But our oldest churches, as a rule, have been made more notable by the political events with which they have been associated than by the honorable interments that have taken place beneath their shadow.  Their connection with the living has endeared them to our memories more than their relations to the dead.  Not because it is Boston’s Westminster Abbey or Temple Church has the Old South been permitted to come down to us as the best example of the Congregational meeting-houses of the eighteenth century, but because of the Revolutionary episodes of which it was the scene, and which are commemorated in the stone tablet upon its front.  The Old South Church, built in 1729, belonged to 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.