looks down a quiet street and
sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden tent, that owes whatever
grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roofs--traces,
both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which
soared aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of
a flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.
This suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which
a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was
all of outward show the small edifice could boast. Within there was very
little that pretended to be attractive. A small organ at one side, and a
plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it was a church
reduced to its simplest expression:

Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne, in
all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of the navy
of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple chapel in its
Sunday garniture. For the lilies of the field, in their season, and the
fairest flowers of the year, in due succession, were clustered every
Sunday morning over the preacher's desk. Slight, thin-tissued
blossoms of pink and blue and virgin white in early spring, then the
full-breasted and deep-hearted roses of summer, then the velvet-robed
crimson and yellow flowers of autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics
that grew under skies of glass in the false summers of our crystal
palaces without knowing that it was the dreadful winter of New England
which was rattling the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language
the whole year told its history of life and growth and beauty from that
simple desk. There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
homily. There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when all
were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.

Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love. The same gentle,
thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit, the
same quiet, the same life of active benevolence. But in all else how
different from the Church of Saint Polycarp! No clerical costume, no
ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs. A liturgy they have, to
be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from the time-honored manuals
of devotion, but also does not hesitate to change its expressions to its
own liking.

Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each o