Produced by Mark C. Orton, Diane Monico, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net RELIGIOUS LIFE OF VIRGINIA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY The Faith of Our Fathers By GEORGE MACLAREN BRYDON Historiographer of Diocese of Virginia VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION CORPORATION WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA 1957 COPYRIGHT©, 1957 BY VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION CORPORATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet, Number 10 CONTENTS Introduction Chapter Page One Beginnings 1 Two The Colonists at Worship 6 Three Making Bricks Without Straw 12 Four Building a Christian Community 22 Five The Coming of the Negro 26 Six Fighting Adverse Conditions 34 Seven The Last Decade 42 Bibliography 46 Appendix A 47 Appendix B 48 INTRODUCTION The settlement of Englishmen at Jamestown in 1607 was the outgrowth of a vision of transatlantic expansion which had been growing stronger steadily during the preceding generation. It was in the following of that vision that Queen Elizabeth granted to a group of men headed by Sir Walter Raleigh the authority to establish a colony upon the remote shores of the Atlantic ocean, and out of the plans of this group came the ill-fated colony which was started at Roanoke Island, in what is now the State of North Carolina, in the year 1585. This colony after a life of a few years disappeared: whether destroyed by Indian attack, or by a Spanish fleet which resented the settlement of Englishmen in a land that was claimed for Spain, or by famine or disease, no one knows to this day. The one permanent result was the giving of the name Virginia to their American land in honor of their Queen.