The deeply affectionate nature of Theodore Parker glows warmly through the Correspondence and Journal.  His friends were necessities, and were loved with a devotion by no means characteristic of Americans.  He could give his life to ideas, but his heart must be given to persons, young and old.  Turning from his task of opposition and conflict, he would yearn for the society of little children, whose household loves might dull the noise and violence and passion through which he daily walked.  “The great joy of my life,” he writes, “cannot be intellectual action, neither practical work.  Though I joy in both, it is the affections which open the spring of mortal delight.  But the object of my affections, dearest of all, is not at hand.  How strange that I should have no children, and only get a little sad sort of happiness, not of the affectional quality!  I am only an old maid in life, after all my bettying about in literature and philanthropy.”  And in a letter to Dr. Francis there comes an exclamation of which the arrangement is very pathetic in its significance,—­“I have no child, and the worst reputation of any minister in all America!”

We are in no position to estimate with any exactness either the adaptation of Theodore Parker to our national well-being or his positive aid to the mental and moral progress of New-England society.  Violent denunciations in the interest of the various sects and policies that he attacked will for the present be levelled against him.  Neither will there be wanting extravagant eulogiums from personal friends, fellow-religionists, and zealous reformers.  Only the distant view of a generation yet to be can see him in just relation to the men of this time.  In judging the weight and work of a contemporary, we attach an over-importance to the number and social position of his nominal adherents; while, in estimating the utility of an historic leader, we instinctively feel that these things are almost the last to be considered.  For the greatest influence for good has come from men who have struggled in feeble minorities,—­ever alienating would-be friends by an invincible honesty, or even by an invincible fanaticism.  Not to the excellences or extravagances of a handful of persons who precisely agree with his views of Christianity may we look for the influence of Theodore Parker which to-day works among us.  We might find it in greater power in Brownson’s Catholic Review, in the humane magnetism of orthodox Mr. Beecher, in the Episcopal ministrations of Dr. Tyng.  For any intelligent Christian must allow that those claiming to represent the Church of Christ have too often sided with the oppressor, fettered human thought in departments foreign to religion, and inculcated degrading beliefs, which scholars eminent in orthodoxy declare indeducible from any Biblical precept.  It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it, which can point the reformer’s gibe