preaching housen.

1713 G. Bull Important Points of Primitive Christianity II. xiii. 545 It is not call'd a Preaching House (tho' there must be Preaching there too at due Times and Seasons) but a House of Prayer.

1747 J. Wesley Jrnl. 2 Nov. (1912) III. 321 Mr. J. Richards had just sent his brother word that he had hired a mob to pull down his preaching-house that night.

1763 F. Gardiner in T. Coke & H. Moore Wesley (1792) iii. ii. 414 I have never..been at the preaching-house in a morning yet, as they preach so early.

a1791 J. Wesley Wks. (1830) VIII. 321 Warn them..Against calling..our Houses, ‘Meeting-houses’: Call them plain preaching-houses, or chapels.

1817 S. Drew Life T. Coke iv. 49 The building of a preaching-house [in New York] was taken into serious consideration. This was..accomplished in the year 1768.

1844 Times 12 Oct. 5/7 They are, in fact, mere preaching houses, meant and intended for the rich..and, too often, theatres for the exhibition of human vanity by popular Evangelical preachers.

1874 J. T. Micklethwaite Mod. Parish Churches 1 The old preaching-house type of the Georgian period.

1935 O. Sitwell & M. Barton Brighton xvii. 312 The attempt to apply Middle Pointed Gothic construction to a Protestant preaching-house results, for the visitor, in a shock of surprise.

1959 News (Frederick, Maryland) 21 Oct. 1/1 This preaching house was dedicated on Feb. 2, 1791 but has long gone out of existence as a Methodist congregation.

1997 Victorian Soc. Ann. 1996 25/1 In the early 19th century, Nantwich parish church was a comfortable, if crumbling, preaching house.