"[The] ark was to be the central sanctity in the ritual worship of the Hebrews, during their wanderings in the wilderness. You may ask, "What have we to do to-day with that structure designed for barbarous fugitives in the Arabian desert three thousand years ago? Why lead us back from the fresh light of this morning to the misty dawn of history for a theme of meditation?" We have this to do with it, — that your new pulpit is in the direct line of descent from the first mercy-seat that consecrated the Jewish tent near Horeb. Those ten commandments, which are at the basis of our modern religion, were folded up and deposited beneath the lids of the ark in the first tabernacle that was built after the revelation from Sinai, more than thirty centuries ago. The Jews are our religious grandfathers... The first Christian churches were modelled after the synagogues; still keeping their reading-desks for the Old Testament, and adding the manuscript biographies of Jesus and the fresh letters of the apostles. When the Roman Catholic form was perfected, the simple reading-desk was supplanted by the more stately and imposing altar for the celebration of the mass. But the Protestant Reformation, appealing more directly to the reason and conscience, made the pulpit most prominent in the furniture of the church, and restored the Old and New Testaments as the basis of instruction and the sole authority. Thus this pulpit, in a young Protestant church in Boston, is connected by subtle historic ties, that reach across the ocean from the New World to the Old."