The first church in America was a very simple affair, an old rotten tent set up in the Jamestown marsh under the pines and hemlocks. The soft May weather made even so much shelter unnecessary, and it was replaced by an awning stretched between the rustling boughs. But busy as the settlers were, they set to work at once on a chapel built of logs and covered with sedge and dirt, which in turn was replaced by a church of timber, fifty feet long, by more than twenty in breadth. This finally was replaced by the brick building whose ruined arches alone remain to tell its story. When Lord De la Warre arrived in Virginia and found the colonists in desperate straits, he wisely occupied their attention by setting them to repair and refurnish the wooden church then in existence, and to decorate it with flowers. Here during his government he worshipped in a degree of state more fitting for a cathedral than for a wooden chapel in the wilderness. He went to church in full dress, attended by his lieutenant-general, admiral, vice-admiral, master of the horse and the rest of the council, with a guard of fifty halberd-bearers in red cloaks behind him. When the service ended, the procession filed out with as much solemnity as it had entered, and escorted the Governor to his house. Religious observances played an important part in the early days of the settlement. The first statute made by an early legislative assembly, requires that in every plantation some house or room be specially dedicated to the worship of God, sequestered and set apart for that purpose, and not to be of any temporal use whatever. It is curious, in view of this last clause, to find it recorded of the House of Burgesses itself: "The most convenient place wee could finde to site in was the quire of the churche." Surely no place could have been more appropriate for the gathering of the first free assembly of the people in America, and it was equally fitting that their proceedings should open with a prayer for guidance in the path which was destined to be darker and more difficult than they knew. "Forasmuch as men's affaires doe little prosper when God's service is neglected," a prayer was said by Mr. Bucke, the minister, "that it would please God to guide and sanctifie all our proceedings to His owne glory and the good of this Plantation."