ard
College, passed with honors, and, walking home again, told his
unsuspecting father, then in bed, of his success. He could not be spared
from the farm, however, nor was there any money to pay for his
maintenance at Cambridge, so he continued working on the farm, keeping
up with his class by studying in the evenings and going to Cambridge
only to take the examinations.

He undertook teaching after that, and gradually worked his way toward
the ministry, to which he was admitted in 1837. He was soon called to
Boston, to a congregation independent of sectarian bonds, and here he
reached the culmination of his fame, attracting the most cultured people
of the city by his breadth of knowledge, warmth of feeling and intensity
of conviction. His interest in slavery began early, and by 1845, his
share in the anti-slavery struggle had become engrossing. He threw
himself into it heart and soul, and no one did more to awaken the
conscience of the north. His speeches, letters, sermons, tracts and
lectures had an immense influence; he took an active part in aiding
runaway slaves to get to Canada, and his labors were incessant and
prodigious. His health at last gave way, and the end came in 1860, at
Florence, Italy, where he lies buried.

Parker's immense influence was due to the brain rather than to the
heart. He possessed no grace of person, music of voice, or charm of
manner, none of that fascination which is a part of the great orator. He
was a white-hot flame which scorched and seared, an intellect pure and
piercing, a self-made instrument to expose the shams of society.

Closely associated with Garrison and Parker in the fight against
slavery, and in some ways more famous than either, was Wendell Phillips.
The very opposite of Parker, handsome in person, cultivated in manner,
with a charm of personality seldom equalled,--the two yet worked hand in
hand for a common cause, the one, as it were, supplementing the other.

Wendell Phillips was the son of John Phillips, the first mayor of
Boston, and was a year younger than Theodore Parker. He went the way of
all well-to-do Boston youth through Harvard, graduating there in 1831,
without distinguishing himself particularly, except by his skill in
debate and his finished elocution. During one of the revivals of
religion which followed the settlement of Dr. Lyman Beecher at Boston,
he became a convert, and this marked the beginning of his interest in
the great moral question of the