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Parker had at his church in Roxbury substituted Marcus Aurelius for the Bible at one of his services; and everybody knew that Marcus Aurelius was a Pagan who had persecuted the Christians. Was it the desire of Theodore Parker to transform Christian Boston into a Pagan Rome? Parker replied with a sermon showing that Boston sent vast quantities of rum to the heathen; that many of her first citizens thrived on the manufacture, export and sale of strong drink; and that to call Boston a Christian city was to reveal a woeful lack of knowledge concerning the use of words. About this time there was a goodly stir in the congregation, some of whom were engaged in the shipping trade. After the sermon they said, “Is it I–Is it I?” And one asked, “Is it me?”

The Unitarian Association of Boston notified Theodore Parker that in their opinion he was no better than Emerson, and it was well to remember that Pantheism and Unitarianism were quite different. That night Theodore Parker read the letter, and wrote in his journal as follows:

The experience of the last twelve months shows me what I am to expect of the next twelve years. I have no fellowship from the other clergy; no one that helped in my ordination will now exchange ministerial courtesies with me. Only one or two of the Boston Association, and perhaps one or two out of it, will have any ministerial intercourse with me. “They that are younger than I have me in derision.” I must confess that I am disappointed in the ministers–the Unitarian ministers. I once thought them noble; that they would be true to an ideal principle of right. I find that no body of men was ever more completely sold to the sense of expediency.

All the agitation and quasi-persecution was a loosening of the tendrils, and a preparation for transplanting. Growth is often a painful process. Socially, Parker had been snubbed and slighted by the best society, and his good wife was in tears of distress because the meetings of the missionary band were held without her assistance and elsewhere than at her house.

Here writes Parker:

Now, I am not going to sit down tamely, and be driven out of my position by the opposition of some and the neglect of others, whose conduct shows that they have no love of freedom except for themselves–to sail with the popular wind and tide. I shall do this when obliged to desert the pulpit because a free voice and a free heart can not be in “that bad eminence.” I mean to live with Ripley at Brook Farm. I will study seven or eight months of the year; and, four or five months. I will go about and preach and lecture in the city and glen, by the roadside and fieldside, and wherever men and women may be found. I will go eastward and westward, and northward and southward, and make the land ring; and if this New England theology that cramps the intellect and palsies the soul of us does not come to the ground, then it shall be because it has more truth in it than I have ever found.

Then came the suggestion from Charles M. Ellis, a Boston merchant, that Parker quit sleepy Roxbury and defy classic Boston by renting the Melodeon Theater and stating his views, instead of having them retailed on the street from mouth to mouth. If the orthodox Congregationalists wanted war, why let it begin there. The rent for the theater was thirty dollars a day; but a few friends plunged, rented the theater, and notified Parker that he must do the rest.

Would any one come–that was the question. And Sunday at eleven A. M. the question answered itself. Then the proposition was–would they come again? And this like all other propositions was answered by time.