The Colonial Houses of Worship in America, Built in the English Colonies before the Republic, 1607-1789, and Still Standing (review)

Book Reviews115 trampling down evil equally necessary in the Lamb's War. "Judge the death, but save the little thing which I have seen moveing and show her the way of love which is much lost in the height." So wrote Nayler to Fox of an unsteady convert in 1653. We still need a Nayler anthology. In point of technical presentation, the book is not altogether satisfying. There are many cases of inexactness which may mislead a reader no less for being due only to inattention by the writer. For instance, John Howard was not a Friend. Morgan Llwyd was not a Baptist. Giles Barnardiston had not been a minister before he became a Friend. John Owen was not Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Richard Baxter did not write against Friends in 1653. The Marshall who wrote the introduction to The Memory of the Righteous Revived was not Christopher. The Hodgkin who wrote the introduction to First Publishers of Truth was not Henry. And Its Allies is not part of the title of my pamphlet, Studies in Christian Enthusiasm. Few authors always transcribe correctly and Hugh Barbour is not among them. More serious is his frequent reliance on quotation at secondhand. Some times the source may have been inaccessible, but many quotations could and should have been checked, and others' alterations, omissions, or insertions of words or phrases not repeated. In a work of scholarship the reader has a right to expect freedom at least from earlier writers' depravations. In other ways, the book has finish appropriate to its real distinction. It is illustrated by maps specially drawn to show Puritan, Separatist, and Quaker meetings in Great Britain and more in detail in the North of England, by facsimiles of an early letter by Fox and of The Quakers Ballad (1674), and by photographs of the interior of the meetinghouse at Yealand Conyers and of the hill country round the meetinghouse at Height, near Cartmel Fell. It includes a perceptive bibliographical note and a full index. It also carries a warm commendation by Roland Bainton. New College, LondonGeoffrey F. Nuttall The Colonial Houses of Worship in America, Built in the English Colonies before the Republic, 1607-1789, and Still Standing. By Harold Wickliffe Rose. New York: Hastings House. 1963. xv, 574 pages. $22.50. H. Wickliffe Rose has been photographing colonial churches and meetinghouses for thirty years. In Japan on a government mission after the Second World War, he found himself constantly being asked: "What are democracy and Christianity?" Unable to give an answer that satisfied himself, he came back to this country determined to learn the answer. "I began to find the nature of our democracy unfolding," he writes, "in the histories of the colonial settlements and their parishes" (p. xiii). Out of that realization has come this massive and splendid book. It contains excellent photographs by Mr. Rose of every colonial house of worship, Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, still standing in the United States. For every church building there is a short but accurate sketch of its history. The book also contains short chapters on the history of each of the twenty denominations represented, chapters on the three major materials of building—wood, brick, and stone—and a series of useful appendices sum- 116Quaker History marizing the main facts about the buildings under such headings as chronological order, location, denominations, and building materials. The index is very full. Beautifully printed and securely bound in blue cloth, the book must be described as superlatively fine in every respect. First of all, the pictures are superb. Mr. Rose knows how to photograph a building—how to make the most effective and dramatic use of light and shadow, where to stand for the clearest and most interesting views, how to relate the building to its accessories of trees, walls, burying grounds. His interiors are all clear and well lighted. Some of the photographs are, simply, masterpieces— and I apologize for describing them without being able to reproduce them: the Walpole Presbyterian Meetinghouse in Lincoln County, Maine, in which shadows etch out the rich texture of the shingled wall in fantastic beauty; the Old Ship Meetinghouse in Hingham, Massachusetts, whose four...