656 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 23 illus., notes, bibl., index

She had been reared in a family devout in a traditionally Puritan way; her parents, both members of the Lexington Church, had baptized her ten brothers Asahel, Habakkuk, Nahum, Matthew, Ishmael, Noah, Hiram, Jeptha, Ammi, and Elisha. Hannah did not baptize her own children, however, until after Theodore was born. On 16 February 1812, the minister of the Lexington Church, Avery Williams, noted in the Church Record Book that he had baptized "Rebekah" Parker, one of Theodore's sisters, aged twelve, her mother "having been propounded for admission to the Church, and giving assent to the Covenant." The baptism was performed at the Parker house because the child was "dangerously sick"; she died two days later. The following Sunday, Hannah formally was admitted "to full Communion." The Sunday after that, she had Williams baptize her five youngest children, Isaac, Ruth, Hiram, Emily, and the one-and-a-half-year-old Theodore, who cried, "Oh, don't!" when the water was sprinkled on him. Finally, in May, Hannah persuaded her two older, unmarried daughters, Mary and Lydia, to get baptized. (Her only remaining children then were her daughter Hannah, who was married and living in Vermont, and her oldest son, John, who may also have been living away from home.)[18]

The significance of Hannah's actions can be perceived only against a backdrop of New England church history. In the original system of New England church polity, set up by Puritan immigrants in the 1630s, everyone was required to attend a church and to support it financially, but only a few worshipers were actual church members—allowed to take communion and have their children baptized. The test of membership was "visible sainthood," which required not only outward morality, but the ability to give an adequate account to the minister of an inward "work of grace." Most first-generation Puritans felt they could meet this standard, but those of later generations increasingly felt they could not (perhaps because the standard seems to have grown gradually more stringent).[19] Even those who led upright lives and went to meeting, if they were unable to give a "relation of grace," did not join the church. Their children remained unbaptized.

New England ministers, afraid these children and their descendants would be lost to the churches, gathered at a synod in 1662 and proclaimed the "Half-Way Covenant." Although communion remained restricted only to "full" church members, baptism was made an inclusive sacrament: all who had been baptized now were considered "half-way" members, who could in turn have their children baptized. This reform relieved parents of some of the pressure to become full members. Perhaps to prevent complacency, ministers soon began urging the half-way members of their congregations to "renew the covenant" before taking the sacraments. This was not a relation of grace, but more simply an affirmation of their commitment to the church. New Englanders came commonly to perform this ceremony just before they were to wed; it was understood that this permitted their future children to partake of the baptismal sacrament. Meanwhile, over the course of the eighteenth century, most churches, and all those with liberal tendencies, abandoned the distinction between full and half-way membership and made the Lord's Supper open to all.

The Lexington Church had marked liberal tendencies. No distinction was made between full and half-way members. When Hannah "assented to the Covenant" that winter day in 1812, she not only got her children baptized, she was "admitted to full communion." But why had she not assented to the covenant already? She and her husband had been baptized, when infants, into the Lexington church. They could have joined the church at any time, but did not—not even when they began having children in 1785. Yet they seem to have attended faithfully, for in 1794, when a pew auction was held to raise funds to build a new meetinghouse, John spent the considerable sum of fifty-seven dollars to buy one in the balcony, near the choir.[20]

Could Hannah have been religiously indifferent, until the illness of her child prompted her to experience an awakening in 1812? Columbus Greene later recalled that baptism was not widely practiced in Lexington and hinted that indifference was the cause. Or could Hannah have refrained from sacraments out of deference to her rationalistic husband? He pointedly did not assent to the covenant along with his wife. Neither of these explanations, however, accounts for Hannah's obvious concern to baptize all her children.

She probably held certain popular religious beliefs about baptism and communion. Puritan thinkers had rejected the "high," Catholic, view of the sacraments—that they actually imparted grace. Baptism and the Lord's Supper were regarded in Puritan theology merely as signs of faith. But these sacraments gained popular meanings they did not formally hold.[21] Puritan parents, out of concern for their children and a desire to bring them within the covenant of the church, came to regard baptism not merely as a sign of nurturing intent, but as a way actually to pass on grace to their children and to protect them spiritually. People holding such beliefs had approved of the Half-Way Covenant and tried to make baptism as widely available as possible. The Lord's Supper, on the other hand, came to be regarded by lay folk as necessarily restricted; only the truly pure could partake of it without danger of damning themselves and corrupting the church. This belief was so strong that even when, beginning in the 1690s, certain ministers opened communion to all, most lay people held back. The belief persisted even among Unitarians in the nineteenth century, many of whom remained reluctant to "approach the table" until they felt "ready." As a writer in the Christian Examiner, the principal Unitarian journal, complained in 1832: The peculiar awe, by which this ordinance is separated from every other ordinance of God's appointment; the habit of singling it out, and exalting it above every other mode of worship and means of grace; the singular dread, in the minds of many, of contracting some heinous and mysterious guilt by a wrong participation of it; . . . the very aspect, too, of many communicants, of constraint and almost of distress; the evident feeling which many of them have, that the elements are the solemn things in this commemoration, and that it becomes them to have a very special impression on their minds, at the moment when they take into their hands these elements,—all these things, are to our apprehension, proofs, that there is still on this subject a great deal of superstition among us.[22]

If Hannah Parker had held such popular, traditional beliefs, she might have hung back from being "admitted into full communion"—but why would she have waited so long to baptize her children? The Lexington church, with its liberal tendencies, had allowed anyone who affirmed the covenant to partake of both baptism and communion. Hannah must have felt that if she had joined the church for the sake of baptizing her children, she also would have had to partake of the Lord's Supper, which she felt unready to do. So she waited for years, until a desire to give spiritual help to her dying daughter prompted her to act.

The urgency with which she acted suggests that, despite Theodore's later denials, she believed enough in the Puritan "dark theology" to think God might damn eternally the souls of sinners. The story Theodore told many times in later life, that he wrestled with the doctrine of eternal damnation as a child, otherwise would be difficult to explain. He would recall the "many, many hours" that he had lain awake in bed, weeping and praying as he thought of Hell; "for years, say from 7 till 10, I said my prayers with much devotion I think & then continued to repeat 'Lord, forgive my sins,' till sleep came upon me." He recalled that he had first learned about Hell and the Devil from the New England Primer, which had been assigned to him in school against his father's wishes.[23]

What were his mother's wishes? Theodore recalled that it was she who had charge of the religious training of the children, and she who decided the religious reading of the family. She surely would have noticed her son's ordeal, and if she did not believe in eternal damnation, she would have tried to comfort him. Theodore claimed, however, that he saw his way through the crisis on his own, rejecting the doctrine as unnatural while still a boy (a claim that can be disputed). He portrays his mother as someone who did not care much for doctrine, but in light of her emotional religious temperament, she may have cast her undoctrinaire Christianity, with its strong folk beliefs, in an evangelical mold, and at the very least used the language of Hell for the unrighteous. Had she done so, she would have been keeping with the traditions of the Lexington church.[24]

The meetinghouse of the church, located about a mile north of the Parker farm, at the center of town alongside the road to Boston, was a two-storied, boxy building. Its big front doors opened out on the town common, where Theodore's father's father, Captain John, had commanded the little troop of militiamen who skirmished with British regulars in the dawn light of 19 April 1775, inaugurating the Revolutionary War. Theodore's father, who was fourteen on that "glorious morning," would tell how his father left in the middle of the night to answer the alarm that the "Red Coats" were coming, how his mother hid the family valuables in a tree trunk, how the family heard musket fire at daybreak, and how his mother sent him to a hill up behind a neighbor's farm to see if the British were heading their way (they were not). Many townspeople had such stories. Columbus Greene later remembered that on Sundays, in the dinner break between morning and afternoon services, he and Theodore would leave the meetinghouse and go over to nearby Dudley's tavern to "hear the old Revolutionary soldiers tell stories of the war." Relics of the war also abounded. John Parker kept as heirlooms two muskets, one that his father had used in the battle, the other that he was supposed to have captured from a drunken British soldier. John also had bought from the town the belfry shed, from which the alarm in 1775 had been rung. He had hauled it down to his farm, and, when Theodore and Columbus were growing up, used it as his woodworking shop.[25]

By that time, the Battle of Lexington, so-called, had grown into a political and religious event of mythic proportions. In 1799, the inhabitants of the town erected a monument on the common, about a hundred yards from the door of the meetinghouse and with an inscription written by the minister, which marked the spot as "Sacred to the Liberty and Rights of Mankind!!!" and commemorated the eight militiamen killed in the battle, including Theodore's distant cousin Jonas, as "[m]artyrs in the cause of God and their country," whose "[b]lood . . . was the Cement of the Union of these States, then Colonies," as it inspired their fellow citizens "to revenge" their death, "and at the Point of the Sword, to assert and defend their native Rights. They nobly dar'd to be free!!" In 1855, Theodore recalled the Sunday when, as a small boy, "my mother lifted me up . . . in her religious, patriotic arms, and held me while I read the first monumental line I ever saw: sacred to liberty and the rights of mankind."[26]

When he was eleven, Theodore witnessed the battle reenacted in front of the meetinghouse, with about twenty of the original participants taking part. His grandfather's role was taken by one of the substantial citizens of the town, Colonel William Monroe, who had been an orderly sergeant in the original. At the appropriate point, Monroe declaimed Captain Parker's famous order, "Don't fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!" and added, "For them is the very words Captain Parker said." It is unlikely that these were Captain Parker's words, but Theodore later asserted to the historian George Bancroft that they were "the family tradition of the day." When he was in his late teens, Theodore served as an ensign in his grandfather's militia company, although by that point the militia was a decadent institution (it was disbanded in 1832) and his duties were mostly clerical. In 1834, he watched as, with solemn ceremony and an oration by Edward Everett, the bodies of the eight militiamen who died in the battle were moved from the town graveyard and reinterred under the monument.[27]

Theodore later credited the influence of his Revolutionary War heritage on the moral part of his religious views. In 1855, when he was leading the resistance in Boston to the Fugitive Slave Law, he would write that the Spirit of Liberty, the Love of Justice, was early fanned into my Boyish heart. That monument covers the bones of my kinsfolk; it was their blood which reddened the long, green grass of Lexington. It is my own name which stands chiselled on that stone; the tall Captain who marshalled his fellow farmers and mechanics into stern array and spoke such brave and dangerous words as opened the War of American Independence,—the last to leave the field,—was my father's father. I learned to read out of his Bible, and with a musket he that day captured from the foe, I learned also another religious lesson, that "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to god."[28]
But his background left a deeper, less conscious influence. He grew up in a town where the common, the battle green, and the churchyard were the same space—a space dominated by a meetinghouse and marked by a monument that proclaimed it sacred. In such a place, was it not palpable that American liberty rested on a religious foundation? Was it not inevitable that when the mature Theodore, now a minister, set out to reform society, he should begin by trying to reform the church?[29]

Theodore later had few kind things to say about the services at the meetinghouse. He recalled only their "notorious dulness [sic] . . . , their mechanical character, the poverty and insignificance of the sermons, the unnaturalness and uncertainty of the doctrines preached on the authority of a 'divine and infallible revelation,' the lifelessness of the public prayers, and the consequent heedlessness of the congregation." Although these criticisms, written in 1859, are in part aimed at his religious opponents at the time, an episode of his early life suggests that he was accurately recalling dissatisfaction.[30]

In 1830, after he left home, he spent a year teaching at a private school in Boston, during which time he "attended the preachings of Dr. Lyman Beecher, the most powerful Orthodox minister in New England," and "went through one of his protracted meetings." Theodore would later claim that when he was a boy the only minister he admired was William Ellery Channing, the foremost American Unitarian.[31] Why then did he bypass Channing and all the other Boston Unitarians to hear the leading New England evangelical, who spent much of his time attacking them? Theodore may have gone out of curiosity, but if so it was not idle curiosity. He attended Beecher's Hanover Street Church every Sunday for an entire year, and the revival meeting he "went through" lasted six days. Although he was not "converted," he seems to have been attracted to evangelicalism. His attraction can be understood only by looking back over the history of the Lexington Church.

It was organized in 1691, but its religious character was established later, largely by two ministers: John Hancock, who filled the Lexington pulpit from 1697 until his death in 1752, and Jonas Clarke, who filled it from 1755 until his death in 1805.[32] Through a tumultuous century of New England religious history, these two kept the Lexington Church at peace and in the process shaped the religious outlook of Theodore's parents and, indirectly, of Theodore himself.

Hancock was often called "Bishop Hancock," a sign of the respect in which he was held by his contemporaries. His personal authority in Lexington was considerable; as Nathaniel Appleton said, addressing the people of the town at Hancock's funeral: "[Y]ou your selves were so sensible of his Wisdom and Goodness, of his Capacity and Readiness to direct and advise you that, as I have understood, you seldom or never engaged in any important or difficult Affair, without consulting him upon it." In a traditional story, two farmers were on the verge of a lawsuit over a disputed property line when he intervened. He walked both farmers to the contested field and had each state his case. Then he instructed them where to drive the surveying stakes. Neither farmer appealed the decision.[33]

The greatest potential challenge to Hancock's authority came in the early 1740s, when he was in his seventies. A series of religious revivals, later named the Great Awakening, caused schisms in churches across New England, including neighboring Concord, and split the Puritan Standing Order of Massachusetts three ways. All three factions identified themselves with the New England Puritan tradition.[34]

Among the many groups of "New Lights," as the supporters of the Awakening called themselves, were the ministers who founded the "New Divinity" tradition in which Lyman Beecher was trained. They were mostly Yale-educated, pastored rural or small-town churches, and believed that they preserved the emotional Calvinist core of Puritanism. Like the Puritans, they preached that we were all born into sin, so that regardless of our efforts, in our hearts we hated God and justly deserved nothing but hellfire. God was merciful, however, and had sacrificed His Son, the Christ Jesus, to pay for our sins. A few souls, which God had chosen before the creation of the world, were thereby saved from eternal damnation. This salvation was wholly the work of divine grace; to suggest otherwise was to deny God's omnipotence. Truly saved persons first would feel acutely and unbearably aware of their own corruption, then realize with sudden elation that God loved them anyway. He would then regenerate them. This emotional "new birth" marked all true religious experience. The New Divinity men denounced certain other New England ministers as having abandoned Calvinism for the heresy of Arminianism, which they defined as the doctrine that you could work your way into Heaven without divine intervention.[35]

The opponents of the Awakening who have received the most historical attention were these so-called Arminians, led by mostly Harvard-trained ministers of wealthy churches in and around Boston; although not all Arminians were of the local elite, most of the local elite was Arminian. Arminians denounced the New Light innovations of mass revival meetings and itinerant preaching as "enthusiasm" at the expense of genuine morality and piety. Their emphasis was on the rational aspects of the Puritan heritage. Most Puritans had believed that although God was omnipotent and could redeem people arbitrarily, He had chosen instead to treat them as rational creatures and give them the terms of salvation in an infallible revelation, the Bible. By studying Scripture and human experience, mortals could identify the means God used to save people. Most Puritans held that God "prepared" a sinner for the onslaught of grace; during preparation, the sinner, seemingly but not actually by his or her own efforts, struggled to be virtuous and pious and to engage in soul-searching.

The Arminians were trying to describe their own religious experience when they developed this idea of preparation and portrayed salvation as a gradual process brought about by human struggle, with divine assistance, against sin.[36] They thereby founded the tradition out of which the "liberal Christianity" of William Ellery Channing was to arise. The ministers who refined this tradition over the next decades were to be driven partly by controversy with the Calvinists, partly by Enlightenment ideas coming from England, and partly by the internal logic of their arguments. In the 1750s, they abandoned predestination and original sin, arguing that these doctrines made God, not humans, responsible for evil. In contrast, they emphasized God's benevolence, which led a few of them by the end of the century to abandon the idea of eternal damnation.

Hancock quietly objected to the excesses of the Awakening, but he was no Arminian. He believed strongly that people were "born in Sin, and sold in Sin, and are in the Power of that Spirit that works in Children of Disobedience." He was among the many "Old Calvinists"—probably the majority of ministers in the 1740s—who saw themselves as the purest defenders of the Calvinist yet rationalist New England heritage. Hancock's specific objection to the revivals was that they encouraged "Divisions and Separations" in the church. "O what Caution and Wisdom should govern the Minds of Ministers in these dividing Times," he cautioned in 1748, "that they and their People may yet take sweet counsel together, and walk to the House of God in Company." Rather than encourage ecclesiastical strife by condemning the Awakening, Hancock used his personal authority to harness and direct the new spirit. In 1741 and 1742, he "harvested" eighty new members for his church. At the same time, he did not denounce the Arminians; in 1747, for example, he attended the ordination of Jonathan Mayhew, even though Mayhew was widely, and correctly, suspected of harboring Arminian tendencies.[37]

Hancock's example of "Old Calvinist" toleration was carried on by his grandson-in-law and successor, Jonas Clarke, whose influence over his congregation came to rival that of the "Bishop." Clarke became the undisputed leader of Lexington political opinion: he wrote the resolutions and instructions given to the representatives of the town on every major issue from the Stamp Act in 1765 to Jay's Treaty in 1794. During the Revolution he was an ardent Whig and is generally credited with inspiring his parishioners' patriotism; it is his words that Theodore remembered reading on the Lexington monument.[38]

In religion, Clarke maintained an orthodox reputation, which is borne out in some of his surviving sermons. Yet he never engaged in theological disputes, and when he gave the Charge at ordinations—which he was reputed to have done more often than any other member of his generation—he usually told the new ministers that the "right of private judgment, in matters of Faith and Conscience, ought ever to be held sacred."[39]

Clarke's broad-church attitude was mixed with a vigorous piety, which inspired twenty-seven congregants to join the church in his first year. His sermons were noted not only for their length (sometimes three hours), but their emotionalism, in which he self-consciously imitated Hancock. Clarke, too, set great store by religious singing, by which he thought "the attention is roused, the passions are composed, the affections are engaged, the devotion is enlivened, and the whole soul is sweetly drawn forth in gratitude, and in most devout acknowledgements of praise of God." In 1766, he reformed the musical practices of the Lexington Church, when he persuaded the congregation to organize a choir, replace the literal New England Psalm book with the more poetic Tate and Brady version, and start using Isaac Watts's Scriptural Hymns. Similar reforms in other congregations frequently became the subject of fierce dispute. In Lexington, Clarke's influence was such that there was little dissent.[40]

Musical reform was often linked to religious liberalism, and Clarke did seem to have Arminian tendencies: his children and students all turned out liberal, as did many of his parishioners, like John Parker. In 1805, the year of his death, his son-in-law Henry Ware, a prominent liberal, was appointed Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard after a long debate. The appointment, along with that of Samuel Webber as president the following year, gave the liberals control of the university for the first time. This event was the opening of a twenty-year controversy between the liberals and orthodox, which was to end with the liberals forming the American Unitarian Association.

The most visible part of the controversy was not over the central issue of original sin, but over the secondary issue of the Trinity. Most liberals, because they did not believe sin was infinite, did not see the necessity of an infinite sacrifice to atone for it; God no longer needed to be crucified, so Christ no longer had to be God. Besides, they thought that if the Bible was read carefully and critically, the doctrine of the Trinity would be found unscriptural; as they read the New Testament, Jesus was portrayed as a superangelic being but not as God. This Christology became the focus of debate in 1815, when the orthodox minister Jedidiah Morse accused the liberals of secretly being "Unitarians"—that is, of thinking that Jesus was merely human. The liberals soon were stuck with the "Unitarian" label. In 1819, when Channing preached the sermon that became the liberal manifesto, he called it Unitarian Christianity.

The "Unitarian Controversy" raged throughout Theodore's boyhood, splitting many churches, but in Lexington all was quiet because, as Columbus Greene recalled, "Unitarian . . . ideas may be said to have prevailed." Clarke's immediate successor, Avery Williams—the minister who baptized Theodore—appears to have been another tolerant Calvinist; but liberal ideas had become so generally accepted that when Williams left after seven years and was replaced by Charles Briggs, a Unitarian, no schism occurred. Briggs was the minister during much of the childhood of both Theodore Parker and Columbus Greene; although most church members liked his "discreet & conciliatory deportment," both young men seemed disappointed in him as a religious teacher.[41]

Part of Briggs's problem was his feeble health, which often kept him from attending to his duties; the town historian notes that the "church records, kept by him, are not only meagre, but loose, and compare poorly with those of his predecessors." Worse, the religiousness of the town waned under his leadership. Greene, looking back on his childhood, could recall "no real depth of religious sentiment[,] no revivals, no love feasts. It was not the custom to have family prayers. The religious domestic customs of an older time seemed to have dyed [sic] out. It was not a universal custom to baptize children. Quite a proportion belonged to Church . . . but not many young persons."[42]

Briggs was himself worried about the growing apathy. "How many are there who do not value their religious privileges. . . !" he said in his only printed sermon. "How many who neglect the instructions of the sanctuary, the ordinances of religion, and all the means of personal holiness!" He called for people to attend worship "punctually" and "from right motives," to baptize their children and take communion, to promote the religious education of their children, and to be charitable. He did not seem to believe, however, that he could effect these changes; his basic argument was that while "the success of religion depends much on the ability . . . of those who dispense it . . . [,] it depends quite as much, nay more, on the disposition and character of those to whom it is preached." Apathy was more the fault of the congregation than the minister, and it was up to the congregation to improve itself. This passive outlook was not in the tradition of Hancock and Clarke, who had energetically sought to inspire devotion and piety.[43]

Theodore and his nephew probably picked up their discontent with Briggs from their elders. The older members of the Parker household had known his predecessors personally. Theodore's aged grandmother, Lydia Pierce, had been baptized by Hancock, had heard him preach during the Great Awakening, and had joined the church in 1756, a few years after Clarke was ordained. John and Hannah both had been baptized by Clarke,[44] and listened to his sermons for decades. Hannah's love of "ballads and psalms" matched Clarke's love of religious music.

Clarke, with his strong personality, long association with the community, tolerant Calvinism, and heartfelt piety, had been able to hold the allegiance of the spectrum of Lexington religious opinion, from liberal rationalists, like John Parker, to those who were devout but undoctrinaire, like Hannah, to those with orthodox sensibilities like John's mother, Lydia, who did not even use the Watts hymnbook. (Theodore remembered that "the original edition of the Puritan hymnbook . . . was much in her hands.") Briggs could not match Clarke's appeal. Although he excited no controversy, he stirred few hearts, and people drifted away from his church. During his ministry, the Baptists made their first inroads into the town, and had enough adherents by 1830 to form a congregation; the Church of Lexington was now merely one of two Lexington churches. Toward the end of Briggs's tenure, a group of Unitarians in the eastern part of town formed a church with Transcendentalist leanings. Emerson preached there on a supply basis from 1836 to 1838 (it was where he ended his ministerial career). The first regular minister was Karl Follen, a German who had been forced to flee Europe because of his religious and political radicalism.[45]

The Parker family felt the same pressures as the Lexington Church and split in a similar way. Both Theodore and his nephew wanted their religion to be deeply felt, like that of Hannah. They had not experienced enough religious feeling in the Unitarianism of Lexington and so were attracted to the fervor of the revivalists. Theodore, after he left Lexington to teach in Boston, attended Beecher's church and a six-day "protracted meeting"; Greene, who left Lexington a few years later to work in the Lowell mills, began attending a Baptist church, and also went to a "protracted meeting"—one that convened every evening for two weeks. Unlike his young uncle, he emerged a convert. He was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1840—just as Theodore was emerging as the major Transcendentalist minister.[46]

In 1834, when Greene first wrote to tell him that he had experienced "a change of heart," Theodore was studying for the Unitarian ministry at Harvard. He responded by congratulating his nephew for having "found religion, for which you were seeking," but added, "I do not suppose you mean to say that religion is some one thing, state or feeling, which comes to you in a moment, when you had no conception of such a thing before. But that it is, that Love to God, and good will to men, which gradually arises in the heart, and which goes on constantly increasing and shining, like the Lamp of the Just, more and more unto the perfect day." In Theodore's next letter, he wrote that although protracted meetings surely had awakened "many a careless thoughtless, worldly-minded, sensual man," they were for most people "too violent, and do more harm than good." He recalled his own experience with a protracted meeting a few years before: "I confess I derived much advantage from it, but it was too harsh a remedy for gentle souls." He urged Greene to read Henry Ware Jr.'s On the Formation of the Christian Character or Life of the Savior, which he thought were "excellent books."[47]

This suggestion indicates one reason why Theodore had not become an evangelical: he was drawn instead to a strain within the liberal tradition that was more suited to his temperament and more in keeping with his religious background. Although the liberals had drawn on the rationalism of the Puritan heritage, they had not wholly abandoned the "affections" to the orthodox. Instead, certain liberal ministers had cultivated a type of sensitive, emotional pietism that they united with their "reasonable" theology. These ministers, of whom the younger Ware was a prominent example, had an undoctrinaire religious fervor not unlike that of John Hancock and Jonas Clarke; Ware in fact was Clarke's grandson and Hancock's great-grandson. Ware had successfully cultivated a pietistic revival in his Boston church, as Charles Briggs had been unable to do in Lexington. Ware's revival was like the "harvests" of Hancock in the 1740s, and of Clarke in the 1750s, in that it was wholly free of the "violence" that Theodore thought marred the protracted meetings. For Theodore, a genuine spiritual awakening was not made in the midst of noise and crowds. Rather, genuine spirituality was, as he often claimed, "tranquil." Yet the young man seems to have been much less tranquil than fiercely ambitious, and his ambition may also have influenced his religious choices.[48]