[Illustration: THE OLD SOUTH, BOSTON.]

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.

[Illustration: KING'S CHAPEL, BOSTON, IN 1872.]

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
differ