USA > Virginia > Colonial churches; a series of sketches of churches in the original colony of Virginia, with pictures of each church > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
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
When the law of 1776 was passed, suspending the parish levies, the question of whether the support of ministers and teachers of the gospel should be left to the voluntary contributions of each religious society or be provided for by a general legal assessment, was professedly left open for future determination. In 1784 the Churchmen in many coun- ties, with a few others, petitioned the General Assembly for a law re- quiring all persons to contribute to the support of religion in some form or other; and a bill was introduced entitled "An Act for estab- lishing a provision for teachers of the Christian religion," and known as the General Assessment Bill. It provided that each taxpayer should declare, when giving in his list of tithables, to what religious society his assessment should be appropriated; but its payment was obligatory. The bill was opposed by three parties in the State, holding very diverse views. There was an element, influential, if not large or open, who were indifferent, if not inimical, to the existence of any Church or re- ligion at all. Secondly, there were the Dissenters generally, but chiefly
16
the Baptists, whose Church methods required little for their mainte nance, but who were quick to see the advantage the measure would afford to the Church of larger requirements upon whose destruction they were avowedly bent. And lastly, but in effectiveness chiefly, there were a small number under the leadership of James Madison, who saw that the whole thing was wrong in principle and contrary to the doc- trine of perfect liberty in matters of religion. It was advocated by some Presbyterians at least and by Episcopalians generally, under the skillful leadership in the Assembly of Patrick Henry, aided by such men as Edmund Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, John Page and Edmund Pendleton; while George Washington was an avowed believer in the principle, to quote his own words, of "making people pay for the sup- port of that which they profess." It is strange to us to-day that such great statesmen and devoted Churchmen should have contended so vig- orously for such a measure. But the traditions and custom of many centuries are hard to overcome. The maintenance of religion without the sanction and support of the government in some form was to them an untried experiment, and one of more than doubtful promise. They were opportunists because of their fears for religion and the Church.
When Madison saw that the bill would certainly pass if brought to a vote, he succeeded in having it laid over until the next session. In the meantime, at the solicitation of Mason and Nicholson, he prepared his famous "Memorial and Remonstrance," which was widely circulated. It received so many signatures, and was probably itself so effective as an argument, that at the next session the bill was defeated with little difficulty. This victory paved the way for the passage, one year later, of Jefferson's Statute of Religious Freedom, which had been reported in 1779 by a committee composed originally of Jefferson, Wythe, Mason, Pendleton and Thomas Ludwell Lee, but which had hung fire in the Assembly for seven years.
The real act by which the Church was disestablished, however, was that for "Incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church," passed at the session of October, 1784, upon the petition of the Episcopal clergy. It made the minister and vestry of each parish a body corporate to hold its property, repealed all former acts relating to vestries or minis- ters and their duties, or to the doctrines and worship of the Church, and provided that the Church, in Convention, should regulate all its religious concerns. The act, as we shall see, was repealed two years later, but in the meantime the Diocese of Virginia was organized under
17
its provisions on the 18th of May, 1785. In that first Convention sixty- nine parishes were represented by thirty-six clerical and seventy-one lay delegates. It was by no means a small or insignificant body, and as one reads the names of the laymen who chiefly composed its mem- bership, he sees that it represented, to a large degree, the foremost peo- ple of the State in substance, position and character. They were trained legislators, and every page of their proceedings shows their skill in this regard and the patient and thorough consideration they gave to the matters before them. Not one of these delegates had ever sat in a Church Legislative Convention before, except Dr. Griffith. Their ecclesiastical training had been gained as vestrymen solely. They met to organize a Church under conditions never before existing. They had no precedent to guide them, no model to which to conform. Their work under such circumstances was truly remarkable. In their re- sponse to the overtures from the North in regard to forming a General Convention, and in the body of Canons which they enacted under the title of "Rules for the Order, Government and Discipline of the Prot- estant Episcopal Church in Virginia," so admirably adapted to the peculiar conditions in which they stood, they manifested that genius for Constitution-making which seemed to be inherent in the Virginian of that day. In these respects they knew clearly what they wanted, and spoke with plainness and confidence. But in another direction their work seems to us to leave much to be desired. In view of the vital needs of the Church, not as an organization but as a living work- ing body, they lacked comprehension, initiative and the foresight of faith. In the face of the actual situation confronting them in each parish, of the problems and demands of the hour calling for practical solution and aggressive effort, they seemed almost powerless, and can only recommend to the several vestries to take the most effectual meas- ures for the support of their ministers, and issue an address to the members of the Church, mildly reviewing the advantages of religion, explaining the present situation, and exhorting them in this crisis "to co-operate fervently in the cause of our Church." "Of what is the Church now possessed?" they cry in plaintive accents, and answer, "Nothing but the glebes and your affections." This was the sum-total of her estate, real and personal. One can hardly fail to see the longing backward glance at the fleshpots of Egypt made while taking the in- ventory. The glebes seemed to them much the more tangible and de- pendable asset of the two. It was of the sort they had been accustomed
18
to look to and to estimate. They did not realize yet by what an un- certain tenure even that was held, as their Baptist friends would show them after awhile, or what a source of weakness these same glebes would prove, in exciting the opposition of their enemies and diverting their own energies for their defence. Still less did they understand the mine of wealth and spiritual power that was latent in that other item of her possessions, the affections of the people for the Church. From that source the Church in the Virginias draws now an income of half a million dollars annually. At that day these affections had never been taught how to express themselves; nor would they until, by sore travail, the Church should learn not to lean upon the arm of flesh, and discover the true source of her strength and wherein was the hiding of her power.
In two years the Act of Incorporation was repealed, the other de- nominations continuing to protest against it and refusing the offer of the Legislature to have a similar act passed in favor of their own Churches. The real injury done the Church by this repeal was small. But as a sign of her loss of prestige, and of the continued persecution to which she would be subject, it added much to her depression and discouragement. Yet she still failed to see the lessons of Providence, and to devote herself to her development from within rather than to saving the sad remnants of her former estate. After five years, and after one failure due to her own disgraceful lethargy, she had obtained a Bishop and was now fully organized. A few new clergymen were being ordained or were coming in from elsewhere, though not enough to take the places of those who died, much less to fill what should have been the demand. The defection of the Methodists made large in- roads in the ranks of her adherents. The pestilential spread of infi- delity still further sapped her strength. The clergy of the old school seemed impotent to cope with dissent or skepticism, or to adapt them- selves to a new order of things. One by one the parishes gave up the hopeless struggle and passed into the inanition of seeming death. The Conventions grew smaller and smaller. The one hundred and seven members in 1785 became but thirty-seven in 1799, in which year, by the way, the General Assembly passed an act repealing specifically and by name all previous acts in any way touching upon "the late protestant episcopal church." The reason given was that they tended toward the re-establishment of a national Church. The real animus is doubtless seen in the confiscation of the glebes which followed three years later.
19
For many years the Convention had been trying to defend her right to this property, so solemnly confirmed to the Church by legislative ac- tion. Not only were the glebes now seized, but the right was asserted to confiscate the Church buildings also; but this they forbore doing so long as they remained in possession of their present owners. Doubtless the general expectation was that in a short time the few churches still in use would be abandoned and fall into irrevocable decay, and so the last vestige of the despised and discredited Church would pass away in the land.
This expectation seemed in every way likely to be realized. The very hand of Providence was interposed to prevent the Convention from successfully defending her claims or continuing the hopeless struggle. The supreme judiciary to which she appealed stood, after the death of Judge Pendleton, hopelessly deadlocked, and to this day her cause remains without formal decision by the Court of Appeals. Doubtless it was most fortunate that it was so.
Several Conventions were held between 1799 and 1812. Others, per- haps, failed for lack of a quorum. We have the journal of but one. For several years none was held, though the number required to form a quorum had been gradually reduced from forty to fifteen, and was later brought down to twelve. The Bishop and most of the clergy had given up in despair. Death was annually reducing their ranks, and hope- lessness, if nothing worse, paralyzed the efficiency of those that re- mained. For twenty years they had tried to uphold the old Church as they had known and understood her, the formal, automatic Church of the old Colonial parish, and it was in vain.
And now it was time for the Lord to work. The Lord always has a remnant that remains according to the election of grace, and through these He has performed the wonderful things in the Church's history. The remnant of the old Church remained in Virginia in numberless: homes, where the Prayer Book was still read and pondered, its cate- chism taught, its precepts followed and its services longed for. An extract from an autobiographical sketch, which has come into my hands, written by an aged saint lately gone to her rest, will illustrate this. She is telling of her grandmother, who lived in the days of which we are speaking, and says: "She was devotedly pious and a great reader. The Prayer Book was her daily companion, and she paid much atten- tion to the festivals and faithfully observed the fasts. She was my godmother. I shall never forget an Easter night, when she took the
20
Bible and read with me the story of the passion and resurrection from the beginning. As she pointed out the consequences of sin, and the ne- cessity of Christ's death for our salvation, our tears mingled together, and for the first time the reality of it was impressed upon my mind. I do not know how old I was, but the scene has never faded from my memory."
Hundreds of similar records could be gathered from the annals of our old families. The Church still lived in the homes, in the affections, in the traditions, in the very blood of her children. About one year before the death of Bishop Madison, when the Church was at the lowest ebb of her fortunes, he ordained to the ministry a son of one of these homes, and in the Convention which was called after the Bishop's death in 1812, among the fourteen clerical and the same number of lay delegates that assembled, the Rev. William Meade took his seat for the first time. The next day the Rev. William H. Wilmer, lately come to Alexandria from Maryland, sat by his side, and the human instruments who were to move for the revival of the Church were prepared.
Bishop Meade was one of the great Virginians. In the work that he accomplished and its abiding results, in his capacity for leadership, in genius, wisdom and character, he stood, if not in the very first rank, then among the foremost in the second. Perhaps he was lacking in a certain breadth of mind, for his convictions were very deep. Doubt- less he was cast in a somewhat stern Cromwellian mould; his work de- manded that. But he accomplished great things. Men trusted him, and he led them aright to high and righteous ends. He was a re- former, an upbuilder, a restorer of paths to dwell in. He had all the qualities of a great commander, and in a lesser degree those of a states- man, and they were consecrated without reserve to a single definite end in the hand of God. Bishop Moore was the Ezra, but Bishop Meade was the Nehemiah of the Restoration, who built the walls and planted the towers of our Jerusalem on sure foundations.
I need not remind you how conspicuously the Divine Providence wrought in bringing Bishop Moore to Virginia as her second Bishop. With that event the revival of the Church began. Dr. Hodges, misinter- preting a statement of Bishop Meade's, says there were but five clergy- men then at work in Virginia; but at no time were there less than thir- teen ministers in charge of parishes in the Diocese, though some of them were now old men, and there were doubtless but five young ministers qualified for the task before them. Very slowly at first the number
21
increased, and with it the number of parishes which began to take on new life. But under a Bishop who had had no part in her late woes, and who would not know an old glebe if he saw one, the Church turned her back upon a painful past and her face to the sunrise.
Time would not admit, nor does need require, that we should follow the onward course of the Diocese under the new order. The Church had learned her lesson-"Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." And He clothed her with change of rai- ment, and set a fair mitre upon her head, and caused her iniquity to pass from her. And He set her feet in a large room.
"In every parish which I have visited," said Bishop Moore in his first Convention address, "I have discovered the most animated wish in the people to repair the waste places in our Zion, and to restore the Church of their fathers to its primitive purity and excellence. I have found their minds alive to the truths of religion, and have dis- covered an attachment to our excellent liturgy exceeding my utmost expectations. I have witnessed a sensibility to divine things bordering on the spirit of gospel times. I have seen congregations, upon the mention of that glory which once irradiated with its beams the Church of Virginia, burst into tears, and by their holy emotions perfectly elec- trify my mind."
The good Bishop's experiences at that time were but limited indeed, and his observations had been made under the most favorable conditions. But so long as he could speak thus the Church was not dead, nor had the affections of her people failed. To restore the Church to far more than her pristine glory and prosperity, to meet her spiritual needs, and to equip her for future ministrations of righteousness, her nurs- ing fathers of that day and their followers laid stress upon four points, which I shall do little more than enumerate.
First: They depended upon the power of the gospel of Christ cru- cified, preached with what, alas! we now call old-fashioned evangelical simplicity and fervor. They were not concerned about propping up the cross, but were intent on holding it up before the heart and con- science. Their theology had a strong tinge of Calvinism, no doubt, but it was remarkably free from any weaker dilutions. This was their remedy for the Church's ailments, their instrument for her upbuilding, and their protest at first against the latitudinarianism of a former age, and afterwards against the sacerdotalism of the tractarian move- ment. We of to-day may well consider whether any better remedy,
22
or more effective instrument, or more emphatic protest, has yet been discovered.
Secondly: They gave themselves to restoring the grace of Disci- pline in the Church, a revival which God grant may never be as greatly needed again! It was not without significance that the Canon, "Of the Trial of a Clergyman," for so many years stood first in the code of Virginia Canons. It had to be revised, sharpened up and fortified at least twelve times after 1785, when the nucleus of it was first enacted. Bishop Meade and a few others fought doggedly for many years for the constitutional amendment requiring delegates to Convention to be communicants, and only carried the point in 1835. The old Canon XIX was another monument of their not ill-directed zeal for purity of life in the Church, and was needful for those times. Strong meas- ures were required to restore the confidence of the people in the stan- dards of personal piety upheld by a Church which had been so long discredited by her sons and vilified by her enemies.
Thirdly: With long patience and by many experiments they taught the duty, and gave opportunity for the exercise, of liberality and devotion in the support of the Church and its extension by mis- sionary effort. The leaders themselves had everything to learn of a practical sort in this direction, and not a few expedients were adopted and tentative efforts made before our numerous Diocesan institutions and funds were placed on their present foundations, and especially before the Diocesan Missionary Society was evolved, and the people taught to love it and to be partakers in its work as a personal obliga- tion and privilege, as they do to-day. It was no small part of the good foundation laid by those fathers of the Virginia Church that, by slow degrees and prayerful effort, they taught her people to give of their substance to the Lord, not only in the support of their own parishes, but in furthering the holy enterprise of missions.
And lastly: Out of what was felt to be the greatest need of the revived Church grew her crowning glory and her richest gift to the cause of religion. Of the ministers under whom the restoration of the Church began, but a few comparatively, certainly not as many as half, were native Virginians. For many years her ministry was re- cruited from beyond the borders of the State, and indeed throughout her history a surprisingly large proportion of her most distinguished and useful clergymen were but adopted sons of the old Commonwealth. The fact has been overlooked because they uniformly became such
23
intense Virginians in loyalty and sentiment as to be proudly reckoned among the very elect. But from the beginning the need of a ministry "native and to the manner born," and well trained and equipped for their work, was felt to be imperative. The standard of ministerial fitness was placed very high by our early bishops, and it has never been lowered. They purposed that the future of the Church should be committed to faithful men trained according to those standards, ground- ed and settled in the faith of the simple, positive and unadulterated gospel in which they believed and of which they were not ashamed. From this purpose, under singular displays of divine blessing, grew the Theological Seminary in Virginia, from which has gone forth streams to make glad the City of God in all lands.
God help us to be worthy successors of such men-to learn the les- sons and to keep the charge which the history of the Virginia Church lays upon all her sons!
The Church in Virginia in the Days of the Colony.
BY THE REV. JOSEPH B. DUNN, OF NORFOLK, VA.
T HE two principal sources of authority in regard to the Colonial Church of Virginia are Hening's Statutes and the old vestry books of the different parishes. During the period of her as- cendency in Virginia the Church needed no defender nor apolo- gist, and after the Revolution, when her organization was shattered, her property taken from her, and her clergy scattered, the Church was left helpless.
The Church had always been a part of the organic life of the Colony, but never a part of its politics. She was not organized for political ends, nor did she have any political traditions nor training. She was never a party in the Colony. To understand her downfall, it is necessary to understand the position the Church held in the community during the Colonial period. This position has never been fairly stated. Dr. Hawks, in the preparation of the History of the Virginia Church, was dependent for his materials in matters relating to the Church upon the works of the Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists, the men who together wrought the destruction of the Church. Bishop Meade ac- cepts the thesis of Dr. Hawks, borrowed as it is from the political briefs of the enemy of the Church, and though he had access to the vestry books of the early Church, he uses them to defend the thesis. His work is rather that of an annalist than a historian.
The history of the Church in Virginia reflects fully and accurately the life of her people; and the reckless condemnation of that Church has made incomprehensible the lives of her public men, who were in most cases devoted Churchmen. If we accept the thesis of the Church's enemies, then Washington, Mason, Nelson and the Lees were all excep- tions to the rule of a corrupt and reckless gentry. This suppositio_ is so preposterous that one Baptist historian attempts to explain Washington on the supposition that he was at heart a Baptist.
The Church in Virginia was from the first the Church of the people rather than the Church of the clergy. The churches were built by the
RT. REV. JAMES MADISON, D. D., Last Rector of Jamestown and first Bishop of Virginia.
25
people, and the demand for clergy was always greater than the supply. As the people built the churches, purchased the glebes and furnished and stocked them out of their own means, they naturally contended that they were the owners thereof. The spirit of independence ex- hibited in the Virginia Assembly was the spirit of the people, and found expression in the vestry meeting as in the halls of legislature. The people of Virginia identified themselves with the Church as they identified themselves with the government. They were the Church as they were the State. In the patent which gave to the Bishop of London the spiritual oversight of the Colony the right of induction was expressly reserved to the Governor of the Colony. The vestries did not fight the letter of this law, but they made it inoperative by persistently asserting that they, as the representatives of the people, were the patrons of the livings; and that neither the king nor the governor, as the representative of the king, could claim the right of presentation, which was an inalienable right of the people themselves. The vestry was elected by the people and held office for an indefinite period. In most cases the vestry was a self-perpetuating body, filling vacancies in their number by their own choice; and yet the people never wholly surrendered their authority; for in some cases, upon de- mand of the people themselves, the vestry was dissolved by an Act of Assembly. The vestry were generally the most conspicuous and in- fluential members of the community. Their duties were not wholly ecclesiastical, for to them was entrusted the care of the poor of the parish and the holding of all trust funds for such purposes. They appointed the procession-masters, and to them was made the report of the processioning. As these processionings established the bounds of every free-holder's property, the business was of great importance. They fixed the rate of taxation for tithes, and to them all tithes were paid. The long tenure of office and the importance and prestige at- taching to the position of a vestryman inevitably produced an aris- tocratic and autocratic spirit in the men who composed the vestry. This august and closely organized body were in very truth "The twelve lords of the parish."
The status of the clergy was no less clearly fixed. The parson was the duly appointed officer in the Church, whose duties were well marked out, and whose authority was carefully defined. The minister was chosen by the vestry, and they were responsible to the people for the character and efficiency of their appointee. The vestry made earnest
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.