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Theodore Parker and the Unitarian Spirit The Reverend Dr. Terence H. Ellen February 27, 2005 Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Reading: Henry Steel Commager, Theodore Parker, Yankee Crusader, Beacon Press, 1947, (UUA, 1960 paper), 152-155. (Three copies in our library.) What had they in common, these reformers, men and women, rich and poor, educated and illiterate? What was it that persuaded Edmund Quincy to preside over the Chardon Street Convention and gave Channing patience to listen to the rantings of Abby Folsom and Sylvanus Brown? What was it that sent Parker and Ripley hot-footing it out to Groton to participate in the wrangling of the Millerites and the Come-outers? What was the magic of Brook Farm that it stirred the hearts of the sanest of men and made them tolerant even of Fruitlands and of Hopedale? Bronson Alcott had made a failure of everything but life, but no matter how fantastic his notions everyone loved him, for he proved the Dignity of Man. Margaret Fuller was as dangerous as Fanny Wright, but all the women of Boston flocked to her Conversations, and Emerson was glad to contribute to her biography. Horace Mann succumbed to phrenology and Thomas Appleton flirted with spiritualism; Parker was fascinated by mesmerism and Emerson avowed himself a Swedenborgian and took lessons from Sampson Reed. Josiah Quincy thought well of the Mormons and admired Joseph Smith, and Ellis Gray Loring circulated petitions on behalf of Abner Kneeland, who was a convicted atheist and a Thomsonian too. Francis Jackson gave refuge to female abolitionists, Higginson hobnobbed with Lucy Stone and Amelia Bloomer, and Phillips championed the Woman’s Movement as the greatest reform in history. Orestes Brownson founded a Society for Christian Progress, Robert Rantoul labored with Seth Parker for the ten-hour day, and John Allen of Brook Farm organized a New England Workingmen̓s Association, while Channing preached socialism from the pulpit and Parker congratulated the Shakers that they alone had solved the problem of industrialism. Charles Sumner enlisted with Garrison and Elihu Burritt in the war against war, and William Ladd projected a plan for a World Congress of Nations. Pierpont worked for temperance and Neal Dow for prohibition; wealthy Reverend John Sargent and poor John Augustus tried to stamp out prostitution; Dorothea Dix forced legislatures to ameliorate the lot of the insane, and Samuel Gridley Howe gave light to the blind. Phillips spoke for penal reform and Parker described the criminal as the victim, not the foe, of society, and James Russell Lowell rebuked the aged Wordsworth for his defense of capital punishment: And always ‘tis the saddest sight to see An old man faithless in Humanity. What had they in common—what but a belief in the perfectibility of man and in the doctrine of progress? Emerson had put it well, Emerson who spoke for them, however reluctantly: “The power which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform is the conclusion that there is an infinite worthiness in man, which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms are the removing of some impediment.” They were all transcendentalists, though they read not Coleridge and knew not Kant. They were all idealists, howsoever they rationalized their emotions or tested them by experience. The ability of man to attain divinity, that was the point of departure. It was assumption, as Rousseau̓s “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains” was an assumption— as magnificent, as revolutionary in its logical consequences. For if Man is a God, how is it we find him a brute? If man was born: free, how is it we find him in spiritual chains? The Calvinists met this issue squarely enough: they rejected the assumptions. But transcendentalists took no stock in Original Sin or the Downfall of Man. They knew that men were born not only free but to the pursuit of happiness, and no matter how sharply Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips might take issue with Mr. Parker̓s theology, they too were transcendentalists at heart. No need to go to Saint Augustine for the City of God— nor to Fourier, either. No need to escape from reality into the past, or to disown the present and go off by yourself to some Brook Farm or Walden Pond. What better place to build the Heavenly City than here in Boston? And what if the spirit of Hunkerism ruled the town? What if dogma was preached from the pulpits and servility taught in the schools and one third of the people were from County Cork and went to Mass? What if the merchants built their proud houses on Beacon Hill while the slums grew apace in South Boston and the salt tide flooded the cellars of the ramshackle tenements, bringing disease and death? What if there was a grog shop on every corner and Deer Island was crowded with wretched harlots; what if the law made criminals and then killed them, and Negroes were hunted in the streets of Boston and sent back to the cotton fields of the South? These things did not prove the depravity of Man, for you could not prove an untruth. You could not invalidate a Natural Law by refusing to obey it. That law was the Law of Progress. Nature and Philosophy united to prove the progress of mankind. Science... lent its support, and even history— if you but read it aright— even history demonstrated the sure advance of civilization and the triumph of right over wrong. Theirs was no easy optimism, not the optimism that shaded dangerously into a smug assurance that whatever was, was right, nor yet an optimism so supremely confident of the wisdom of Providence that it faltered into fatalism. But they read with approval those lines from Locksley Hall—
Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. and felt themse1ves in tune with the Infinite.
This is what gave them fortitude, the conviction that they were on the side of the angels, that they were fulfilling Nature and Nature’s laws, and that the stars in their courses fought for them. That is what gave dignity to their zeal and strength to their numbers. It made them courageous in the face of opposition, resolute in the face of discouragement, eloquent in the face of apathy. It armored them against attack and fortified them against contumely. It gave them a militant, an unconquerable faith, that was at last triumphantly proclaimed by one who knew them all: He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; 0, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. Sermon Theodore Parker’s grandfather was the commander of the militia who gathered on the Lexington green to meet the British regulars come to seize the munitions. It was he who said the famous words, “If they mean to have war, let it begin here.” Theodore̓s father watched the battle of Lexington as a youth of fourteen, and handed down the story along with his father’s musket and a passion for liberty to his own son. The musket always hung above the fireplace of Theodore̓s study, and liberty was his touchstone. On his desk he had two busts, one of Jesus and one of Spartacus, the leader of the slave rebellion against Rome. Indeed, to Theodore Parker, the genius of us as a people and as a nation was our love of liberty, and so he found the institution of slavery an absolute contradiction of everything we stood for, as were all other societal oppressions which denied to women and the poor, to those in prison and to those denied an education, the rightful prospects of liberty. Born in 1810 in Lexington, Mass., Parker came to adulthood during one of the most exciting periods in American intellectual and social history, and Boston was a center such as no other for the new ideas and movements. With his enormous love of learning which brought him into contact with an incredible array of people and ideas and which led him to assemble the largest personal library in America at that time, a library which he later donated to the people of Boston via the Boston Public Library (Harvard wanted it badly), Parker absorbed much. But he always, always, centered on the belief that liberty is the birthright of every single human being, and that that fact lays out a moral course for all of us if we are to make that birthright real for all. This central belief inspired not only his passionate abolitionism and engagement in many reform movements of the day, but it also made him an ardent champion of the democratic process. Indeed, it was his definition of democracy which Abraham Lincoln, through a mutual friend (Lincoln’s junior law partner William Herndon), then made famous to us in his address at Gettysburg when he spoke of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. (Parker’s formulation was government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.) Part of Parker’s fire on this subject came from his own humble background. Despite his grandfather̓s fame, Theodore was the eleventh child of a modest farming family. He could afford Harvard Divinity school only because he could avoid tuition by living off campus while he taught at a school, and his growing up before that consisted principally of doing the chores.Unfortunately, his life on the farm later led him to scandalize the proper Bostonians with his forthright talk about sexual matters. As a farmer, he saw no scandal in the subject and realized that if ever prostitution was to be done away with and women emancipated and much silent misery alleviated, someone would have to begin talking openly on the matter. Boston, by and large, did not agree, adding but one more element to his many scandals. Always, Parker kept a common touch about him that led many erudite ministers to characterize his sermon deliveries as crude and unpolished, but which made him beloved of the people. When a number of people started up a new church in Boston in order to give him a pulpit—after he had been shunned by all the other Boston ministers, orthodox Calvinist Christian ministers and orthodox Unitarian ministers both—he soon made the 28th Congregational Society of Boston the largest church in America. The preachers didn’t like what he said or the way he said it, but the people did. When Parker came to speak at the venerable “Great and Thursday Lecture,” an old Bostonian religious and moral event that had once been the center of intellectual life but had withered to a boring event of a few diehards trying to attend to some obscure theological point, the hall was packed to standing room only and the content of the address such that the series was canceled lest Parker be allowed to speak there again. After all, he was the only minister in Boston going around and publicly praying to God as “The Father and Mother of us all.” (Robinson, The Unit. and the Univ., p.85). He was the only white minister with blacks in attendance at the services, horrible to tell. He was the only minister to address his congregation as “Fellow subjects of Virginia” after the Fugitive Slave Bill was passed, making Massachusetts citizens criminals if they harbored fugitive slaves from their owners. He was the only Boston minister to whose services the radical women such as Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Julia Ward Howe chose to come, knowing that their quest for dignity and equality for women would be honored and defended. But Theodore Parker’s troubles began back before he took up his many social causes. They began when he joined his Transcendentalist friends espousing a religion that was optimistic about who we humans are and that was naturalistic in tone. His troubles began when he started saying things like our chalice lighting words this morning (“Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living.”) His troubles began when he turned the enormous power of his scholarship to the service of the Transcendenta1ists and their declaration that religion was not something divinely bequeathed solely to Jesus and hence to Christians, who had then to receive it on authority from the church, but rather that religion was a universal human possession, known in the intuition and in reason, as natural as flowers and stars. It did not help that he had studied in Germany and was the main voice who brought to America the method and results of German higher criticism, which made it very clear that the books of the Bible were human creations authored at various times in history for various specific human purposes. It did not help that his knowledge of twenty languages and all sorts of subjects made his arguments for such a free and natural religion compelling. Never mind his outrages to the orthodox Calvinists bent on hell-fire and human depravity and an angry self-righteous God. His own Unitarian colleagues were all a-twitter at his galling assertions that the truth or falsehood of the Christian religion lay in the universal truth or falsehood of its ethics, and that the miracles of Jesus were no such thing and in no way proved his authority. To Parker, nature itself was the miracle, not the transcending of it. Further, all creeds, all theological concepts, even Jesus himself, were transitory aspects that were not essential, since what was permanent in Christianity were the essential moral truths that Jesus espoused and lived and that could be found then, of course, in other religions and among those who were part of no official religion. To Parker, what was true was true, no matter from whence it came. He put all this into a sermon he delivered at the ordination of a friend. A threesome of Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian ministers were in appalled attendance and wrote the scandal up. This was too much for his Christian Unitarian brothers in Boston, who just recently had been the wild heretics and were now hoping for a little respect and peace and quiet, as well as some rational dignified theological order. After a proper tea at their regular meeting, they lit into Parker and asked him to resign from their fellowship. He defended what he had said, reminded them of their free religious heritage and wondered if this were a heresy trial that was in progress, and refused to resign, though of course they were free to throw him out if they so chose. They could not so choose, but they did withdraw all invitations to speak at their churches. The one minister who did invite him to exchange pulpits was thrown out of his own church. So it went with Theodore Parker in ecclesiastical Boston. But there was a whole other world blossoming around him. Before his move to Boston to the 28th Congregational Society, he was minister in West Roxbury just outside town, and it was there that George Ripley founded Brook Farm, the visionary, experimental transcendentalist community. Ripley left the Unitarian ministry in order to start Brook Farm, selling all his books to raise money in the process. To it came not only Parker, but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, calling it the great love of his life, Margaret Fuller, editor of the transcendentalist magazine The Dial and outspoken champion of women̓s rights, Bronson Alcott, who was to take the positive and naturalistic thinking of his friends and apply it to the young people of his Temple School as the beginnings of progressive education in America, Horace Mann, who was to insist on the right of all to education, William Ellery Channing and his personal secretary Elizabeth Peabody, founder of the best bookshop in Cambridge and a woman̓s center at which Margaret Fuller held her famous women’s “Conversations,” James Freeman Clarke, fresh up from Kentucky and later to organize the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, the first great interfaith meeting on this continent, Lydia Maria Child, author of one of the first anti-slavery tracts, Emerson and Thoreau of course, and Samuel and Julia Ward Howe, who championed many progressive causes. If proper Boston threw Parker out, these creative people did not. And then there were the various reformers in or out of that Brook Farm fold. William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist extraordinaire, Frederick Douglass, a good friend, Dorothea Dix, champion of the rights of the mentally ill, John Brown, later to lead the famous raid on Harper’s Ferry to enable the slaves to gain their own freedom. Theodore Parker was not the first abolitionist, but he became one of the most influential and passionate. People seeking to help fleeing slaves came often to his home. He was one of John Brown’s secret committee of six who were privy to Brown’s plans. Though he hated war, Parker came reluctantly to the conclusion that in some cases only force of arms would effect freedom. And he held it the right of those denied liberty to use force to gain it, if necessary. His grandfather̓s musket reminded him of that fact, and he was one of the early to realize that those who profited from the institution of slavery would never give it up without bloodshed. But his main weapons were, first, words, with which, as Commager put it, he became the conscience of his generation, and, second, deeds such as the hiding of fugitive slaves and the leading of protests when some were caught and dragged through the streets of Boston on their way back south. (When one escaped slave, Anthony Burns, was dragged back through the streets of Boston, the protests went on for ten days. Army reserves were brought out to restore order, reserves formed from some of the proudest of the militia who had fought for independence. Many of those proud soldiers wept at their posts as Burns was dragged by.) It was a dramatic time to live, a time in which the soul of this nation was being fought for. And Parker was in the thick of it. As he put it, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And he was doing all the bending he could by constantly reminding everyone that there are higher laws than the laws of the State. As he put it, “To say there are no higher laws than that of the state is to make us practical atheists.” (Crusader, 208) And so he was constantly referring others to the universal laws of the moral universe which demanded equal justice for all. When Daniel Webster defended the Fugitive Slave Bill as a necessary protection of justifiable property rights, Parker responded, “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” (Ibid, 224). Parker’s Unitarian version of hellfire and brimstone was not just applied to the abolition of slavery, however. All of life was grist for the moral mill. He even had a sermon on the moral duties of milkmen, though I confess I haven’t read it. If all of us are divine in our nature and the moral law runs throughout that whole nature, then there is no part of life that is not religious in its very core, and so worthy of moral reflection. He and his friends challenged the Puritan Sabbath laws, not because they were of extreme practical importance, but because they used the power of the state to coerce the conscience in matters of religion. He attacked the practice of capital punishment just as he objected to a lot of the other dubious moral lessons given by the state in its actions. As he put it after cataloging the various taxing structures which placed the heaviest burdens on the poor and the conduct of the Mexican War for its blatant purpose of stealing land, and so on through a list of governmental sins, “Everybody knows that the political action of a nation is the mightiest educational influence in that nation. But such is the doctrine the State teaches to [the poor], a constant lesson in fraud, theft, violence, and crime.” (Ibid, 173). Parker was informed on all the statistics of crime and could prove that crime “furnished an index not of character but of opportunity.” (172) He pushed for reform of the prison system and organized a society to rescue delinquent girls and give them jobs. He advocated for more lenient divorce laws and for a more enlightened view of sexuality. He wished to change the suffrage and property laws and the attitudes of men towards equality of the sexes. He invited the Reverends Antoinette Brown and Sheba Smith to preach from his pulpit. He once again shocked Boston, this time with a sermon entitled, “The Bad Merchant,” in which he laid out the statistics demonstrating the horrible exploitation of labor by low wages at the same time as dividends to stockholders yielded 20% to 40% a year in some of the cotton mills. He blistered the industrial feudalism of his day with scathing sermons. “I cannot help thinking,” he said,” that labor is often wickedly underpaid and capital sometimes as grossly overfed. I shall believe that capital is at the mercy of labor when the two extremes of society change places.” (183) Theodore Parker was involved in so many causes and projects that he wore down even his strong constitution and had to leave hurriedly for the West Indies and then Italy when he came down with consumption at 50. He died soon thereafter in Florence, Italy, in April, 1860. Of course Parker could accomplish so much because he had the constant help of his wife and first love, Lydia Cabot. I talk about Parker this morning not to make us feel badly about how little we are doing in comparison to this acknowledged dynamo. I give this brief sense of him, rather, because I am drawn to him the same way Henry Steele Commager is, and I think for similar reasons. Here̓s how Commager put it in 1960: “Ah, my brave brother!” said Emerson in that moving elegaic to his friend. “It seems as if, in a frivolous age, our loss were immense, and your place cannot be supplied.” The age is no longer frivolous, but desperate, and Parker̓s place is still not fully supplied; for there is no one who is the conscience of our generation, who speaks to the moral sense of the community—to presidents and congress [members], to business [people] and scholars and preachers, as Parker did to his day. But, as Emerson added, “The nature of the world will affirm to all [people], in all times, that which for twenty-five years you valiantly spoke; the winds of Italy murmur the same truth over your grave; the winds of America over these bereaved streets; . . . the sea which bore your mourners home affirms it, the stars in their courses, and the inspirations of youth.” Even now, as problems of war and peace, of arrogance and power and pretensions of race crowd upon us, the world of nature and of [humanity] still affirms the truths that Parker preached. ( Theodore Parker: An Anthology, ed. H.S. Commager, 8,9). Theodore Parker knocked down the rigid Christian walls of his day in order to clear out for us all some wider visionary room to live in. He kept the essential and tossed the chaff to the winds and then went about living the loving justice that liberty morally invoked in him. In doing so, he is but one superb example of the human immensity of the heritage which we all lay claim to. Further, he proved that the use of reason and honoring of the heart and the intuitions of meaning can enrich each other, and that the active development of the individual and the claims of social justice can both be honored. He proves how tender and strong is the living stream of which we are now a part, and how blessed we are by those who have preceded us. To then do likewise for those who come after us and for those who live around us is the essence of this tradition and this story. It is very simple, this lesson. It is very precious. So may we live it. |
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