OLD SWEDES' CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA.
New York is poor in old buildings, and especially poor in old churches. Besides St. Paul's, the comparatively modern St. John's Chapel and the John Street Methodist Church, it really has nothing to show to the tourist in search of ancient places of worship. The vicinity can boast a few colonial temples—the quaint old Dutch church at Tarrytown, dear to the readers of Irving; the Tennent Church on the battle-ground of Monmouth, New Jersey, with its blood-stains of wounded British soldiers; and a charmingly plain little Friends' meeting-house, no bigger than a small parlor, near Squan, New Jersey, being the most strikingly attractive. In Newark one notes the deep-set windows and solid stone walls of the old First Presbyterian Church, and the quiet plainness of Trinity Episcopal Church, which looks like Boston's King's Chapel, with the addition of a white wooden spire.
Philadelphia is richer than any other American city in buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the older streets it is a frequent sight to see quaint little houses of imported English brick modestly laid in alternate red and black, curiously like the latest modern fashion. The ample room for growth possessed by this widespreading city has saved many an ancient house for present use as dwelling or store. One is not surprised, therefore, to find on the old streets near the Delaware three churches of weather-stained brick which seem trying to make the piety of an elder age useful to the worshippers of to-day. All three of these churches—Gloria Dei, Christ and St. Peter's—now have their chief work among the poor people whom one always finds in a business quarter near the river-front, but each attracts, by its old-time associations and its modern missionary spirit, a goodly circle of attendants from the western parts of the city. Gloria Dei Church, the oldest of the three, was built in 1700 by Swedish Lutherans on the spot where the Swedish predecessors of the Friends had located their fortified log church twenty-three years earlier. Its bell and communion-service and some of its ornamental woodwork were presented by the king of Sweden. It is surrounded by the usual graveyard, in which lies Alexander Wilson, the lover and biographer of birds, who asked to be buried here, in a "silent, shady place, where the birds will be apt to come and sing over my grave." The Old Swedes' Church retained its Lutheran connection until recent years, when it became an Episcopal parish.
Christ Church and St. Peter's were formerly united in one parochial government, and to the two parishes ministered William White, the first Church-of-England minister in Pennsylvania, the friend and pastor of Washington, the chaplain of Congress and one of the first two bishops of the American Church. The present structure of Christ Church was begun in 1727, but not finished for some years. The parish is older, dating from 1695. Queen Anne gave it a communion-service in 1708. In 1754 came from England its still-used chime of bells, which were laboriously transferred during the Revolution to Allentown, Pennsylvania, lest they should fall into British hands and be melted up for cannon. At Christ Church a pew was regularly occupied by Washington during his frequent residence in Philadelphia; and here have been seated Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and many another patriot, besides Cornwallis, Howe, André and others on the English side. Around and beneath the church are many graves covered by weather-worn stones, and on the walls of the interior there are a number of mural tablets.
St. Peter's Church was begun in 1758, and completed three years later. In quiet graciousness of appearance it is like another Christ Church, and its interior arrangements are still more quaint, the chancel being at the eastern end of the church, while the pulpit and lectern are at the western. In the adjoining churchyard is a monument to Commodore Decatur.
One cannot find in all America sweeter and quainter memorials of a gentle past—memorials still consecrated to the gracious work of the present—than the churches and other denominational houses in the old Moravian towns of Pennsylvania. At Bethlehem, as one stands in the little three-sided court on Church street and looks up at the heavy walls, the tiny dormer windows and the odd-shaped belfry which mark the "Single Sisters' House" and its wings, one may well fancy one's self, as a travelled visitor has said, in Quebec or Upper Austria. Still more quaint and quiet is Willow Square, behind this curious house, where, beneath drooping willow-boughs, one finds one's self beside the door of the old German chapel, with the little dead-house, the boys' school and the great and comparatively modern Moravian church near by. Through Willow Square leads the path to the burying-ground, where lie, beneath tall trees, long rows of neatly-kept graves, each covered with a plain flat stone, the men and the women lying on either side of the broad central path. Several of the ancient Moravian buildings date from the middle of the last century. The Widows' House stands, opposite the Single Sisters' Range, and across the street from the large church is the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, established in 1749, and by far the oldest girls' school in the United States.
It was in 1778 that the Single Sisters gave to Pulaski that banner of crimson, silk which is commemorated in Longfellow's well-known "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns at Bethlehem." The poem, however, written in the author's early youth, and preserved for its rare beauty of language and fine choice of subject, rather than for its historical accuracy, has done much to perpetuate a wrong idea of the Moravian spirit and ritual. Mr. Longfellow writes in his first stanza
When the dying flame of day
Through the chancel shot its ray,
Far the glimmering tapers shed
Faint light on the cowled head,
And the censer burning swung,
When before the altar hung
That proud banner, which, with care,
Had been consecrated there;
And the nuns' sweet hymn was heard the while,
Sung low in the dim, mysterious aisle.
But the Moravians know nothing of chancels, tapers, cowled heads, censers, altars or nuns. Their faith has always been the simplest Protestantism, their churches are precisely such as Methodists or Baptists use, and their ritual is plainer than that of the most "evangelical" Episcopal parish. Their "single sisters' houses," "widows' houses" and "single brethren's houses"—the last long disused—are simply arrangements for social convenience or co-operative housekeeping. Mr. Longfellow's poetic description applies to the Moravian ceremonial no more accurately than to a Congregational prayer-meeting or a Methodist "love-feast."