ct 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 {444} 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
means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on
British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long
after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an
American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on
German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In
1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard
Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of
translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected he was
helped