ts 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 mediaeval 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 keep
Their 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