For several years, assisted by her husband, Mrs. Child edited the _Antislavery Standard_, elevated its literary character, extended its circulation, and increased its efficiency.
But, in a more private way, this admirable woman rendered the early Abolitionists most important services. She, together with Mrs. Maria W. Chapman and Eliza Lee Follen, and others, of whom I shall write hereafter, were presiding geniuses in all our councils and more public meetings, often proposing the wisest measures, and suggesting to those who were “allowed to speak in the assembly” the most weighty thoughts, pertinent facts, apt illustrations, which they could not be persuaded to utter aloud. Repeatedly in those early days, before Angelina and Sarah Grimké had taught others besides Quaker women “to _speak_ in meeting,” if they had anything to say that was worth hearing,--repeatedly did I spring to the platform, crying, “Hear me as the mouthpiece of Mrs. Child, or Mrs. Chapman, or Mrs. Follen,” and convulsed the audience with a stroke of wit, or electrified them with a flash of eloquence, caught from the lips of one or the other of our antislavery prophetesses.
N. B.--That Mrs. Child, when she became an Abolitionist, did not become a woman “of one idea” is evinced, not only by her two volumes of enchanting “Letters from New York,” “Memoirs of Madame de Staël” and “Madame Roland,” “Biographies of Good Wives,” and several exquisite books for children, but still more by her three octavo volumes, entitled “Progress of Religious Ideas,” which must have been the result of a vast amount of reading and profound thought on all the subjects of theology and religion. Her later work, “Looking towards Sunset,” is full of beautiful ideas about that future life, for which her untiring devotion to all the humanities in this life must have so fully prepared her.
Lane Seminary was an institution established by our orthodox fellow-Christians, mainly for the preparation of young men for the ministry. It attained so much importance in the estimation of its patrons, that, in 1832, they claimed for it the services and the reputation of Rev. Dr. Beecher, who left Boston at that time and became its president. There he found, or was soon after joined by, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, another distinguished teacher of Calvinistic theology. This school of the prophets was placed on Walnut Hill, in the vicinity of Cincinnati, that it might be near to the Southwestern States, and was separated from Kentucky only by the river Ohio. It had attracted, by the reputation of its Faculty, from all parts of the country, quite a number of remarkably able, earnest, conscientious, and, as they proved to be, eloquent young men.