own immortality, . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and
Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be
drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He
_announced_ truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the
disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and
descended from eight generations of clergymen, had resigned the
pastorate of the Second Church of Boston because he could not
conscientiously administer the sacrament of the communion--which he
regarded as a mere act of commemoration--in the sense in which it was
understood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes
occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of
"lay preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a church. The
representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker,
an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many
subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a
man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely
religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal
following. The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after
him, "Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to
"fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which
assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a
"boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion.

It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England
transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from
Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and
Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had
domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's _Remarks on a
National Literature_, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged
that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one