USA > Virginia > Colonial churches; a series of sketches of churches in the original colony of Virginia, with pictures of each church > Part 1
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30
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Gc 975.5 C71 1359865
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02374 5026
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016
https://archive.org/details/colonialchurches00unse
JAMESTOWN TOWEN
THE OLD TOWER AT JAMESTOWN, VA.
Colonial Churches
A Series of Sketches Churches in the Original Colony of Virginia . . . .
WITH PICTURES OF EACH CHURCH
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Each Sketch by an
Especially Qualified Writer 0 O O
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RICHMOND, VA. SOUTHERN CHURCHMAN CO. 1907
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Copyright 1907 by SOUTHERN CHURCHMAN CO. Richmond, Va.
PREFACE.
T HIS book is issued in response to a recognized need and an ex- pressed demand. 1359865
These papers appeared originally as articles in the Southern Churchman, and from the beginning of their publication elicited a wide interest; hence, it was considered wise to preserve them in com- pact and permanent form.
The object of this book is two-fold: First, to show that this Church is no intruder in this land, but was the first religious body to claim possession of the English Colonial Possessions for Christ and Holy Church; that the very first settlers in these Colonies were Church- men, intent on the spread of the Church and the preaching of the Gospel; and that before any other body of Christians had located in the territory of the English Colonies the Church had taken formal and permanent possession.
Second: To show that this possession was not an ephemeral or spo- radic act, but that it was continuous and permanent; that where the Colonists first landed, there the ministrations of the Church were begun, and there permanent church buildings were erected; that these ministrations have continued unbroken to the present day; and that permanent and handsome structures marked the progress of Colonial growth, and remain to-day as monuments to the piety and churchly character of the American forefathers.
Incidentally, this book will show the amazing effect which Church- men had on the founding of the Colonies, and the tremendous part they played in the upbuilding and development of the nation and the formation of national ideals and character.
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And this work is done by no polemic or argumentative process, but simply by reciting and putting on permanent record the historic facts In connection with Colonial, Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary History, as it affected the Church.
For too many years Churchmen have allowed those who are anti- pathetic to her character and purpose to write her history as it touched Colonial development and legislation; and it is far from sur- prising that she should have been misrepresented and maligned; and it is more than high time that her own sons should give to the world the facts as they really were and are.
The papers constituting this book have been prepared by many authors, each specially qualified for the special work undertaken, and the whole represents a labor of love and loyalty such as has never, so far, been equalled in the history of the American Church. What the writers of these articles have done has been done without hope of other reward than that of placing their Mother Church, the Mother Church of this Land, right in the eyes of all fair-minded men. They deserve the gratitude of the Church at large for their faithful en- deavors.
To the American Church this book is dedicated, with the hope and prayer that in this Tercentenary year it may not only silence the detractor, but may strengthen the position of every Churchman who believes in the historic position and claims of his Mother Church.
W. M. CLARK,
Editor Southern Churchman.
The Fall and Rising Again of the Church in Virginia.
An Essay, Read Before the Alumni Association of the Theological Seminary in Virginia, June 20, 1907.
VIRGINIA SEMINARY ALUMNI ADDRESS 1
BY THE REV. EDWARD L. GOODWIN, HISTORIOGRAPHER OF THE DIOCESE OF VIRGINIA.
T HE year 1907 will be marked as that in which a re-study was made of the beginnings of the history of Virginia, and espec- ially of the Church in Virginia. All eyes are turned this year to Jamestown, and many minds are seeking to reconstruct the scenes enacted there three hundred years ago. Orators and writers are telling the story anew, and with a new realization of its import; and we are very sure that one result will be a fairer estimate of the purpose and character of the founders of the State, and a new demon- stration of the good providence of God in planting and preserving on these American shores this vine of His Church, which has grown and filled the land.
I venture to take as the subject for the essay to-day another epoch in the history of the Virginia Church, which we must know if we would truly trace our descent from the Church of Jamestown and understand the lessons of our long past. Our theme is, "The Fall and Rising Again of the Church in Virginia." The story would cover, for its complete telling, a period of about a century of her life, or, say, from 1740 to 1840. At the beginning of this period we see the Church sit- ting as a queen upon her throne, supported and protected by her lord, the State, apparently the most stable institution among this new peo- ple. In the midst we see her dethroned, distrusted and disqualified, vainly striving to save from the wreck of her fortunes some remnants of her former possessions, if not of her power. At its end she appears
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revived, chastened and purified, girded with humility and grace as one who doth serve, and entered upon the holy work in the doing of which she has outlived all calumny and been honored of God and men.
That the Church which was founded with the Colony of Virginia should be an Established, or State, Church was inevitable under the conditions existing. No other form of Church was known or conceived of, and as the English government went with her Colonies as the mould of her civilization and law, so the English Church would go as the outward embodiment of her Protestant religion. Just what was to be the permanent form and theological complexion of that Church was still a question of controversy at home. It seems to have given the colonists very small concern either now or later; and it is singular how little echo of the theological strifes of England was heard n! Vir- ginia. The Church established here was the English Church of 1607 and thereabouts, and that has been the norm of Virginia Churchman- ship ever since. The colonists wanted simply good men like Hunt and Whittaker and Buck and their immediate followers, selected and sent out by the London Company, to read the old prayers in their rude churches, to preach to them and to administer the sacraments as they had been accustomed to have them at home. They worshipped ac- cording to the forms of the big Prayer Books in their churches, and they and their children learned the catechism out of them, and they obeyed as far as possible the "Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasti- cal," which were bound with them at the end, after the Psalms in metre. When these Canons failed to meet their particular wants, they made other Canons by their Burgesses, under the guise of Acts or Or- ders of Assembly, and the county lieutenants and churchwardens saw that they were proclaimed and duly followed. Those curious Church- men called Puritans were perfectly welcome in Virginia so long as they obeyed the laws. Those queer non-Churchmen called Quakers, (by no means the Quakers of a later day), were not welcome because they would not obey the laws, and taught men so.
Among the Canons ordained by the General Assembly were those creating in each parish a Select Vestry, as it would be called in Eng- land. A vestry was originally the whole body of parishioners, met to order their parochial affairs; the model, by the way, of the New Eng- land town meeting. But this was not convenient in Virginia, and the vestry was ordered to be composed of "the most sufficient and selected men" to be chosen by the parishioners; the origin of our vestry elec-
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tions, dating back to 1642. Later the number was fixed at twelve, and most unfortunately they were made a self-perpetuating body. These administered parochial affairs, as that term was understood in the wide meaning of English law.
The Church thus established, and supported by parochial taxation, seems fairly well to have met the religious wants of the people of that day. Perhaps under no other conditions could she have done so well when both the Colony and the Church were in their infancy, and she was in the position of a Mission Church, but with no missionary so- ciety or agency behind her to look to for direction and support.
But when a century and a quarter had passed, conditions were differ- ent. The Colony had grown tremendously in every way; in numbers and wealth, in political vigor, in the intellectual and economic progress of the great body of her people. It was practically no longer a Col- ony but a Commonwealth. The Church, meanwhile, had grown in size only; but in vitality, in adaptiveness, in capacity for self-support, self- government or self-discipline, in ability to meet her altered and in- creased responsibilities, not one whit! She was rather growing infirm in her swaddling clothes. She was tied and bound, and all but stran- gled by the very bonds on which she leaned. Her weakness and in- ability to meet new conditions as they arose was not inherent in the Church, but lay in outward and artificial circumstances, which she had not the power, even if she had the wisdom, to change. What she might have done and become, undebilitated by State patronage and unham- pered by political control, none can tell. What she failed to become and to do, being thus handicapped, is patent enough now.
I lay stress upon this one fatal condition, because it is the sufficient explanation of all her weakness and her woes. The system of Church government in Virginia was, I believe, without parallel in history. It was not Episcopal, nor Presbyterian, nor Congregational, nor yet a compound of the three. It was a government by a political, local, lay aristocracy, which was a branch of the civil government of the Colony. The Church herself was without power to act, to provide for her es- sential needs or to perpetuate or develop her life.
Among the secondary causes of the weakness of the Church, and the one which has been almost exclusively insisted upon, was the scarcity of her clergy and the unworthiness and inefficiency of many of them. The root of this difficulty lay further back-in her incapacity to pro- duce a native ministry sufficient and suitable for her needs. She had
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no power of mission. Occasionally a young Virginian would go to Eng- land and there seek the ministry, but he would do it of his own initia- tive. Sometimes a vestry would find a man of sufficient education and proper character whom they would induce to take orders and accept their living. The process of securing ordination for such an one was not difficult. They had but to supply him with their own letter of recommendation and a title to their parish, to which the Governor and, perhaps, the Commissary would add their endorsement. Armed with these, the candidate would set out on his pilgrimage to the palace of the Bishop of London, where, for the first and only time in his life, he would come in touch for a moment with a source of ecclesiastical order and authority. If he escaped the dangers of the sea and the ravages of small-pox in a London tavern, he returned within a twelve-month in priest's orders, and fully equipped with Tillotson's Sermons and, per- haps, half a dozen other books, which would constitute his theological library.
These few native ministers were by far the best, I believe, in the Colony. Other vestries ordered ministers to be selected and sent from England by their friends or their factors in London, much as they or- dered Prayer Books or Communion plate; while others consulted the Commissary, and took what applicant for a living he might have on his hands; or they employed from time to time whatever clerical dere- lict might drift their way and apply for the place. These last, as might be supposed, were usually the worst. Yet the vestries were really concerned in trying to get good men for their parishes, and in being rid of those who proved otherwise. In spite of their efforts, many unworthy men, and a few impostors who were not in orders at all, held livings of which they could not be dispossessed. But such cases were much less frequent than has been represented, and the great majority of the Colonial clergy were godly, faithful and, in many cases, able men.
My heart goes out to the memory of these servants of God in those earlier and less auspicious days of the Virginia Church, who did their work with patience with so little to animate or encourage them. They wrought alone and almost unheeded, each in his own isolated field of labor, wide as the wilderness in territory, but narrow almost to the vanishing point in all that could give inspiration, impetus or promise to their work. They had no great Church life behind them or around them; no standard to live up to, no competition to rouse their energies.
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They had no Bishop, no Conventions or Convocations, or clerical asso- ciations. They had no missions or missionary societies to stir their zeal; no guilds or choirs or Sunday-school to uphold their hands in the work of their parishes. They had no books, no papers, no mail. No Southern Churchman-think of that! £ No missionary in the re- motest foreign field to-day is so completely cut off from the manifold expressions of religious life and activity as were these men. What- ever atmosphere of this sort there was around them was of their own creation. And yet, for a century and three-quarters, these ministers kept the religion of Christ and of the Mother Church alive here in the wilderness. If the old parish registers, wherein alone their work found earthly record, had been preserved to us, the names of those whom they baptized and catechized and married and buried would form an almost complete roster of the souls in Virginia during that period.
Wherein they failed to gain and hold for the Church the love and reverence of the common people, a sufficient explanation may be found in. the conditions of the Establishment. The clergyman was, in common estimation, identified with and the creature of the vestry, and the vestry was a close corporation of real or would-be aristocrats. So- cial lines were closely drawn, with the usual unhappy result. In church the common people sat in pews assigned them down by the door. If they did not come to church the churchwardens occasionally presented them to the grand jury, and they were fined, as they were also for racing horses or hunting on Sunday and other offenses against morality and Church discipline, and the vestry got the money. Their little tobacco crop was taxed heavily for parochial purposes. True, the twelve vestrymen probably paid one-half the tithes of the parish, but they laid the levy and the small planter did not. As a contribu- tion he might have given his sixty pounds of tobacco willingly. As a tax he paid it grudgingly. If he took up land further back in the wil- derness, the parish system followed him, with new churches to build and a new parson, living, perhaps, forty miles away, to be paid his 16,000 pounds of tobacco. The Church was fast becoming unpopular with the masses whom it not did reach, or at least reached but im- perfectly and with small power to win their affection.
The rise of the Dissenters in Virginia and the beginnings of their inroads upon the legal preserves of the Church dates practically from about the year 1740, though it was nearly twenty years later before their opposition was seriously felt, and still another decade before
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they began to attack the Establishment with deadly determination. Their progress, however, among the plain people of the country was rapid from the beginning, and the reasons are not far to seek. Many of the dissenting preachers, however ill-equipped in knowledge and narrow in creed, were men of earnest piety and burning zeal. They brought religion to the doors of the people who, before, could hardly reach its exponent by a Sabbath day's journey. They presented it in such guise as they could understand, appealing to the feelings rather than the understanding, but touching the hearts as the long sermons and lifeless services of the parish churches had never touched them. Moreover, these preachers were men of strong native sense and shrewd- ness, and they understood their congregations very thoroughly. Their very weaknesses they turned into elements of strength. Their lack of education, their being without regular orders, the sporadic and demo- cratic organization of their churches, the very small expense attaching to their support and the maintenance of this native and homely form of religion, as contrasted with that of the Established Church-they made all these things weigh in their favor. "Free Religion" proved to be a harp of many strings, and they played upon them all. When at last the magistrates began, in a few instances, to seek to curb their zeal or reprimand their excesses, they courted prosecution with the devotion of the martyr combined with the shrewd wisdom of the po- litical agitator. Fines they did not like to pay, but there was no such pulpit as the grated window of the county jail. This appealed to the popular sympathy as possibly nothing else could. The crime of perse- cution was now added to those ascribed to the Church; and presently a still more serious charge began to be laid at her doors, and one more potent to fire the public heart. It was the English Church! The pop- ular indignation aroused by the Stamp Act grew apace until it burst into the patriotic flame of Revolution, and the odium which began to attach to England was not slow to be directed toward the Church which bore her name.
Meanwhile the Baptist and Presbyterian voter had become an ele- ment to be reckoned with. As early as 1759 an act was passed de- claring that a vestryman joining a dissenting congregation thereby va- cated his office. But few Dissenters as yet found their way to the House of Burgesses, but they were helping to elect those that did. The perfectly just, but unwise, course of the clergy who protested and ap- pealed to the courts against the Option or Two-penny act of 1758, which
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allowed their tobacco salary for that year, when tobacco was particu- larly high, to be compounded to them at the miserable rate of sixteen shillings and eight pence a hundred, and their practical defeat, con- trary to law and justice, but in obedience to the will of the people, did much to strengthen the prejudice against the Church and embolden her enemies.
The boon of Disestablishment came to her, however, from the wis- dom and convictions of her own sons. Many of the old vestrymen must have been long ago persuaded that not only the cause of religion, but the influence and vitality of the Church which they loved were being hampered and jeopardized by its connection with the State; that the whole system, however venerable, was false and vicious, and that the principles of religion as well as the logic of events demanded that her service should be perfect freedom. For the first time in the his- tory of Virginia, if not of the English race, an opportunity for declar- ing and carrying into effect these convictions presented itself in 1776. Before that time the Church in Virginia had no more power to free herself from the control of the State than has the Department of Jus- tice, for instance, to decline its allegiance to the government of which it is a part. But when the people of Virginia met in Convention to face the question of Revolution and to proclaim their Declaration of Rights, the occasion offered, and the promptness with which it was seized upon to pronounce the principle of Religious Liberty shows that the conception had long found lodgment in their minds. When that Con- vention, composed of Churchmen almost to a man, unanimously adopt- ed the sixteenth article of the Bill of Rights they knew perfectly that it would lead, and was meant to lead, to the disestablishment of their Church, though few, perhaps, saw as clearly as did George Mason, its author, and the father of Religious Liberty, the full extent to which it would go in guiding further legislation.
Almost immediately after the adoption of the new Constitution, the General Assembly proceeded to put into effect the principle announced, by an act declaring null and void in this Commonwealth all acts of Parliament which limited the right of maintaining any religious opin- ions or exercising any mode of worship. The same act exempted Dis- senters from the payment of parish levies for the support of ministers; and, lest such levies should now fall too heavily upon those who still adhered to the Established Church, if required to pay the ministers their fixed salaries, the act providing for such levies was suspended
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for one year. All glebe lands, churches and chapels, church plate, &c., were, however, expressly reserved and saved for the church in each parish for all coming time. The act for the support of the clergy con- tinued to be suspended from year to year until it was finally repealed in 1779.
The passage of this act of October, 1776, was the crucial test for the Church. The prop which had been her temporal support, the parish levy, was removed in a moment and without warning. It came at the most inopportune time, at the beginning of the Revolution, when the distractions of war filled the land, when taxation was heavy and prop- erty depreciated, and when the principal men of each parish were ab sent on public duty or absorbed in the stirring events and doubtful issues of the day. What steps were taken in the different parishes to- ward supporting the Church by the new system of voluntary contri- butions we have little or no means of knowing. In the great majority of cases probably nothing was done, the matter being deferred until more peaceful times. The ministers, if they stayed in their parishes, had their glebes, and from these and such alms as they might receive, gained their meager living. Some turned to secular pursuits for sup- port; others drifted out of the State; several entered the army as offi- cers or chaplains. At the outbreak of the Revolution, or, say, in 1775, there were, as nearly as we can gather, about ninety-five parish minis- ters in the Colony. Bishop Meade, following Dr. Hawks, says that at its close, or in 1785, "only twenty-eight ministers were found laboring in the less desolate parishes of the State." But Dr. Hawks' figures are not accurate, for we can find at least forty-two whose names reappear after the Revolution, and there may have been others whom age or dis- tance prevented from coming to the Conventions, and of these at least thirty were still in their old parishes. During the ten years certainly as many as twenty-three would die or become disabled, which would leave only thirty to be accounted for after a decade of upheaval and war, when the very foundations on which they had rested were over- turned. We cannot, therefore, justify Bishop Meade's hasty conclusion that "had they been faithful shepherds, they would not have thus de- serted their flocks."
With the first return of peace the Church people began to cast about for means for rehabilitating and maintaining their Church. And here another source of weakness, due wholly to their former condition as an Established or State Church, manifested itself in a way that, to us,
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seems perfectly amazing. The idea of a Church supported by the free- will offerings of her people was one that was absolutely foreign to their minds. Whether such a condition would be desirable or not was not at all the question at issue. To the minds of the very great ma- jority of the leading Churchmen such a scheme was visionary and im- practicable. It meant that religion would die out in the land, or degen- erate into they knew not what form of ribaldry and free-thinking. In a few places, like Alexandria, for instance, a number of wealthy men from one or two parishes might unite and maintain the services of the Church by pew rents, and this Washington took the lead in doing there; but elsewhere the light of the Church would be extinguished forever. Such was their firm conviction, and why? Because the duty of giving had never for one moment been taught, nor an opportunity for its ex- ercise been offered, in the Colonial Church! I suppose that on Com- munion occasions an offertory was taken to be distributed by the min- ister among the poor, a purely formal proceeding. Beyond this I doubt whether an offering had ever been taken in a Colonial church, or that the people had ever been asked to give a penny for her support or ex- tension. The vestry paid all the bills out of the parish levy. The peo- ple were asked and expected to give nothing, only to pay the tithes assessed upon them as the law demanded. And so they had never learned to give, nor to imagine the Church and her ministry being maintained in any such uncertain and unbusinesslike fashion.
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