THEODORE PARKER | AdventAI

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 22, 1861

THEODORE PARKER.

A FOREIGN journal gives in these few words the truest and best criticism upon Mr. Parker’s ministry in relation to reforms:

In three modes he seriously hindered reform in America: 1. He shook man’s faith in prayer, which alone can keep the heart of the reformer cheerful, sweet, and strong. 2. He shook man’s faith in the Bible, from which all modern reforms have rolled. 3. He weakened man’s sense of sin, furnishing men with a ready-made apology for the crimes against which he fought, drugging the conscience with opiates of his theology, while he struck at it with the goad of his ethics. While he spoke one sharp word against a special sin, he spoke ten against the possibility of any sin. His theology kills the air, so that the reform cannot live there. And we are to remember that he never forgot that he was a preacher—a preacher of a religion which he expected would supplant the Christianity of the New Testament. He ever kept his mark in view, and whatever he might transfix on the way, the arrow was aimed at Bible Christianity. When we see, then, that fundamental error permeated and poisoned all his work, notwithstanding the courage and even sublime fury of his assault on mighty sins, we are forced to regard his career, on the whole, as a backward eddy in the great on-sweeping current of human reform.