Read Ebook: Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century The Faith of Our Fathers by Brydon G MacLaren George MacLaren

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all persons convicted of a first offense of felony, whether male or female, bond or free, might plead benefit of clergy.

Slavery existed in the American colonies from Massachusetts and Connecticut to Virginia and the Carolinas at the end of the seventeenth century. It was alien to English ideals of human freedom. Yet out of it all one tremendously important fact has come to pass. The Negro came to America from almost every Negro tribe and dialect in central and southern Africa; he came without any connection except his connection with other slaves when more than one were sold to the same master. He came into a highly developed civilization with great organized power of leadership and government; and through the generations of slavery the Negro in America wrought for himself a national and racial consciousness within the sphere of American life. The American Negro today is the most highly educated and the most advanced Negro in the world. As such he has the opportunity to make his own contribution to the culture and the civilization of the world. This their centuries of slavery and repression have brought them.

Fighting Adverse Conditions

The political conditions in England throughout the middle of the seventeenth century bore heavily upon Virginia in religious as well as in civil matters. The period of civil war which began in 1642 lasted until the King was captured by the parliamentary forces, and Archbishop Laud, the hated persecutor of dissenters, was beheaded. After an imprisonment of four years the king was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell reigned as Protector of the Commonwealth. The civil war had lined up the dissenting bodies in England, and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, against the King and the Church of England.

On the American scene the Puritan colonies in New England were in hearty sympathy with the dissenters in England. In Virginia the government and the great body of the people were in equal sympathy with King Charles and the Established Church. It is true there were in Virginia the goodly number of several hundred Puritan settlers. In the Church also there was some Puritan sympathy among a small group of the clergy. One of these, indeed, the Rev. Thomas Harrison, who became minister of Elizabeth River Parish in 1640, was presented for trial in the county court in April 1645 "For not reading the Book of Common Prayer, and not administering the sacrament of baptism according to the canons and order prescribed, and for not catechizing on Sunday in the afternoon, according to the Act of Assembly." He was banished to Massachusetts in 1648, where he remained for two years and married. Afterward he returned to England and was given official position in the Commonwealth under Cromwell.

In the heated atmosphere of the times the Puritan group in Virginia took occasion to apply to the Puritan church government in Massachusetts to send three ordained Puritan "missionaries" to their fellow religionists in Virginia, but upon the arrival of the missionaries their ship was met by government officials; the three missionaries sent back to Massachusetts; and the master of the ship was fined for bringing them to the colony. No one in official position in Virginia could escape the conviction that the sending of Puritan ministers to Virginia at such a time, whether upon request of the Nansemond River group or upon suggestion from Boston, was for any purpose other than to foment and organize Puritan opposition to the King. For that reason Puritanism in Virginia came under suspicion, and the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, with the full support of the government and public opinion, treated all Puritans as enemies. He made their situation so intolerable that the entire group accepted an invitation from the proprietor of the Province of Maryland and migrated to that colony. There, given land on the Severn River, they gained control of the provincial government within a few years. The forcing of the group out of Virginia was a political act of defense and was not religious persecution.

In England marriage was held to be a religious service to be performed by no one other than a priest of the Church; and Parliament, after abolishing the Prayer Book and the canons of the Anglican Church, was compelled to enact another law making provision for the performance of the marriage ceremony as a civil contract. The new law directed that justices of the local courts perform marriages and record them, if desired, in the court records. The people of Virginia paid no attention to this law except, as far as is known, in one case in Northumberland County. In the year 1656 a man and woman in Lancaster County, instead of going to the minister, if there were one, or to the reader of the parish, went to a county official of Northumberland and were married according to the Act of Parliament. Their marriage was recorded in the court order book and there nine months later the new incumbent, Samuel Cole of Lancaster, found it. He thereupon declared openly that the law of Virginia was in effect in his parish and not the Acts of Parliament. The affair ended when the parson required the wedded couple to consider themselves unwed until he could announce the banns of matrimony for them on three separate Sundays and then perform a Christian marriage. He then took occasion to go to the Northumberland county court and record his certificate of marriage of the couple in the court order book. The two certificates still appear in the order book of the county court of Northumberland County in the following words:

Certificate of Marriage, 11 Sept. 1656. John Merryday and Mrs. Ann Nash, als. Mallet, were married by Coll. Jno. Trussell, according to Act of Parliament, 24 August, 1653. Witnesses Geo. Colclough, Leonard Spencer and Jno. Carter. Rec. 20 Sept. 1656.

A number of ministers of Presbyterian ordination, and some openly acknowledged Puritans thereupon came into the colony and these became incumbent ministers of parishes. The last known one was the Rev. Andrew Jackson, incumbent of Christ Church Parish in Lancaster County from some years after 1680 until his death in 1711. He was a godly and devout minister, beloved by his parishioners. Tradition says that he "stood up to read the Psalms, but remained seated when they said the Creed."

The improvement increased more rapidly after a new bishop of London came into that diocese in 1675 and manifested active interest in the affairs of the parishes in America.

During the decade 1660-70, shortly after King Charles had been received and crowned King of England, the General Assembly of Virginia made earnest effort to call the attention of the Crown and the people of England to the needs of the Church in the colony. A committee of clergymen was sent from Jamestown to London to present the matter to the King. The committee published a pamphlet telling of the great need and urging a definite programme to help improve religious conditions. Three things ought to be done: first, a bishop should be sent at once to visit the parishes and ordain as deacons devout laymen who had been serving as readers so that there would be at least a deacon in every parish; second, fellowships ought to be established at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge for the support and training of men for the ministry who would agree to serve the Church for a term of years in the parishes of Virginia; third, and most important, a bishop ought to be consecrated to organize a diocese in Virginia and bring the parishes there into the full life of the Anglican Church.

No one knows what influence the pamphlet had in arousing interest. Certainly no bishop was sent to ordain readers as deacons; and no fellowships were established at the universities to train men to serve in the ministry in Virginia. But a movement did start to organize a diocese and consecrate a bishop. This occurred after 1670. The movement won approval and a charter was prepared for the signature of King Charles as the temporal head of the Church. The charter provided that the diocese was to be called the Diocese of Virginia, and Jamestown was to become the see-city where the bishop was to have his "Cathedral." A clergyman was selected by the King to become the new bishop. He was the Reverend Alexander Moray who had fled Scotland with Prince Charles and had gone as chaplain with the ill-fated campaign ending in defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1652 in which Prince Charles sought to win his throne from the Parliamentary conquerors. Mr. Moray then fled to Virginia and became rector of Ware Parish in Gloucester County.

But something happened in 1672 after the King had announced publicly that he had selected Mr. Moray to be bishop. Nobody knows what it was, but the charter was never signed, and Mr. Moray was not made a bishop. There is some evidence that he died just at that time and possibly that caused the plan to fall through.

It would seem probable that the failure of the plan in 1672 aroused the interest of Henry Compton who became Bishop of London in 1675, for in that same year he secured from the Crown authority to select and license men to serve as ministers of the parishes in America. And shortly thereafter a fund called "The King's Bounty" was established, from which each clergyman licensed to serve in America was given twenty pounds sterling to pay the cost of his voyage. This plan continued until the American Revolution. It did great good, for it gave to every Anglican clergyman in the colonies a bishop whom he felt he knew, and to whom he could write if necessary. The Bishop of London never at any time had any authority whatsoever over the laity of the Church in America, nor over the work of the vestries as temporal heads of the parishes. But his influence with the clergy was of enormous value to their morale.

Ten years later Bishop Compton went farther and secured authority to appoint clergymen as his personal representatives in the colonies; to confer with the clergy; and, if necessary, to remove from their parishes clergymen who had proven to be unworthy men. The commissaries lost their power some sixty years later when a new Bishop of London appointed in 1748 refused to give his commissaries the authority which earlier commissaries had exercised.

The first commissaries, James Blair for Virginia and Thomas Bray for Maryland, made great contribution to the life of the Church of England in the colonies and in England also. Commissary Bray was the moving spirit in organizing three missionary societies in England: the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; and, in his old age, the society of Dr. Bray's Associates for ministry to Negro slaves in all the colonies. He also instituted a plan for sending libraries of theological books to parishes in the colonies, an enormous help to clergymen in far-off places.

James Blair served as Commissary in Virginia from his appointment in 1689 until his death in 1743. His greatest work was the establishment and development of the Royal College of William and Mary in 1693. He raised money for its establishment first by asking pledges from all persons in Virginia who were able to give, and then in England where he quickly gained the active interest of Queen Mary and King William. He secured his charter for the College in 1693 and by 1695 the erection of college buildings was well under way. He served as president of the college until his death in 1743. He steered it through its early difficulties; he fought for it against Governor and Council when necessary; and he brought it to its full status as a College with six professors and more than a hundred students in 1729. He lived long enough to welcome Reverend George Whitefield, the first great leader of the evangelical movement, when he came to Williamsburg in 1740, and had the happiness to learn that his College had won the admiring approval of his visitor. Whitefield wrote in his diary an account of what he saw, and ended, "I rejoiced in seeing such a place in America."

Commissary Blair fought steadily and successfully for the rights and privileges of the clergy, and secured real increase in clerical salaries. He fought also for the right of the vestries to elect the rectors of their own parishes, even as he strove when need was, to secure the removal of the occasional unworthy clergyman.

The organization of the College of William and Mary in 1693 was indeed the culmination of the plan of the London Company to establish a University in Virginia. The first effort went up in smoke in 1622. There was another effort in the days of Sir William Berkeley after the Restoration, but the time was not then ripe. But the opportunity came again. Already there were several endowed schools in Virginia: The Syms School in Hampton, the Eaton School, also in that parish, the Peasley School in Gloucester County, and others. Many parish clergymen also became noted for the excellency of their schools. So the College which began in 1693 came to head a group of schools which had already spread through the colony.

From its beginning it held to the ideal of having a School of Divinity to train men for the ministry of the Church of England, as well as a school of philosophy or liberal arts as we now describe it, to train men for secular life and leadership in the colonial life. When the College reached its maturity it had a School of Divinity with two professors, and a School of Philosophy with two, in addition to masters in other departments. It had also a foundation which could support eight men studying for the ministry. From that time until the Revolution a steady stream of candidates went from the College to the Bishop of London for ordination. But that is part of the story of the next century. The beginning came in 1693.

The Last Decade

The decade 1690-1700 was an era of steady growth in the religious and cultural life of Virginia. New counties were created as population spread further and further up the great rivers; and parishes increased in numbers as the population grew. The first official list of "The parishes and the clergymen in them" which has survived the wreckage of time was the list of 1680, and the next is the list of 1702. These lists show that in 1680 there were forty-eight parishes and thirty-six clergymen incumbents. In the list of 1702 there were fifty parishes and forty clergymen.

The one most notable event in the religious life of both England and Virginia was enactment by Parliament in 1689 of the Edict of Toleration. That act in the first year of the reign of King William and Queen Mary was the first incident in the movement of the English people through their legislature toward freedom of religion. The Act did not repeal the severe laws against dissent adopted in the reign of King Charles, II, but it did remove the penalties. It took the first step along a new roadway into human freedom; and the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic hailed it as such.

In 1699 there were three denominations of dissent in Virginia; the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Quakers. The many thousands of immigrants from Scotland who had belonged to the Established Church of Scotland found little to object to in the worship of the Established Church of Virginia, and entered into it without difficulty or objection.

But the Presbyterians from England, as dissenters from the Established Church of that country, and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who began their immigration to Virginia after the Restoration, brought with them the determination to organize in America as a Presbyterian denomination. They were especially strong in the counties of Princess Anne and Norfolk; and the first Presbyterian congregation in Virginia was organized in 1692 in that area. It is also of interest to note that the Reverend Francis Makemie, who organized the first presbytery in Philadelphia about 1705 and later the first Synod of the Presbyterian Church in America, lived for many years in Accomac County, Virginia.

There was a Baptist minister in the village of Yorktown during the decade 1690-1700 but little is known of his work, nor is it known whether there were then one or more organized Baptist congregations.

The Quakers were the most widely scattered and in numbers probably the strongest of the three groups. They were especially numerous in Henrico County and the eastern section of Hanover County and on the Nansemond river. The Church Attendance Act of 1699 and the Toleration Act of the English Parliament applied to them as to other dissenters, but they were still under suspicion as to their loyalty and also because they continued their early custom of open and violent attacks on the religion and worship of the orthodox Churches. They gave bitter offense by their public announcements in time of war between England and France or between England and Spain that they would give aid and furnish such supplies as might be needed to any enemy fleet which should come with hostile intent into the Virginian waters.

While the laws which punished interruption of religious services were still necessary and were enforced, the adoption of the proviso in the Virginian Act of 1699 was a real step forward on the way to the ultimate goal of entire freedom of worship. It made the worship of the dissenters as truly legal as that of the Established Church, and it removed from the dissenters the requirement that they attend the worship of the Anglican Church.

Thomas Story, the noted English Quaker, who wrote and published a journal of his life and work as a Quaker preacher, gives an interesting account of his two prolonged visits to Virginia in 1698/99 and in 1705. In his daily journal for 1705 he comments at every stopping-place, with manifest pleasure, upon the welcome given him and his friends and the freedom of public preaching accorded him wherever he went. He was welcomed and entertained over and again at Anglican homes and he records occasionally the fact that a county sheriff or constable or justice of the county court was present at his preaching. He does not record any instance in which anyone in civil authority in the colony protested against his preaching or attempted to stop him; and the high point of his visit came when the Governor of Virginia, learning of his approach, invited him and his friends to the Governor's mansion, entertained them and gave them fruit to carry with them on their journey toward Philadelphia.

So Virginia came to the end of its first century, having fought through the various adverse conditions which its people found along the way. The colony had come into an era of opportunity and growth with a well established government, a seaborne trade which brought prosperity, and a concept of religion which made room for all forms of the Christian faith that would remain at peace with each other, and as citizens be loyal to their government. As the people approached their first centennial anniversary celebration in 1707 they looked forward with a confidence born of past experience to the new century upon which they were to enter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

With appendix giving list of Anglican clergymen who served in Virginia in the Colonial period.

This is the old standard work upon this subject, and is still of great value, but must be used with the understanding that records and other original sources made available since his day disprove many of his statements about local conditions. This is especially true regarding his statements concerning the unworthiness of the colonial clergy. His expressed conviction that most of them were unworthy morally has been entirely disproved by the evidence of records now available.

The following extracts from the Journal of the Life of Thomas Story, during his visit to Virginia in 1698 are indicative of the attitude of the people of Virginia toward religious toleration:

Next Fourth Day being the 1st day of the 1st month we went again by water to a monthly meeting at Chuckatuck, where came our friend Elizabeth Webb from Gloucestershire in England, who had been through all the English colonies on the Continent of America and was now about to depart for England. The meeting was large and the Sheriff of the County, a Colonel, and some of others of note in that county were there, and very sober and attentive.

On the 22nd we had a pretty large meeting at Southern Branch, at the house of Robert Burgess. He was not a Friend by profession, but a Justice of the Peace, and of good account in these parts. There had never been a meeting there before; yet the people were generally solid and several of them tendered; and after the meeting the Justice and his wife were very respectful, and treated us to beer and wine, and would gladly have had us to have eaten with them and lodged in their house that night, but being otherwise engaged in the course of the service.

The next day we had a meeting at Romancock, which was large and open. Many persons of note from those parts were there, as Major Palmer, Captain Clayborn, Doctor Walker, and others, all very attentive.

A List of Parishes in Virginia, and the Clergy in them under date of July 8, 1702.

Parishes and Incumbent Ministers

Charles City County. Bristol Parish, George Robertson Westover Parish Charles Anderson Martin's Brandon Parish Weyanoke Parish James Bushell

Elizabeth City County Elizabeth City Parish James Wallace

Essex County South Farnham Parish Lewis Latan? Sittenbourn Parish Bartholomew Yates St. Mary's Parish William Andrews

Gloucester County Petsoe Parish Emmanuel Jones Abingdon Parish Guy Smith Ware Parish James Clack

Henrico County Bristol Parish George Robinson Varina als Henrico Parish James Ware King William Parish Benjamin De Joux

James City County Wallingford Parish Wilmington Parish John Gordon James City Parish James Blair Martin's Hundred Parish Stephen Fouace Bruton Parish Cope D'Oyley

Isle of Wight County Warrosqueake Parish Thomas Sharpe Newport Parish Andrew Monroe

King and Queen County St. Stephen's Parish Ralph Bowker Stratton-Major Parish Edward Portlock

King William County St. John's Parish John Monroe

Lancaster County Christ Church Parish Andrew Jackson St. Mary's White Chapel Parish John Carnegie

Middlesex County Christ Church Parish Robert Yates

Nansemond County Upper Parish Lower Parish Chuchatuck Parish

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