The ancestors of Theodore Parker seem to have been creditable offshoots from the Puritan stock.  They were men and women of thrift and sagacity.  Of his mother there are very sweet glimpses.  He describes her as “imaginative, delicate-minded, and poetic, yet a very practical woman.”  She appears to have been thoroughly religious, but without taste for the niceties of dogmatic theology.  Piety did not have to be laboriously put into her, before it could generously come out.  “I have known few,” writes her son, “in whom the religious instincts were so active and profound, and who seemed to me to enjoy so completely the life of God in the soul of man.”  And again he says, “Religion was the inheritance my mother gave,—­gave me in my birth,—­gave me in her teachings.  Many sons have been better born than I, few have had so good a mother.  I mention these things to show you how I came to have the views of religion that I have now.  My head is not more natural to my body, has not more grown with it, than my religion out of my soul and with it.  With me religion was not carpentry, something built up of dry wood, from without; but it was growth,—­growth of a germ in my soul.”  Thus we see that Parker was not singular in his sources of goodness and nobility:  here also have the strong and worthy men of all time received their inspiration.  The mother’s sphere is never confined to the household, but expands for joy or bitterness through the world at large.  A youth of farm-work, snatches of study, and school-teaching, seem to be the appointed curriculum for our trustworthy men.  In addition to this, Theodore achieves a slight connection with Harvard,—­insufficient for a degree, yet enough for him, if not for the College.  Then he teaches a private class in Boston, and presently opens school in Watertown.  Here, for the first time, comes a modest success after the world’s measurement.  He has soon thirty-five, and afterwards fifty-four scholars.  And now occurs an incident which is unaccountably degraded to the minion type of a note.  It is, however, just what the reader wants to know, and deserves Italics and double-leading, if human actions are ever sufficiently noteworthy for these honors.  The Watertown teacher receives a colored girl who has been sent to him, and then consents to dismiss her in deference to the prejudices of Caucasian patrons.  Simon Peter denied the Saviour for whom he was afterwards crucified with his head hanging down.  One day we shall find this schoolmaster leaving most cherished work, and braving all social obloquies, that he may stand closer than a brother to the despised and ignorant of the outcast race.  The colored girl was amply avenged.  But the teacher is here, as ever after, a learner, and his leisure is filled with languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Spanish, and French.  During his subsequent stay at the Cambridge Divinity School, there are added studies in Italian, Portuguese, Icelandic, Chaldaic, Arabic,