maintained in the cities of Western Europe. No ponderous wheels of government are to be seen, nor is the clash of its operations to be heard. Beholding few or no military preparations for the purpose of preventing popular outbreaks or drying up individual drops of disaffection, and yet to learn how man can restrain and rule himself, he almost comes to the conclusion that we are a people without government. In like manner, seeing no union of Church and State, no imposing religious establishment, he is apt to conclude that we are a people without religion. Our churches, it is true, have not those surroundings of pomp and show and solidarities of age, which in Catholic Europe make the Church of Rome revered alike by the intelligent and the unlearned alike by the courted hero and the obscure orphan girl. We are a migratory people, and have no holy places remarkable for their splendor and antiquity; no gilded shrines before which worshipping generations have knelt so often, that both images and shrines have become doubly sacred. We have no gray-worn cathedrals with long aisles and many-pillared arches, whose stained windows, ornate with Scriptural scenes, cast soft shadows upon the pavement, whose paintings have grown into things of beauty under cunning hands toiling to realize the ideal, whose marble angels seem poised for ascending or descending flight, and whose Madonnas are so beautiful, that it is no wonder the silent worshippers often forget their prayers before them. But have we not, instead, splendid hotels and magnificent steamers railways binding together our mountain-chains, and canals linking our inland seas? Believing in political equality, is it necessary that the apple-woman should kneel by the side of velvetrobed beauty, to teach us that one person is no better than another? Or, believing that liberty is destined every where to supplant despotism, what need have we of an institution in our midst illustrating the idea of the Church universal, even though it boasts of an intimate connection with that vast spiritual brotherhood which has existed in all lands, and has embalmed the memory of the good and the great of all ages? We are a nation of travellers, therefore what is the use of pilgrimage? For aside from devotion, pilgrimage, in the old world, is what travelling and frequenting the great watering-places are with We are an intensely practical people; and hence many of the paraphernalia of worship in the old world-the costly shrines, the profusion of images and pictures, the moving of solemn processions, the dress and genuflections of priests, seem to us very like the evershifting scenes and changing characters that belong to the stage.

us.

The absence of a Church establishment is, however, no more evidence of our being an irreligious people, than the absence of garrisons and an armed police, is proof that we are without government. Voluntary obedience to the best laws, not the absence of law, is the element

of liberty. The planets, wheeling silently in their vast orbits, give us the most perfect idea of freedom; yet we are told, if one of them should falter for a second of time in its appointed course, the universe would be thrown into chaos.

In church, as in political matters, the voluntary system is found to work best; and the existence of so many charitable institutions in New

DR. ALEXANDER'S CHURCH, COR, OF FIFTH AVE. AND NINETEENTH-STREET, York, is sufficient evidence that the spirit of her citizens is by no means so mercenary as some would have us suppose. More missionaries have sailed from our port than from any other in the world; and

we believe there is no city where the poor, other things being equal, are better provided for, or where more is voluntarily done for the promotion of every good cause. Foreigners, therefore, cannot say that we are an irreligious people, from the fact of our having no established religion.

The first prominent objects that meet the eye, when sailing up the bay of New-York, are the spires of her churches pointing heavenward like silent fingers. Of several of these splendid edifices, of which NewYorkers are justly proud, we give excellent illustrations.

In the last number of the KNICKERBOCKER, we mentioned how Director Kieft managed to build the first church on Manhattan, and how, in contrast with that little edifice within the walls of old Fort Amsterdam, we have now over three hundred churches in the city, not enough, however, to accommodate one third of our population, were they all inclined to avail themselves of religious services. The Reformed Dutch Church was organized in New-Amsterdam as early as 1620, and the first sermon in English from the Dutch pulpit preached by Dr. Laidlie in 1764.

Down to comparatively a recent date, many peculiarities prevailed in the Dutch Reformed Church, the remembrance of which is not altogether lost. Unlike the plainly-attired Puritan preachers, the dominies invariably appeared in the high, circular pulpit, clad in a gown of black silk, with large flowing sleeves; and so indispensable was this livery deemed, that, at the installation of a dominie in the beginning of the nineteeenth century, who came unprepared with a gown for the occasion, the senior clergyman peremptorily refused to officiate, and the ceremony would have been postponed for a week, had not a robe been opportunely furnished by a friendly minister. The tall pulpit was canopied by a ponderous sounding-board. The first psalm was set with movable figures, suspended on three sides of the pulpit, so that every one on entering might prepare for the opening chorus. Pews were set aside for the Governor, Mayor, city-officers, and deacons; and the remaining seats were held singly by the members for their life, then booked, at their death, to the first applicant. The clerk occupied a place in the deacon's pew, and prefaced the exercises in the morning, by reading a chapter from the Bible, and, in the afternoon, by chanting the Apostolic Creed, to divert the thoughts of the people from worldly affairs. All notices designed to be publicly read, were received by him from the sexton, then inserted into the end of a long pole, and thus passed up to the cage-like pulpit, where the minister was perched far above the heads of the congregation. It was his business, too, when the last grains of sand had fallen from the hour-glass, which was placed invariably at the right hand of the dominie, to remind him by three raps with his cane, that the time had come for the

end of the sermon. A story is told of a dominie who, one hot summer's day, seeing the clerk asleep and the people drowsy, quietly turned the glass himself, and after seeing the sands run out for the second time, remarked to the congregation that, since they had been patient in sitting through two glasses, he would now proceed with the third.'*

ST. PAUL'S CHURCH, COR. OF FOURTH AVE. AND TWENTY-SECOND-STREXT.

The stone church built by Director Kieft having been destroyed by fire in the days of the Negro Plot, the congregation erected the Garden