Sabbath in Puritan New England

								

than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
expel, control, and censure its members.
These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
the house of God."
As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
profanations of holy places.
The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.
The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
England church architecture.