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Updated: June 6, 2025
In every town there are places of worship for Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anabaptists, and every denomination of Christianity; and the meeting-houses prepared for these sects are not, as with us, hideous buildings, contrived to inspire disgust by the enormity of their ugliness, nor are they called Salem, Ebenezer, and Sion, nor do the ministers within them look in any way like the Deputy-Shepherd.
Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for. Now, too, the first of October, or later, the Elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.
The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England to create and perpetuate.
It is owing to his weakness in bestowing pompous cognomens on our embryo towns and villages that to-day names like Utica, Syracuse, and Ithaca, instead of evoking visions of historic pomp and circumstance, raise in the minds of most Americans the picture of cocky little cities, rich only in trolley-cars and Methodist meeting-houses.
I have seen a copy of this petition, signed by eighty-four of the inhabitants; and though without a date, seems to have been addressed to King George the First, about 1716: it alledges, "That Birmingham is, of late years, become very populous, from its great increase of trade; is much superior to any town in the county, and but little inferior to any inland town in the kingdom: that it is governed only by a constable, and enjoys no more privileges than a village: that there is no justice of peace in the town; nor any in the neighbourhood, who dares act with vigour: that the country abounds with rioters, who, knowing the place to be void of magistrates, assemble in it, pull down the meeting-houses, defy the king, openly avow the pretender, threaten the inhabitants, and oblige them to keep watch in their own houses: that the trade decays, and will stagnate, if not relieved.
The people ran up and down the streets, crying, King James the Third! The true king! No Usurper. In the evening they pulled a good part of the Quakers' and Anabaptists' meeting-houses down. The heads of houses have represented that it was begun by the Whiggs." Probably the heads of houses reasoned on a priori principles when they arrived at this remarkable conclusion.
"At the death of his wife Minuit felt a deeper sense of his responsibility to time, and the finite uses of it expanded to a cheerful conception of the infinite. The country round was generally settled by a religious people, and the many meeting-houses of different sects had his equal confidence and sympathy.
If I have not spoken to you of all the metamorphoses occasioned here by the revolution, it is because several of them bear not the stamp of novelty. If the exchange in Paris is now held in the ci-devant Eglise des Petits Peres, did we not at Boston, in New England, convert the meeting-houses and churches into riding-schools and barracks?
To study nature without fear is possible, but without reproach, impossible. The man who worships in the temple of knowledge must carry his arms with him as our Puritan fathers had to do when they gathered in their first rude meeting-houses. It is a fearful thing to meddle with the ark which holds the mysteries of creation.
The next thing they will stop reading among all slaves, prevent emancipation by law, and watch the colored meeting-houses. The fire will be buried under the amount of the fuel, yet all be there." "Mr. Ogg, your experience is remarkable. And you have been sold and run away in nearly every slave state? Politely, sir, are they not kidnapping white men, too?
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