accidents were prevented.

The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.

These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.

"Old house of Puritanic wood,
Through whose unpainted windows streamed,
On seats as primitive and rude
As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,
The white and undiluted day."

We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.