Parker, THEODORE, a great American preacher, was born at Lexington, Massachusetts, August 24, 1810. His grandfather held a command at Lexington, his father was an intelligent Unitarian farmer and wheelwright. He graduated at the Divinity School at Harvard in 1836, and settled the year after as Unitarian minister at West Roxbury, now a part of Boston. The naturalistic or rationalistic views which separated him from the more conservative portion of the Unitarians first attracted wide notice in an ordination sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841). The contest which arose on the anti-supernaturalism of this discourse led him to further develop his theological views in five Boston lectures, published under the title of A Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion (1841), which was followed by Sermons for the Times. Failing health induced him to make an extended tour in Europe. In 1844 he returned to America, and for the remainder of his life preached to a congregation of three thousand at the Melodeon and Music Hall, besides incessantly writing for the press on social and theological questions. He lectured also throughout the States, and plunged with characteristic enthusiasm into the anti-slavery agitation. In the midst of his work he was attacked in 1859 with bleeding from the lungs, and made a voyage to Mexico, whence he sailed to Italy, only to die at Florence, May 10, 1860. His lectures, sermons, and miscellaneous writings have been collected and published in America and England, and reveal vast learning, keen spiritual insight, with great force of argument and felicity of illustration. Yet the thought is neither clearly defined, profound, nor always self-consistent, while the form is usually far inferior to the content.
The English edition of his works was edited by Frances P. Cobbe (14 vols. 1863-71). There are Lives by Weiss (2 vols. Boston, 1864), Frothingham (New York, 1874), Dean (Lond. 1877), and Frances E. Cooke (3d ed. Boston, 1889). See also vol. i. of Martineau's Essays, Reviews, and Addresses (1890).