Boston has other churches which, like the Park Street, are neither ancient nor modern, the Hollis Street Church and the First Church in Roxbury being good examples. New England has hardly a better specimen of the old-fashioned meeting-house on a hill than this old weather-beaten wooden First Church in Roxbury, the home of a parish to which John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, once ministered. Another quaint memorial of the old colonial days survives in the current name, "Meeting-house Hill," of a part of the annexed Dorchester district of Boston.
[Ilustration: ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK.]
St. Paul's Church, on Boston Common, was the first attempt of the Episcopalians of the city, after the loss of King's Chapel, to build a temple of imposing appearance. Controversies theological and architectural rose with its walls, and young Edward Everett, if report is to be credited, was the author of a tract, still in circulation, in which its design and its principles formed the text for a criticism on the religion to whose furtherance it was devoted. Standing as it does next the United States court-house, the uses of the two buildings seem to have been confused in the builders' minds; for there is something ecclesiastical in the appearance of the hall of justice, which was originally a Masonic temple, and something judicial in the face of the church.
In Cambridge, three miles from Boston, the eighteenth-century Episcopalians not only possessed a church, but also displayed to unwilling eyes a veritable "Bishop's Palace"--the stately house of the Rev. East Apthorp, "missionary to New England" and reputed candidate for the bishopric of that region. Mr. Apthorp was rich and influential, but his social and ecclesiastical lot was not an easy one, and he soon returned to England discouraged, leaving his "palace" to come down to the view of our own eyes, which find in it nothing more dangerous to republican institutions than is to be discovered in a hundred other of the three-story wooden houses which used so to abound in Massachusetts. Christ Church, Cambridge, in which the bishop _in posse_ used to minister, and which stands opposite Harvard College, was designed by the architect of King's Chapel, and has always been praised for a certain shapely beauty of proportion. For the last twenty years it has boasted the only chime of bells in Cambridge, whose quiet shades of a Sunday evening have been sweetly stirred by the music struck from them by the hands of a worthy successor of the mediæval bell-ringers, to whom bells are books, and who can tell the story of every ounce of bell-metal within twenty miles of his tower. It was of this church, with its Unitarian neighbor just across the ancient churchyard where so many old Harvard and colonial worthies sleep, that Holmes wrote: