[432] his vigorous hand gave you has sufficed, spite of boding prophecy, to keep these doors open! Yes; he has left those accustomed to use weapons, and not merely to hold up his hands. And not only among yourselves; from another city I received a letter full of deep feeling, and the writer, an Orthodox church-member, says:--
I was a convert to Theodore Parker before I was a convert to--. If there is anything of value in the work I am doing to-day, it may in an important sense be said to have had its root in Parker's heresy,--I mean the habit without which Orthodoxy stands emasculated and good for nothing, of independently passing on the empty and rotten pretensions of churches and churchmen, which I learned earliest and more than from any other from Theodore Parker. He has my love, my respect, my admiration.Yes, his diocese is broader than Massachusetts; his influence extends very far outside these walls. Every pulpit in Boston is freer and more real to-day because of the existence of this. The fan of his example scattered the chaff of a hundred sapless years. Our whole city is fresher to-day because of him. The most sickly and timid soul under yonder steeple, hide-bound in days and forms and beggarly Jewish elements, little dreams how ten times worse and narrower it was before this sun warmed the general atmosphere around. As was said of Burke's unsuccessful impeachment of Warren Hastings, “never was the great object of punishment, the prevention of crime, more completely obtained. Hastings was acquitted; but tyranny and injustice were condemned wherever English was spoken,” so we may say of Boston and Theodore Parker. Grant that few adopted his extreme theological views, that not many sympathized in his politics, still, that Boston is nobler, purer, braver, more loving, more Christian to-day, is due more to him
