energy--as the phrase now goes--has been at work in the spectacle before
us. So many chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to have the
aspect of a village street; although everything is so inartificial and
inceptive, that it seems as if one returning wave of the wild nature
might overwhelm it all. But the one edifice which gives the pledge of
permanence to this bold enterprise is seen at the central point of the
picture. There stands the meeting-house, a small structure, lowroofed,
without a spire, and built of rough timber, newly hewn, with the sap
still in the logs, and here and there a strip of bark adhering to them.
A meaner temple was never consecrated to the worship of the Deity. With
the alternative of kneeling beneath the awful vault of the firmament, it
is strange that men should creep into this pent-up nook, and expect God's
presence there. Such, at least, one would imagine, might be the feeling
of these forest-settlers, accustomed, as they had been, to stand under
the dim arches of vast cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary
worship in the old ivy-covered churches of rural England, around which
lay the bones of many generations of their forefathers. How could they
dispense with the carved altar-work?--how, with the pictured windows,
where the light of common day was hallowed by being transmitted through
the glorified figures of saints?--how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it
must have been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries?--
how, with the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles,
pervading the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of
audible religion? They needed nothing of all this. Their house of
worship, like their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. But the
zeal of a recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts,
enriching everything around them with its radiance; making of these new
walls, and this narrow compass, its own cathedral; and being, in itself,
that spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architecture,
pictured windows, and the organ's grand solemnity are remote and