take me back again to the railroad station, seven miles off, where I was to pass the night and take the cars at half-past six the next morning.

"Luckily, I always carry a few little creature-comforts in my wallet. I ate a seed cake or two, and a fig with lumps of sugar. We reached the tavern at eleven, could get nothing to eat at that hour, and, as it was a temperance house, not a glass of ale, which is a good nightcap. It took three quarters of an hour to thaw out :-went to bed at twelve, in a cold room, was called up at five, had, what is universal, a tough steak, sour bread, and potatoes swimming in fat. wanted me to deduct from my poor fifteen dollars the expenses of my nocturnal ride, and would have succeeded, but I could not make the change.' Afterwards wrote to apologize for the omission of supper. Forsan hæc olim meminisse juvabit,' says the hearty young man; but to gray-beards and bald-heads a little of protinus is worth deal of olim.

Monday last at seven, George and I walked down to the Lowell Depôt, and at eight started for Rouse's Point, two hundred and eighty-seven miles off, sick and only fit to lie on a sofa, and have day-dreams of you, sweet absent ones! and think over again the friendly endearments that are past, but may yet return. A dreadful hard ride ends at nine P.M., and I find myself in the worst tavern (pretending to decency) in the Northern States. Bread which defies eating, crockery which sticks to your hands, fried fish as cold as when drawn from the lake. Rise at half-past four, breakfast (?) at five, off in the cars at half-past five, lecture at Malone that night, lie all day on the sofa, ditto at Potsdam next day. The third day, leave Potsdam at nine, and reach Champlain (if I get there) at half-past eight, spending ten and a half hours in travelling by railroad ninetythree miles! Thence, after lecture, to Rouse's Point, and at half-past five to-morrow morning return to the cars, which are to take me home.

"Next week, three days in the East Counties,' and the next four days in Central New York. That, I hope, ends the business, bating nine or ten more in April and May." (Vol. i. pp. 305, 306.)

This same sort of labour continued to the end, and shortened his days. He writes, in 1857,

"Last February I went to Central New York to lecture. Feb. 9th I was to lecture at Waterford, 10th at Syracuse, 11th at Utica, 12th at Rochester, and then return and reach Boston at midnight of 14th-15th. I should pass every night in my bed except that of the 12th. But, on the contrary, things turned out quite otherwise. The railroad conductor left us in the cars all night at East Albany, in the midst of the inundation. Common New England prudence and energy would have taken us all over the river. I had no dinner; no supper, except what I had in my wallet [dried fruit and biscuit]; no breakfast the next morning, save a bit of tough beef in an Irish boarding-house. When I awoke on the morning of the 10th, I felt a sharp pain in my right side, not known before. I got to Syracuse that night, 10th, via Troy; lectured at Utica the 11th, and at eleven P.M. took the cars for Rochester and Vol. 63.-No. 314.

P

rode all night, till 5 or 6 in the next morning, when I got into damp sheets at Rochester, and slept an hour. I was ill all that day, and at night had all the chills of an incipient fever. But I lectured, took the cars at 2 or 3 A.M., having waited for them three or four hours in the depôt, and reached Albany in time for the 4 P.M. train, Friday, and got to Boston about 2 A.M. on Saturday, having had no reasonable meal since noon, Thursday. Sunday I preached at Boston and Watertown, as my custom was. The next week I was ill, but lectured four times; so the next, and the next, until in March I broke down utterly, and could do no more. Then I had a regular fever, which kept me long in the house; but as soon as I could stand on my feet an hour, I began to preach." (Vol. ii. p. 246.)

"In the spring of 1856, Mr. Parker volunteered to increase the amount of labour, which was already so heavy upon him, by supplying the pulpit of an independent society in Watertown. Old associations, and a desire to do something to support a movement for which his influence was partly responsible, induced him to make this offer. But it was more than he should have undertaken. For a year he rode from Boston to Watertown in all weathers, and preached generally the sermon which he had delivered in the Music Hall in the forenoon. The only compensation which he desired to receive for this, was the payment of his livery-stable bill. His activity in other directions was not abated. Lecturing went on as usual; and his whole life was controlled and deeply touched by the political and moral questions of the time. It was not possible for the strongest organisation to carry so many burdens, and be unfretted by their weight." (Vol. ii. p. 244.)

To a friend he writes:

"When I tell you that I have now lectured eighty-four times since November 1, and preached at home every Sunday but two, when I was in Ohio, and never an old sermon; and have had six meetings a month at my own house, and have written more than a thousand letters, besides a variety of other work belonging to a minister and a scholar, you may judge that I must economize minutes, and often neglect a much-valued friend." (Vol. ii. p. 239.)

It was this restless energy that finally hastened his death. In January, 1859, bleeding from the lungs commenced. His physicians told him that he had but one chance out of ten of recovery. His congregation presented him with one year's stipend, and entreated him to go abroad and recruit. Had he gone to Madeira, and indulged in entire rest, he might possibly have been recruited for a few years' longer labour. But he set off for Europe, and went everywhere, at all hazards, braving sea and land travel: going to hear a great debate in the English house of Commons; then feeling fatigued and ill; then off to Paris, to Dijon, to Switzerland; then to Rome, in the rainy season, where the damp and bad weather put an end to all hope of recovery. All through this last year of sickness we see a man who might possibly have recovered for a time, if

he could have sat down in indolent tranquillity, but whose fate is rendered certain by his prodigious energy.

3. But, besides his eagerness in the search for knowledge, and his delight in imparting it, there are various little traits of a pleasing kind. Some of these, resting only on the testimony of a partial biographer, we receive with some grains of allowance. For instance :

"No kind of physical indulgence ever seemed to tempt him for a moment. He caught no habits from coarse boys, and his imagination was chaste as a girl's. When he was not at work in the field, he was deep in a book. The root of envy never was in him." (Vol. i. p. 34.)

We are inclined to give credit to much of this, not because Mr. Weiss says it, but because in the warm outpourings of Mr. Parker's soul in his private letters, we find traces of what men call "good feeling.

For instance, he seems to shrink from and dislike vice and vicious thoughts, even when he meets with them in men of his own views. Here are a few instances :

"Rousseau, -a liar, a thief, a great knave! I abhor him. I shall never read his works with much interest after the developments of his Confessions." (Vol. i. p. 187.)

"Much in Heine I hate; much likewise I admire and love. Heine was malignant and blasphemous." (Vol. i. p. 308.)

"Goethe: Wilhelm Meister. I don't like it. The effect is not

moral, not pleasing upon me. The actors are low, selfish; for the most part mean and lewd." (Vol. ii. p. 22.)

“I dislike Schiller heartily, and always did. He is proud, inflated, diseasedly self-conscious." (Vol. ii. p. 23.)

"Paine was no man for my fancying; in the latter years of his life he was filthy in his personal habits; there seems to me a tinge of lowness about him." (Vol. ii. p. 426.)

With equal frankness he admits the excellence of some men whose theology he disliked. Thus, after reading the life of Jonathan Edwards, he writes thus :-

"A most remarkable child, youth, and man; mild, gentle, and most lovely. How such a person must have revolted, naturally, from. the stern, sour doctrines of Calvinism." (Vol. i. p. 38.)

So of Judson's life he writes :-
:-

"The noble memoir of Mr. and Mrs. J. is beyond all praise. Judson's character is truly noble. If the only result of missions were to raise up such men, it were enough. One such man is worth more than a temple like the Parthenon!" (Vol. ii. p. 257.)

Writing with this frankness, we can receive with credence his own statement of the causes which repelled him from "the prevailing theology." He says:

"I did not see much in the clerical profession to attract me. The notorious dulness of the Sunday services; their mechanical character; the poverty and insignificance of the sermons; the lifelessness of the prayers, and the consequent heedlessness of the congregations, all tended to turn a young man off from becoming a minister." (Vol. ii. p. 450.)

He sinned in fabricating a Deity and a creed for himself, and according to his own fancy; but it is evident that "whatever his hand found to do, he did it with his might." When laid aside, he thus writes of his successor :

"I sympathize with what you say of the services at the Music Hall. Emerson appeals only to the intellect, the understanding, imagination, reason: never directly to the conscience or the soul. I love to read the deep things of the Old and New Testament. I love the sweet words of the hymns we used to sing; and for my own part, I should almost as soon renounce the sermon as the prayer." (Vol. ii. p. 345.)

Gossiping before God, tattling mere words, asking Him to do my duty,--that is not prayer. I believe in prayer from the innermost of my heart, else must I renounce my manhood and the Godhead above and about me. I believe in prayer, for it is the upspringing of my soul to meet the Eternal; and thereby I seek to alter and improve myself,-not Thee, O Thou Unchangeable, who art perfect from the beginning. Then I find that he that goeth forth even weeping, bearing this precious seed of prayer, shall doubtless come again rejoicing, and bring his sheaves with him." (Vol. ii. p. 253.)

We have now fairly stated all that we know in Mr. Parker's favour, and must come to that which is the main question,that which alone induces us to review this ponderous memoir, -the peculiar character of Mr. Parker's religious system.

We showed, more than three years ago, that this same Theodore Parker was, in truth, the apostle of the faith which sundry Englishmen, such as Dr. Temple, Professor Jowett, and Mr. Wilson, Dr. Rowland Williams, and Bishop Colenso are now trying to foist upon us, in lieu of the faith which upheld Ridley and Bradford in the flames, and made calm and peaceful the death-beds of Jewell and of Hooker. How much, or how little, our Essayists may have studied Theodore Parker, we know not. Regarding this new phase of Deism as the special temptation of our day, we cannot think so meanly of it as to regard it as the invention of any single man. But the interest and the importance of Theodore Parker's writings consists in this, that the whole substance and essential part of all the Essays and Reviews, and of all Bishop Colenso's assaults on the Pentateuch, may be found in the writings of this Boston Deist, issued between ten and twenty years ago. It is this single circumstance which induces us, so long after his departure, to give a few more pages to the

important question, What was the System of which Parker was the propounder, and which, in various shades of clearness or obscurity, is now gaining adherents by hundreds and by thousands, from among the half-informed and quite undecided members of the British churches?

Let us take his own account, first, of the self-education by which he found his way out of Socinianism into Deism; and secondly, of the system with which, about the thirtieth year of his life, he found himself entirely imbued.

1. His training was thoroughly American. He tells us that he was "born and bred among Unitarians;" but was mainly left to form his creed for himself. He says, "I think few New Englanders, born of religious families in the first ten years of this century, were formally taught so little superstition." (This, in plain English, means, "were formally taught so little of Christianity.") He proceeds :—

"In my early childhood, after a severe and silent struggle, I made away with the ghastly doctrine of Eternal Damnation and a wrathful God. From my seventh year I have had no fear of God, only an evergreatening love and trust. The doctrine of the Trinity, the great mystery of Revelation,' had long since gone the same road." (Vol. ii. p. 452.)

No one, we should think, out of America, ever seriously boasted, that by the time he was seven years old he had considered and weighed the great question, Whether God would punish the wicked? and had decided it in the negative; and that the doctrine of the Trinity had been weighed and scrutinized and found untenable "long before;" i.e. before he had thrown off his frocks! English minds can hardly realize an absurdity so monstrous; but in New England these avowals will scarcely occasion surprise.

Beginning thus early, and with so keen an appetite for the slaughter of "superstitions," it was not difficult to "make away with" all the other doctrines of Christianity. Thus :

"I had found no evidence which to me could authorize a belief in the supernatural birth of Jesus of Nazareth." Many miracles related in the Old and New Testament seemed incredible to me: some were clearly impossible; others ridiculous, and a few were wicked.” "I had no belief in the plenary, infallible, verbal inspiration of the whole Bible; and strong doubts as to the miraculous inspiration of any part of it. Some things were the opposite of Divine; I could not put my finger on any great moral or religious truth taught by revelation in the New Testament, which had not previously been set forth by men for whom no miraculous help was ever claimed." (Vol. ii. p. 452.)

Such was his boyhood and early manhood. Brought up among the Unitarians, he was ready, as a child, to fling aside