THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
met in Music Hall and reached a membership of 7,000. In Boston he became a heroic leader of the antislavery crusade and a fervent advocate of temperance and prison reform and the education of women. Absorption in these social aims and pastoral work together with frequent lecturing throughout New England overtaxed an intellectual power which might have made an epoch in theological scholarship. His most exact work was an amplified revision in English of De Wette's work named above (1843). His intellectual toil amid distracting conditions was unparalleled and he was a prolific author of pamphlets, books, and articles in periodicals. Hemorrhage of the lungs compelled him to end his labor at the age of forty-eight. In Feb., 1859, he went to Vera Cruz and thence to Switzerland. After a winter in Rome he went to Florence, where he died and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
Though unable to appreciate the motives of his conservative opponents, Parker thoroughly understood the genesis and bearings of his own views, as is shown by his lectures on " Transcendentalism " and the " Theological and Philosophical Development of New England " (Matter and Spirit in Centenary edition of his Works). New England thought had been controlled by sensational philosophy (" the original sin of the Anglo-Saxon people," Matter and Spirit, p. 353), and therefore rested religion on supernatural miraculous revelation. Political emphasis upon the inherent rights and the trustworthiness of man, the dissolvent effect of rationalism on dogma, and the growth of democracy produced the Unitarian and Universalist movements without producing at first a new philosophic system. Later the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Cousin, and Cudworth generated in minds like Channing and Emerson the conviction that man has an inherent spiritual element, nonmiraculous in its origin and operation. In opposition to this fresh thought the common Unitarianism, which had been simply an Arminian Biblicism, began to emphasize the miraculous historical evidences. Parker championed the new idealism without assenting to all the extravagances of the transcendental movement. Rich in historical knowledge he analyzed the total accretions of Christianity to an interior essence. This is identical with the essential religion of Jesus, whom Parker exalted with glowing eloquence (" the highest representative of God we know ") while he pointed out historic limitations in the ideas of Jesus and rejected all the traditional Christologies. Like the German mystics he saw in Jesus the supreme instance of man's experience of God, an experience not confined to Christianity though not elsewhere equalled in degree or in purity of expression. Hence Parker identified the essential Christianity seen in Jesus with " absolute religion." By this he did not mean a universal religion reached by generalizing elements common to all historic religions (though cf . Chadwick's Theodore Parker, p. 100) but the purest expression of the religious consciousness (Discourse, pp. 21 3, 214) as that is ascertained by abstract analysis (pp. 6-7) and self-inspection (ib. p. 5). Dormant or active in varying degrees, there belongs to every
human being a specific religious consciousness irreducible and ultimate, acting spontaneously from diverse provocations, and in this religious consciousness the idea of God is immediately given to experience. Following Schleiermacher, Parker described this consciousness as a " mysterious sentiment of something unbounded " and the idea of God as simply the power which is the correlate to a sense of dependence.
But Parker did not adhere to this minimum relation of " dependence " and " power," and, using the terms of his own developed faith, described the religious sense as a reverence which normally culminates in trust, hope, love (ib. p. 32), or a voluntary obedience to the will of God. Similarly the " idea " of superhuman power given in the sense of dependence is soon transformed into the " conception " of God, " an infinite of power, wisdom, justice, love, whereon we may repose, wherein we may confide " (ib. pp. 141-142). While the term personality is defective as applicable only to finite human beings, impersonality could be used only to express a transcendence of limitations in the ground of all personal existence. " Infinite knowing must be his " (ib. p. 148). A sermon on " Communion with God " (Ten Sermons, 1853) describes a personal communion rising to rapturous blessedness, though without the mystic's ecstasy or absorption into deity. Parker often used the symbol of motherhood (Theodore Parker's Prayers, 1862) to denote the tenderness and unselfishness of God's love to man, and he opposed to the popular preaching of Calvinism an eloquent insistence on the infinite beneficence of God's character and providence: " love becoming a universe of perfect welfare." This optimism did not check Parker's impetuous and heroic conflict with social evils. Developing this conception of a perfect self-expression of God in the world, he championed with ardor the view of divine immanence in the world of matter and in the world of spirit, " while God yet transcends both and is limited by neither " (Weiss, Life, vol. i., Appendix, p. 470). Mere pantheism he regarded as " irreligious naturalism " (Discourse, p. 174, note). Reasoning from the theory of immanence and from the experiences of religious communion (204) he opposed to the traditional view of inspiration an affirmation of universal inspiration varying in degree with racial and individual capacity, but he did not clearly define the relation of such inspiration to man's own activity. The coldness with which these views were received in his own time and neighborhood has been succeeded by widespread sympathy in the churches of his communion and many others. Francis A. Christie.
Bibliography: Parker's Works, ed. Frances Power Cobbe, appeared in 14 vols., London, 1863-70; the centenary edition, Boston, 1907 sqq., contains hitherto unpublished material. An excellent selection from his writings is contained in Views of Religion, introduction by J. F. Clarke, ib. 1890. The best biography is J. W. Chadwick's Theodore Parker, Boston, 1900 (contains good bibliography) Consult further: J. Weiss, Life and Correspondence oj Theodore Parker, 2 vols., New York, 1864; A. Reville, Theodore Parker, sa vie et ses muvres, Paris, 1865, Eng, transl., Life and Writings of Theodore Parker, London 1877; O. B. Frothingham, Life of Theodore Parker, Boston, 1874; S. Johnson, Theodore Parker, Chicago, 189U