Theodore Parker was an American theologian, Unitarian clergyman, and publicist.
Background
Theodore Parker was born on August 24, 1810 in Lexington, Massachussets, United States. He was a descendant of Thomas Parker of Norton, Derbyshire, England, who settled in Lynn, Massachussets, in 1635, and in 1640 was one of the founders of the town and church of Reading. A grandson removed to Lexington in 1712 and had for grandchild the Captain John Parker who led the Lexington minute-men, April 19, 1775. John (1761 - 1836), son of the Revolutionary captain, a farmer and mechanic with a vigorous mind and love of knowledge, married on February 17, 1784, Hannah Stearns of Lexington, a woman of sensitive religious feeling without concern for doctrinal disputes. Of their eleven children only Theodore, the youngest, became eminent. The boy's precocious childhood had marks of independent and varied aptitudes. A child of seven years, he inferred from graduations of lichen, moss, grass, bush, and tree, a hierarchy of ascending forms throughout nature. In growing boyhood his historical lore claimed attention in the political discussions of his elders. These varied propensities, early awakened, prefigured his career.
Education
Theodore Parker's schooling was limited to four months of two summers, three months of ten winters in a district school taught by college students, and a few months in Lexington Academy. All other weeks were given to farm work and carpentry, but in leisure hours he read borrowed books with voracious appetite and a phenomenally retentive memory. Discerning teachers taught Theodore Parker Latin and Greek and he undertook modern languages by himself. At ten years, he made a botanical catalogue of all vegetables, plants, trees, and shrubs that grew by his home, and when not yet twelve he turned to astronomy and metaphysics. At seventeen, Theodore Parker began four years of teaching in neighboring district schools. He walked to Cambridge August 23, 1830, and passed the examination for entrance to Harvard College. Too poor to enroll, he was allowed to take the examinations throughout the course and in 1840 was made an honorary master of arts.
Career
On March 1831, Theodore Parker became assistant in a private school in Boston and a year later opened his own school in Watertown. He now gained the friendship of Watertown's learned pastor, Convers Francis, steeped in German thought, and won the tender love of Lydia Cabot, daughter of John Cabot of Newton. Long hours of teaching, of studying for Harvard examinations, of acquiring Semitic languages and poring over Cousin and Coleridge made a life without play or exercise; they also deprived him of the give-and-take fellowship with other youths that might have trained him to more sustained good humor and more tolerant indifference to praise and blame. On April 1834, he entered the Harvard Divinity School, where he lived ascetically on scant savings, meager earnings, and a bursary, but prodigally in the expenditure of mental energy, "an athlete in his studies, " said his fellow student Christopher P. Cranch. His journal shows a knowledge of twenty languages, and of the most necessary, the knowledge was exact. In Prof. John Gorham Palfrey's absence, he gave the instruction in Hebrew. Echoing the thought of the faculty, he believed in an inspired Bible, a revelation evidenced by miracles, in Christ as the Son of God supernaturally conceived.
Nevertheless, in editing with two classmates The Scriptural Interpreter he made use of mild German criticism that brought protests from the readers, and when he graduated, July 1836, he had some doubt of miracles and the virgin birth. A month later he began to translate De Wette's Einleitung in das Alte Testament, a work for which America was not yet ready. Half a dozen churches offered him a settlement, but because of its proximity to libraries he chose the modest parish of West Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, and there, he was ordained on June 21, 1837. In his sermons he avoided controversial matters and presented religion only in terms of his inward experience, but this habit led him, in his private reflections, away from dependence on miraculous revelation to a main reliance on the direct, intuitive religious functioning of man's spirit, "the felt and perceived presence of Absolute Being infusing itself in me. " Furthermore, the friendships now made were with the progressive spirits of the New England renaissance, Dr. William Ellery Channing and his nephew W. H. Channing, Charles Follen, Frederic H. Hedge, Wendell Phillips, George Ripley, Emerson, and Alcott. He hailed Emerson's Divinity School Address (1838) as "the noblest, the most inspiring strain I ever listened to [though] a little exaggerated, with some philosophical untruths".
To the controversy that followed he contributed a pamphlet under the pseudonym of Levi Blodgett, arguing that an intuitive religious faculty makes external props like miracles unnecessary. Difference of opinion on this question was then creating division in Unitarian circles and rumors of Parker's attitude cost him the customary exchanges with the Boston pastors. From such disfavor, in spite of a militant disposition, he suffered abnormally, and the more keenly since his intense studies were now often interrupted by physical depression and despondent moods. German thought and sympathy with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson, however, were surely developing his native reliance on intuition into a systematic intellectual form. An undesigned rupture came with a sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, preached at an ordination in South Boston, May 19, 1841. In it he demanded that "we worship, as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing between us and the father of all. " This was Emerson's lyrical deliverance done with a ruder prose, and a community already irritated by controversy reacted violently. The orthodox denounced him in the press; the liberal clergy withheld all tokens of fellowship; nevertheless, the following winter laymen in Boston arranged for Parker to deliver a series of lectures, which were published under the title A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842). In this remarkable work, ill received in America but of large circulation in English editions and German translation, Parker's vast erudition fortifies an eloquent appraisement of Christianity as the highest evolutionary ascent of the universal and direct human experience of divine reality. He demanded a new theology, which should be a science of religion and interpret its data by the immanence of God in nature and human experience.
The Boston Association of Ministers, to which Parker belonged, was disquieted. Its members had relaxed inherited doctrine, but they rested truth on supernatural revelation. Feeling became acute when they read an article by Parker in The Dial of October 1842. Some of them had served on a council called to consider the conflict of the Rev. John Pierpont with his church over a sermon on traffic in liquor, and now they found their decision denounced as a Jesuitical document in the interest of the liquor trade. On January 1843 the Association suggested that Parker resign his membership, but he refused on the ground that the right of free inquiry was at stake. Soon after, he published his translation of De Wette's Einleitung, and then, to secure needed rest, he spent a year in European travel (September 1843 - September 1844). It was a year of rich experience for a mind stored with knowledge of history and literature, and significant in Parker's life since conferences with the scholars of many lands made him confident in his theological position and convinced of a mission to spread enlightened liberalism.
Opponents created his opportunity. When Rev. J. T. Sargent invited Parker to speak in his mission chapel the controlling Fraternity of Churches intervened and Sargent resigned (November 1844). The rules for a traditional lecture in the First Church of Boston were revised to exclude Parker from future participation (December 1844). James Freeman Clarke's chivalrous exchange with Parker, January 1845, caused members of his church to secede. A group of men, therefore, resolved "that the Rev. Theodore Parker shall have a chance to be heard in Boston" and secured a hall for Sunday services. Parker was heard, and in January, definitely resigning the West Roxbury pastorate, he was installed as minister of the new Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston, which in November 1852 found nobler quarters in the new Music Hall. Parker defined this church as a union to cultivate love of God and man with a common regard for Jesus as the highest known representative of God. It was to be active in all possible ways for human welfare, and Parker's devotion to its enterprises entailed the sacrifice of a cherished plan to elaborate a true science of religion with its own specific scientific method.
While in Rome in 1844, reflecting on America's historic task, he judged that popular ignorance and corrupt leadership required a campaign of intellectual, moral, and religious education. In his new pulpit and on lecture tours over a wide area, as well as in frequent publications, he discussed problems of war, temperance, prisons, divorce, education, human rights, the careers of American statesmen, always with a wealth of knowledge and a sober practical judgment. His faith was that social wrong would be righted as men attained consciousness of the infinite perfection of God, of the eternal right, of immortal life. Inevitably, the national situation involved him in the agitating discussion of slavery and thus of political parties and political leaders. Bold speech and bold courage gave him enthusiastic followers and bitter enemies, his frequent harsh invectives and ascription of rapacious motives intensifying the social division. The results of his intensive study of the history and economic aspects of slavery were presented in A Letter to the People of the United States Touching the Matter of Slavery (1848) and in articles in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847 - 1850). Webster's Seventh of March speech and the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) created a crisis, and Parker made passionate speeches in Faneuil Hall (March 25, October 14) and as leader of a vigilance committee was dramatically active in the escape of the fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft (November 1850) and in the foiled plot to rescue Thomas Sims (April 1851).
On October 31, 1852, a week after Webster's death, Parker preached a sermon on the statesman's career, recognizing his great abilities but reprobating his character and motives. Believing in the right to secede and not averse to a separation of North and South, Parker failed to comprehend Webster's supreme devotion to national union and laid his policy to ambition for the presidency with Southern support and to financial obligations to Boston capitalists. Two days after the arrest of Anthony Burns. Another fugitive slave (May 24, 1854), Parker incited Faneuil Hall hearers to rescue the prisoner by an attack on the court house, but the plan miscarried and Burns was deported. With six others, Parker was indicted by the grand jury, but on April 3, 1855, the indictment was dismissed as ill framed. This fact did not hinder Parker from publishing an elaborate Defence, valuable for its accounts of the fugitive slave episodes but marred by invectives against the responsible authorities. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 occasioned a fresh outburst of sermons and addresses, some passionately rhetorical, others with forceful economic argument. He now foresaw and predicted civil war.
With voice and purse he supported the New England Emigrant Aid Society, the Massachusetts Kansas Committee, and as one of a secret committee abetted John Brown's project of a foray in the mountains of Virginia. At Parker's invitation Brown disclosed his plans at a secret meeting in Boston, March 4, 1858, and though Parker predicted failure, he favored the project as likely to precipitate the now inevitable conflict. His political influence is evidenced by his immense correspondence with Sumner, Seward, Chase, John P. Hale, and Charles Francis Adams. Through the mediation of William H. Herndon, he influenced Abraham Lincoln, who probably derived from him the formula "government of the people, by the people, for the people".
After exposure on a lecture tour in the spring of 1857 he became ill, an operation for fistula, a laming accident, and symptoms of tuberculosis followed. A violent hemorrhage, January 9, 1859, ended all public activity. With wife and friends he sailed for Vera Cruz, February 3, and, much improved, journeyed in June to London and Paris and then on to the home of his friend Edward Desor in Combes Varin, Switzerland. After a winter in Rome, he died in Florence on May 10, 1860, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery outside the Pinto Gate.
His writings are collected in Theodore Parker's Works (1863 - 1870), edited by Frances P. Cobbe and published in London; also in the Centenary Edition (1907 - 1911), published by the American Unitarian Association, which includes a valuable introduction and critical notes. A German edition of his writings, Theodor Parkers Saemmtliche Werke (1854 - 1861) was prepared by Johannes Ziethen.
Views
Theodore Parker argued strongly against the Mexican War and for abolition of slavery, and was especially interested in problems of poverty and crime, yet he also attacked the flawed ethics and moral responsibility of the merchant class.
Quotations:
"Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. "
"Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am. "
"Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never. "
"All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little — something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. "
"The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. "
Personality
Theodore Parker was an energetic and ambitious man. Lacking distinguished presence, ungraceful in bearing, unmusical in voice, with little animation of manner, Theodore Parker yet dominated audiences by reasoning power, by full knowledge of facts, by the thrill of his moral idealism, his poetic joy in the world's ineffable beauty, and the glowing ardor of his disclosures of the mystery of communion with God.