The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill.
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