"La Fayette.
"July 25, 1825."
While on a Revolutionary topic we may mention that among a great many relics of '76 preserved in the town is the sword of General Wayne—"Mad Anthony"—a straight, light blade in leather scabbard, possessed by Mr. W. H. Naff.
JESSUP & MOORE'S PAPER-MILLS.
The citizens of this pleasant town have ever been orderly and pious, just as they have ever been loyal. Their religious institutions have grown and flourished. Godfearing and unspeculative, they have attached themselves to such creeds as appealed most powerfully to the heart with the least possible admixture of form. "The words Fear God" says Joubert, "have made many men pious: proofs of the existence of God have made many men atheists." Since the day when Whitefield poured out his eloquence among the Brandywine valleys and touched the hearts of the French exiles, Methodism, with its almost entire absence of dogma, has had great success in the community. This success is now indicated by a rich congregation, and a church-building that would be called noble in any city. Grace Church, on Ninth and West streets, is a large Gothic temple, seating nearly eight hundred persons—warmed, frescoed and heavily carpeted inside, and walled externally with brownstone mixed with the delicate pea-green serpentine of Chadd's Ford. The architect was a native Wilmingtonian—Thomas Dixon—now of Baltimore. The windows, including a very brilliant oriel, are finely stained: the font is a delicate piece of carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations for Sunday-schools and lectures are of singular perfection. Few shrines in this country show better the modern movement of Methodism toward luxury and elegance, as compared with the repellant humiliations of Wesley's day.
It is to be hoped that this advance in attractiveness does not indicate any lapse in the more solid qualities of spiritual earnestness. "Whenever this altar," well said Bishop Simpson in dedicating the building on the centenary anniversary of the rise of Methodism—"whenever this altar shall be too fine for the poorest penitent sinner to kneel here, the Spirit of God will depart, and that of Ichabod will come in."
We have indicated the Swedish Lutheran missionaries exhorting under the roof of their antique church in a language which their congregations were beginning to forget, and afterward in a broken English hardly more intelligible. Their place is largely taken now by predicators of the faith of John Knox, with a plentiful following of pious believers. Among the family of Presbyterian kirks in Wilmington the youngest is a large brick edifice built in 1871, for sixty-one thousand dollars, on Eighth and Washington streets, able to seat nearly a thousand persons, most comfortably and invitingly furnished, and supplied with lecture-, infant- and Sunday-school-rooms, together with a huge kitchen, suggesting the agapæ or love-feasts of the primitive Christians. Meantime, Anglicanism does not lack supporters. The descendants of Monsieur Du Pont, cultured and influential, have done much to advance the creed, and about fifteen years ago Mr. Alexis I. Du Pont, pulling down a low tavern in the suburbs, prepared to erect a church upon the site, to be built mainly through his own liberality. Unhappily, Mr. Du Pont died from the effects of an explosion at the powder-works ten weeks after the laying of the corner-stone; but the building was soon completed through the pious munificence of his widow, and the Bible of St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church now rests on its lectern upon the site of the old liquor-bar, and the gambling-den of former days is replaced by its pews. The rector is Mr. T. Gardiner Littell, a man of eminent goodness and intelligence. St. John's has a beautiful open roof, stained windows and a fine organ: it can offer seats to seven hundred worshipers.
"AT THE SIGN OF SHAKESPEARE."
These few specimen churches—and especially the last, which blots out a grogshop—are good instances, with the large congregations they accommodate, of the way in which a sane, flourishing manufacturing community provides for the spiritual needs of its members. The tone and moral well-being which Boz found, or thought he found, among the operatives at Lowell are largely realized here. But our picture of Wilmington as a hive of industry is not yet complete, and before we enter upon the highly-interesting problem of its dealings with its working family, we should enter a few more of its sample manufactories.