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The people were hungry for truth–the seats were filled.

What began as a simple experiment became a fixed fact. Boston needed Theodore Parker.

An organization was effected, and after much discussion a name was selected, “The Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston.” And the Orthodox Congregationalists raised a howl of protest. They showed that Parker was not a Congregationalist at all, and the Parkerites protested that they were the only genuine sure-enoughs, and anyway, there was no copyright on the word. Congregational Societies were independent bodies, and any group of people could organize one who chose.

In the meantime the society flourished, advertised both by its loving friends and by its frenzied enemies.

Parker grew with the place. The Melodeon was found too small, and Music-Hall was secured.

The audience increased, and the prophets who had prophesied failure waited in vain to say, “I told you so.”

There sprang up a demand for Parker’s services in the Lyceum lecture- field. People who could not go to Boston wanted Parker to come to them. His fee was one hundred dollars a lecture, and this at a time when Emerson could be hired for fifty.

Parker had at first received six hundred dollars a year at Roxbury, then this had gradually been increased to one thousand a year.

The “Twenty-eighth” paid him five thousand a year, but the Lyceum work yielded him three times as much. The sons of New England who fight poverty and privation until they are forty acquire the virtue of acquisitiveness.

Parker and his wife lived like poor people, as every one should. The saving habit was upon them. Lydia Parker had her limitations, but her weakness was not in the line of dress and equipage. She did her own work, and demanded an accounting from her Theodore as to receipts and disbursements, when he returned from a lecture-tour. To save money, she did not usually accompany him on his tours. So God is good. To get needful funds for personal use he had to juggle the expense-account.

Reformers are supposed to live on half-rations, and preachers are poor as church mice; but there may be exceptions. Both Emerson and Parker contrived to collect from the world what was coming to them. Emerson left an estate worth more than fifty thousand dollars, and Theodore Parker left two hundred thousand dollars, all made during the last fourteen years of his life.

Theodore Parker preached at Music-Hall nine hundred sermons. All were written out with great care, but when it came to delivering them, although he had the manuscript on his little reading-desk, he seldom referred to it. The man was most conscientious and had a beautiful contempt for the so-called extemporaneous speaker. His lyceum lectures were shavings from his workshop, as most lectures are. But preparing one new address, and giving on an average four lectures a week, with much travel, made sad inroads on his vitality. Every phase of man’s relationship to man was vital to him, and human betterment was his one theme. In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five he was indicted, along with Colonel Higginson and William Lloyd Garrison, for violation of the Fugitive-Slave Law. And when John Brown made his raid, Theodore Parker was indicted as an “accessory before the fact.” Had he been caught on Virginia soil he would doubtless have been hanged on a sour-apple tree and his soul sent marching on.

In his sermons he was brief, pointed, direct and homely in expression. He used the language of the plain people On one occasion he said: “I have more hay down than I can get in. Whether it will be rained on before next Sunday I can not say, but I will ask you to use your imaginations and mow it away.”

Again he says: “I do not care a rush for what men who differ from me do or say, but it has grieved me a little, I confess, to see men who think as I do of the historical and mythical connected with Christianity, who yet repudiate me. It is like putting your hand in your pocket where you expect to find money and discovering that the gold is gone, and that only the copper is left.”