Meeting, “assemblée,” is a general term applicable to any collection of people for secular, sacred, political, conversational, festive, or corporate purposes; in short, to all occasions on which numbers meet together.

It is a term which prevents all verbal disputes, and all abusive and injurious implications by which men are in the habit of stigmatizing societies to which they do not themselves belong.

The legal meeting or assembly of the Athenians was called the “church.” This word “church,” being peculiarly appropriated among us to express a convocation of Catholics in one place, we did not in the first instance apply it to the public assembly of Protestants; but used indeed the expression —“a flock of Huguenots.” Politeness however, which in time explodes all noxious terms, at length employed for the purpose the term “assembly” or “meeting,” which offends no one. In England the dominant Church applies the name of “meeting” to the churches of all the non-conformists.

The word “assembly” is particularly suitable to a collection of persons invited to go and pass their evening at a house where the host receives them with courtesy and kindness, and where play, conversation, supper, and dancing, constitute their amusements. If the number invited be small, it is not called an “assem............