As was remarked in the paper on Chicago, the architectural activity of the West is not largely ecclesiastical, and the churches are for the most part as near to traditional models as their designers have the knowledge to bring them. In the Eastern States a great many interesting essays have been made towards solving the modern problem of a church in which the pulpit and not the altar is the central point of design, while yet retaining an ecclesiastical expression. There is an edifice in St. Paul called “the People’s Church,” in which the designer seems purposely to have avoided an ecclesiastical expression, and to have undertaken to typify in brick and stone the wild, free theology of the West. He has so far succeeded that nobody could possibly take the result of his labors for a church in the usual acceptation of the term, but this negative attainment does not yet constitute a positive architectural success. It may be that Western ideas in theology are thus far somewhat too sketchy to form a basis for the establishment of an architectural type, since mere negation is insusceptible of architectural expression. The People’s Church does not lack, however, many of the qualities that should belong to every building as a building, apart from its destination. In spite of such unhappy freaks as that by which the stone basement merges into the brick superstructure with no architectural mark of the transition, and cuts the openings quite at random, or as that by which the brick wall, for a considerable but indefinite extent, is quite promiscuously aspersed with irregular bits of stone, it shows a considerable skill in the placing and detailing of features, and the disposition of the openings gives the principal front a grateful sense of stability and repose. The ample entrances designate it as a place of popular assembly, and possibly its religious purpose may be taken to be confessed, though somewhat shamefacedly, in the wheel-window at the centre of one front, and the tall traceried opening at the centre of the other, which are the only relics of ecclesiastical architecture that are suffered to appear. It is evident that it is a “People’s” something, and possibly this is as near to a specification of its purpose as the neo-theologians have attained. In this case, as it is notoriously difficult for a man to give expression to an idea of which he is not possessed, the architectural ambiguity is assuredly not to be imputed to the architect. A Unitarian church in Minneapolis is also an unconventional specimen of church architecture, though it could not be taken for anything but a church, and it is undeniably a vigorous performance, consisting of massive, well-divided, and “well-punched” walls in a monochrome of dark-red sandstone. The novelty and the unconventionally, however, seem, both in composition and in detail, to have been sought rather than [Illustration: UNITARIAN CHURCH, MINNEAPOLIS. L. S. Buffington, Architect.]