her
interest was manifested in every question affecting the welfare of
humanity. Peace, temperance, education, prison reform, and equality of
civil rights, irrespective of sex, engaged her attention. Under all the
disadvantages of her estrangement from popular favor, her charming Greek
romance of _Philothea_ and her _Lives of Madame Roland_ and the _Baroness
de Stael_ proved that her literary ability had lost nothing of its
strength, and that the hand which penned such terrible rebukes had still
kept its delicate touch, and gracefully yielded to the inspiration of
fancy and art. While engaged with her husband in the editorial
supervision of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, she wrote her admirable
_Letters from New York_; humorous, eloquent, and picturesque, but still
humanitarian in tone, which extorted the praise of even a pro-slavery
community. Her great work, in three octavo volumes, _The Progress of
Religious Ideas_, belongs, in part, to that period. It is an attempt to
represent in a candid, unprejudiced manner the rise and progress of the
great religions of the world, and their ethical relations to each other.
She availed herself of, and carefully studied, the authorities at that
time accessible, and the result is creditable to her scholarship,
industry, and conscientiousness. If, in her desire to do justice to the
religions of Buddha and Mohammed, in which she has been followed by
Maurice, Max Muller, and Dean Stanley, she seems at times to dwell upon
the best and overlook the darker features of those systems, her
concluding reflections should vindicate her from the charge of
undervaluing the Christian faith, or of lack of reverent appreciation of
its founder. In the closing chapter of her work, in which the large
charity and broad sympathies of her nature are manifest, she thus turns
with words of love, warm from the heart, to Him whose Sermon on the Mount
includes most that is good and true and vital in the religions and
philosophies of the world:--

"It was reserved for Him to heal the brokenhearted, to preach a gospel to
the poor, to say, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved
much.' Nearly two thousand years have passed away since these words of
love and pity were uttered, yet when I read them my eyes fill with tears.
I thank Thee, O Heavenly Father, for all the messengers thou hast sent to
man; but, above all, I thank Thee for Him, thy beloved Son! Pure lily
blossom of the centuries, ta