Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
living in the evil days of the Fugitive Slave Law, a devout freethinker
borne on the crest of transcendental thought--Theodore Parker became
the embodiment and epitome of the New England renaissance. More
completely perhaps than any other representative, he gathered up and
expressed the major revolutionary impulses of his time and world: the
idealistic theism implicit in the Unitarian reaction from Calvinism;
the transcendental individualism latent in the doctrine of divine
immanence; and the passion for righteousness, to make the will of God
prevail in a world where the devil quite openly kept his ledgers. He
was an eager and thorough iconoclast, impatient to break the false
images--the God of John Calvin with its slanders of human nature,
and the god of State Street with its contempt for justice--which New
England, he believed, had worshiped too long, forgetting the ideals of
the Revolutionary fathers. The mind and conscience of Boston seemed
to him stifled by the strait-jacket of respectability. Righteousness
like a fugitive slave, was driven into hiding, or must walk the open
streets with a Derringer in its pocket. As a free soul loving freedom,
and a righteous man loving righteousness, he believed a duty was laid
on him to cut away the strait-jacket, to shame the Boston that sold
the poor in the gates for a pair of shoes. He must labor to set free
the mind and conscience of Boston that they might go forth purified to
work a beneficent work in a world that is God’s and not the devil’s.
His attack was keen and unsparing; he laid on with gusto; he used
homely words; he was just rather than polite. Impatient of humbug and
self-seeking he dealt in searching criticism rather than conventional
eulogy. At his touch distinguished reputations shrank to the mean and
commonplace, and inflated dignitaries collapsed like a pricked balloon.
Intellectually honest, he spoke the truth he had been at immense
pains to gather, and in consequence those who suffered the sting of
his attack--ministers and lawyers and merchants and politicians, men
in high position, distinguished leaders of Boston society--were not
slack in crying out against him as a demagogue and agitator. Next to
Garrison he became the most hated man in New England; and something of
that contemporary hatred, fierce and unforgiving, clings to his name
still, coloring later estimates of his worth, hinting that his manners
were not on a level with his morals.[459] An extraordinarily vital and
interesting person, in short, was this Yankee preacher with his Puritan
conscience--this transcendental critic with his quiver full of facts;
one not to be ignored in casting up the accounts of the New England
renaissance.
With his memorable sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in
Christianity_, preached in May, 1841--a sermon that ranks in the
history of Unitarianism with Channing’s Baltimore sermon--the
Unitarian movement entered upon its second broad phase. It abandoned
supernaturalism established on the sufficient authority of the
Scriptures, and adopted the conception of an evolutionary theism, of
God progressively revealing himself to the developing faculties of
men and speaking through the conscience. Under Channing’s guidance
Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism--total
depravity, predestination, a God of wrath; it had shifted the emphasis
from stable will to boundless love; and by such teachings it had
captured the greater churches of Boston. By 1830 it had become securely
established as the religion of Boston respectability, with implied
bounds set to its intellectual liberalism. As the first ardor abated it
fell to defining the new orthodoxy, resting content with what already
had been won. It was against this new orthodoxy that held fast to the
old supernaturalism that Theodore Parker protested. “The defect of
the Unitarians was a profound one,” he pointed out; “ceasing to fear
‘the great and dreadful God’ of the Old Testament, they had not quite
learned to love the all-beautiful and altogether lovely [God] of the
universe.”[460] He would have no pausing of the movement of adventurous
thought, no settling back into the ruts of dogmatism; and so he threw
himself with immense energy into the work of liberating Unitarianism
from a premature orthodoxy.
For this work he was admirably equipped. The greatest scholar of
his generation of New England ministers, deep in German theology
and philosophy, with the latest results of higher criticism on his
study table, he was critically trained to separate historical fact
from ecclesiastical tradition, and establish his theology on a basis
of naturalism. He was at once scientific and transcendental. He had
translated De Wette’s _Introduction to the Old Testament_ and was
intimately acquainted with Strauss’s _Leben Jesu_. He knew the oriental
backgrounds of Hebraic thought, had studied comparative religion with
its suggestive record of taboos and fetishism, and was gathering
materials for a comprehensive history of religion from primitive times.
Intellectually acquisitive and curious, he far outran the less informed
and courageous of his Unitarian brethren. But he was far more than
a critic, he may well be accounted a religious genius. A convinced
intuitionist, he tested every authority by appeal to transcendental
experience. He frankly abandoned faith in the supernatural, with its
corollaries of miracles and its “fetishism of the Bible,” and was
far advanced in a theism that compensated for the supernatural by a
passionate love of God. Thus established in personal experience his
religion issued in conduct. Love of God was more to him than historical
faith embodied in an historical church; love to his fellow men was
more appealing than dogma. Hence the profoundly ethical quality of
his religion, warm, palpitating, generous, that set it apart from
the colder and austerer ethicism of the conventional Unitarians. The
spirituality of Channing was enriched in Parker by the ardency of his
loving nature.
The three major doctrines of his theism, as elaborated in his “Letter
to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society,” were the
infinite perfection of God, the adequacy of man to all his functions,
and the sufficiency of absolute, natural religion. In his elaboration
of these doctrines the controlling influence of transcendental thought
is everywhere apparent. A metaphysical optimism throws a golden light
on all his thinking. The trinitarian Godhead, equally with the devil,
vanishes in “the infinitely perfect God,” “immanent in the world of
matter, and in the world of spirit, the two hemispheres which to us
make up the universe”--a universe created “from a perfect motive, for a
perfect purpose, of perfect substance, and as a perfect means.” Hence
it follows in Parker’s logic, that
there must be a complete solidarity between God and the two-fold
universe which He creates. The perfect Creator is thus also a
perfect providence; indeed, creation and providence are not
objective accidents of Deity, nor subjective caprices, but the
development of the perfect motive to its perfect purpose, love
becoming a universe of perfect welfare. I have called God Father,
but also Mother ... to express more sensibility, the quality of
tender and unselfish love, which mankind associates with Mother
more than aught else beside. (“Letter,” etc., in Weiss, Vol. II,
pp. 470-471.)
The doctrine of the adequacy of man flows logically from the doctrine
of the immanence of God, but Parker was not content to rest it on
such basis alone. The conception of human perfectibility, as it
filtered down to him through different strata of thought, romantic
and idealistic, found a high sanction in his transcendentalism; but
his practical nature demanded that it be established if possible on
a scientific foundation. Anthropology must substantiate philosophy.
Parker was not convinced that it could be thus adequately established;
nevertheless he would travel the objective path as far as it might
lead. Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ was published after Parker was
seized with his fatal illness, yet in much of the latter’s thinking he
was groping his way toward some similar conception of “the unity of
life of the human race,” with its “progressive development” from “the
state of ignorance, poverty, and utter nakedness of soul and sense,
the necessary primitive conditions of the race, up to the present
civilization.” In the deep-buried scattered records of the past, slowly
being gathered together and interpreted by science, he found “proof of
time immense, wherein man, this spiritual Cosmos, has been assuming
his present condition, individual, domestic, social, and national,
and accumulating that wealth of things and thoughts which is the mark
of civilization.” The doctrine of human perfectibility might not be
capable of scientific proof, but it was more than a reasonable hope; it
was implicit in all the past.
But this progressive development does not end with us; we have
seen only the beginning; the future triumphs of the race must be
vastly greater than all accomplished yet. In the primal instincts
and automatic desires of man, I have found a prophecy that what
he wants is possible, and shall one day be actual.... What good
is not with us is before, to be attained by toil and thought, and
religious life. (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 471-472.)
Of this slowly and painfully evolving man with his expanding ideals,
religion Parker believed to be the highest ultimate expression; and
religion, as the eyes of men slowly open to larger truths, will be seen
to be answerable to the needs of daily life, to embody the highest
ideal of social excellence. The noblest religion he believed was
not supernatural, but natural. “The absolute religion which belongs
to man’s nature, and is gradually unfolded thence,” “is the idea of
humanity, dimly seen but clearly felt, which has flitted before the
pious eyes of men in all lands and many an age, and been prayed for
as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’” It is forever refashioning its ideal,
re-embodying its vision, in every devout soul, in every creative age.
“The religious history of the race is the record of man’s continual
but unconscious efforts to attain this ‘desire of all nations’”
(_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475). But unhappily every new advance soon
crystallizes in dogmas and institutions; taboos and fetishisms are
quick to re-imprison the mind that struggles to be free. Old forms,
therefore, must be daily broken to make room for evolving experience.
Religion must be free; it must rise spontaneously from the depths
of life. Christianity has suffered grievously from a fetishism of
the Bible, from its worship of the supernatural, from an ungenerous
sectarianism beloved of “ecclesiastic skeptics,” who believe “there is
no place for the Christian Church or the Bible till they have nullified
the faculties which created both, and rendered Bible-makers and
Church-founders impossible.” Every age must write a new Bible out of
its God-given instincts, permeated with the divine love that is slowly
shaping society to the divine purpose.
No more is the atheistic mocker or the ecclesiastic bigot
commissioned to stop the human race with his cry, “Cease there,
mankind, thy religious search! for, thousand-million-headed as
thou art, thou canst know nought directly of thy God, thy duty,
or thyself. Pause, and accept my authenticated word; stop, and
despair!” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475.)
It was this ethical quality of his religion that kept Theodore Parker
so sensitive to wrongs and so generous in response to the call of
social justice. His religion quickened his social conscience and
summoned him to serve the plentiful reform movements of the day. With