he had first found in the depth of his own consciousness, and
that which he preached he lived out in his own noble life.
The great lessons of the Absolute Religion truly penetrated
his whole being. He seemed always to live in the light of
God's love, and to be able to work for his fellows with the
unwavering faith and tireless energy of one who actually beheld
in vision the foregleams of an immortality, wherein all souls
shall be redeemed and glorified.
Theodore Parker was born in 1810, near Lexington, Massachusetts. His parents were of the yeoman class, and old Puritan stock. His grandfather had fired the first shot in the war of Independence. From childhood he was a laborious student; at twenty-four, after passing through Harvard University, he knew ten languages, and before his death he is said to have acquired no less than twenty. His vocation was little doubtful. “In my early boyhood," he says, “I felt I was to be a minister.” In 1837 he was ordained and appointed to the Unitarian Church at West Roxbury, near Boston. Very soon the emancipation from all fetters of thought which he had always sought, brought him to conclusions far beyond his fellow-Unitarians. “The worship of the Bible as a Fetish hindered me at every step.” He wrote two sermons of the Historical and Moral Contradictions in the Bible, but hesitated for a year to preach them, lest he should “weaken men's respect for true religion by rudely showing them that they worshipped an idol.” But at length he could wait no longer, and to ease his conscience preached his two sermons. His hearers told him “of the great comfort they had given them.” “I continued,” he says after this, “my humble studies, and as fast as I found a new truth I preached it. At length, in 1841, I preached a discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” This was the crisis. The other ministers, both Trinitarian and Unitarian, were profoundly indignant, and so far as in them lay excommunicated him. “Some of them would not speak to me in the street, and in their public meetings they left the benches where I sat down.” Then he delivered in Boston the lectures which eventually were published in an enlarged form as “Discourses of Matters Pertaining to Religion,”—the book of which the present volume is a reprint of the fourth edition.
In September, 1843, Parker came to Europe, and after a year's travel returned to Boston, strengthened in heart and health. On the 16th February, 1845, he entered on the ministry of that congregation (the 28th Congregational Society), which he served with unwearied energy till that fatal morning, fourteen years afterwards, when his excessive labours brought on bleeding from the lungs, and his place knew him no more.
The present volumes will convey but a partial idea of the extent of Parker's labours during the years of his ministry, the sermons he preached, the orations and lectures he delivered through the States, the books he wrote, the studies he prosecuted, and, above all, the philanthropic and anti-slavery labours which he originated and aided. His congregation, which eventually became the largest in Boston, was foremost in every project of social improvement in the city, and the most outspoken and daring of the abolition party. They formed, under Parker's presidency, a committee of vigilance for the aid of slaves, and in the course of a year succeeded in passing four hundred coloured men and women into Canada. The Fugitive Slave Bill he openly announced he would resist by force, and in 1851 he sheltered in his house a man and wife who formed part of his congregation, and whose master sought to reclaim them. He wrote his sermon that week with his pistol in his desk before him! In the same year another negro, named Sims, was arrested in Boston, and Parker's efforts for his relief, his attendance on him to the vessel in which he was borne back to slavery, and his discourses afterwards, roused so much animosity, that a prosecution against him was commenced, and only relinquished when it was found that his imprisonment would be a triumph for his cause. It was on this occasion he prepared the elaborate “Defence” to be reprinted in the 10th volume of this series,—also the splendid sermons “on Conscience,” and on “the Laws of God and the Statutes of Man.”
His courage in the anti-slavery cause, and indeed in every cause he had at heart, was such as might be expected of the preacher of such a faith. Obnoxious beyond any other man in America, both on account of his religion and his politics, he never once failed to go wherever his voice or his presence could be of use, delivering lectures in all parts of the country, and entering meetings where he was an object of bitterest rancour. On one such an occasion we have been told by an eye-witness that he was standing in a gallery at a large pro-slavery meeting in New York, when one of the orators tauntingly remarked, “I should like to know what Theodore Parker would say to this!” Would you like to know?” cried he, starting forward into view,—“I'll tell you what Theodore Parker says to it!” Of course there instantly arose a tremendous clamour and threats of killing him and throwing him over. Parker simply squared his broad chest, and looking to the right and the left, said, undauntedly, “Kill me? Throw me over? you shall do no such thing. Now I'll tell you what I say to this matter.” His bravery quelled the riot at once.
Parker's intellectual endowments were of the highest class, and enabled him to defend his religious creed with the power of a clear head and an eloquent tongue. The peculiar characteristic of his mental faculties seemed to be a singular lucidity and clearness of arrangement of facts and ideas. These great natural gifts, combined with so much daring originality of thought, would have been perilous had he not laboured to supply himself with such a ballast of deep and solid learning as served to keep his mind steadily balanced. It has been already said that he understood ten languages. Of their literature, ancient and modern, his amazing knowledge will be sufficiently proved by the notes appended to the present volume. It would probably be difficult to parallel, save in Germany, a scholarship at once so varied and so recondite. For the carefulness and minuteness thereof also, let his recension of De Wette's treatise on the Old Testament testify.
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. His tenderness to his wife and to all around him broke out in a thousand little gentle cares and delicate thoughtfulnesses continually. No man was ever more beloved in the happy circle admitted to the intimacy of his home, and every mail brought him from far away lands letters of gratitude and affection. His immense power of human sympathy made itself felt so strongly, that it is said no clergyman of any creed, in our day, ever received so many confidences and confessions. No wonder that when the end of that loving life drew near he said to the writer, “I would fain be allowed to stay a little longer here if it pleased God,—the world is so interesting and friends so dear!” At the last of all, when his noble intellect was sinking under the clouds of approaching night, his tender affections were still lingering, anxiously careful for the gentle wife weeping by his side, and he dreamed that he had found comfort for her, telling us with brightening looks that though he was dying in Florence there was another Theodore Parker in America who would carry on his work and be her support and consolation.
Parker was brave, eloquent, learned, and warm-hearted all in an exceptional degree. He was also a man of fine poetic taste and love of art, and of the most refined and winning manners. There seemed no one human pursuit of an elevated kind in which he could not take interest. The element of pure joyous wit and humour was overflowing in him. Even in his graver writings this sometimes breaks out in freaks of sarcasm irrepressible, as where he argues that there can be no Devil since no print of his hoofs has been found in the Old Red Sandstone,—and that men are after all more well-disposed than the contrary, since “even South Carolina senators are sober all the forenoon!” But of course it was in private life that his playful humour naturally overflowed. We have seen letters to his intimate friends as full of pure drollery as Sydney Smith could have penned. One we remember, for instance, in which he answered his correspondent's accounts of a journey from Rome to Naples by his remarkable discoveries and ethnological and antiquarian speculations on a trip down the railway two stations from Boston. In another epistle he parodied some foolish over-illustrated biography then in vogue by extracting all the little woodcuts of advertisements of houses, steamers, &c., from the newspapers, and introducing them solemnly as “The House he was born in,” “His berceaunette,” “His perambulator,” and finally “His Mother,” being the well-known lady with half her hair dyed and the remainder grey!
All this versatility gave an inexpressible charm to Parker's character. In conversing with him one chord after another was struck, and each seemed richer and sweeter than the last. At one moment perhaps he was told of some moral results of his labours, or some poor backwoodsman wrote him a letter (we have seen a few out of many such), saying how his sermons were the food of the higher life to the writer and the rough comrades assembled weekly to hear them in their log-huts in the forests of the Far West. Then Parker's eyes would brighten, and the tears start into them, till he turned the subject to hide his emotion, and in a moment he would jest like a boy at some passing trifle with peals of richest laughter. And growing grave again, as some deeper subject opened, he would pour out his strange hoards of learning, all arranged in his own orderly fashion, as if he had constructed a table of it, beforehand, in his memory. Never far away were noble, sacred words of love and faith. One of the most religious women we ever knew, said to us, “It was good only to see Mr Parker in his church on Sunday, before we heard him. It made us all know that he felt the presence of God. 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. But the one which shall approve itself as truly divine, must nourish not only isolated merits, but all the possible virtues and faculties of human nature, such as it has been constituted by the Creator. The creeds stand self-condemned, which dwarf or kill any stem or branch, or flower or even leaflet of true humanity,—which make men emaciate and lacerate the bodies God has so wonderfully made;—or prefer hideous and monotonous churches and edifices of charity to the example of a world of endless beauty and variety;—or regard distrustfully every fresh discovery of science, instead of resting satisfied that all truth is God's truth, and to nothing but error can it be dangerous;—or check and crush their natural domestic affections, instead of regarding each one of them as a step, lent to help us up from earth to heaven;—all these creeds stand self-condemned. They may be the service of some unknown being, but they assuredly do not succeed in harmonizing the soul with the Creator of this world, the Divine Author of Human Nature. Nay more, the creed which should freeze all the joyous flow of wit and jest, and teach (without shadow of historical authority) that its Ideal Man “seldom smiled and never laughed”—that creed also is condemned. God who has made the playful lamb and singing lark, the whispering winds which rustle in the summer trees, and the ocean waves' “immeasurable laugh”—that same God gave, in His mercy, jest and glee and merriment to man; and here also, as in the joys of the senses and the intellect and the affections, “to enjoy is to obey.” Theodore Parker's faith, at least, bore this result,—it brought out in him one of the noblest and most complete developments of our nature which the world has seen; a splendid devotion, even to death, for the holiest cause, and none the less a most perfect fulfilment of the minor duties and obligations of humanity. Though the last man in the world to claim faultlessness for himself, he was yet to all mortal eyes absolutely faithful to the resolution of his boyhood to devote himself to God's immediate service. Living in a land of special personal inquisition, and the mark for thousands of inimical scrutinies, he yet lived out his allotted time, beyond the arrows of calumny, and those who knew him best said that the words they heard over his grave seemed intended for him; “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!” The lilies, which were his favourite flowers, and which loving hands laid on his coffin, were not misplaced thereon. Truly if men cannot gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles, then must the root of that most fruitful life have been a sound one.
At last the end came. The eloquent orations he had poured forth so freely for every righteous cause, and the incessant travelling at all seasons to deliver them, wheresoever he was called, brought out the tendencies of hereditary disease. The last journey he ever made in America was in the midst of a northern winter, and when he was already ill, to perform a funeral service in a friend's family, or rather to comfort the mourners with his sympathy, and speak to them (as he knew so well how to do) of God's great love in their affliction. He returned home much worse, but refused to give up working, and prepared as usual his sermon for the week. He had never spared himself at any time. The words of a hymn he often called for in his church fitted well his brave unwearied spirit:
“Shall I be carried to the skies
“ On flowery beds of ease,
“While others fought to win the prize,
“ Or sail’d through bloody seas?”
Or another, of Whittier’s, which he liked equally well.
“Hast thou through life's empty noises
“ Heard the solemn steps of time,
“And the low mysterious voices
“ Of another clime?
“Not to ease and aimless quiet
“ Doth the inward answer tend,
“But to works of love and duty
“ As thy being’s end;
“Earnest toil and strong endeavour
“ Of a spirit, which within
“Wrestles with familiar evil
“ And besetting sin,
“And without with tireless vigour,
“ Steadfast heart and purpose strong,
“In the power of faith assaileth
“ Every form of wrong.”
Had he understood the gravity of his danger he would doubtless have accepted the duty, however dissonant to his habits, of greater care for himself. But it was hard for the strong heart lodged in the powerful frame to believe that its beatings were already numbered, or that it was needful yet to check labours whose full harvest daily filled his bosom. How often this same mistake is made by the choicest spirits of the world, and how inexorable is the law which stops the hand too ready for its holy work, we need not pause to repeat. The Life Beyond must explain it all. At best a man only finds his place and fits himself to fill it, either in the company of the Prophets or the humbler ranks of philanthropy, when he has gained almost the summit of mortal life, and all beyond must be declivity and decay. It is little marvel then if those whose hearts are truest to their labours “work while it is called the day,” even with self-wasteful energy, dreading the inevitable approach of Age—if not yet of Death, of the day when our “windows shall be darkened and the grasshopper a burden,” even before the final closing of that night “when no man can work.”
Theodore Parker's fourteen years of apostleship were over. On Sunday morning, January 9th, 1859, he wrote to his congregation,—“I shall not speak to you to-day, for this morning a little after four o'clock I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat. I hope you will not forget the contribution to the poor. I don't know when I shall again look upon your welcome faces, which have so often cheered my spirit when my flesh was weak.” He never saw them (at least from his pulpit) again. Compelled to seek a warmer climate, he sailed with his wife and friends for Santa Cruz, where he spent the winter, and then passed through England on his way to Switzerland, where he sojourned awhile with his friend Professor Desor of Neufchâtel, and then passed on to Rome as the cold weather drew near. Friends gathered round him, dear and congenial friends whom he had known and loved at home, and for a while he seemed to do well. But as the spring drew near it became evident that the sands of life were running out; he sank rapidly and hopelessly. His horror of the oppression and turpitude of the Papal government was so great that he could not endure to die in Rome, and made his friends (among whom was a physician, Dr Appleton, devoted altogether to his care) carry him away to pass his last hours in a free country. As he passed out of the Roman territory and saw the Italian tricolor waving by the road-side, the dying man raised himself feebly in his carriage and lifted his hat to the emblem of liberty. By the time he had reached Florence the fatigue of the journey had left him but a little residue of days to live. He knew it. He had wished to be spared, and felt, as he had said years before in his Sermon of the Immortal Life, “It is selfish to wish for death when there is so much need of us here.” But when the time came he was calm as a child. The writer, who, although aided by his words and honoured by his friendship for many years, had never seen him till that hour, found him on his bed of death, conscious of the inevitable future, but looking at it as peacefully as if it had been a summons to his home across the ocean. “You know I am not afraid to die,” he said; and here a smile, the most beautiful we ever saw on a human countenance, broke over his face. “You know I am not afraid to die, but I would fain have lived a little longer to finish my work. God gave me large powers, and I have but half used them.” Half used them! And he said this on his death-bed, whither he had been brought in the prime of manhood by over use of them, by the utter sacrifice of his health and strength in the cause of Truth and Right! He lingered on a few days, gently falling asleep, as it seemed, and dreaming, after the wont of the dying, that he was going on a journey, going home after his long wanderings, and only wakening, at intervals, to give a few parting gifts to friends (among others the bronze inkstand, from which these pages are written), and to comfort his wife, and say tenderest words of thanks for the little offerings of flowers, or aught beside we brought him. Now and then he would rouse himself, and speak his old brave thoughts, answering, as if to a familiar and welcome voice, if we named sacred things. Once, for example, when he asked the day of the week, and we said, “It is Sunday, a blessed day, is it not, dear friend?” “Yes!” he said, with sudden energy; “when one has got over the superstition of it, a most blessed day.” Gradually and without pain the end came on, and on the 10th of May, 1860, he passed away from earth in perfect peace.
We cannot regard such an end otherwise than with solemn thankfulness, that God allows such men to live and work and die among us, to show us what man may do and be in this life, and to raise our thoughts to what must be the life to come, for souls which have made earth itself a holy place. His most gifted countrywoman reached Florence too late to pay to her great fellow-abolitionist a last tribute of the respect and regard which outstripped all limits of creed. At her request the writer gave her all the details of his last hours, and repeated (doubtless with faithless tears) the words above quoted, concerning his unfinished labours, adding, “To think that life is over—that work is stopped!” “And do you think,” said she, raising her eyes with a flash of rebuke, “do you think;—did he think that Theodore Parker has no work to do for God now?”
It must be so. He who recalled his soldier in the heat of the battle must have a nobler command for him on high; yet we must miss him here, and sorely his country misses him in her hour of trial. He was a great and a good man; the greatest and best, perhaps, which America has produced. He was great in many ways,—in original genius, in learning, in eloquence, and in a courage and honesty which no danger could daunt or check. 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 central truth of the universe.
When it was all over, and the great soul had gone home to God, we saw him lying, as it were, asleep, a pale flush still on his face, and his head (that noble head!) resting under a crown of the rich pink and white roses of Tuscany. The strong man, dead in the flower of manhood, seemed only slumbering on a warm summer day. Never was the “rapture of repose” more legible upon the face of death. It seemed as if God had said, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Well hast thou spent thy talents ten times ten!” A few days later we followed him, to hear, as he had desired, the Beatitudes of the Gospels read for his sole funeral service, over his grave, in the beautiful Campo Santo of Florence. It seemed well that he should sleep in such a spot, under a sky as cloudless as his faith, and where the cypresses of Italy, like nature's spires, stand pointing from a bright world below to a yet brighter heaven. As we passed along the streets of the grand old city we perceived that the tricolor banners were hung from every window for some victory or festival, and the people were passing in throngs to the churches, whose bells were pealing joyfully. At first it struck like a dissonance to our hearts, and then we remembered what Theodore Parker had been and still must be in a higher life than ours; and we said one to another, “For us, too, this is a festa-day, the solemn Feast of an Ascension.”
FRANCES POWER COBBE.
Belgrave House,
Durdham Down,
Bristol.
- ↑ A remarkable exception, however, is the extension of the “Brahmo Somaj,” or “Church of the One God,” in Bengal, founded by Rammobun Roy, and now numbering 14 branch churches, holding the purest Theistic Creed, and applying it with noble energy to the moral progress of the nation, to the obliteration of caste, the instruction of the lower orders, and the elevation of woman.
- ↑ La Chaire d'Hébreu au Collége de France. Par Ernest Rénan, p. 30.
- ↑ It is, perhaps, needful to guard against the accusation so constantly reiterated against the adherents of Consciousness as a basis of religious faith, that they actually stand on the lessons of Christianity, while professedly disavowing their authority. The truth is, that the hypothesis of Darwin (whether true or false, as regards the genesis of animal species) very aptly represents the natural history of the various creeds of mankind. Each one rises out of another, which chronologically preceded it—the strongest and noblest types being the parents of offspring, which reproduce in still higher forms their special excellencies. He who would pretend in our day to stand free from all obligations to Christianity, would boast as absurdly as he who should deny his obligations to his parents, his ancestors, and all the antecedents of his family and nation. But, in like manner, he who thinks that St John could have written his Gospel without a Plato before him, or St Paul his Epistles without a Zeno, would think also that Newton might have written the Principia had no Pythagoras or Euclid preceded him. Consciousness, as a basis of theology, is strengthened, not discredited, by every evidence that the greatest saints and sages of all time have corroborated its truths. The highest philosophy asks no man to originate or invent the truths of theology, but only when such truths are presented to him in any mode, to possess the consciousness of their veracity.
- ↑ Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Octobre, 1861, p. 746.