sermons with a loaded pistol in his desk. We can hardly realise this as a fact of civilised life in the middle of the nineteenth century. In consequence of his strong language on this subject, he was indicted, with several others, for a misdemeanour before the Court of the United States, and had prepared a defence; but, owing to some technical informality, the proceedings were quashed in their preliminary stage; and as there was a strong party in his favour, those who had instituted them were not sorry to let the matter drop. But the influence of wealth and social position set strongly against him. Even those whose theological opinions were not at the widest distance from his own, hung back from publicly recognising him, and viewed him with a certain distrust as a dangerous man. Only two years before his health broke down, he had been requested by the senior divinity class at Cambridge to deliver the customary address on the Sunday previous to their graduation; but the Theological Faculty, consisting of three Unitarian ministers, interposed their veto to prevent it. Notwithstanding his scholarly habits and devotion to study, Theodore Parker has spent a life of unremitting public activity. In addition to his regular duties as a preacher, he has constantly lectured in various parts of the Union on the subjects in which he was most desirous to excite the interest of his countrymen-the wickedness of Slavery, the dignity of Labour, the elevation of Women, and the true nature and influence of Religion. Such is a brief outline of the ministerial experience of this remarkable man, as narrated by himself.

In this rapid survey of his public life, Mr. Parker has introduced a slight and irregular sketch of his theological and philosophical system; but, writing to friends already familiar with it, he presupposes much which is not fully stated, and the want of which leaves the general reader incompetent to embrace clearly his views. His letter in this respect resembles one of the Epistles of Paul. He scatters his seed of thought on a soil prepared for it; but they who are without have first to learn what that soil is, before they can understand what fruit it will bear. From his writings of various kinds we may collect a tolerably complete idea of his fundamental principles. In his earliest work, the Discourse, they are alone exhibited in any thing like a systematic form. His later productions are chiefly occasional, and his principles are often disguised by the onesidedness and exaggeration almost inseparable from controversy. It must not be forgotten, too, that Theodore Parker is not so much a divine or a philosopher as a social reformer, and all that he has written must in fairness be judged from that point of view. He early convinced himself that there were radical deficiencies in the

churches and theology of his time, which drew after them great social evils; and he saw, as he thought, the truths, overlooked by the majority and hidden under artificial dogmas, which meet this want, and ought to be put forth, without fear of immediate consequences, by all who discern them. In the views which he thus circulated there was doubtless a large element of invaluable truth, which the world is deeply indebted to him for having brought so clearly out. But, like all men of strong faith and earnest purpose who are set on effecting a great change in public opinion, he seems to us to have grasped the very truth which he had discovered in too narrow and dogmatic a form, he seems not to have separated from it with sufficient discrimination certain assumptions with which it has no necessary connection, and in his eagerness to reform the present and secure a better future, to be at times unjust to the past. Indeed, he is not always consistent with himself.

Mr. Parker bases all religion on a grand primary intuition. He finds in the human soul, so universally as to make apparent exceptions of no weight in the general result, an instinctive sentiment of Deity, the germ of religiousness. In this primitive germ of sentiment lies folded up, according to him, the intuitive idea of God, subsequently developed by the Higher Reason. As men become self-conscious and reflective, the sense of the Infinite arises within them; and under its influence they silently expand this innate sentiment of the Divine, which their own wider experience and observation are continually enriching and enlarging, till it reaches the dimensions of a faith in Infinite Being, Absolute Causality, the Ground of all things, the Infinite of Power, Wisdom, and Love. So we arrive at the Intuitive Idea of God. It is a combined result of the primitive instinct and the necessary operation of our original faculties.* But the idea thus wrought out by the pure intellect is cold and abstract. Between this, the final conclusion of religious philosophy, and the dim sentiment of the half-conscious savage, there is an intervening stage of belief in which the imagination attempts, under various forms, to realise to itself the presence and working of a Divine Being. This Parker calls the Conception of God, to distinguish it from the Sentiment and the Idea of God. All the great popular religions which have held sway in the earth, embody some form of this conceptional faith; and as the conception corresponds to and represents the point of mental and moral advancement at which the people entertaining it have arrived, it must, from its very nature, be changing and progressive. The absolute idea of God's infinite perfection, with all the consequences legitimately deducible from it, as distinct from the

* Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion, book ii. ch. i.

mutable conception of the popular religions, is the corner-stone of Mr. Parker's theological system; and he lays on it a great, almost an exclusive, stress. With the idea of the Divine perfection he connects, as an inseparable consequence, that of absolute and inflexible law pervading the entire universe. This deduction compels him to deny, à priori, all miracle as usually understood, and all special inspiration; for these things on his theory are impossibilities, and the admission of them would subvert his fundamental idea of God. Scripture, therefore, with all its truth and beauty, is only one among many human literatures, a product of the normal working of natural human faculties, as much within the circle of unchanging and eternal law as the Principia of Newton or the Kosmos of Humboldt. It is not, and cannot be, the only, the final, and the authoritative Word of God. It exhibits various and successive forms of conceptional religion, and is at war with itself; the old Judaic dispensation being wholly irreconcilable with the gospel of love preached by Jesus Christ, though both are contained within the cover of the same book, and both are treated by Christians in general with equal regard. Mr. Parker denies the validity of the ordinary theological distinction between natural and revealed religion, between the regular and the special operations of Divine grace. He holds God to be immanent in every part of creation, and present to every human soul-but acting in and through the material and the mental worlds according to uniform and irreversible law; not, however, in any pantheistic sense, which is excluded by his definition of God, and which he distinctly repudiates. The admission of this artificial distinction between nature and revelation has been fatal, he thinks, to a free and progressive theology, and in Protestantism has only substituted one kind of spiritual despotism for another. Slavery to the Church has been exchanged for bondage to the Bible, the reverence for which among the more rigid Scripturalists has degenerated into a blind Fetish worship. To overthrow the tyranny of the Letter, and set up in its place the free service of the Spirit; to fling off all subserviency to outward and traditional authority, and to keep the mind ever open to fresh communications from the eternal Fountain of truth and right;—this, argues Parker, should be the aim of every true reformer who would raise the churches of Christendom from their present languishing condition, and make them once more vehicles of spiritual life to the world.†

See Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology, p. 106; a remarkable passage, where he declares himself anti-Hegelian.

+ See Discourse of Matters, &c. book v. ch. vi.; Theism, Atheism, &c. p. 64; Review of Dorner's work "On the Person of Christ," in the Miscellanies; and Experience as a Minister, passim.

Mr. Parker affirms, that we have intuitively through our reason" a positive idea of God," "the most positive of all ideas, implied logically in every idea that we form," "clear and distinct, not to be confounded with any other idea," "the central truth of all other ideas whatever." If by this be simply meant, that through an impulse inherent in the mind, men pursue cause after cause, till they rest in the idea of a final and absolute causality; that this first cause, from inability to conceive any limit to its nature and working, they necessarily invest with the attribute of infinity; and that in this form the Divine Idea endures as the immutable background of all human thought, and is involved as a fundamental element in every apprehension of phenomenal existence; he asserts what no one will dispute; it is nothing more than what every philosophical theist has uniformly asserted. But when he sets up this Idea in opposition to the Conception of God, which he would have it supersede and exclude, and makes it a sort of boast that "it is the corner-stone of all his theological and religious teaching, the foundation, perhaps, of all that is peculiar in his system," he assumes more than he is entitled to, and more than even his own concessions will allow. He admits himself that this idea of the pure reason is "cold and abstract," not answering "to this complex nature of ours;" that it is made up, in fact, of successive negations, a denial of all thought and all affection in God, such as we can alone conceive them. Nothing, indeed, remains, after this rigid elimination of all positive elements, but the faintest outline of metaphysical definition, which seems to us to include within it a simple vacuum, pale and colourless, till the warm flush of our human affections is shed on it, reflected from the conception of what is purest and noblest within ourselves. Only thus does God become a Reality to us, sustaining the closest vital relationship to our humanity. With so entire an exclusion of the conceptional element as we understand Mr. Parker to contend for, we do not see how, at the end of his analysis of the Idea, he can consistently get at its two most important ingredients, Knowledge and Love.

The humanising of the conception of God, which Mr. Parker shrinks from as a degrading limitation of the Divine Idea, we, on the contrary, within limits to be shortly specified, regard as the necessary condition of all knowledge which can act with any effect on our moral nature, and of recognising in any intelligible sense the personality of Deity. We can only set out from ourselves. We are to ourselves the first and nearest of realities. We rise to the Divine from and through the Human. Here

*Discourse, &c. pp. 150-153, third edition. Experience, &c. p. 78.

Discourse, &c. p. 156.

alone, in our own deep, indestructible self-consciousness, has reason any footing of permanence and solidity. Instinctive feeling is the germ of religiousness. Out of this are evolved successive conceptions, less and less unworthy of their object, as human nature itself expands. Beyond these, and excited by them, the philosophic reason awakes. But its object is not to annihilate the positive elements sent up from the inner depths of the soul; rather, by a wise employment of the great abstractions of the Infinite and the Absolute, to clear away from them all needless limitations, and open before them a boundless space for future expansion. It is true, the religious faculty may embody in its conception of Deity the lower as well as the higher attributes of human nature; and when, as in the earlier stages of social development, the passions are in the ascendant, and the imagination is their minister, if visible representation be not, as in the Hebrew decalogue, sternly prohibited, a gross humanity will of course reflect itself in its visions of the Divine, and give birth to an anthropomorphic idolatry. A Baal, a Thammuz, a Melcarth, and an Astarte will be the result. But the instinct of progress is ever active in our nature. Religious reverence finds an object in higher qualities. The spirit of wisdom and the spirit of beauty, so widely diffused through all things, are at length personified in an Athene and an Apollo, and draw towards them the worship and the aspiration of mankind. Nor does the process of spiritual development stop here. Men transfer to God what they most value in humanity. Its highest development leads up to Him, and furnishes the point of view for contemplating Him, though it is seen to fall infinitely below Him. There is felt to be something more excellent and glorious than wisdom or power, something which can alone give to these attributes any title to reverence or trust-Truth, Justice, Mercy, Rectitude, Holiness, and Love. A perception of the eternal and unchangeable worth of these qualities clings to the deepest consciousness of our spiritual being, and becomes clearer and distincter with its expansion. We could not lose it entirely without ceasing to be men. And these qualities we send up into our conception of God, with a perfect confidence that they are His (though in a way and to a degree infinitely transcending our present comprehension), because we feel there is, and must be, an affinity between our spirits and the Father of Spirits. The profound sense of dependence and responsibility which the most reckless unbelief cannot entirely shake off, would be something contradictory and inexplicable without this close moral relationship between us and Him. It is through the inspirations of conscience, then, though they can only suggest a human conception, without giving the infinite idea, that we rise up to an