This is the same man who was to write President Fillmore, “No man out of the political arena is so much hated in Massachusetts as myself” (Weiss 1864, II:100). Because of his religious conviction, this man with such an intense need for affection was destined to become bitterly despised.
Parker’s quest for religious truth resulted in an early rejection of Calvinism and a serious qualification of Unitarianism of the time. Parker’s earliest recorded protest against traditional religious forms was at the age of two and a half. It was the occasion of his christening, and a larger concourse of friends than usual made the event impressive. As the water was sprinkled on his head, however, little Theodore vigorously fought off the dismayed clergyman and lustily shouted, “Oh, don’t!”
Of more serious character was the effect of the doctrine of eternal damnation. Having heard the doctrine expounded from a near-by pulpit, little Parker lay in bed for hours weeping in terror and praying until sleep gave him repose. As a young man, Parker attended meetings of the famous Calvinist preacher, Lyman Beecher. “The better I understood [Beecher’s theology],” said Parker, “the more self-contradictory, unnatural and hateful did it seem. A year of his preaching about finished all my respect for the Calvinist scheme of theology” (Weiss 1864, I:57).
So, Parker, confirmed in his Unitarianism, went to Harvard Divinity School and entered the Unitarian ministry. To understand Parker’s qualification of Unitarianism we should place it in the perspective of Unitarian history. Under the influence of William Ellery Channing and his famous “Baltimore Sermon” Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism such as the Trinity, a wrathful God, total depravity, and pre-destination, but still held that the Scriptures were the final authority. Although interpreted by reason, the Scriptures were considered a source of revelation external to man.
After the initial thrust by Channing, Unitarians had little interest in going further. They had achieved a degree of respectability that felt good. They fell to defending a new orthodoxy based on the authority of the Scriptures. The creative period had passed. Parker characterized the situation this way:
Alas! After many a venturous and profitable cruise, while in sight of port, the winds all fair, the little Unitarian bark, o’ermastered by its doubts and fears, reverses its course, and sails into dark, stormy seas, where no such craft can live. (Weiss 1864, II:483)
Then, on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his “Divinity School Address” to an astonished convocation of Harvard Divinity School students and faculty. Emerson disputed the final authority of the Scriptures since they were a source of revelation external to man and insisted that all knowledge of truth must come from within each man through intuition. A year later Andrews Norton answered Emerson in his speech before the alumni of the Divinity School, “The Latest Form of Infidelity.” And, on May 19, 1841, a day of infamy for orthodox Unitarians, Parker with transcendentalist sympathies responded with his well-known sermon at the ordination of Charles C. Shackford, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.”
Parker was now a marked man. Fellow Unitarians cancelled and avoided pulpit exchanges because of “ill health,” “home engagements,” and “frequent absence from their desks” (Frothingham 1874, 152). Other ministers refused to serve with him on committees, to attend the same funeral or wedding, to sit on the same bench at public meetings, to remain in the same public apartment, to trade at the same bookstore, to reply to his letters, or even to return his salutation on the street. Parker sadly said, “I see men stare at me in the street, and point, and say, ‘That is Theodore Parker,’ and look at me as if I were a murderer” (Frothingham 1874, 345).
In 1842 Parker published his Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, the most thorough statement of his transcendentalist qualification of Unitarianism. He believed that man has the ability to perceive truth directly, that God is in the soul of man and man in the soul of God, that the term “sin” is tainted and of little value, that the Bible should be read as Plato, Seneca or any other book, and that Jesus was human, a religious genius as Homer was a poetical genius.
This was too much for the Unitarians, and they summoned Parker before the Boston Association of Ministers, of which he was a member. With few exceptions, members of the Association criticized Parker, exhibiting the orthodoxy and disregard for freedom of speech that then characterized Unitarianism. Some attacked his works as “vehemently deistical,” others as “subversive of Christianity.” Chandler Robbins asked that Parker withdraw from the Association. The Unitarians, however, failed to intimidate him, for despite the criticism of that meeting and the abuse to follow for the rest of Parker’s life, he refused to withdraw or retreat. A typical sentiment about Parker was voiced by a Boston layman:
I would rather see every Unitarian congregation in our land dissolved and every one of our churches occupied by other denominations or razed to the ground than to assist in placing a man entertaining the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits. (Angoff 1927, 85)
Disapproval was most desperate, however, from clergymen of even more orthodox persuasions, who publicly prayed against him:
O Lord! Send confusion and distraction into his study this afternoon, and prevent his finishing his labor for tomorrow . . . confound him, so that he shall not be able to speak. O Lord! Put a hook in this man’s jaws. . . . O Lord! If this man will persist in speaking in public, induce the people to leave him, and come up and fill this house. . . . Lord, we know that we cannot argue him down; and, the more we say against him, the more will the people flock after him, and the more will they love and revere him. O Lord! What shall be done for Boston if thou dost not take this and some other matters in hand? (Frothingham 1874, 495)
The Liberator once called Parker “more of the hyena than the jackal” (Liberator, July 18, 1856) and a Rev. Mr. Burnham said, “Hell never vomited forth a more wicked and blasphemous monster than Theodore Parker” (Frothingham 1874, 495).
All this hatred and abuse for a man so much needing approval and acceptance simply because of a difference in theological belief—a paradox, indeed! We are not to assume, however, that Theodore Parker stood passive before such an affront. He returned the fire. It is a further paradox that this man who was so gentle with the children became such a terrible opponent. It is a paradox that, despite his sensitivity to abuse from others, Parker was sometimes insensitive to his sarcastic and bitter denunciations of them. More often, however, the sensitivity of Parker succumbed to melancholy. O. B. Frothingham, perhaps Parker’s best biographer, wrote:
Parker was brave; but, as has been said already, he was tender, with an immense capacity for suffering. He could battle long and well; but to battle alone cost him dear. He wanted love; and they from whom he had the best right to expect it failed him. (Frothingham 1874, 175)
When he preached the Thursday lecture in 1840 and was accosted afterwards by an abusive colleague, Parker “left him, not in anger, but in sorrow, and went weeping through the street” (Weiss 1864, I:142). Suddenly Parker realized, “I am alone—ALL ALONE!” (Frothingham 1874, 172). His loneliness sometimes gave way to depression. His periods of depression were almost never evident to others, but were occasionally expressed in letters, as in this one to his friend, S. P. Andrews: “You detected something in my bearing which argued that there was unhappiness, at least discontent of some sort, in the wind. I admit its existence in a greater extent than you imagine; but of the cause, not a word” (Frothingham 1874, 94–95). Usually, however, his feelings of depression were poured into his mighty journals, of which many a line were “blotted with his manly tears” (Chadwick 1900, 208). At places his prose becomes poetry:
I