most offensive comparisons. When we read such passages as the following, we do not wonder to hear of orthodox divines meeting in solemn conclave, to pray that the Almighty would darken his understanding and confound his speech, that he might no more breathe forth such horrible blasphemies.

6

"Such ill-entreated souls often grow idiotic in their religious sense, or else therein stark-mad, and penned up in churches and other asylums, mope and gibber in their hideous bereavement, thinking man is totally depraved,' and God a great ugly devil, an almighty cat, who worries his living prey, tormenting them before their time, and will forever tear them to pieces in the never-ending agony of hell."*

Fastidious and sensitive natures will be repelled by a certain vehemence and exaggeration both of speech and act with which Theodore Parker is on many occasions justly chargeable. But some onesidedness of thought, and an undue tenacity of will, are almost essential to the work of a reformer. When deep-rooted errors and evils have to be torn up and cast away, the concentrated force of a strong mind must be directed against them. The efficiency of its stroke would be enfeebled if it were held back by scrupulous consideration for the feelings of parties interested, or by fear of possible consequences. When in after times men perceive the good that has resulted from this unsparing riddance, they are not disposed to take too exact an account of a few harsh words and vehement measures, wrung from an earnest mind in the exciting crisis of some great action. Who would now endorse all that Milton and Luther wrote and did in the heat of controversy? Yet we forget these errors of temper and judgment in the splendid results of their struggle for truth and freedom. To the last of these great men Mr. Parker seems to us to bear some resemblance. He has the same massive strength of intellect and will; the same high trust in God, and fearlessness of consequences; the same poetical temperament; the same devotional fervour; the same scholarly habits of mind and reverence for learning; and withal, under a similar roughness of outward bearing, the same loving and affectionate nature within. The wide difference of their position and work need not blind us to an essential affinity in their genius. Mr. Parker's appetite for knowledge is insatiable. He is indeed a perfect helluo librorum. His library is said to be the richest private collection of books in Boston. Considering the constant toil and struggle of his public life, it is wonderful how he should have found time to read so much. We suspect, however, from some indications in his writings, that his learning is more varied and comprehensive

Fourth Sermon to Progressive Friends, p. 94.

than exact. But he has gained from it a breadth of view that has been of eminent service to him in his particular vocation of a religious reformer. Perhaps no man in America is more extensively read in the great philosophers and theologians of Germany; yet the result has been a type of character very different from the ordinary Gelehrte of that very learned country. This has arisen from the constant application of Parker's learning to life, and his daily contact with the realities of the world. With him learning has not evaporated in refined doubts and recondite speculation, but has nursed a profound faith, and a fervid yet practical humanity. The fact is worth notice, as pointing to the obvious cure of much of that aimless and unfruitful scepticism by which the learned intellect of Germany has been so deeply infected. Freedom of thought generates mental disease, unless it is balanced by freedom of action. We think it fortunate for America, that the man who in future generations will doubtless be looked up to as one of her greatest reformers and instructors, should possess such scholarly tastes and attainments. The example will exert a salutary and refining influence on her future civilisation. Mr. Parker has filled up a failing part in the preliminary agency of the great and good Dr. Channing. Channing awakened the spiritual life, and diffused great principles, which found a reception at once, as they are still finding all over the world, in every open mind and pure heart. But he left untouched the difficult question of the connection of those principles with the sacred writings which he accepted as the depository of true religion. He did not possess the particular kind of learning which would have fitted him for the task. But the task could not ultimately be evaded. Sooner or later it must be accomplished; and Parker undertook it. That he has solved the problem which it presents, none will affirm. That he has often been rash, and wanting in thoroughness and discrimination, all must admit. But he entered on his work with courage and honesty; and he has given an impulse to theological inquiry which can never be reversed, and out of which future scholars will draw more complete and satisfactory results. With the strongest popular sympathies, and a devoted attachment to freedom in the largest sense, and thrown not unfrequently into vehement antagonism with the rich and educated classes of his countrymen, Parker's scholarly habits of mind, and historical breadth of view, have always kept him from stooping to the low arts and the levelling tendencies of the ordinary democrat. His nature is at bottom essentially noble and gentlemanlike; his spirit lofty and pure. In his harshest outbursts of passionate indignation, you never discern a trace of what is mean and vulgar. Altogether his

cast of mind is historical; and in this he seems to us distinguished from Francis Newman. Inferior to Mr. Newman in logical acuteness and subtlety, and perhaps in tenderness and refinement of spiritual taste, he has the advantage over him in the poetical and historical faculty; and this mental temperament, combined with his practical experience, has given him on the whole, notwithstanding some extravagances of expression, a sound view of the meaning and value of the Bible, and secured his substantial faith in Christianity. But it is the moral and religious qualities of his nature which constitute his distinguishing excellence his courage, his honesty, his perfect truthfulness, his inflexible justice, his comprehensive humanity, his affectionateness and simplicity, his almost childlike trust in God and assurance of immortality. When the controversies in which he has been involved have passed away, and the passions of which he has been the object are forgotten, these qualities will shine out unobscured in the remembrance of his noble and heroic character, and find a lasting place in the love and reverence of all good men.

What should be the bearing of Christian churches towards this man of devout and Christian soul, of holy, earnest, and Christian life? The majority of his native churches have already answered this question, in the wrong sense, as we think, and to the injury of their own highest influence on the world. They have denied his title to the Christian name; and some whose avowed and hereditary principle had been his earliest stimulus to think freely, and with whom he might naturally have claimed a denominational affinity, have refused to hold out to him the right hand of fellowship and call him brother. He stands, therefore, in great measure alone among the churches of his country, recognised here and there by some insulated and independent spirit out of all Christian persuasions, and provoking inevitably by sheer contrast the invidious inquiry, whether the work of Christianity is the most efficiently discharged by those who assume as of right, or by those who are denied, the Christian name. It will be a fatal day for the existing churches, when numbers of brave, earnest, and devoted men, who faithfully represent the spirit, and are laboriously accomplishing the mission, of the primitive Gospel, shall be excluded from their communion in consequence of some imagined technical informality in the terms of their admission. Good men have said

to us, "We wish we could acknowledge Mr. Parker as a Christian; there is so much in him that we truly admire." We doubt not, the difficulty is conscientiously experienced; and all honour be to conscientiousness in every form. We are sure, there are many who would gladly open their arms wider, if

they were not kept back by a feeling, that in doing so they would let Christianity escape from their grasp. The question is now becoming a vital one, and it deserves serious consideration, whether we do not gratuitously hamper ourselves by too narrow a definition of Christian belief, and whether the richness and freedom of the Christian life are not injuriously hemmed in by the artificial constructions that we have set up for its defence. Arguments are used in books on the Evidences which do not appear in the oldest Apologies. Even at the time of the Reformation, and in some of the earliest Protestant Confessions, we find the work of the Spirit in converting the soul more insisted on as the main thing, than the acceptance of proofs which the learned devised, and only the learned can appreciate. The scrupulousness of theology has raised difficulties which an open and natural faith would never have felt, had the simple message of Jesus been left to produce its unaided impression on the human heart. The consequence is that we think more of a certain class of evidence, arbitrarily selected, than of the one only important conclusion; we attach more value to the process than to the result. Many a man, barred by these artificial hindrances, halts at the threshold, and never enters the temple. Surely, if he gets to Christ, has his spirit, and does his work, we ought not to be very particular about the way. For ourselves, we practically solve the question thus: we regard every man as a Christian who sees in Christ himself an expression of true religiousness,-of the true relation between God and man; and whose own life and temper are such, that Christ, were he now on earth, doing his work amidst the altered relations of our modern society, would accept him as a disciple and fellow-worker. Some persons ask, Why should men be so anxious to keep the Christian name? There are good and devout men outside the Church's pale. Why can we not recognise each other on each side of the line without all this sensitiveness about a common denomination? The question implies a strange unacquaintance with some of the deepest feelings of the heart. They who put it, little know how dear is the Christian name to many whose speculative belief widely diverges from their own-how dear are all the associations of the Christian Church-how cherished the memory of its prayers, its hymns, its ordinances-how sweet the thought of spiritual communion with Christ, and with thousands of good and holy men who have lived in his faith and wrought in his spirit through the long conflict of the ages with human guilt and woe. And to be shut out of this blessed converse and companionship as aliens and intruders, and classed externally with those who are perhaps hostile to the very cause for which we would gladly live and die, is in our

view a great spiritual injustice, which finds its only excuse in the blindness of those who would perpetrate it, to its real character.

The world is slowly opening its eyes to the necessity of greater breadth and comprehensiveness in the bonds of Christian communion; and these liberal tendencies are not confined to any denomination. Nothing wider in principle, or nobler in spirit, can be conceived than the recommendation of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, at this time the most popular orthodox preacher in America, in his Life Thoughts: "You are to accept as a Christian every one whose life and disposition are Christlike, no matter how heretical the denomination may be to which he belongs. Wherever you find faith, and righteousness, and love, and joy in the Holy Ghost, you are to look upon them as the stamped coin of Christ's kingdom, and as a legal tender from God to you. The immediate Future of Christianity, especially in its more liberal and learned forms, seems to us to depend on the right solution of this question. Men who are really attached to their Religion, and can separate its substance from its forms, will not endure to see the science, the earnestness, the patriotism, and the philanthropy of the age drifting away from the Church, and powerfully organising themselves for good, in an attitude, if not of actual hostility, yet of absolute indifference to its institutions. We do not object to more limited clusters of fellow-workers, held together by a common conviction, and attracted by similarity of taste and sentiment, or coincidence of immediate object, for wherever there is the earnestness of strong conviction, there will be fruitful working; but what we do desire to see realised, as the great want of this age, is the cheerful recognition of each other by all these separate groups of associated workers, as the inheritors of a common name and a common mission,-making Christianity, not what it now too generally is, an obstructive and dividing agency, but the healing and restorative principle of society; giving men power in their several positions, and from their different points of view, to cooperate for the extirpation of falsehood, ignorance, and wrong, and the establishment of a universal reign of knowledge, purity, and love. The foes to human peace and progress are so many and so malignant, that they require to be met by the hearty union of all good men. The Church, by which we mean the visible embodiment in worship and communion of the spiritual principle in humanity represented by Christ, has always gained strength by comprehension, and lost it by exclusion. The reason is obvious. Men can only enter into large associations through the attractive force of what is fundamental and essential. They separate into sects and schools on what is unessential and accidental. • Quoted in the Proceedings of Progressive Friends for 1858, p. 116.