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[166]
in a civilized community.
The question of suffrage had not then been brought into prominence, and, as I remember, he insisted most upon the claim of the sex to equality of education and of opportunity.
On one occasion he invited Lucretia Mott to his pulpit.
On another its privileges were accorded to Mrs. Seba Smith.
I was present one Sunday when he announced to his congregation that the Rev. Antoinette L. Brown would address 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.
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 Theo,
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