Theodore Parker was an energetic, ambitious man who devoted himself to a life of scholarship, preaching, and social action. Although he remained a minister through his career, he was also perhaps the most theologically and socially active transcendentalist. It was not nature but the nature of man which absorbed his vast energies. Theodore Parker was born into a large family of a reading farmer, and was an early voracious reader, writing and memorizing poetry. At 17 he taught school for four years, then enrolled at Harvard, finishing his work but not receiving a degree because he had been unable to pay his fees (although he would receive an honorary master's degree later). After a year in Boston, listening to Dr. Lyman Beecher and disagreeing with his Calvinism, he opened his own school in Watertown for two years. There he was introduced to transcendentalist thought through his friend, the Unitarian minister Convers Francis. He married another teacher, Lydia Cabot, and began writing a criticism of the New Testament, hoping someday to become dean of the Harvard Divinity School, which he began attending in 1834. Less