slavery in the State and the older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant. The death of Moses within sight of the promised land seems the only parallel to the death of Parker less than six months before the election of Abraham Lincoln and the publication of Essays and Reviews.[1]
But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully aided by the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost opponents. Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery. Typical among examples of this use were the arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man whose noble character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence in all branches of the American Protestant Church. While avowing his personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible sanctioned it. Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took the same ground, and then came that tremendous rejoinder which echoed from heart to heart throughout the Northern States: "The Bible sanctions slavery? So much the worse for the Bible." Then was fulfilled that old saying of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg: "Press not the breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield blood rather than milk."
Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the foremost scholars had taken ground in favor of it, and the most conservative of these whose opinions were entitled to weight had made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable, there was fanatical opposition to any change. The Syllabus of Errors, issued by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other documents issued from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties of this needed transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman Catholic scholars skillfully explained away the obstacles thus created, others published works insisting upon the most extreme views as to the verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In the Church of England various influential men took the same view. Dr. Baylee, Principal of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture "every scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its histories and narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy.
- ↑ For the appellation "religious Titan" applied to Theodore Parker, see a letter of Jowett, Master of Balliol, to Frances Power Cobbe, in her autobiography, vol. i, p. 357, and for Reville's statement, ibid., p. 9; for a pathetic account of Parker's last hours at Florence, ibid., i, pp. 10, 11. For the statement regarding Parker's audiences and his power over them, the present writer trusts to his own memory. There is a curious reference to Bishop Hopkins's ideas on slavery in Archbishop Tait's Life and Letters.
