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. 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. . . . 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 Utilitarianismwhether 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. FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY, an English historian and biographer, born at Dartington, Devonshire, April 23, 1818; died October 20, 1894. He was educated at Westminster School, and at Oriel College, Oxford, and in 1842 became a Fellow of Exeter College. In 1844 he was ordained a deacon in the Established Church, and for some time was reckoned as one of the High Church party of whom J. H. Newman was a leader. At this time he wrote many biographies in the series entitled Lives of the English Saints. In 1847 he published anonymously a volume of fiction entitled Shadows of the Clouds. In 1848 appeared his Nemesis of Faith, which evinced that he had come to differ widely from the doctrines of the Anglican Church. His two works were severely censured by the authorities of the University. He then resigned his Fellowship, and was obliged to give up an appointment which he had received of a teachership in Tasmania. After this, for some years, he wrote largely for the Westminster Review and for Fraser's Magazine, becoming ultimately for a short time the editor of the latter periodical. He had in the meantime begun his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. This History extends to twelve volumes, of which the first two appeared in 1856, and the last two in 1870. In 1867 he put forth a volume of Short |