When I awoke in the morning, and looked from
my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its
Storehouses,
towers, and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its
daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses
and light-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their thousand-ton
clipper ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered
that day, itself one of the capitals of the American Republic,
and the sole emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific; when I
looked across the bay to the eastward, and beheld a beautiful town
on the fertile, wooded shores of the Contra Costa, and steamers,
large and small, the ferryboats to the Contra Costa, and capacious
freighters and passenger-carriers to all parts of the great bay and
its tributaries, with lines of their smoke in the horizon, - when
I saw all these things, and reflected on what I once was and saw
here, and what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on
reality at all, or the genuineness of anything, and seemed to myself
like one who had moved in "worlds not realized."
I could not complain that I had not a choice of places of worship.
The Roman Catholics have an archbishop, a cathedral, and five
or six smaller churches, French, German, Spanish, and English;
and the Episcopalians, a bishop, a cathedral, and three other
churches; the Methodists and Presbyterians have three or four
each, and there are Congregationalists, Baptists, a Unitarian,
and other societies. On my way to church, I met two classmates
of mine at Harvard standing in a door-way, one a lawyer and the
other a teacher, and made appointments for a future meeting. A
little farther on I came upon another Harvard man, a fine scholar
and wit, and full of cleverness and good-humor, who invited me to
go to breakfast with him at the French house - he was a bachelor,
and a late riser on Sundays. I asked him to show me the way to
Bishop Kip's church. He hesitated, looked a little confused,
and admitted that he was not as well up in certain classes of
knowledge as in others, but, by a desperate guess, pointed out
a wooden building at the foot of the street, which any one
might have seen could not be right, and which turned out to be
an African Baptist meeting-house. But my friend had many capital
points of character, and I owed much of the pleasure of my visit
to his attentions.
The congregation at the Bishop's church was precisely like one
you would meet in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. To be sure,
the identity of the service makes one feel at once at home, but the
people were alike, nearly all of the English race, though from all
parts of the Union. The latest French bonnets were at the head
of the chief pews, and business men at the foot. The music was
without character, but there was an instructive sermon, and the
church was full.
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