Among the first laws enacted in Virginia was one requiring every minister who came into the colony to take the oath of "conformity" to the Church of England. The law did not include laymen; it was the minister only who was required to take the oath. Later, the laws enacted by the General Assembly required every clergyman coming into the colony to subscribe to the Articles of the Christian Faith according to the Church of England and to be of Anglican ordination. By reason of sheer inability at times to provide sufficient Anglican clergymen for the parishes, clergymen of Presbyterian ordination were permitted to serve in Virginia parishes; and that was true throughout the whole seventeenth century. The last Presbyterian clergyman to hold an Anglican parish in Virginia, Rev. Andrew Jackson of Christ Church Parish, Lancaster County, died in 1710. Throughout the century the law required every citizen to attend the parish church, but there was never an ecclesiastical court in which a layman could be tried, convicted or punished as a dissenter. CHAPTER THREE Making Bricks Without Straw The colony of Virginia, after the protective and guiding influence of the Virginia Company was taken away, found itself in an almost impossible situation so far as religious organization was concerned. The leaders of colonial life realized all the more clearly as time passed that King Charles I, who succeeded his father King James I in 1625, was not the least interested in the religious welfare of the colony. America was entirely outside the bounds of any diocese or province in England, and consequently there was no bishop of a diocese, or archbishop of a province with any personal responsibility for the guidance or help of the parishes which were being organized in the colony. The Church in Virginia was left to itself to live or to die. It believed, according to the teachings of the Church, that bishops were necessary for the ordination of men to the ministry and for the performance of the spiritual rite of confirmation, whereby alone under the law of the Church of England baptized Christians could be admitted to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. A bishop was also necessary for the organization and leadership of a diocese, which was the governing body to which every parish and congregation must belong. But no bishop was ever sent by the Church of England to Virginia or to any other part of America throughout the entire colonial period.