CENTENNIAL HISTORY
Connecticut minister--a predecessor of mine--used to delight in saying that the weekly prayer-meeting would he held "in the school-house next beyond the Episcopal meeting-house." The word "church" was rigidly reserved by him to designate the "body of believers." Let 'us glance, then, at the meeting-house of the olden time. If you will look through that curious compilation, Barber's "Historical Collections of Connecticut," you will find it filled with odd and quaint-looking woodcuts representing the villages and town-centres of this commonwealth of ours. In most of the cuts you will find a meeting-house; in many of them two religious edifices: and it will not take you long to discover that the Connecticut meeting-house had a character of its own, by which it is easily recognized. If it is not at the centre of a village, you will find it on some hill-top, standing alone or in the company of an academy or school. It is a two-story, wooden structure, differing from other buildings in being destitute of a chimney and possessing a steeple or spire. The steeple does not usually sit astride of the roof, nor is it perched atop of a portico of Grecian columns, as in some more recent edifices; it caps, rather, a square tower which stands solid on the ground, and rises thence, against the gable, to the peak of the roof, and high above it. The roof is rather scanty and this, together with the height of the edifice, gives to the whole structure a certain high-shouldered effect which is more characteristic than graceful. It is written in the "History of Torrington" that in building the first meeting-house in that town, the posts were made eighteen feet high, but that some meddling committee-man had them reduced to eight feet--a misdemeanor for which he was tried and punished. It appears that on grounds of expediency, he was wrong; on aesthetic grounds he was probably right--as any one will conclude who examines a number of Connecticut houses of worship of the eighteenth century. Most of them are needlessly tall, and painfully awkward.