EARLY ENGLISH CHURCHES IN AMERICA

1607-1807. By Stephen P. Dorsey '35. Oxford University Press. 1952. 206pp. $10.00.

The jacket calls this book "a visual essay," but it is far more than that modest phrase suggests. With its chapters on the "historical background," and with its 118 photographs of exteriors and interiors of notable Episcopal Churches scattered from the Carolinas to New Hampshire, it is actually an illustrated account of the colonial period with specific reference to the Anglican tradition in the New World.

The author records the establishment of the Church of England first in Virginia and Maryland, then in the Carolinas, later in the Middle States, and finally in New England where it engaged in a long struggle with the deeply embedded Puritanism of the region, and it remained definitely English until after the Revolution. For, as he points out in picture and story, there were no American bishops consecrated until after the war was over, in spite of the fact that two thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were communicants.

Probably most readers will be attracted particularly to the excellent photographs of significant people of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Houses of Worship and their inner "ornaments." From various sources, notably from the Library of Congress and from the author's own camera, these pictures with their helpful captions and notes help the modern reader to understand afresh how important to American culture this gracious way of living was, symbolized by the simple dignity and beauty of the Churches portrayed.

As a book, Early English Churches is a delight to the eye and the hand and the mind. It is well organized, thoroughly indexed and documented, and it is beautifully printed in large type on fine paper with ample margins.