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Parker was selected by Octavius Brooks Frothingham (in his Transcendentalism in New England) to serve as the type figure of "The Preacher" of the movement. He was, to be sure, not the only preacher among the Transcendentalists. But Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry, as did George Ripley; Frederic Henry Hedge is remembered chiefly as a scholar; and James Freeman Clarke was a church reformer and builder, whose preaching was ancillary to other things. Parker's lasting image, however, is that of a man on the platform of the Music Hall, where his Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society met, attacking the popular theology of the day or speaking a prophetic word with respect to slavery and other social ills. The sermon, or the lecture as the secular equivalent, was his chosen medium. And so, on his monument in the old Protestant cemetery in Florence, the inscription reads: "The Great American Preacher."
Theodore Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, the youngest child of a farmer and the grandson of the Captain John Parker who commanded the Lexington minutemen on the morning of 19 April 1775.
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