Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
As the Old South stands as the brick-and-mortar enshrinement of the best
Puritan thought of the eighteenth century, so King's Chapel in Boston,
built twenty-five years later, represents the statelier social customs
and the more conservative political opinions of the early New England
Episcopalians. Its predecessor, of wood, was the first building of the
Church of England in New England. The present King's Chapel, with its
sombre granite walls and its gently-lighted interior, suggests to the
mind an impression of independence of time rather than of age. One reads
on the walls, to be sure, such high-sounding old names as Vassall and
Shirley and Abthorp, and on a tomb in the old graveyard near by one sees
the inscriptions commemorating Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts
and his son John, governor of Connecticut. But King's Chapel seems the
home of churchly peace and gracious content; so that, as we sit within
its quaint three-sided pews, it is hard to remember the stormy scenes in
which it has had part. Its Tory congregation, almost to a man, fled from
its walls when the British general, Gage, evacuated Boston; the sterner
worshippers of the Old South occupied its Anglican pews for a time; and
later it was the scene of a theological movement which caused, in 1785,
the first Episcopal church in New England--or rather its remnant--to
become the first Unitarian society in America.
In Salem street, Boston, left almost alone at the extreme north end of
the city, is Christ Church, built in 1723. Its tower contains the oldest
chime of bells in America, and from it, according to some antiquarians,
was hung the lantern which on April 18, 1775, announced to the waiting
Paul Revere, and through him to the Middlesex patriots in all the
surrounding country, that General Gage had despatched eight hundred men
to seize and destroy the military stores gathered at Concord by the
Massachusetts Committees of Safety and Supplies. Thus opened the
Revolutionary war, for the battles at Lexington and Concord took place
only the next day.
The white-spired building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets,
Boston, known as the Park Street Church, is hardly so old as its
extended fame would lead one to suppose, for it dates no farther back
than the first quarter of the present century. Its position as the
central point of the great theological controversies of 1820 in the
Congregational churches of Eastern Massachusetts has made it almost as
familiar as the "Saybrook Platform." The meeting-house was built at the
time when the greater part of the Boston churches were modifying their
creeds, and when the Old South itself would have changed its
denominational relations but for the vote of a State official, cast to
break a tie. Its inelegance and rawness are excused in part by its
evident solidity and sincerity of appearance. In its shadow rest
Faneuil, Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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