During each winter, also, a series of public lectures on American history is delivered in the Old South meeting house.
Of late years the stringency of the Quaker discipline has been relaxed: the peculiarities of dress and language have been abandoned; marriage with a non-member or between two nonmembers is now possible at a Quaker meeting-house; and marriage elsewhere has ceased to involve exclusion from the body.
The township is at the head of navigation on the Charles, and occupies the fertile undulating plains along the river running back to a range of hills, the highest of which are Whitney Hill (200 ft.) and Meeting House Hill (250 ft.).
The Jethro Coffin House was built in 1686, according to tradition; the Old North Vestry, the first Congregational meeting-house, built in r 7 r r, was moved in 1767, and again in 1834 to its present site on Beacon Hill.
When the king arrived at Belfast in that year there were only two places of worship in the town, the old corporation church in the High Street, and the Presbyterian meeting-house in Rosemary Lane, the Roman Catholics not being permitted to build their chapels within the walls of corporate towns.