"Eclipse," p. 81." In 9th edition, p. 71.

The passage concerning Mr. Parker is in the _preceding_ page: I had
read it, and I do not see how it at all relieves the disgust which
every right-minded man must feel at this passage. My disgust is not
personal: though I might surely ask,--If Parker has made a mistake,
how does that justify insulting _me_? As I protested, I have made
no peculiar claim to inspiration. I have simply claimed "that which
all[16] pious Jews and Christians since David have always claimed."
Yet he pertinaciously defends this rude and wanton passage, adding, p.
155: "As to the inventor of lucifer matches, I am thoroughly convinced
that he has shed more light upon the world and been abundantly more
useful to it, than many a cloudy expositor of modern spiritualism."
Where to look for the "many" expositors of spiritualism, I do not
know. Would they were more numerous.

Mr. Parker differs from me as to the use of the phrase "Spirit of
God." I see practical reasons, which I have not here space to insist
on, for adhering to the _Christian_, as distinguished from the
_Jewish_ use of this phrase. Theodore Parkes follows the phraseology
of the Old Testament, according to which Bezaleel and others received
the spirit of God to aid them in mere mechanical arts, building and
tailoring. To ridicule Theodore Parker for this, would seem to me
neither witty nor decent in an unbeliever; but when one does so, who
professes to believe the whole Old Testament to be sacred, and stoops
to lucifer matches and the Eureka shirt, as if this were a refutation,
I need a far severer epithet. Mr. Rogers implies that the light of a
lucifer match is comparable to the light of Theodore Parker; what will
be the judgment of mankind a century hence, if the wide dissemination
of the "Eclipse of Faith" lead to inscribing the name of Henry Rogers
permanently in biographical dictionaries! Something of this sort may
appear:--

"THEODORE PARKER, the most eminent moral theologian whom the first
half of the nineteenth century produced in the United States. When the
churches were so besotted, as to uphold the curse of slavery because
they found it justified in the Bible; when the Statesmen, the Press,
the Lawyers, and the Trading Community threw their weight to the same
fatal side; Parker stood up to preach the higher law of God against
false religion, false statesmanship, crooked law and cruel avarice.
He enforced three great fundamental tr