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
And still another motive was the religious one. The Virginia Company
kept constantly in the forefront their plan to Christianize the
Indians. Their plan as they began to put it into effect included the
establishment of parishes and the selection of fit clergymen to go
overseas; to establish a University with a college therein for Indians,
and to take Indian youths into English families to fit and prepare them
for their college. They secured from both King and Archbishop the
authority and permission to bring the expatriated Pilgrim Fathers back
under the English flag, and give them a settlement in Virginia, a plan
which failed after the Pilgrims had started for their promised new
home.
CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings
The men who came to Jamestown brought the ideals and ways of life of
the mother country; its common law, the enactments of Parliament, the
Church of their people; and as shown in the prayer written in England
which the commanding officer of the colony was required to use daily at
the setting of the watch, they hoped also that the natives of the land
might be brought into the Kingdom of God. They made petition for their
own needs, but they prayed also:
And seeing, Lord, the highest end of our plantation here is
to set up the standard and display the banner of Jesus
Christ, even here where Satan's throne is, Lord let our
labour be blessed in labouring the conversion of the
heathen; and because thou usest not to work such mighty
works by unholy means, Lord sanctifie our spirits and give
us holy hearts that so we may be thy instruments in this
most glorious work.
It is of real significance that the London Company made its first
settlement a parish after the manner of the Church of England, and
elected as its first rector the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, one of the
most noted clergymen in England, and a man who had captured the
imagination of all with his books on travel in far lands. He was
expected to remain in England and represent the needs of the colonists
and help, perhaps, to select clergymen to go to new parishes which
would be formed as settlements developed. The religious aspect of the
movement was approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he approved
also the selection of the Reverend Robert Hunt who came to Jamestown as
the vicar of the parish and the pastor of the colonists.
The London Company made a provision that each new settlement should
become a parish with its own rector. The first settlements were
established by the Company itself and were called "Cities" after the
ideal and pattern of Geneva. That city, the home of John Calvin and of
the Calvinistic theology which so strongly influenced the Church of
England in the Seventeenth Century, was a self-governing unit in the
Swiss Confederation. It consisted of the city and its suburban
territory and was the prototype from which the "City" or "Hundred" in
Virginia and the "Township" or "town" in Massachusetts were formed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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