Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: The Faith of Our FathersBrydon, G. MacLaren (George MacLaren)
Religion
Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: The Faith of Our Fathers
Brydon, G. MacLaren (George MacLaren)
Church of England in Virginia; Virginia -- Church history; Virginia -- Religion
Another problem which the Church faced in Virginia resulted from the
character of the immigrants who came to the colony. It is a well
established fact that the men who came in three ships to Jamestown in
1607 were from various strata of society in England. They all entered
James River on equality of opportunity and of danger. Some at least had
come from the higher classes of society; younger sons, perhaps, or
relatives of stockholders in the London Company, attracted to Virginia
because of the newness of the adventure and the spice of danger; sons
of professional men and men of business, intrigued by a new business
life and opportunity; men from the laboring classes and the peasantry
of rural sections. But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown
settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be
attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the families of
today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia descend
from or married into the families of the men and women who came to the
colony in these earliest years of settlement, and have ancestors buried
among the unknown dead of the Jamestown cemetery and churchyard.
There were three sources from which the settlers came; and these
sources were more or less in effect throughout the whole of Virginia's
first century. First and foremost in numbers and importance were the
sons of small farmers and tenant farmers, and younger sons of the
laboring classes and small merchants. No matter how large the
population may be, always there are positions of employment with a
normal wage; but when the younger sons of a mechanic or other working
man grow to maturity where there is only one wage-producing employment
available to the family, the younger sons must seek a living from other
sources. Farms cannot be reduced below the number of acres required to
support one family. When that has been done and there are several sons,
one of them must inherit the farm and the others must seek a living
elsewhere.
The broad acres of Virginia and its equable climate attracted thousands
of such younger sons, and also others who had not been successful and
sought opportunity in a new land. The settlers came from every section
of England, and from the bleak hills of Scotland; from Wales and also
from Ireland. The English were mostly from the Anglican parishes of the
Established Church. The Scottish new-comers were accustomed to
membership in the Established Church of Scotland and they found little
difficulty in living within the Established Church of Virginia. Indeed
there is no recorded effort to establish a Presbyterian congregation in
Virginia until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. So friendly
was the feeling between the Anglicans and the Scottish Presbyterians in
the Norfolk section that Rev. James Porter of Presbyterian ordination
was the incumbent minister of the Anglican Lynnhaven Parish prior to
1676 and until his death in 1683.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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