Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9

E >> Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9

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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.

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."

Recently there has been resurrected and regalvanized a story that was
first told in Music-Hall by Theodore Parker on June Nineteenth,
Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six. The story was about as follows:

Once in a stagecoach there was a man who carried on his knees a box,
on which slats were nailed. Now a box like that always incites
curiosity. Finally a personage leaned over and said to the man of
the mysterious package:

"Stranger, may I be so bold as to ask what you have in that box?"
"A mongoose," was the polite answer.

"Oh, I see--but what is a mongoose?"

"Why, a mongoose is a little animal we use for killing snakes."

"Of course, of course--oh, but--but where are you going to kill
snakes with your mongoose?"

And the man replied, "My brother has the delirium tremens, and I
have brought this mongoose so he can use it to kill the snakes."

There was silence then for nearly a mile, when the man of the
Socratic Method had an idea and burst out with, "But Lordy gracious,
you do not need a mongoose to kill the snakes a fellow sees who has
delirium tremens--for they are only imaginary snakes!" "I know,"
said the owner of the box, tapping his precious package gently, "I
know that delirium-tremens snakes are only imaginary snakes, but
this is only an imaginary mongoose."

And the moral was, according to Theodore Parker, that, to appease the
wrath of an imaginary God, we must believe in an imaginary formula,
and thereby we could all be redeemed from the danger of an imaginary
hell. Also that an imaginary disease can be cured by an imaginary
remedy.

Theodore Parker died in Florence, Italy, in Eighteen Hundred Sixty,
aged fifty years. His disease was an excess of Theodore Parker. His
body lies buried there in Florence, in the Protestant cemetery, only a
little way from the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

At his funeral services held in Boston, Emerson said:

Ah, my brave brother! It seems as if, in a frivolous age, our loss
were immense, and your place can not be supplied. But you will
already be consoled in the transfer of your genius, knowing well
that the nature of the world will affirm to all men, in all times,
that which for twenty-five years you valiantly spoke. The breezes of
Italy murmur the same truth over your grave, the winds of America
over these bereaved streets, and the sea which bore your mourners
home affirms it. Whilst the polished and pleasant traitors to human
rights, with perverted learning and disgraced graces, die and are
utterly forgotten, with their double tongue saying all that is
sordid about the corruption of man, you believed in the divinity of
all, and you live on.

OLIVER CROMWELL

_For my beloved wife, Elizabeth Cromwell. These:
Edinburgh, 3d May, 1651_

My Dearest: I could not satisfy myself to omit this post, although I
have not much to write; yet indeed I love to write to my dear who is
so very much in my heart. It joys me to hear thy soul prospereth:
the Lord increase His favors to thee more and more. The great good
thy soul can wish is, that the Lord lift upon thee the light of His
countenance, which is better than life. The Lord bless all thy good
counsel and example to all those about thee, and hear all thy
prayers and accept thee always.

I am glad to hear thy son and daughter are with thee. I hope thou
wilt have some opportunity of good advice to them. Present my duty
to my mother. My love to all the family. Still pray for Thine,
_Oliver Cromwell_

[Illustration: OLIVER CROMWELL]

Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, which word was first applied in bucolic
pleasantry by an unbeliever--may God rest his soul!--and was adopted
by this body of people who desired to live lives of purity, reflecting
the will of the Lord.

Oliver did in his life so typify all the Puritan qualities of sterling
honesty (as well as some simplicities springing out of his faults)
that the time spent in considering him shall not be lost. "Our Oliver
was the last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from England," wrote
Thomas Carlyle. Obscured in lurid twilight as the shadow of death,
hated by somnambulant pedants, doleful dilettanti, phantasmagoric
errors, bodeful inconceivabilities, trackless, behind pasteboard
griffins, wiverns, chimeras, Carlyle had to search through thirty
thousand pamphlets and forty thousand letters for the soul of
Cromwell.

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, England, April Twenty-fifth,
Fifteen Hundred Ninety-nine. His parents belonged to the landed
gentry, but who yet were poor enough so they ever felt the necessity
of work and economy. The mother of Cromwell was a widow when she
wedded Richard, the happy father of Oliver. The widow's husband had
accommodatingly died, and he now has a monument, placed they say by
Oliver Cromwell himself, in Ely Cathedral, which records him thus:
"Here sleepeth until the last Great Day, when the Trump shall sound,
William Lynne, Esq., who had the honor and felicity to be the first
husband of Elizabeth, Mother through the Grace of God to Oliver
Cromwell." At the bottom of the inscription a would-be wag wrote, "Had
he lived long enough he would have been the stepfather of Oliver."

Oliver was the fifth child of his parents, who it seems were happily
wedded, the gray mare being much the better horse. And this once
caused Oliver to say (and which the same is here recorded to disprove
the statement that he had no wit), "Men who are born to rule other men
are themselves ruled by women." This may be truth or not--I can not
say.

Smelted out of the dross-heap of lying biographers, most of whose
stories should be given Christian burial, we get the truth that this
boy was brought up by pious, hard-working parents.

The splenetic capacity, the calumnious credulity, the pleasures of
prevarication and of rolling falsehoods like a sweet morsel under the
tongue, have made those thirty thousand Cromwell pamphlets possible.
It is stated by one writer, Heath, now pleasantly known as "Carrion
Heath," that Oliver's father was a brewer, and the son grew up a
tapster, but was compelled to resign his office on account of being
his own best customer.

Waiving all these precious libels, created to supply a demand, we find
that Oliver grew up, swart and strong, a sturdy country lad, who did the
things that all country boys do, both good and ill. He wrestled,
fought, swam, worked, studied a little. He was packed off to
Cambridge, where he entered Sidney Sussex College, April Twenty-
second, Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, which is the day that one William
Shakespeare died, but which worthy playwright was never even so much
as once mentioned by Cromwell in all of his voluminous writings. If
Cromwell ever heard of Shakespeare he carefully concealed the fact.

Before we proceed further it may be proper to say that the father of
our Oliver had a sister who married William Hampden of Bucks, and this
woman was the mother of John Hampden, who was deemed worthy of mention
in "Gray's Elegy" and also in several prose works, notably the court
records of England. The family of Oliver traced to that of Thomas
Cromwell, Earl of Essex; although such is the contempt for pedigree by
men who can themselves do things, that Oliver once disclaimed Thomas,
as much as to say. "There has been only one Cromwell, and I am the
one." It was about thus (I do not five the exact words, because I was
not present and the Pitt system was not then in use, great men at that
time not having stenographers at their elbows): Bishop Goodman, (known
as Badman) was reading to the Protector a long, slushy Billwalker-of-
Fargo address full of semi-popish jargon, when his Lordship's
relationship to Thomas, the Mauler of Monasteries, was mentioned. Here
broke in Oliver with, "Eliminate that--eliminate that--he was no
relative of mine--good morning!"

Bishop Badman was a queer old piece of theological confusion, who went
over to popery, body, boots and breeches, believing that Oliver was
a bounder and was soon to be ditched by destiny. Bishop Badman, having
made the prophecy of ill-luck, did all he could to bring it about,
when death ditched him; and whether he ever knew the rest about
Cromwell, we do not know, even yet, as our knowledge of another world
comes to us through persons who can not always be safely trusted to
tell the truth about this.

At Cambridge, our Oliver did not learn as much from books as from the
boys, eke girls, I am sorry to say--all great universities being co-ed
in fact, if not in name. His mother sent him things to eat and things
to wear, but among items to wear at that time, stockings were for
royalty alone. Queen Elizabeth was the first person of either the male
or the female persuasion in England to wear knit stockings, and also
to use a table-fork--this being for spearing purposes.

Oliver's mother sent him a baize or bombazine table-cloth. And this
tablecloth did he cut up, prompted by the devil, into stockings, for
he was justly proud of his calves, the same having been admired by the
co-eds of Cambridge. For all of these things, in after-years, Oliver
did pray forgiveness and beseech pardon for such pride of the eye and
lust of the flesh, manifest in pedal millinery.

A year at Cambridge proved the uselessness of the place, but it was
necessary to go there to find this out. The death of his father
brought matters to a climax, and Oliver must prepare for very hard
times. Then London and a lawyer's office welcomed him.

On Thursday, October Twenty-ninth, Sixteen Hundred Eighteen, Cromwell
saw a curious sight: it was the fall of the curtain in the fifth act
of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, who introduced tobacco into
England, and did several other things, for which the monarchy was, as
usual, ungrateful. Raleigh had sought to find an Eldorado for England,
and alas! he only found that man must work wherever he is, if he would
succeed, and that fields of gold and springs of eternal youth exist
only in dreams, where they best belong. It was a cold, gray morning,
and Sir Walter was kept standing on the scaffold while the headsman
ground his ax, the delay being for the amusement and edification of
the Christian friends assembled.

"One thing I will never do," said Oliver Cromwell, law-clerk, swart
and lusty, in green stockings and other sartor-resartus trifles; "one
thing I will never do--and that is, take human life!" Oliver was both
tender-hearted and grim.

Sir Walter's frame shook in the cold, dank fog, and the sheriff
offered to bring a brazier of coals; but the great man proudly drew
around him the cloak, now somewhat threadbare, that he had once spread
for good Queen Bess to tread upon, and said, "It is the ague I
contracted in America--the crowd will think it fear--I will soon be
cured of it," and he laid his proud head, gray in the service of his
country, calmly on the block, as if to say, "There now, take that, it
is all I have left to give you!"

* * * * *

How much legal lore Cromwell acquired in London is a matter of dim and
dusty doubt. That his vocabulary was slightly extended there is quite
probable, for later he uses the word "law-wolf," thus supplying Alfred
Henry Lewis with a phrase that was to be sent clattering down the
corridors of time. That Alfred Henry may have been absolutely
innocent of the truth that he was using a classicism and not a Kansas
mouth-filler is quite probable. In London, Oliver took unto himself a
wife, he being twenty-one and three weeks over. The lady was the
daughter of a client of the firm for which Oliver Cromwell was a
process-server. That he successfully served papers on the young lady
is undeniable, for he led her captive to Saint Giles' Church,
Cripplegate, and they were there married August, Sixteen Hundred
Twenty, the clerk being so overcome (doubtless by the presence of
Oliver Cromwell, the coming Lord Protector of England, Scotland and
Ireland) that he neglected to put in the day of the month. In the same
church sleeps one John Milton, who was much respected and beloved by
our Oliver, and who proved that a Puritan could write poetry.

The father of Oliver having died, as before truthfully stated, first
prophesying that his son would grow up a ne'er-do-well, this son took
his new-found wife up to the Fen Country to live with his mother and
sister. That he would be Lord Protector of the Farm seems quite the
proper thing to say, but that he was dutiful, modest, teachable, is a
fact.

Here he lived, with babies coming along one a year, hard-working,
simple, earnest, for seven years escaping the censorious eye of Clio,
weaver of history. Happy lives make dull biographies. Also, we can
truthfully say that nothing tames a man like marriage. Take marriage,
business, responsibility, and a dash of poverty, mix, and we get an
ideal condition. These things make for a noble discontent and the
industry and unrest that unlimber progress.

Then comes that peculiar psychic experience which is often the lot of
men born to make epochs, who also have souls fit to assert themselves.
We find our Oliver consumed with a strange despair, biting world-
sorrow, Tophet pouring black smoke into the universe of his being--
temptations in the wilderness!

Men of neutral quality do not make good Christians-militant. Our
Oliver was not neutral. Out of the black night of unrest and through
the thick darkness, he gradually saw the eternal ways and got good
reckonings by aid of the celestial guiding stars.

So Oliver emerged at twenty-seven, alive with cosmic consciousness--a
God-intoxicated man. That Deity spoke through him, he never doubted.
Thereafter he was to be religious, not only on Sundays and Wednesday
evenings, but always and forever.

Suddenly and without warning appears in history, Oliver Cromwell,
taking his seat in the House of Commons on Monday, March Seventeenth,
Sixteen Hundred Twenty-seven, making then a speech of five minutes,
accusing one Reverend Doctor Alablaster of flat popery; and goes back
into the silence, pulling the silence in after him, to remain twelve
years.

Then comes he forth again as member of Cambridge. He was a country
squire, bronze-faced, callous-handed, clothes plainly made by a woman,
dyed brown with walnut-juice. The man was much in earnest, although
seemingly having little to say. He was not especially conspicuous,
because it was largely a Parliament of Puritans. As members, there sat
in it John Hampden, Selden, Stratford, Prynne, and with these, the
rising tide had carried Oliver Cromwell. In a seat near him sat Sir
Edward Coke, known to posterity because he wrote a book on Lyttleton,
and Lyttleton is known to us for one sole reason only, and that is
because Coke used him for literary flux.

Religions are founded on antipathies.

Patriotism, which Doctor Johnson, beefeater-in-ordinary, said is the
last refuge of a rogue, is usually nothing but hatred of other
countries, very much as we are told that the shibboleth of Harvard is,
"To hell with Yale."

Puritanism is a reactionary move, a swinging out of the pendulum away
from idleness, gluttony, sham, pretense and hypocrisy.

Charles the First was king. He was a year younger than Oliver, but as
Fate would have it, he was to die first. So sat Oliver Cromwell, grim,
silent--thinking. And then back he lumbered by the stagecoach to his
country house.

His finances not prospering, he had moved to the little village of
Saint Ives, famous because of the fact that there was born the only
lawyer ever elected to a saintship. Once a year there is a village
festival at Saint Ives in honor of the attorney, when all the children
sing, "Advocatus et non latro, res miranda populo."

The land owned by Cromwell was boggy, willow-grown, marshy, fit only
for grazing. Oliver was a justice of the peace, now devoting his days
to improving his herds, draining the marsh-lands, praying,
occasionally fasting, exhorting at the village crossroads, and once
collaring the loafers at a country tavern and making them join in a
hymn. This exploit, together with that of quelling a small disturbance
among some student factions at the neighboring town of Cambridge, had
attracted a little attention to him, and Cambridge Puritans, not
knowing whom else to send to Parliament, chose Cromwell, the dark
horse.

With his big family he was very gentle, yet obedience was demanded,
and given, without question or dispute, and a glance at the portrait
of the man makes the matter plain. It was easier to agree with him
than successfully to oppose him.

So slipped the years away, broken only by an echo from cousin John
Hampden, who refused to pay "ship-money." This ship-money meant that
if you didn't pay so much--twenty shillings or ten pounds, according
to the needs of the exchequer--you could be drafted into His
Majesty's service and sent to sea. The money you paid was nominally to
hire a substitute, but no one but King Charles and Attorney-General
Noy, who fished out the precious precedent from the rag-bag of the
past, knew what became of the money.

Noy was a close-running mate of Archbishop Laud, who hunted heretics
and cropped the ears of a thousand Puritans. Noy is described for us
as a law-pedant, finding legal precedent for anything that royalty
wished to do. Noy devised the ship-money scheme, and then died before
his law went into effect: killed by the hand of Providence, the
Puritans said, who uttered prayers of thankfulness for his taking off,
all of which was quite absurd, since the law lives, no matter who
devised it. Rulers who wish to tax their subjects heavily should do it
by indirection--say by means of the tariff.

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