r Sunday-schools and lectures are of singular perfection. Few shrines
in this country show better the modern movement of Methodism toward
luxury and elegance, as compared with the repellant humiliations of
Wesley's day.

It is to be hoped that this advance in attractiveness does not indicate
any lapse in the more solid qualities of spiritual earnestness.
"Whenever this altar," well said Bishop Simpson in dedicating
the building on the centenary anniversary of the rise of
Methodism--"whenever this altar shall be too fine for the poorest
penitent sinner to kneel here, the Spirit of God will depart, and that
of Ichabod will come in."

We have indicated the Swedish Lutheran missionaries exhorting under the
roof of their antique church in a language which their congregations
were beginning to forget, and afterward in a broken English hardly more
intelligible. Their place is largely taken now by predicators of the
faith of John Knox, with a plentiful following of pious believers. Among
the family of Presbyterian kirks in Wilmington the youngest is a large
brick edifice built in 1871, for sixty-one thousand dollars, on Eighth
and Washington streets, able to seat nearly a thousand persons, most
comfortably and invitingly furnished, and supplied with lecture-,
infant- and Sunday-school-rooms, together with a huge kitchen,
suggesting the _agapae_ or love-feasts of the primitive Christians.
Meantime, Anglicanism does not lack supporters. The descendants of
Monsieur Du Pont, cultured and influential, have done much to advance
the creed, and about fifteen years ago Mr. Alexis I. Du Pont, pulling
down a low tavern in the suburbs, prepared to erect a church upon the
site, to be built mainly through his own liberality. Unhappily, Mr. Du
Pont died from the effects of an explosion at the powder-works ten weeks
after the laying of the corner-stone; but the building was soon
completed through the pious munificence of his widow, and the Bible of
St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church now rests on its lectern upon the
site of the old liquor-bar, and the gambling-den of former days is
replaced by its pews. The rector is Mr. T. Gardiner Littell, a man of
eminent goodness and intelligence. St. John's has a beautiful open roof,
stained windows and a fine organ: it can offer seats to seven hundred
worshipers.

[Illustration: "AT THE SIGN OF SHAKESPEARE."]

These few specimen churches--and especially the last, which blots out a
grogshop--are