delicate main-springs of
character had been missed. Broad contrasts, heaps of good and evil,
almost exaggerated praises, pungent satire, catalogues of sins that
seemed pages from some Recording Angel's book,--these were his mighty
methods; but for the subtilest analysis, the deepest insight into the
mysteries of character, one must look elsewhere. It was still
scene-painting, not portraiture; and the same thing which overwhelmed
with wonder, when heard in the Music Hall, produced a slight sense of
insufficiency, when read in print. It was certainly very great in its
way, but not in quite the highest way; it was preliminary work, not
final; it was Parker's Webster, not Emerson's Swedenborg or Napoleon.

The same thing was often manifested in his criticisms on current
events. The broad truths were stated without fear or favor, the finer
points passed over, and the special trait of the particular phase
sometimes missed. His sermons on the last revivals, for instance, had
an enormous circulation, and told with great force upon those who had
not been swept into the movement, and even upon some who had been. The
difficulty was that they were just such discourses as he would have
preached in the time of Edwards and the "Great Awakening"; and the
point which many thought the one astonishing feature of the new
excitement, its almost entire omission of the "terrors of the Lord,"
the far gentler and more winning type of religion which it displayed,
and from which it confessedly drew much of its power, this was
entirely ignored in Mr. Parker's sermons. He was too hard at work in
combating the evangelical theology to recognize its altered phases.
Forging lightning-rods against the tempest, he did not see that the
height of the storm had passed by.

These are legitimate criticisms to make on Theodore Parker, for he was
large enough to merit them. It is only the loftiest trees of which it
occurs to us to remark that they do not touch the sky, and a man must
comprise a great deal before we complain of him for not comprising
everything. But though the closest scrutiny may sometimes find cases
where he failed to see the most subtile and precious truth, it will
never discover one where, seeing, he failed to proclaim it, or,
proclaiming, failed to give it force and power. He lived his life much
as he walked the streets of Boston,--not quite gracefully, nor yet
statelily, but with quick, strong, solid step, with sagacious eyes
wide open,