a terrible shaking of thrones and altars. The axe had fallen on the neck of a king, and the halberd had smitten the image of many saints. Scarcely an authority stood fast. None was unchallenged. The brain of Bacon had discharged its force into the intellectual world. Newton's torch was flinging its beams to the confines of creation. The national genius sparkled in constellations of brilliant men; Continental literature was pouring into England the speculative mind of Holland, the dramatic writing and criticism of France. There was new thought and fresh purpose; a determination to know and do something; a sense of intellectual and moral power, that portended great changes in Church. and State. The infidels were the men who felt this spirit first. They were its children; they gave it voice; it gave them strength. They trusted in it. Fidelity to its call was their faith. They believed in the sovereignty of Reason, the rights of the individual Conscience and they cherished a generous confidence in the impulses of an emancipated and ennobled humanity. They had that faith in human nature which, indeed, is, and ever has been the faith of faiths. It is a faith hard to hold. These infidels must have found it so in their times. When shall we honor, at its due, the heroism of Protest, the valor of Disbelief? When shall we give to the martyrdom of Denial its glorious crown?-Belief of the Unbelievers. THEODORE PARKER. With him the religious element was supreme. It had roots in his being wholly distinct from its mental or sensible forms of expression completely distinguished from theology, which claimed to give an account of it in words, and from ceremonies, which claimed to embody it in rites and symbols. Never evaporating in mystical dreams, nor entangled in the meshes of cunning speculation, it preserved the freshness and bloom and fragrance in every passage of his life. His sense of divine things was as strong as was ever felt by a man of such clear intelligence. His feeling for divine things never lost its glow; never was damped by misgiving, dimmed by doubt, or clouded by sorrow. The intensity of his faith in Providence, and of his assurance of personal immortality, seems almost fanatical to modern men who sympathize in general with his philosophy. All the materialists in and out of Christendom had no power to shake his conviction of the infinite God and the immortal existence: nor would have had, had he lived until he was a century old; for, in his view the convictions were planted deep in human nature, and were demanded by the exigencies of human life. The services they rendered to mankind would have been their sufficient justification, had he found no other; and in this aspect they interested him chiefly. . 66 It has been said that Parker accomplished nothing final as a religious reformer; that if he thought of himself as the inaugurator of a second Reformation a reformation of Protestantism—the leader of a new departure," as significant and momentous as that of the sixteenth century, he deceived himself. Luther, it is said, found a stopping-place, a terminus, and erected a "station," where nearly half of Christendom have been content to stay for three hundred years, and will linger, perhaps, three hundred years longer. Parker stretched a tent near what proved to be a "branchroad," where a considerable number of travellers will pause on their journey, and refresh themselves, while waiting for the "through-train." That Parker thought otherwise, that he believed himself sent to proclaim and define the faith of the next thousand years, merely gives another illustration of the delusions to which even great minds are subject. Already thought has swept beyond him; already faith has struck into other paths, and taken up new positions. The scientific method has supplemented the theological and the sentimental, and has carried many over to the new regions of belief. Parker is a great name, was a great power, and will be a great memory; but it is doubtful if he did the work of a Voltaire or a Rousseau; that he did not do the work of a Luther is not doubtful at all. Certainly, Parker was not a discoverer. He originated no doctrine; he struck out no path. His religious philosophy existed before his day, and owed to him no fresh development. But he was the first great popular expounder of it; the first who undertook to make it the basis of a faith for the common people; the first who planted it as the corner-stone of the working-religion of mankind, and published it as the ground of a new spiritual structure, distinct from both Romanism and Protestantism. 66 . The ethics of Theodore Parker grew from the same root as his religion, and were part of the same system. These, too, rested on the spiritual philosophy - the philosophy of intuition. He believed that to the human Conscience was made direct revelation of the eternal law; that the moral nature looked righteousness in the face. He was acquainted with the objections to this doctrine. The opposite philosophy of Utilitarianism whether taught by Bentham or by Mill—was well known to him, but was wholly unsatisfactory. Sensationalism in morals was as absurd, in his judgment, as sensationalism in faith. The Quaker doctrine of the inner light" was nearer the truth, as he saw it, than the "experience" doctrine of Herbert Spencer. Experience might assist conscience, but create it never. Conscience might consult even expediency for its methods; but for its parentage it must look elsewhere. Conscience, for him, was the authority, divine, ultimate. He obeyed, even if it commanded the cutting off of the right hand or the plucking out of the right eye. He would not compromise a principle, wrong a neighbor, take what was not fairly his, tell a falsehood, betray a trust, break a pledge, turn a deaf ear to the cry of human misery, for all the world could give him. At the heart of every matter there was a right and a wrong, both easily discernible by the simplest mind. The right was eternally right; the wrong was eternally wrong; and eternal consequences were involved in either. Philosophers might find fault with his psychology- they did find fault with it. He answered them, if he could; if he could not, he left them answerless: but for himself, he never doubted, but leaned against his pillar.- Biography of Theodore Parker |