"To learn what I could about the spiritual faculties of man, I not only studied the sacred books of various nations, the poets and philosophers who professedly treat thereof, but also such as deal with sleep-walking, dreams, visions, prophecies, second-sight, oracles, ecstasies, witchcraft, magic-wonders, the appearance of devils, ghosts, and the like. Besides, I studied other works which lie out from the regular highway of theology; the spurious books attributed to famous Jews and Christians; Pseudepigraphy of the Old Testament, and the Apocrypha of the New; with the strange fantasies of the Neoplatonists and Gnostics."
Very important reading all this for one who studied to qualify himself to instruct his fellow men in the natural history of the world's religions; but not so valuable as illustrating the "instinctive intuitions of human nature." Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Boehme, Eckardt, never worked by that method, which may properly be called the method of Sensationalism applied to Transcendentalism. Parker, on the religious side, was a pure Transcendentalist without guile, accepting the transcendental ideas with no shadow of qualification; stating them with the concrete sharpness of scientific propositions, and applying them with the exactness of mathematical principles. He took them as he found them in the writings of the great German thinkers; shaped them as he, better than any body else, could shape thought in form of words,—as he shaped the formula of republican government—"government of the people, by the people, for the people"—from the looser statement of Daniel Webster,—and laid them down as corner-stones of a new theological structure. The materials were furnished by Schleiermacher, Spinoza, Jacobi, Schelling; the architectural skill was his own. Consciousness he did not undertake to analyze; the "facts of consciousness" he took on others' verification; their spiritual import he perceived, developed and applied. Transcendentalism put into his hands the implements he was in special need of.
It is not easy to determine the precise period at which Parker fully accepted, with all its consequences, the transcendental philosophy. He was not a Transcendentalist—not distinctly and avowedly one—at the time of his ordination, in 1837; he clearly was in 1840, the date of the Levi Blodgett letter, which contains the most thorough-going statement of the transcendental idea to be found in any single tractate. The probability is, that he always was one in sentiment, and became more and more consciously one in thought, as he found it necessary to shift his position in order to save his faith. So long as the beliefs he cherished seemed to be satisfactorily supported on the old grounds, he was content; but as the old grounds, one after another, gave way, the beliefs were transferred to the keeping of new principles. Then the sentiments of his youth hardened into ideas; the delicate creatures that lived and gleamed beneath the waters of faith's tropical ocean, became reefs of white stone, that lifted their broad surface above the level of the sea, and offered immovable support to human habitations.
Parker was, more than anything, a preacher;—preacher more than theologian, philosopher or scholar. Whatever else he was, contributed to his greatness in this. He had a profuse gift of language; expression was a necessity to him; his thoughts came swiftly, and clothed in attractive garments; he had wit, and he had humor; laughter and tears were equally at his command. His resources of illustration, drawn from history, literature, biography, nature, were simply inexhaustible; the fruits of enormous reading were at the immediate disposal of a memory that never lost a trifle of the stores committed to it. The religious emotions were as genuine with him as they were quick, and as deep as they were glowing: the human sympathies were wide as the widest, and tender as the tenderest. He had the power of persuasion and of rebuke, a withering sarcasm, a winning compassion. His indignation at wrong was not so qualified by sentimental regard for the wrong doer that invective was wasted on lifeless abstractions, nor was his judgment of evil doers so austere that wickedness escaped by being made incredible. It cannot be said of anybody that he has been able to discriminate nicely, in hours of moral feeling, between wrong doers and wrong deeds; that cannot be done in the present state of psychological science. We simply do not know what the limits of personal responsibility are; how much power is entrusted to the will; how much allowance is to be made for temperament and circumstance; at what point the individual is detached from the mass of mankind, and constituted an accountable person. Parker was guilty, as others are, of personal injustice in holding individuals answerable for sins of their generation, and for vices transmitted with their blood; conscience and charity were occasionally at issue with him; but if righteousness was betrayed into intemperance of zeal, peace made haste to offer its kiss of sorrow, and unaffected tears damped down the flames of wrath when they threatened to consume the innocent. This two-fold power of blasting and of blessing, was vastly effective both on large audiences and on small. The personal integrity which no one ever doubted, the courage which was evident to even hasty observers, the mental independence which justified the boldness of its position by an indefatigable purpose to discover truth, were prime qualifications for the office he filled. The very disadvantages,—an unheroic presence, an uninspired countenance, an unmelodious and unpliable voice, the necessity of interposing glasses between his clear blue eyes and his audience, and thus veiling the heavens that lay behind them,—helped him by putting out of mind all thought of meretricious attempts at influence, and compelling recognition of the intellectual and moral force which could so easily dispense with what most orators consider invaluable aids.
All that Parker had went into his preaching; the wealth of his library, the treasures of his heart, the sweetness of his closet meditations, the solemnity of his lonely musings. But it was not this that gave him his great power as a preacher. That, we are persuaded, was due in chief part to the earnestness of his faith in the transcendental philosophy. How cordially he entertained that faith, what to him it signified in politics, ethics, religion, may be learned by any who will take pains to read a lecture by him on Transcendentalism, recently published by the Free Religious Association. That he ascribed the popular interest in his preaching to his philosophical ideas will not perhaps be accepted as evidence on the point, for men are apt to be mistaken in regard to the sources of their power; but it is interesting as a testimony to his own belief, to know that he did so. In a sermon preached on November 14th, 1852, the occasion being his leaving the Melodeon for the Music Hall, he presents first the current modes of accounting for his success, and then his own.
"The first reason assigned for the audience coming together was this: they came from vain curiosity, having itching ears to hear 'what this babbler sayeth.'
"Then it was said, men came here because I taught utter irreligion, blank immorality; that I had no love of God, no fear of God, no love of man; and that you thought, if you could get rid of your conscience and soul, and trample immortality under foot, and were satisfied there was no God, you should have a very nice time of it here and hereafter.
"Then it was declared that I was a shrewd, practical man, perfectly well 'posted up' in every thing that took place; knew how to make investments and get very large returns,—unluckily it has not been for myself that this has been true. And it was said that I collected large headed, practical men to hear me, and that you were a 'boisterous assembly.'
"Then, that I was a learned man and gave learned discourses on ecclesiastical history or political history,—things which have not been found very attractive in the churches hitherto.
"Again, that I was a philosopher, with a wise head, and taught men theological metaphysics; and so a large company of men seemed all at once smitten with a panic for metaphysics and abstract preaching. It was never so before.
"Next it was reported that I was a witty man, and shot nicely feathered arrows very deftly into the mark; and that men came to attend the sharp shooting of a wit.
"Then there was a seventh thing,—that I was an eloquent man; and I remember certain diatribes against the folly of filling churches with eloquence.
"Then again, it was charged against me that I was a philanthropist, and taught the love of men, but did not teach at all the love of God; and that men really loved to love one another, and so came.
"Then[Pg 312] it was thought that I was a sentimentalist, and tickled the ears of 'weak women,' who came to delight themselves and be filled full of poetry and love.
"The real thing they did not seem to hit; that I preached an idea of God, of man and of religion, which commended itself to the nature of mankind."
The great preacher is always an idealist, and according to the fervor of his idealism is he great. This was the source of Channing's power; it was the charm of Emerson's. In reply to a friend who questioned her as to the nature of the benefits conferred on her by Mr. Emerson's preaching, Margaret Fuller wrote:
"His influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any American, and from him I first learned what is meant by an inward life. Many other springs have since fed the stream of living waters, but he first opened the fountain. That the 'mind is its own place' was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind. Several of his sermons stand apart in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history. It would take a volume to tell what this one influence did for me."
Mr. Parker's ministry had three periods, in each of which the ideal element was the attraction. The first was the period of quiet influence in West Roxbury, where the stream of his spiritual life flowed peacefully through green pastures, and enriched simple hearts with its unintermitted current. Accounts agree that at this time there was a soul of sweetness in his preaching, that was a good deal more than the body of its thought. The second was the period at the Boston Melodeon, the first of his experience before the crowd of a metropolis. This was the controversial epoch, and, from the nature of the case, was largely polemical and negative as towards the popular theology. But even then the strain of spiritual faith was heard above the din of battle, and souls that were averse to polemics were fed by the enthusiasm that came from the inner heights of aspiration. The last period was that of the Music Hall—the famous period. Then the faith was defined and formulated; the corner-stones were hewn and set; the fundamental positions were announced with the fidelity of iteration that was customary with the "painful preachers of the Word" in churches where people were duly stretched upon the Five Points of Calvin. The three cardinal attestations of the universal human consciousness—
The Absolute God,
The Moral Law,
The Immortal Life,