and sometimes blinded him to facts that even thrust themselves upon his attention. He was sadly lacking in reverence, as also in that subtle sympathy which so appreciates the attitude of other minds as, in a measure, to compensate for the lack of an instinct of respect. His works are disfigured with phraseology of a justly offensive kind, audacious and contemptuous. His later style is ordinarily inferior to his earlier, and marks the degeneracy of an intellect that breaks away from laws, being characterized by a license that is not liberty, and made weak by over-much strength. This vigorous and independent writer was by no means an original thinker. His arguments against Christianity are put in his own dress, indeed, and with rare audacity and eloquence; they are fairly his own, and yet are not new. We do not recollect a single original contribution, on his part, to the munitions of the adversaries. Abounding in forcible popular appeals and in telling paragraphs for popular use, his books contain little careful reasoning; and it may be said with utmost exactness, that he has proved nothing. Indeed, it was not his nature to prove, but to assert. He was a dogmatist, and of the most truculent sort. He puts forth slight claim upon our reverence as a philosopher, still less as a theologian; but stands strongly forth a popular orator and declaimer; a rhapsodist, with skill to open the fountains of wrath, and to stir the multitude to mutiny; but as a spiritual teacher, a guide and shepherd of souls, untrustworthy, and, from the very habit of his mind, incompetent. Mr. Parker gives us, in his letter to the members of his society, an enumeration of the projects entering into his plan of life; from which, as also from his published works, it appears that, while assuming for his main task the subversion of Christian ideas and the establishment of a theology more widely diverse from the popular system, as he says, than Christianity from Judaism or from Paganism, he intended to take in hand the questions of poverty, drunkenness, prostitution, and crime (prison discipline and the reforVOL. XVIII. No. 69. 5 mation of criminals), the "education and guidance of the poorer Irish," and slavery:— a plan redolent of youthful enthusiasm and ambition, but more extensive than a man of sound discretion would have undertaken, and in its most important departments too lofty for his powers. The reformer of philosophy needs, himself, to be a profound and exhaustive thinker; the creator of a new and better theology must be a divine; the bringer in of a higher phase of religion must be a man of profound reverence, piety, and devotion, comprehending and presenting the results of religious speculation and life in practical forms, and whose rational instinct is superior to other men's reasoning, and whose spiritual intuition so far supersedes experience, that he begins where many others, after long toil, are happy to end. But Mr. Parker was none of these. Nor does he appear to have taken in the greatness of these several tasks sufficiently for the due comprehension of their difficulty. Had he appreciated the full grandeur of such enterprises, and reflected upon what the achievement of any one of them involved, he would have thought the easiest too difficult for one man's strength and life. As it was, with his lack of method and of carefulness, and with his haste and passion and unfairness, he accomplished little, less than at first seems, far less than his followers think, or himself thought, infinitely less than his desire and expectation. Especially is this true of his negative work, his assaults upon religious belief. Here, rose the massive walls of the Christian theology, built with honest and careful hands, toiling in pious seriousness through eighteen centuries, its plans wrought over by able and conscientious architects, its several parts fitted and cemented together with devout painstaking, and its whole the expression of the Christian experience of the truth. Up comes our errant knight, with beating drum and clanging trumpet, and thinks, seemingly, that by one brave rush, these ancient walls, so deeply founded and so strongly cemented, will be made to disappear; and that, directly, he will have others reared in their place, loftier, and stronger, and fairer to look upon; while at the same time he is taking in hand such playthings as the institution which holds four millions of men in hereditary bondage, and is throttling the several hydras and gorgons dire which infest society and the state. Let us thank him for his benevolent wishes; and let us not smile unkindly at their extravagance, or at the folly of his no-methods; nor of the wrong that he did, let us speak too harshly, for he has, in reality, wrought much less harm. than most have been wont to suppose. It is not by such attacks as these that the Christian Doctrine is to be subverted. It will stand until a better can be put in its place. Mr. Parker has not diminished the strength of evangelic Christendom; and the force of his wild assault has mainly spent itself upon the outlying border-sects that verge upon the broad waste of Infidelity. The howling storm has passed by; and only rotten or rootless trees have been levelled in its path. Our author's admirers seem to think of him as of some great headland pushing loftily out into the stream of time and turning the current of events; whereas he may rather be likened to a sunken and still sinking rock, around which, once, the waves stormed, but over which the steady tide is flowing, with a ripple and a murmur still, but these each year diminishing, so that at last, nothing more than a feeble eddy shall remind us of the transitoriness of denial. Theodore Parker has gone, and his influence has mainly departed with him. Personal friends will still cherish the memory of his noble qualities and his pleasant companionship; those already committed to his errors, or strongly inclined to them, will be confirmed in their misbelief; and a few youthful minds will, for some time yet, be led astray by reading his books; but these books are not such as will bear a careful study, are not of permanent value, are not destined to be accepted as sound authority, to be consulted as monitors of the soul in its eternal interests, or as oracles of political or of social philosophy. They are essentially ephemeral. Mr. Parker spoke for the hour. While he was speaking, he was powerful; but his speech lacked the wisdom that makes language immortal. There remains, indeed, a last act in this tragedy of thought; for there are deductions from Mr. Parker's theories, which he has, himself, been at pains elaborately to refute, but which have already been made by some of those who have accepted his teachings, and will certainly be made by others. One depth more opens at the feet of them that have wound their way down into the enchanted hollow whither he so boldly beckons; and a denial of a personal God and of immortality, must break at last the thin crust, and let his venturesome disciples down into gulfs of Atheism. We have but one life here, and that is very precious to us. Nor to us alone; a human life is in itself a precious thing, and no soul in which the sense of humanity dwells can see a life thrown away, without a deep, uprising sorrow. Here was a man who thought that he was doing a great work, for the welfare of his kind and for the glory of God; he meant to do it, he had the strength to do it, he labored hard to do it; he bore contumely, he was stung with the grief of separation from those whom he honored, and of whom he had hoped honor in return; he was wounded in the house of them that he had been wont to esteem his friends, he died before his time, worn down with over much work, and the chafing of his spirit, — all this, and yet the final result of his life, so far as recognizable now, is, an injury done to religion and little good to the cause of either liberty or morality. - Had this man, gifted with the rare faculty of making the people hear him, risen to an appreciation of the vastness and the sacredness of the dread themes that he discussed, so as to have been led to treat them with the tenderness, the sobriety, and the carefulness which they justly claim; had he duly measured the value of past labors, rightly estimated the difficulty and peril of attempts at improvements, felt less acutely the necessity of doing a great work, himself, and been penetrated so profoundly with faith in the divine sovereignty, as to participate, as a man may, in the divine patience; had he lived and labored in such a spirit and method, a far nobler work would he have wrought, and a more honorable record would he have left in the annals of his country and of the church. But his natural tendencies and his whole education were so against him, that he failed of the spiritual insight which is essential to the true "divine,” and which would have put him in possession of the central meaning of the Christian system, and have shown him that it is all that he understood by "the absolute religion" and more, to wit: the absolute religion in a shape to be vitally apprehended and appropriated by mankind, so as to be the means of transforming the marred nature of our sinful race back into the image of the glory of its first estate, of God's eternal archetype. These causes of error were greatly aggravated, also, by that antagonism into which his opinions and the spirit of his advocacy. brought him, and which irresistibly intensified his faults. Let the mantle of charity be thrown over all; and after fitly recognizing what it is our duty to see and to declare, let every soul cherish thoughts of tenderness. Well did the Apostle pray without ceasing, for his brethren, that God would give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Christ. God grant it to us all. ARTICLE II. THE THEOLOGY OF SOPHOCLES. BY REV. WILLIAM S. TYLER, D. D., PROFESSOR IN AMHERST COLLEGE. [Concluded from Vol. XVII., p. 619.] Antigone. In its leading characters, the Antigone bears a strong resemblance to the Electra. The central figure in each, on whom all eyes are fastened, and who gives name to the piece, is a young woman, who stands up for the right, in opposi |