The citizens of this pleasant town have ever been orderly and pious, just as they have ever been loyal. Their religious institutions have grown and flourished. Godfearing and unspeculative, they have attached themselves to such creeds as appealed most powerfully to the heart with the least possible admixture of form. "The words _Fear God_" says Joubert, "have made many men pious: proofs of the existence of God have made many men atheists." Since the day when Whitefield poured out his eloquence among the Brandywine valleys and touched the hearts of the French exiles, Methodism, with its almost entire absence of dogma, has had great success in the community. This success is now indicated by a rich congregation, and a church-building that would be called noble in any city. Grace Church, on Ninth and West streets, is a large Gothic temple, seating nearly eight hundred persons--warmed, frescoed and heavily carpeted inside, and walled externally with brownstone mixed with the delicate pea-green serpentine of Chadd's Ford. The architect was a native Wilmingtonian--Thomas Dixon--now of Baltimore. The windows, including a very brilliant oriel, are finely stained: the font is a delicate piece of carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations for 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."