sors of Queen Anne's at
St. Paul's, built about thirty years after the former, would have
reclaimed their property.
The motives of those who thus revived the relation of their ancestors
with the Established Church were not altogether pious; but the fact
incontestably proves, that after nearly a century of separation from that
establishment, the objections to it, in the minds of many of the children
of the colonists, were by no means insurmountable. Indeed, it was about
a question of parish taxation that they differed with their
co-religionists. The place selected for the meeting-house was so far
distant from the homes of many of the parish, that they could not attend
without great inconvenience, and yet they were required to pay the parish
rates for the support of the minister. They remonstrated and appealed in
vain to the civil authorities in the colony and to those in England, for
relief; for the law was clearly against them, unless they chose to
conform to the doctrines and discipline of the Established Church.
Finding nothing in the Thirty-nine Articles inconsistent with the faith
they professed, they easily reconciled themselves to the ceremonies, and
thus succeeded in their object of removing from their shoulders an
involuntary burden.
As may be imagined, at first and for years afterwards, they remained but
"a feeble folk," regarded with suspicion and dislike by the more
narrow-minded of their contemporaries, though the days were long gone by,
when an Episcopalian, especially if suspected of a leaning towards
Popery, was set in the pillory or the stocks. The Church, however, had
been long flourishing, in my youth, and I was always particularly
impressed when I attended service there, as I always did on Christmas
Day, with the organ, an instrument utterly unknown in our other places of
public worship, and with the comfort diffused by the large Russian stove
which projected from a corner of the building; while we, for long years
afterwards, shivered in our meeting-houses of a cold Sunday. To be sure,
the younger children carried their mothers' hand-stoves, constructed of
tin in a frame of wood and pierced with holes in the top, to let out such
heat as could be communicated by a small pan of coals covered with ashes.
But for the male part of the congregation, who despised such a luxury,
it was almost impossible to avoid occasionally striking the benumbed feet
together, and sometimes the clatter was almost as consi
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