Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

In a comparative sense, we look in vain for old churches in a new country, for in our architecture, if nowhere else, we are still a land of yesterday, where age seems venerable only when we refuse to look beyond the ocean, and where even a short two hundred years have taken away the larger share of such perishable ecclesiastical monuments as we once had. Our grandfathers' temples, whether they stood on the banks of the James River or on the colder shores of Massachusetts Bay, were built cheaply for a scanty population: their material was usually wood, sometimes unshapen logs, and their sites, chosen before the people and the country had become fitted to each other, were afterward often needed for other uses. So long as London tears down historic churches, even in the present days of fashionable devotion to the old and the quaint, and so long as the Rome of 1880 is still in danger from vandal hands, we need only be surprised that the list of existing American churches of former days is so long and so honorable as it is. If we have no York Minster or St. Alban's Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral, we may still turn to an Old South, a St. Paul's and a Christ Church. It is something, after all, to be able to count our most famous old churches on the fingers of both hands, and then to enumerate by tens those other temples whose legacy from bygone times is scarcely less rich.

The American churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were plain structures, unpretending without and unadorned within; and this for other reasons than the poverty of the community, the lack of the best building-materials, and the absence both of architects and of artistic tastes. It was a simple ritual which most of them were to house, and the absence of an ornate service demanded the absence of ornamentation, which would be meaningless because it would symbolize nothing. The influence of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Baptists in Rhode Island, the Dutch Reformed in New York, the Lutherans and Presbyterians in the Middle and Southern colonies, and the Friends in Pennsylvania, whatever their denominational differences, was a unit in favor of the utmost simplicity consistent with decency and order; and though there was a difference between Congregational churches like the Old South in Boston and the Friends' meeting-houses in Philadelphia, the difference was far less marked than that existing between the new and old buildings of the Old South society, which the modern tourist may compare at his leisure in the Boston of to-day. Even the Episcopalians shared, or deferred to, the prevailing spirit of the time: they put no cross upon their Christ Church in Cambridge, nearly a hundred and thirty years after the settlement of the place, lest they should offend the tastes of their neighbors. The Methodists, the "Christians," the Swedenborgians, the Unitarians and the Universalists were not yet, and the Moravians were a small and little-understood body in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Nearly all the colonists, of whatever name, brought from Europe a conscientious love of religious simplicity and unpretentiousness: for the most part, the English-speaking settlers were dissenters from the Church which owned all the splendid architectural monuments of the country whence they came; and it was not strange that out of their religious thought grew churches that symbolized the sturdy qualities of a faith which, right or wrong, had to endure exile and poverty and privation—privation not only from social wealth, but from the rich store of ecclesiastical traditions which had accumulated for centuries in cathedral choirs and abbey cloisters.

Therefore, the typical New England meeting-house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may perhaps be taken as the best original example of what America has to show in the way of church-building. To be sure, its cost was modest, its material was perishable wood, its architectural design was often a curious medley of old ideas and new uses, and even its few ornaments were likely to be devoid of the beauty their designers fancied that they possessed. But it was, at any rate, an honest embodiment of a sincere idea—the idea of "freedom to worship God;" and it was adapted to the uses which it was designed to serve. It stood upon a hill, a square box with square windows cut in its sides—grim without and grim within, save as the mellowing seasons toned down its ruder aspects, and green grass and waving boughs framed it as if it were a picture. Within, the high pulpit, surmounted by a sounding-board, towered over the square-backed pews, facing a congregation kept orderly by stern tithing-man and sterner tradition. There was at first neither organ nor stove nor clock. The shivering congregation warmed itself as best it might by the aid of foot-stoves; the parson timed his sermon by an hour-glass; and in the singing-seats the fiddle and the bass—viol formed the sole link (and an unconscious one) between the simple song-service of the Puritan meeting-house and the orchestral accompaniments to the high masses of European cathedrals. The men still sat at the end of the pew—a custom which had grown up in the days when they went to the meeting-house gun in hand, not knowing when they should be hastily summoned forth to fight the Indians. In the earliest days the drum was the martial summons to worship, but soon European bells sent forth their milder call. Behind the meeting-houses were the horse-sheds for the use of distant comers—a species of ecclesiastical edifice still adorning the greater number of American country churches, and not likely to disappear for many a year to come.

In the elder day there was no such difference as now between city and country churches, for the limitations of money and material bore upon both more evenly. But with growing wealth and the choice of permanent locations for building came brick and stone; English architects received orders; and the prevailing revival led by Sir Christopher Wren and his followers dotted the Northern colonies with more pretentious churches, boasting spires not wholly unlike those which were then piercing London skies. With costlier churches of permanent material there came also the English fashion of burial in churchyards and chancel-vaults, and mural tablets and horizontal tombstones were laid into the mortar which has been permitted, in not a few cases, to preserve them for our own eyes.

But our oldest churches, as a rule, have been made more notable by the political events with which they have been associated than by the honorable interments that have taken place beneath their shadow. Their connection with the living has endeared them to our memories more than their relations to the dead. Not because it is Boston's Westminster Abbey or Temple Church has the Old South been permitted to come down to us as the best example of the Congregational meeting-houses of the eighteenth century, but because of the Revolutionary episodes of which it was the scene, and which are commemorated in the stone tablet upon its front. The Old South Church, built in 1729, belonged to the common class of brick structures which replaced wooden ones; for, like Solomon's temple, its predecessor had been built of cedar sixty years before. The convenient location of the Old South and the capaciousness of its interior brought to it the colonial meetings which preceded the Revolution, and especially that famous gathering of December 13, 1773, whence marched the disguised patriots to destroy the taxed tea in Boston harbor. The convenient access and spacious audience-room of the old church also led to its occupancy as a riding-school for British cavalry in 1775. Even now, in the quiet days following the recent excitement attending its escape from fire and from sale and demolition, the ancient church still finds occasional use as a place for lectures and public gatherings. Its chequered days within the past decade have at least served to make its appearance and its part in colonial history more familiar to us, and have done something to save other churches from the destruction which might have overtaken them.

As the Old South stands as the brick-and-mortar enshrinement of the best Puritan thought of the eighteenth century, so King's Chapel in Boston, built twenty-five years later, represents the statelier social customs and the more conservative political opinions of the early New England Episcopalians. Its predecessor, of wood, was the first building of the Church of England in New England. The present King's Chapel, with its sombre granite walls and its gently-lighted interior, suggests to the mind an impression of independence of time rather than of age. One reads on the walls, to be sure, such high-sounding old names as Vassall and Shirley and Abthorp, and on a tomb in the old graveyard near by one sees the inscriptions commemorating Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts and his son John, governor of Connecticut. But King's Chapel seems the home of churchly peace and gracious content; so that, as we sit within its quaint three-sided pews, it is hard to remember the stormy scenes in which it has had part. Its Tory congregation, almost to a man, fled from its walls when the British general, Gage, evacuated Boston; the sterner worshippers of the Old South occupied its Anglican pews for a time; and later it was the scene of a theological movement which caused, in 1785, the first Episcopal church in New England—or rather its remnant—to become the first Unitarian society in America.

In Salem street, Boston, left almost alone at the extreme north end of the city, is Christ Church, built in 1723. Its tower contains the oldest chime of bells in America, and from it, according to some antiquarians, was hung the lantern which on April 18, 1775, announced to the waiting Paul Revere, and through him to the Middlesex patriots in all the surrounding country, that General Gage had despatched eight hundred men to seize and destroy the military stores gathered at Concord by the Massachusetts Committees of Safety and Supplies. Thus opened the Revolutionary war, for the battles at Lexington and Concord took place only the next day.

The white-spired building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets, Boston, known as the Park Street Church, is hardly so old as its extended fame would lead one to suppose, for it dates no farther back than the first quarter of the present century. Its position as the central point of the great theological controversies of 1820 in the Congregational churches of Eastern Massachusetts has made it almost as familiar as the "Saybrook Platform." The meeting-house was built at the time when the greater part of the Boston churches were modifying their creeds, and when the Old South itself would have changed its denominational relations but for the vote of a State official, cast to break a tie. Its inelegance and rawness are excused in part by its evident solidity and sincerity of appearance. In its shadow rest Faneuil, Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

Boston has other churches which, like the Park Street, are neither ancient nor modern, the Hollis Street Church and the First Church in Roxbury being good examples. New England has hardly a better specimen of the old-fashioned meeting-house on a hill than this old weather-beaten wooden First Church in Roxbury, the home of a parish to which John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, once ministered. Another quaint memorial of the old colonial days survives in the current name, "Meeting-house Hill," of a part of the annexed Dorchester district of Boston.

St. Paul's Church, on Boston Common, was the first attempt of the Episcopalians of the city, after the loss of King's Chapel, to build a temple of imposing appearance. Controversies theological and architectural rose with its walls, and young Edward Everett, if report is to be credited, was the author of a tract, still in circulation, in which its design and its principles formed the text for a criticism on the religion to whose furtherance it was devoted. Standing as it does next the United States court-house, the uses of the two buildings seem to have been confused in the builders' minds; for there is something ecclesiastical in the appearance of the hall of justice, which was originally a Masonic temple, and something judicial in the face of the church.

In Cambridge, three miles from Boston, the eighteenth-century Episcopalians not only possessed a church, but also displayed to unwilling eyes a veritable "Bishop's Palace"—the stately house of the Rev. East Apthorp, "missionary to New England" and reputed candidate for the bishopric of that region. Mr. Apthorp was rich and influential, but his social and ecclesiastical lot was not an easy one, and he soon returned to England discouraged, leaving his "palace" to come down to the view of our own eyes, which find in it nothing more dangerous to republican institutions than is to be discovered in a hundred other of the three-story wooden houses which used so to abound in Massachusetts. Christ Church, Cambridge, in which the bishop in posse used to minister, and which stands opposite Harvard College, was designed by the architect of King's Chapel, and has always been praised for a certain shapely beauty of proportion. For the last twenty years it has boasted the only chime of bells in Cambridge, whose quiet shades of a Sunday evening have been sweetly stirred by the music struck from them by the hands of a worthy successor of the mediæval bell-ringers, to whom bells are books, and who can tell the story of every ounce of bell-metal within twenty miles of his tower. It was of this church, with its Unitarian neighbor just across the ancient churchyard where so many old Harvard and colonial worthies sleep, that Holmes wrote:

Like sentinel and nun, they keepTheir vigil on the green:One seems to guard, and one to weep,The dead that lie between.

The suburbs of Boston are not poor in churches of the eighteenth, or even of the seventeenth, century. The oldest church in New England—the oldest, indeed, in the Northern States—still standing in Salem, was built in 1634, and its low walls and tiny-paned windows have shaken under the eloquence of Roger Williams. It has not been used for religious purposes since 1672. In Newburyport is one of the American churches, once many but now few, in which George Whitefield preached, and beneath it the great preacher lies buried. A curious little reminder of St. Paul's, London, is found here in the shape of a whispering gallery. Another landmark is the venerable meeting-house of the Unitarian society in Hingham, popularly known as the "Old Ship." Built in 1681, it was a Congregational place of worship for nearly a century and a half. Its sturdiness and rude beauty form a striking illustration of the lasting quality of good, sound wooden beams as material for the sanctuary. Preparations have already been undertaken for celebrating the second centennial of the ancient building. Nearly as old, and still more picturesque with its quaint roof, its venerable hanging chandelier of brass, its sober old reredos and its age-hallowed communion-service, is St. Michael's, Marblehead, built in 1714, where faithful rectors have endeavored to reach six generations of the fishermen and aristocracy of the rocky old port. The antiquarian who has seen these old temples and asks for others on the New England coast will turn with scarcely less interest to St. John's, Portsmouth; the forsaken Trinity Church, Wickford, Rhode Island, built in 1706; or Trinity, Newport, where Bishop Berkeley used to preach. In Newport, indeed, one may also speculate beneath the Old Mill on the fanciful theory that the curious little structure was a baptistery long before the days of Columbus—the most ancient Christian temple on this side the sea.

It is not uncommon to find comparatively new American churches to which their surroundings or their sober material or their quiet architecture have given a somewhat exaggerated appearance of age. Such is the case with the curious row of three churches—the North and Centre Congregational and Trinity Episcopalstanding side by side on the New Haven green in a fashion unknown elsewhere in our own country. Any one of these three churches looks quite as old as that shapely memorial of pre-Revolutionary days, St. Paul's Chapel, New York, built in 1766 in the prevailing fashion of the London churches. As with St. Paul's, there was also no marked appearance of antiquity in the North Dutch Church, New York, removed in recent years. The poor old Middle Dutch Church in the same city, with its ignoble modern additions and its swarm of busy tenants, would have looked old if it could have done so, but for modern New Yorkers it has no more venerable memory, in its disfigurement and disguise, than that furnished by its use, for a time, as the city post-office.

New York is poor in old buildings, and especially poor in old churches. Besides St. Paul's, the comparatively modern St. John's Chapel and the John Street Methodist Church, it really has nothing to show to the tourist in search of ancient places of worship. The vicinity can boast a few colonial temples—the quaint old Dutch church at Tarrytown, dear to the readers of Irving; the Tennent Church on the battle-ground of Monmouth, New Jersey, with its blood-stains of wounded British soldiers; and a charmingly plain little Friends' meeting-house, no bigger than a small parlor, near Squan, New Jersey, being the most strikingly attractive. In Newark one notes the deep-set windows and solid stone walls of the old First Presbyterian Church, and the quiet plainness of Trinity Episcopal Church, which looks like Boston's King's Chapel, with the addition of a white wooden spire.

Philadelphia is richer than any other American city in buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the older streets it is a frequent sight to see quaint little houses of imported English brick modestly laid in alternate red and black, curiously like the latest modern fashion. The ample room for growth possessed by this widespreading city has saved many an ancient house for present use as dwelling or store. One is not surprised, therefore, to find on the old streets near the Delaware three churches of weather-stained brick which seem trying to make the piety of an elder age useful to the worshippers of to-day. All three of these churches—Gloria Dei, Christ and St. Peter's—now have their chief work among the poor people whom one always finds in a business quarter near the river-front, but each attracts, by its old-time associations and its modern missionary spirit, a goodly circle of attendants from the western parts of the city. Gloria Dei Church, the oldest of the three, was built in 1700 by Swedish Lutherans on the spot where the Swedish predecessors of the Friends had located their fortified log church twenty-three years earlier. Its bell and communion-service and some of its ornamental woodwork were presented by the king of Sweden. It is surrounded by the usual graveyard, in which lies Alexander Wilson, the lover and biographer of birds, who asked to be buried here, in a "silent, shady place, where the birds will be apt to come and sing over my grave." The Old Swedes' Church retained its Lutheran connection until recent years, when it became an Episcopal parish.

Christ Church and St. Peter's were formerly united in one parochial government, and to the two parishes ministered William White, the first Church-of-England minister in Pennsylvania, the friend and pastor of Washington, the chaplain of Congress and one of the first two bishops of the American Church. The present structure of Christ Church was begun in 1727, but not finished for some years. The parish is older, dating from 1695. Queen Anne gave it a communion-service in 1708. In 1754 came from England its still-used chime of bells, which were laboriously transferred during the Revolution to Allentown, Pennsylvania, lest they should fall into British hands and be melted up for cannon. At Christ Church a pew was regularly occupied by Washington during his frequent residence in Philadelphia; and here have been seated Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and many another patriot, besides Cornwallis, Howe, André and others on the English side. Around and beneath the church are many graves covered by weather-worn stones, and on the walls of the interior there are a number of mural tablets.

St. Peter's Church was begun in 1758, and completed three years later. In quiet graciousness of appearance it is like another Christ Church, and its interior arrangements are still more quaint, the chancel being at the eastern end of the church, while the pulpit and lectern are at the western. In the adjoining churchyard is a monument to Commodore Decatur.

One cannot find in all America sweeter and quainter memorials of a gentle past—memorials still consecrated to the gracious work of the present—than the churches and other denominational houses in the old Moravian towns of Pennsylvania. At Bethlehem, as one stands in the little three-sided court on Church street and looks up at the heavy walls, the tiny dormer windows and the odd-shaped belfry which mark the "Single Sisters' House" and its wings, one may well fancy one's self, as a travelled visitor has said, in Quebec or Upper Austria. Still more quaint and quiet is Willow Square, behind this curious house, where, beneath drooping willow-boughs, one finds one's self beside the door of the old German chapel, with the little dead-house, the boys' school and the great and comparatively modern Moravian church near by. Through Willow Square leads the path to the burying-ground, where lie, beneath tall trees, long rows of neatly-kept graves, each covered with a plain flat stone, the men and the women lying on either side of the broad central path. Several of the ancient Moravian buildings date from the middle of the last century. The Widows' House stands, opposite the Single Sisters' Range, and across the street from the large church is the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, established in 1749, and by far the oldest girls' school in the United States.

It was in 1778 that the Single Sisters gave to Pulaski that banner of crimson, silk which is commemorated in Longfellow's well-known "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns at Bethlehem." The poem, however, written in the author's early youth, and preserved for its rare beauty of language and fine choice of subject, rather than for its historical accuracy, has done much to perpetuate a wrong idea of the Moravian spirit and ritual. Mr. Longfellow writes in his first stanza

When the dying flame of dayThrough the chancel shot its ray,Far the glimmering tapers shedFaint light on the cowled head,And the censer burning swung,When before the altar hungThat proud banner, which, with care,Had been consecrated there;And the nuns' sweet hymn was heard the while,Sung low in the dim, mysterious aisle.

But the Moravians know nothing of chancels, tapers, cowled heads, censers, altars or nuns. Their faith has always been the simplest Protestantism, their churches are precisely such as Methodists or Baptists use, and their ritual is plainer than that of the most "evangelical" Episcopal parish. Their "single sisters' houses," "widows' houses" and "single brethren's houses"—the last long disused—are simply arrangements for social convenience or co-operative housekeeping. Mr. Longfellow's poetic description applies to the Moravian ceremonial no more accurately than to a Congregational prayer-meeting or a Methodist "love-feast."

Beside the deep and silent waters of the James River in Virginia, undisturbed by any sound save the flight of birds and the rustle of leaves, stands all that is left of the first church building erected by Englishmen in America. A good part of the tower remains, the arched doorways being still intact, and it seems a pitiable misfortune that the honestly-laid bricks of the venerable building could not have come down to our day. But, as it is, this ancient square block of brick forms our one pre-eminent American ruin. Nothing could be a more solemn monument of the past than the lonely tower, surrounded by thick branches and underbrush and looking down upon the few crumbling gravestones still left at its base. Jamestown, long abandoned as a village, has now become an island, the action of the waters having at last denied it the remaining solace of connection with the mainland of the Old Dominion, of whose broad acres it was once the chief town and the seat of government—the forerunner of all that came to America at the hands of English settlers.

In the slumberous old city of Williamsburg, three miles from Jamestown, stands the Bruton parish church, two hundred and two years old, and still the home of a parish of sixty communicants. Built of brick, with small-paned windows and wooden tower, its walls have listened to the eloquence of the learned presidents of the neighboring William and Mary College, and its floor has been honored by the stately tread of many a colonial governor, member of the legislature or Revolutionary patriot; for Williamsburg was the capital and centre of Virginia until the end of the eighteenth century, and shared whatever Virginia possessed of political or personal renown. Washington, of course, was more than once an attendant at Bruton Church, and so were Jefferson and Patrick Henry and an honorable host. In the church and in the chapel of William and Mary College—which the ambitious colonists used to think a little Westminster Abbey—was the religious home of a good share of what was stateliest or most honorable in the early colonial life of the South.