vectives which modern literature knows, against the kidnappers, the pro-slavery politicians, the pro-slavery priests, and the slave-catching commissioners. These invectives were sometimes cruel and severe; in the spirit of Moses, David, and John the Baptist, rather than in that of Christ. Such extreme severity, whether in Jew or Christian, defeats its own object for it is felt to be excessive and unjust. I can not approve of Theodore Parker's severity. I consider it false, because extravagant; unjust, because indiscriminate unchristian, because relentless and unsympathizing. But then I will remember how bitterly he was pursued by his opponents; how Christians offered prayers in their meetings, that he might be taken away how Boston wealth and aristocracy hated and reviled him; how little he had, from any quarter, of common sympathy or common charity. I can not wonder at his severity but I can not think it wise. Being so great, I wish he had been greater.

It is not philosophical, because it sets the Spirit of Christ at war with the forces of Nature.

"All kinds of winds and weather

Must be taken up together,

To make a year

Or a sphere."

We deny altogether the idea that everything is to be accomplished by gentle means; these are one method, but there are other methods. We deny that any one method can be called exclusively the Christian method, for all are made equally necessary by the Father of all, and if pursued with an eye single to his glory, must be for the advancement of his Kingdom. The lifegiving ray of the sun is atwin with the deadly sunstroke. We have read that in the Kingdom which should come, the wolf should dwell with the lamb, and the lion and the fatling lie down together, but never that the wolves were to become lambs and the lions fatlings; each is a just part preserving its own individuality, if only led by the little child by the spirit of simplicity and obedience. Now we have every evidence that Mr. Parker's severity was in every case directed against some flagrant wrong: the roar in his voice was unmistakable, but it was Sinai-thunder by which alone those who worshiped the Golden Calf in the plain. could be brought to tremble. That this severity was the result of any personal experiences of Mr. Parker, as we are sorry to find Mr. Clarke intimating, is not true in any sense. Not one severe

word in mere self-vindication has he left.

From the next discourse on our list, that of Rev. O. B. Froth

ingham, we select a fine passage relating to Mr. Parker's severity. This subtle thinker, who was long on terms of intimate sympathy with Parker, says:

But the decisive word in this connection remains to be said. When charity becomes intensest, it scorches. Amiability is love in its negative form; but when love assumes it's positive form, when it becomes an earnest and broad humanity, then it begins to sparkle and flash and smite. He who reveres the good, and cleaves to it, necessarily abhors the evil, and denounces it; and he who has small abhorrence of evil has usually but a feeble allegiance to good. It was out of the bosom of his loving kindness that Jesus launched the frightful bolts of his invective at the scribes and Pharisees of his time; clearing the atmosphere of their hypocrisy by dreadful process of thunder-storm, that the common people might not suffocate. It is out of his heart of infinite pity for the world, that the Almighty Father makes the wicked consume away, and buries faithless nations in shameful graves. He who speaks in the interest of principles can not be silenced by a refutation; and he who labors in the cause of man must use the vices of men as his tools. What seems cruelty to the individual may be mercy to the whole, and to them likewise in the end.

The Rev. Charles T. Brooks, of Newport, R. I., whose own life and character will seem to those who know him best the true exemplification of the "Man of God," in speaking to the late graduating class at Cambridge, introduced with great felicity the following allusion to the departed man :

But I turn from the living to the great army of ministers and martyrs who have finished their course below. How noble an exemplification of many points in my subject would the manly Robertson furnish! But from the number of our own departed fellow-graduates there comes back at this hour to my memory the image of a fellow-student of my own, whom I remember twenty-five years ago, as he sat in that little chamber at Divinity Hall, bending over his huge folios; and who, after a toilsome and thorny service, has, within a few months, been translated to that clearer vision, for which, through the dust of this building-ground and the smoke of this battle-field, his noble heart yearned and strove. This brother of ours, as the tender respect, and even reverence, with which men of most differing creeds speak of him departed touchingly testify, whatever may have been his errors of opinion or expression, presented a memorable example of the honest preacher and the faithful pastor combined with the earnest patriot and philanthropist; and the manner in which his death has affected men of all sects and parties shows that the instincts of the heart recognize the soundness of the principle, which seems to me one of the great lessons of our brother's life, that the man makes the minister.

The next discourse on our list (that of Rev. C. A. Bartol) is an indictment under the guise of friendliness. Beginning in the Quorum magna pars fui style, indicating the man who would fain link his name with that of scholars whilst evading their sacrifices, he at length says: "He even charged on some, who thought he went too far, the secret treachery of opinions like his own, which they were ashamed to divulge and afraid to enact." A most disingenuous sentence this must seem to those who know the very names of distinguished Doctors of Divinity in Boston and vicinity, who began in frank sympathy with Strauss and Parker, but shrank back when they saw the heavy price which was demanded of the brave pioneer. Again, with insufferable conceit, this Bartol says: "He had not imagination, simple reverence, and holy wonder, to admit the marvels at which, on the road of investigation, the scientific understanding balks, but which are welcome to the higher reason in every artist and true spiritualist, to poet and painter, to Dante and Shakspeare and Milton and Raphael, to genius of all sorts treading on the mysterious borders, none ever measured, of the unseen world." That is, in plain speech, the miracles are conveniently credible to such artists, poets, "geniuses of all sorts," illuminati of " the higher reason," as Bartol, Gannet, Ellis & Co.; but Göthe, Carlyle, Emerson, Parker and others, men of mere 66 scientific understanding," must move on the lower plain! It is amusing to find this critic after this flattering Emerson, who said that in the mouth of the Church "miracle means monster," and unable to suppress his jealousy that the Sage of Concord should have termed Parker the only thoroughly faithful preacher of morals in the land.

Mr. Hepworth's discourse must be recognized as a hearty and brave word from a rising young man, who, although surrounded by such influences as those which penned the last-mentioned sermon, remembers Schiller's advice, "Follow the dreams of thy youth." It is the inevitable response of a noble instinct to a noble life. And Transitional Unitarianism may well heed the blasts of the horns about its Jericho-walls, when the young ministers in old pulpits about Boston utter such sentiments as the following:

He said of God, "If He is, He is always near: not here to-day, and there to-morrow; but here always." And when he denied the miraculous coming of Christ, it was not that he would put God away from the world,

as the Church had done in saying that He was closer at one time than at another; but that he would have God as close to-day and to each as He was eighteen hundred years ago and to Christ. And, in this denial of what others believed to be miracles, both his logical faculty and his instincts were at one. He could see no historical evidence, nothing compulsory, in the facts given. No man sought more carefully or more earnestly than he; and his soul certainly, as no soul can, did not relish the doctrine. His instincts corroborated his judgment. For I imagine, that, if we believe in miraculous interposition to save us, we do it only on compulsion. It is more natural to believe, and more satisfactory, that God's plan was so arranged in the first place that no emergency could arise for which it would become necessary to suspend his laws and act in an extraordinary way.

The next sermon which we are to mention is by Mr. Alger; and it is one whose merits and defects are equally startling. To speak of the last and least first, how strange that any one speaking of a simple old Puritan, like Parker, could utter such a sentence as the following:

Not frittering himself away in dissipated miscellaneousness of effort, but pouring himself in cumulative course of foreseeing and single purpose, he will not evaporate like a shower of isolated exertions in the desert of contemporaneous notice, but roll as a voluminous river of influence across the plains of posthumous fame.

Here we have, one may say, Eastern Splendor added to Oriental Magnificence! And throughout the discourse there is too much ambition, too little of the simplicity eminently befitting the occasion. Yet the discourse presents a broader and more patient comprehension of the subject than any we have read. We are sorry that we are able to cull but one of the incisive passages which invite us:

And now that his great soul has gone up to judgment, and his poor form sleeps in the earth, nor recks how they rave, shall petty men, who. as far as appears from any thing they ever did, were not worthy to unloose the latchets of his shoes, stand up and condemn him because he offended their views, their taste and prejudices? Shall the merest fledglings of the traditional church assume seats of superiority, and complacently sit in judgment on his genius and his works, amidst the applause of those who knew little of him except blindly to fear his teachings? With their three-inch calipers, shall they take the smallness of his mind? with their ludicrous ignorance, pronounce on his lack of learning. with their thricerefined parrotry, declaim on his want of originality? out of their abject submission to outgrown dogmas of folly and fear, bewail the benighted

ness of his belief? and, in their hooded bigotry, accuse him of blasphemous arrogance, and doom him to eternal perdition? Undoubtedly they will. This is one of the penalties of heroic greatness, marching before the van of its age, must always pay. Mean men thus revenge themselves on it; or they thus seek to appear great themselves by showing how easily they include a great man, and toss off an exhaustive estimate of him. To the despicable nature the glorious nature looks despicable too; and when an ant measures Olympus, Olympus is an inch high.

Since the above was in print, we have received from London a discourse, entitled "Lessons from the Life of Theodore Parker," by the former pastor of our Cincinnati Church, now the honored successor of James Martineau in Liverpool, W. H. Channing. Mr. Channing's difficulty is evidently his personal nearness to Parker to speak of his lost friend was too much like speaking of himself, for him to feel perfectly free. The very printed words of this pamphlet are choked with emotion. Leaving out for want of space many noble bursts, we dwell for a moment on the following, which seems to us a strange misconception:

He taught that God is immanent alike in the Universe and in Man; but he did not recognize that He is INFLUENT yet more. Hence his theory of Inspiration was limited to instinct and to genius, and virtually excluded direct communication from the Divine Spirit to the Human Spirit, as from person to person. Logically carried out, this mode of speculation would have plunged him into the abyss of Pantheism, from which his great heart and brave energy alone kept him back. And from Pantheism he was saved by this happy inconsistency. In distinct assertions, often reiterated, he avowed himself to be a Theist. He worshipped The Infinite Person, with whom each Finite Person may hold loving, intelligent intercourse, in whom all Finite Persons may be made one by sympathetic cooperation. Hence he prayed in the closet, in the family group, in the great congregation. And how fervent, exalting, and overflowing with courageous trust and joyful tenderness, were his public devotions, thousands of fellowworshipers will testify. Such experience of personal intercommunion with the Divine Being, by Will on will, and Mind on mind, should have taught him a higher view of Inspiration, than can be derived from the doctrine of God's immanence, alone.

It seems to us, on the contrary, that Mr. Parker made the "communication from the Divine Spirit to the Human Spirit" too direct. His Theory teaches

that the World is not nearer to our bodies than God to the Soul; "for in Him we live, and move, and have our being." As we have bodily senses to lay hold on matter and supply bodily wants, through which we