Like sentinel and nun, they keep Their vigil on the green: One seems to guard, and one to weep, The dead that lie between.
The suburbs of Boston are not poor in churches of the eighteenth, or even of the seventeenth, century. The oldest church in New England--the oldest, indeed, in the Northern States--still standing in Salem, was built in 1634, and its low walls and tiny-paned windows have shaken under the eloquence of Roger Williams. It has not been used for religious purposes since 1672. In Newburyport is one of the American churches, once many but now few, in which George Whitefield preached, and beneath it the great preacher lies buried. A curious little reminder of St. Paul's, London, is found here in the shape of a whispering gallery. Another landmark is the venerable meeting-house of the Unitarian society in Hingham, popularly known as the "Old Ship." Built in 1681, it was a Congregational place of worship for nearly a century and a half. Its sturdiness and rude beauty form a striking illustration of the lasting quality of good, sound wooden beams as material for the sanctuary. Preparations have already been undertaken for celebrating the second centennial of the ancient building. Nearly as old, and still more picturesque with its quaint roof, its venerable hanging chandelier of brass, its sober old reredos and its age-hallowed communion-service, is St. Michael's, Marblehead, built in 1714, where faithful rectors have endeavored to reach six generations of the fishermen and aristocracy of the rocky old port. The antiquarian who has seen these old temples and asks for others on the New England coast will turn with scarcely less interest to St. John's, Portsmouth; the forsaken Trinity Church, Wickford, Rhode Island, built in 1706; or Trinity, Newport, where Bishop Berkeley used to preach. In Newport, indeed, one may also speculate beneath the Old Mill on the fanciful theory that the curious little structure was a baptistery long before the days of Columbus--the most ancient Christian temple on this side the sea.
It is not uncommon to find comparatively new American churches to which their surroundings or their sober material or their quiet architecture have given a somewhat exaggerated appearance of age. Such is the case with the curious row of three churches--the North and Centre Congregational and Trinity Episcopalstanding side by side on the New Haven green in a fashion unknown elsewhere in our own country. Any one of these three churches looks quite as old as that shapely memorial of pre-Revolutionary days, St. Paul's Chapel, New York, built in 1766 in the prevailing fashion of the London churches. As with St. Paul's, there was also no marked appearance of antiquity in the North Dutch Church, New York, removed in recent years. The poor old Middle Dutch Church in the same city, with its ignoble modern additions and its swarm of busy tenants, would have looked old if it could have done so, but for modern New Yorkers it has no more venerable memory, in its disfigurement and disguise, than that furnished by its use, for a time, as the city post-office.