The Classic Revival had one of its early significant manifestations in the buildings of the University of Virginia, a group for which we have to thank no less a person than Thomas Jefferson. The plan embodied the most comprehensive building scheme that had yet been essayed. To Jefferson’s discriminating architectural taste and conscientious devotion to his self-imposed task as architect and supervisor of the work we owe it that the University buildings worthily represent one of the best phases of revived classicism in America. There is a dignity and honesty in Jefferson’s conception of revived classicism and a thorough sincerity that often failed to appear in later work of the same school. The result achieved commands our respect and when we remember that the parts of plans and sections of details were jotted down on scraps of paper and the backs of scribbled memoranda we cannot help wondering what would have happened if the same seemingly careless and unsystematic course were pursued in our own day. It was doubtless the enthusiastic devotion of the architect and his constant supervision along with the conscientious efforts and pride of every artisan that saved the day as it did in so many other cases. [Illustration: PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL, PHILADELPHIA.] [Illustration: BLACK HORSE INN YARD, PHILADELPHIA.] [Illustration: BRUTON PARISH CHURCH, WILLIAMSBURG, VA. 1714.] CHAPTER XII CHURCHES OF THE COLONIAL PERIOD It is a far cry from the first place of worship contrived at Jamestown, in 1607, to the stately fanes erected in the eighteenth century in all the Colonies. Through each successive stage of development, however, runs a thread of continuity corresponding to the material circumstances of the colonists. Everywhere in the Colonies, the church building was an exceedingly important structure and no one building or set of buildings, in each community, more faithfully reflected the social and political as well as the religious conditions of the colonists. Setting aside the civic and defensive uses to which church edifices were often put, especially in the earliest period, and confining ourselves to the purely ecclesiastical side of their existence, we shall find them an invaluable index to the varied aspects of the life of the times.