Samuel Parker was a remarkable and multi-faceted man. Well known in his day – although hardly well regarded – as a formidable and sharp-tongued polemicist and enemy of dissent, he has been all but forgotten. A handful of literary scholars interested in Andrew Marvel's Rehearsal Transpros'd – which was a response to several of Parker's tracts – knows at least one side of him, and the critical consensus is that Parker was an unworthy opponent who was easily driven from the field of battle. Parker's name appears from time to time in works on Restoration ecclesiology and religious thought – especially in reference to his attacks on nonconformity and toleration – and here too the received opinion is that he was a relatively minor figure.

Intelligent, well read, prolific, and possessed of diverse interests, he was an advocate of the new science, an astute critic of the Restoration Platonists and what he saw as their misuses of language, a more than merely competent natural-law theorist, and a high church apologist for the Anglican establishment. But he was intemperate and mean spirited in his attacks on dissenters, ruthlessly absolutist in his political theory and – at the end of his life – an ally (and possibly a pawn as well) of James II's in the king's attempt to further the interests of Roman Catholics. (James, ignoring Archbishop Sancroft's recommendation of Robert South, had appointed Parker bishop of Oxford in 1686.) Because he consistently cast his lot with what was ultimately the losing side in Restoration politics, history has buried Parker in either defamation or obscurity, yet another instance of Whiggery triumphant that would have pleased many of his contemporaries.