the common
class of brick structures which replaced wooden ones; for, like
Solomon's temple, its predecessor had been built of cedar sixty years
before. The convenient location of the Old South and the capaciousness
of its interior brought to it the colonial meetings which preceded the
Revolution, and especially that famous gathering of December 13, 1773,
whence marched the disguised patriots to destroy the taxed tea in Boston
harbor. The convenient access and spacious audience-room of the old
church also led to its occupancy as a riding-school for British cavalry
in 1775. Even now, in the quiet days following the recent excitement
attending its escape from fire and from sale and demolition, the ancient
church still finds occasional use as a place for lectures and public
gatherings. Its chequered days within the past decade have at least
served to make its appearance and its part in colonial history more
familiar to us, and have done something to save other churches from the
destruction which might have overtaken them.

As the Old South stands as the brick-and-mortar enshrinement of the best
Puritan thought of the eighteenth century, so King's Chapel in Boston,
built twenty-five years later, represents the statelier social customs
and the more conservative political opinions of the early New England
Episcopalians. Its predecessor, of wood, was the first building of the
Church of England in New England. The present King's Chapel, with its
sombre granite walls and its gently-lighted interior, suggests to the
mind an impression of independence of time rather than of age. One reads
on the walls, to be sure, such high-sounding old names as Vassall and
Shirley and Abthorp, and on a tomb in the old graveyard near by one sees
the inscriptions commemorating Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts
and his son John, governor of Connecticut. But King's Chapel seems the
home of churchly peace and gracious content; so that, as we sit within
its quaint three-sided pews, it is hard to remember the stormy scenes in
which it has had part. Its Tory congregation, almost to a man, fled from
its walls when the British general, Gage, evacuated Boston; the sterner
worshippers of the Old South occupied its Anglican pews for a time; and
later it was the scene of a theological movement which caused, in 1785,
the first Episcopal church in New England--or rather its remnant--to
become the first Unitarian society in America.

In Salem street, Bost