Perhaps Nature and necessity chose it for him.  If not his temperament, at least the circumstances of his position, cut him off from all high literary finish.  He created the congregation at the Music Hall, and that congregation, in turn, moulded his whole life.  For that great stage his eloquence became inevitably a kind of brilliant scene-painting,—­large, fresh, profuse, rapid, showy;—­masses of light and shade, wonderful effects, but farewell forever to all finer touches and delicate gradations!  No man can write for posterity, while hastily snatching a half-day from a week’s lecturing, during which to prepare a telling Sunday harangue for three thousand people.  In the perpetual rush and hurry of his life, he had no time to select, to discriminate, to omit anything, or to mature anything.  He had the opportunities, the provocatives, and the drawbacks which make the work and mar the fame of the professional journalist.  His intellectual existence, after he left the quiet of West Roxbury, was from hand to mouth.  Needing above all men to concentrate himself, he was compelled by his whole position to lead a profuse and miscellaneous life.

All popular orators must necessarily repeat themselves,—­preachers chiefly among orators, and Theodore Parker chiefly among preachers.  The mere frequency of production makes this inevitable,—­a fact which always makes every finely organized intellect, first or last, grow weary of the pulpit.  But in his case there were other compulsions.  Every Sunday a quarter part of his vast congregation consisted of persons who had never, or scarcely ever, heard him before, and who might never hear him again.  Not one of those visitors must go away, therefore, without hearing the great preacher define his position on every point,—­not theology alone, but all current events and permanent principles, the Presidential nomination or message, the laws of trade, the laws of Congress, woman’s rights, woman’s costume, Boston slave-kidnappers, and Dr. Banbaby,—­he must put it all in.  His ample discourse must be like an Oriental poem, which begins with the creation of the universe, and includes all subsequent facts incidentally.  It is astonishing to look over his published sermons and addresses, and see under how many different names the same stirring speech has been reprinted;—­new illustrations, new statistics, and all remoulded with such freshness that the hearer had no suspicions, nor the speaker either,—­and yet the same essential thing.  Sunday discourse, lyceum lecture, convention speech, it made no difference, he must cover all the points every time.  No matter what theme might be announced, the people got the whole latitude and longitude of Theodore Parker, and that was precisely what they wanted.  He broke down the traditional non-committalism of the lecture-room, and oxygenated all the lyceums of the land.  He thus multiplied his audience very greatly, while perhaps losing to some degree the power of close logic and of addressing a specific statement to a special point.  Yet it seemed as if he could easily leave the lancet to others, grant him only the hammer and the forge.