Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/24

Rh of the same discourses, unaware how it was the very greatness of his reverence for things truly holy, which inflamed his Luther-like soul with iconoclastic zeal.

As to the extraordinary clearness and didactic lucidity of Parker's style (strangely resembling that of old Hugh de St Victor, in his monkish Latin), there is no need to apologize for it. “I always think,” said he, “that I am addressing, not the highest minds, but the simplest and most uneducated among my congregation; and I strive to say everything so that they may understand me.” Thus truly did he preach his great gospel of God's goodness to the poor; and in a way, perhaps, which would be safe to few theologians. Always we find him stating the major term of his syllogism, “God is infinitely good. Now, what follows?”

It would seem as if there were two forms of the love of truth among men. In the one it is an affirmative love, a forcible grasp thereof, which affords a fulcrum strong enough to move the world; yet often leaves the holder without any accurate sense of the limitations of his creed, and without much power to appreciate the creeds of others. In the other, it is a negative love of truth, which takes the form of a hatred of error, and induces the man to spend his life in stripping his own creed leaf by leaf, like a rose, of its external and more questionable doctrines, while he sees vividly the collateral truths in the creeds of others. Theodore Parker belonged essentially to the first order of minds. None have preached with nobler, manlier faith the affirmative truths of absolute religion. In treating of the popular theology, it must be avowed that, to the majority of Englishmen, his wide human sympathies will seem to fall short in this one point, and that he has sometimes appeared to confound the Christianity of the churches generally with Calvinism, and to have drawn Calvinism itself either from the grim treatises of the old Puritan divines, or from living exponents of their doctrine, not to be paralleled on this side the Atlantic. It is due to one so great in his simple integrity as Parker, that even those who owe him most of gratitude should thus avow where they find his limitations.

On the side of some of the deeper mysteries of experimental religion, of repentance and regeneration, Parker said and wrote but little. He ever strove to give his hearers the fullest, richest faith in the infinite love and goodness of God; and then he left that divine alchemy to do its work and infuse a holier