The growth of the colonial house follows the development of the family and repeats the history of the race. The immigrant procures his abode, as he afterward buys his clothes, ready made. The ancient troglodyte lives to-day in the Derbyshire cave dweller; the original Romanist settlers of Maryland were driven to take refuge in cave houses in Virginia; and the New Zealand hermit, like "great Pæan's son" at Lemnos, "weeps o'er his wound" of the heart in a cave by the resounding sea. Where they can not be found ready dug they can be excavated, as they were by some early Pennsylvania colonists. Others in Virginia, New York, and New England found it easier to dig holes in the ground, thus imitating the Germans of Tacitus, whose winter residences are also repeated in those basements which form the wholesome abode of the London domestic servant. The wattle-and-daub house of the Anglo-Saxon villager has been everywhere reproduced in the colonies, and may still be abundantly found.
If the occupation of caves and the burrowing of holes suggests man's distant affinity to the carnivora and lower quadrupeds, his simian origin is confirmed by the use he makes of the tree. In the infant city of Philadelphia there were "few mansions but hollow trees." A rude form of tent is the next stage, the canvas consisting (as may still be seen among the poorer campers-out) of clothes or rags. Then, as in the early days of Sydney, the tents were covered in with bushes and thatched over. Next (as may to-day be observed in the neighborhood of Coolgardie) a framework of branches is employed to support the canvas, and the tent is converted into a cabin. A stride toward the house is taken when the branches are replaced by a regular woodwork, with doors and windows; the envelope being still sometimes canvas, which is soon replaced by corrugated iron. The Brazilian country house where Darwin lodged sixty years ago was built of upright posts with interwoven boughs. Another line of development starts from the trunk of the tree. The early American colonists made bark wigwams. The Australian pastoralist "erected a temporary house, generally of large sheets of bark, in the first instance." In countries where the winter is more severe or the bark less substantial, the backwoodsman builds, as the early colonist built, a rude cabin of round logs. Then the logs are hewn, or they are split or sawn into planks, and built into the weatherboard houses still common in the rural parts of Australia, and general even in New Zealand towns. In their earliest stages they are still without a floor and are roofed with thatch or shingle. Towns often thus remain like early Sydney, "a mere assemblage of paltry erections intermediate between the hut and the house." The architecture is of the simplest. A "butt" and a "ben," with a "lean-to," form the prevailing type. As the family grows or its wealth increases, new portions are added, till many colonial houses look for all the world as if they had "come out in penny numbers." Even with a few stately structures luxurious mansions, extensive government offices, Gothic parliamentary buildings a wooden city has an indefinable meanness of appearance. It is improved out of existence by the dread agency of fire. Like Charles's London, New Orleans and many another colonial town have thus had an Augustan renewal. Houses are now built of brick, stone, or concrete; tile, slate, and iron replaced thatch and shingle; two stories were ventured on; chimneys were smaller but safer. They became susceptible of architecture: Spanish features were introduced into those of New Orleans; the more northern colonies copied the English country house, with modifications to suit the hotter or colder climate; and in New South Wales a taste for mansion-building came into vogue along with splendid equipages, liveried servants, and pedigrees. Such houses were at first arranged in all degrees of irregularity and confusion. The street is a modern invention. The cows returning from pasture laid out Boston, and the bullock teams climbing up from the harbor charted Sydney. Towns in manufactured colonies, as Savannah, Augusta, most South American cities, Christchurch and Invercargill in New Zealand, were planned before settlement and have their streets at right angles.
A hundred years ago Talleyrand, exiled in the United States, described the journey from one of these cities to the interior as successively exhibiting all past stages of the human habitation from the mansion to the tent, and just a century later one of Talleyrand's countrymen, M. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu, traveling in the reverse direction, from "the bush" to Coolgardie, witnessed the gradual transformation of the tent into the two-storied hotel. A great part of the history of the race in the matter of habitations is thus museumed in the space of a few miles.
If the temple rises out of the tomb, is modeled on that, and remains to the last pre-eminently a place of sacrifice, the church is an enlarged dwelling house. It is the house of the god, as the fetichist called it the house of God, as we still reverently call it; and in Romanist countries to this day it is in a manner the abode of two divine personages, who figure as dizened and painted dolls that are named respectively God and the Mother of God! Both lines of development are rapidly recapitulated in colonies. The temple appears as the cathedral, which has modest beginnings, but gradually assumes the architecture and proportions of Gothic cathedrals, losing relation to the primary wants of the worshipers comfort and audibility ministering mainly to their higher needs, and if used for preaching at all, reserved for such occasional and sensational pulpit oratory as that of Dominican monks like Lacordaire at Notre Dame in Paris, or of a Protestant Dominican like the late Canon Liddon at St. Paul's in London. The church, chapel, or meeting house may be found in colonial villages in its most rudimentary form, scarcely distinguishable in style from a dwelling house. According to the sect it belongs to, it develops in one of two opposite directions. The age of cathedrals is past, even in Roman Catholic countries, but the tendency of Anglican and allied churches is to simulate the old cathedral; high ritualistic sections mimic the gorgeous Madeleine. The more liberal denominations, on the other hand, develop downward; the colonial Baptist tabernacle is on the lines of Spurgeon's great building at Newington, but the ancient pulpit is widened into a platform and the seats slope upward as in a concert hall; it is a mere auditorium, in which the preacher is all. The development in this direction finds its extreme in the secularist hall, which is a mere concert room, with a piano in place of an organ. The ceremonial development is on the same lines toward the gradual adoption of ancient rites by the older churches, toward more freedom in the younger sects. Many a colonial clergyman has wrecked himself or his congregation through too much ritualism; a few have injured themselves through an excess of liberalism.
A parallel evolution takes place in church government. Where an organized settlement is made on political principles, congregations carry their minister with them, or rather the ministers carry their congregations. Where the colony is normally founded and grows up as the mother country grew, the first ministers, like the first preachers of Christianity itself, are often laymen. In an interior county of Virginia Morris read every Lord's day to his neighbors from the writings of Luther and Bunyan, and a meeting house was at length built for him; it is a typical instance of the beginnings of most churches. The part of laymen remains long prominent in colonies. The Anglican lay reader is everywhere a feature of colonial church life. In the more flexible churches a storekeeper or retired sea captain will read Spurgeon's sermons or preach excellent sermons of his own in an Otago village or the Australian bush. Where missionaries have been sent out to convert the heathen in a country afterward colonized, many of them remain as ministers, as did Augustin and his monks in England. The Presbyterian catechist likewise becomes a settled minister. Others arrive. Men of independent character, like Dr. Lang, of Sydney, resolve not to wait for any dead man's shoes in the kirk, but sail beyond the seas to colonies where there is no minister of their own denomination. Heretics, incompatibles, men who have failed, men whose health has given way, emigrate in increasing numbers. Still, the supply is long deficient. Clergymen were scarce in New York. A bounty was offered to immigrants in Virginia. Six years after the establishment of the Church of England in North Carolina there was only one clergyman in the country. The few there are repeat the history of the first Christian bishops and the early English monks in serving a circuit of two, three, or more churches. The state comes to the rescue by providing for their support. In England contributions were at first voluntary; by the eighth century tithes were levied, folk-land was granted, and private endowments were made. Just so was the Church of England established and endowed in New York, Virginia, and North Carolina; in Maryland a poll tax of forty pounds of tobacco was levied for its support. In Connecticut and Massachusetts a church was set up in each parish on Congregationalist principles by a vote of the people, who elected the minister and voted his salary. So uncertain was the tenure that in several States even the Anglican minister was hired from year to year; and quite lately an Anglican church in a British colony engaged its incumbent, as it might have engaged its organist, for a term. In 1791 the Church of England in Canada was partially established, and its clergy endowed with grants of land. The Australasian colonies have pursued a very various policy. By the Constitution Act of 1791 one seventh of the ungranted lands in New South Wales was set apart for the support of a Protestant clergy. An attempt to endow the Anglican Church in South Australia in the early forties was defeated by a radical governor. A recrudescence of the ecclesiastical principle permitted the church settlements of Otago and Canterbury in New Zealand to appropriate a portion of the funds derived from the sale of lands for the endowment of the Presbyterian and Anglican churches respectively. So far the colonies followed, latterly with halting steps, the history of the mother country. As in political, so in ecclesiastical government, they have anticipated that history. The American state churches did not survive the Revolution. In Canada the Presbyterians and other sects successfully asserted their claims to a share in the church endowments, which between 1840 and 1853 were distributed among the municipalities, all semblance of a connection between church and state being thus destroyed. New South Wales passed through a period of religious equality with concurrent endowment of the four most numerous denominations, and a long struggle against the principle of establishment was ended in 1879, when the reserves were devoted to the purposes of education. The practice of confiscating for the church a portion of the proceeds of the land sales was gradually dropped in Otago and Canterbury, probably more for commercial reasons than in consequence of the opposition of the democratic governor aforesaid, who spoked the wheel of the South Australians. Yielding to Nonconformist pressure, the liberal Government in 1869 enforced the principle of religious equality throughout the crown colonies, which were thus, willingly or not, made to follow the lead of the movement in Ireland. The internal organization of the colonial church is also anticipative. Fifty-two years ago Sir George Grey bestowed on the Anglican Church in New Zealand, then governed by him, a constitution modeled on that of the corresponding church in the United States, as the political constitution he drafted for the colony was modeled on the Constitution of the United States; and it has been imitated in other Australasian colonies, which have thus declared themselves independent of the mother church, while the colony is still politically dependent on the mother country. In yet another point the daughters have outstripped the parent. Three Presbyterian denominations still fissure the old home of Presbyterianism; only two have ever existed in the colonies, and for thirty years these two have been one. The four chief Methodist sects in Australia are also said to be on the point of amalgamating.