estament made an impression on many
thoughtful men; his sermon in 1841 on The Transient and Permanent in
Christianity marked the beginning of his great individual career;
his speeches, his lectures, and especially his Discourse on Matters
pertaining to Religion, greatly extended his influence. His was a deeply
devotional nature, and his public prayers exercised by their touching
beauty a very strong religious influence upon his audiences. He had his
reward. Beautiful and noble as were his life and his life-work, he was
widely abhorred. On one occasion of public worship in one of the more
orthodox churches, news having been received that he was dangerously
ill, a prayer was openly made by one of the zealous brethren present
that this arch-enemy might be removed from earth. He was even driven out
from the Unitarian body. But he was none the less steadfast and bold,
and the great mass of men and women who thronged his audience room at
Boston and his lecture rooms in other cities spread his ideas. His fate
was pathetic. Full of faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his
labours, he retired to Italy, and died there at the darkest period in
the history of the United States--when slavery in the state and the
older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant.
The death of Moses within sight of the promised land seems the only
parallel to the death of Parker less than six months before the
publication of Essays and Reviews and the election of Abraham Lincoln to
the presidency, of the United States.(492)

(492) For the appellation "religious Titan" applied to Theodore Parker,
see a letter of Jowett, Master of Balliol, to Frances Power Cobbe, in
her Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 357, and for Reville's statement, ibid.,
p. 9. For a pathetic account of Parker's last hours at Florence, ibid.,
vol. i, pp. 10, 11. As to the influence of Theodore Parker on Lincoln,
see Rhodes's History of the United States, as above, vol. ii, p. 312.
For the statement regarding Parker's audiences and his power over them,
the present writer trusts to his own memory.

But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully aided by
the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost opponents. Nothing
during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean
religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of
Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery. Typical among examples
of this