Secular Meeting Houses
For more details on this topic, see Colonial meeting house.In New England towns in the United States, there are meeting houses which serve as a sort of town or city hall, and are used for public meetings, voting, and town offices.
A meeting house may have a dual purpose as a place of worship and public discourse, as in early American Puritan congregations.
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Famous quotes containing the words secular, meeting and/or houses:
“As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity.... The march of God in the world, that is what the State is.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I have seen some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meeting yours. A truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters. Serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. My friend looks me in the face and sees me, that is all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It breedeth no small offence and scandal to see and consider upon the one part the curiosity and cost bestowed by all sorts of men upon their private houses; and on the other part the unclean and negligent order and spare keeping of the houses of prayer by permitting open decays and ruins of coverings of walls and windows, and by appointing unmeet and unseemly tables with foul cloths for the communion of the sacrament.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)