ddress them on the Sunday following. As he
pronounced the word "Reverend," I detected an unmistakable and probably
unconscious curl of his lip. The lady was, I believe, the first woman
minister regularly ordained in the United States. She was a graduate of
Oberlin, in that day the only college in our country which received
among its pupils women and negroes. She was ordained as pastor by an
Orthodox Congregational society, and has since become better known as
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a strenuous advocate of the rights of her
sex, an earnest student of religious philosophy, and the author of some
valuable works on this and kindred topics.

[Illustration: THEODORE PARKER

_From a photograph by J. J. Hawes._]

I am almost certain that Parker was the first minister who in public
prayer to God addressed him as "Father and Mother of us all." I can
truly say that no rite of public worship, not even the splendid Easter
service in St. Peter's at Rome, ever impressed me as deeply as did
Theodore Parker's prayers. The volume of them which has been published
preserves many of his sentences, but cannot convey any sense of the
sublime attitude of humility with which he rose and stood, his arms
extended, his features lit up with the glory of his high office. Truly,
he talked with God, and took us with him into the divine presence.

I cannot remember that the interest of his sermons ever varied for me.
It was all one intense delight. The luminous clearness of his mind, his
admirable talent for popularizing the procedures and conclusions of
philosophy, his keen wit and poetic sense of beauty,--all these combined
to make him appear to me one of the oracles of God. Add to these his
fearlessness and his power of denunciation, exercised in a community a
great part of which seemed bound in a moral sleep. His voice was like
the archangel's trump, summoning the wicked to repentance and bidding
the just take heart. It was hard to go out from his presence, all aglow
with the enthusiasm which he felt and inspired, and to hear him spoken
of as a teacher of irreligion, a pest to the community.

As all know, this glorious career came too soon to an end. While still
in the fullness of his powers, and at the moment when he was most
needed, the taint of hereditary disease penetrated his pure and
blameless life. He came to my husband's office one day, and said, "Howe,
that venomous cat which has destroyed so many of my people has fixed her
claws