At the close of his college course, after a two-days’ visit to Sutton with Miss Bullard, he started for Cincinnati to begin his theological studies at Lane Seminary, of which institution his father had been elected president and professor of theology, and whither he had moved with his family two years before. The Seminary, located at Walnut Hills, two miles out of the city, had been established for the sake of supplying preachers and pastors for the great and growing West. It was thought that the territory traversed by the Ohio and the Mississippi was “the valley of decision” for the great interests of our country and of the world. To meet the emergency and take possession of this broad domain for Christ, its rightful Lord, was felt to be the most important work that could occupy the attention of the Christian public. It had been decided that a theological seminary established at Cincinnati, in the very centre of this district, afforded the most effective means for attaining the great object in view; that the best man in the whole country should be secured to stand at its head; and that that man, all things considered, was Dr. Beecher. He would bring energy, enthusiasm, and practical wisdom; would secure confidence in the work among Eastern capitalists, and conduct the enterprise to assured success. Out of this conviction sprang the Seminary and the call to Dr. Beecher to be its head. He was in perfect and enthusiastic sympathy with the object in view. He says of the project: “There was not on earth a place _but that_ I would have opened my ears to for a moment.... But I had felt and thought and labored a great deal about raising up ministers, and the idea that I might be called to teach the best mode of preaching to the young ministry of the broad West flashed through my mind like lightning. It was the greatest thought that ever entered my soul; it filled it, and displaced everything else.” Coming to this definite work under the inspiration of this great thought, from a church which had been for years in the midst of a continuous revival, he had naturally given the Seminary a markedly practical tone of spiritual earnestness. A strong man himself, he attracted men of like stamp; and there had come, soon after he took charge of the institution, “a noble class of young men, uncommonly strong, a little uncivilized, entirely radical, and terribly in earnest.” Dr. Beecher’s method of instruction was peculiar and in harmony with his spirit and purpose. It was not so much of the formal lecture order as of the free conversational kind, in which questions were invited, objections were answered, thought was quickened, and feeling was awakened, with the result that the great truth which was the subject of the lecture was likely to be not only in a large measure comprehended but felt and appropriated by the students.