Daily Inspiration Quote by Theodore Parker

Parker’s line reads like an early warning flare from the industrial age: not against work, but against work as a totalizing force that re-engineers the self. The sting is in “hydraulic pressure,” a metaphor that drags the reader out of moral abstraction and into machinery. Pressure is impersonal; it doesn’t persuade, it crushes. By choosing a term from physics rather than scripture, the theologian signals that modern domination won’t always look like chains or kings. It will look like schedules, quotas, and a life narrowed to one “single thing.”

The phrasing “make himself servant” is also a quiet indictment. No tyrant needs to show up. The surrender is voluntary, even virtuous-seeming. That’s the subtext: the new bondage arrives disguised as responsibility, ambition, even providence. Parker’s moral vocabulary centers “manhood,” not in the chest-thumping sense, but as shorthand for full human agency - a person capable of conscience, community, and spiritual depth. Excessive business doesn’t merely exhaust; it hollows out, “all taken out of him,” leaving a functioning worker where a whole person used to be.

Context matters: Parker was a Unitarian reformer active in abolitionism and social critique, watching a market society accelerate and tighten its grip on daily life. The sentence is a theological intervention in economic language. It implies that a life consumed by “business” is not just unhealthy but spiritually deforming - a misdirection of devotion. Work becomes an idol, and the cost is the self.