James River and warned the residents of Jamestown. So it was that Jamestown and some of the adjoining settlements were warned in time to protect themselves.

The massacre was of course a terrific catastrophe to the whole colony. Outlying settlements had to be abandoned and the colony was engaged in war with the Indians for several years. Then a second catastrophe occurred. King James became dissatisfied with the independent attitude of the London Company and personally secured its dissolution in 1624. He then took control of Virginia as a Royal Colony and he himself appointed the Governor and Council of the colony.

This ended all plans for the opening of the university. The King died in the following year and his son, King Charles I, was not interested in a university in Virginia. Nor was he or anyone else interested in sending ministers to the colonial parishes.

The London Company, with a membership including representatives of the Church and the universities, and of business interests and the higher social classes, had the confidence of the people. The King did not. He had their loyalty as their sovereign, but the spiritual and cultural welfare of a colony overseas carried little weight amid the political cross-currents and the self-seeking of a royal court.

CHAPTER TWO

The Colonists at Worship

There are several first-hand accounts of religious worship in the earliest days of the Jamestown colony. Captain John Smith wrote of the men at worship in the open air until a chapel could be erected. He describes the scene of a celebration of the Holy Communion, with the Holy Table standing under an old sail lashed from tree to tree, with a bar of wood fastened between two trees as the pulpit, and men kneeling on the ground before their first altar. Services were held daily, according to the rules of the Book of Common Prayer which they brought with them: morning prayer and evening prayer everyday, and sermons twice on Sunday and once during the week. The law of the Church required the Holy Communion to be celebrated at least three times during the year; on Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday; and unquestionably this law was observed at Jamestown. Many clergymen celebrated that sacrament oftener. There can be little doubt that the first celebration of the Holy Communion at Jamestown was on Whitsunday, May 24th (old style) 1607, although the first one of which a record remains was held on the third Sunday after Trinity, June 21. That was a special celebration, held for a two-fold purpose, one, that Mr. Hunt had been able to reconcile serious differences between certain elements among the colonists who had been in angry strife with each other, and second, because two of the ships which brought the colonists to Virginia were to set sail on the following morning upon their return trip to England.

William Strachey, writing in a report of the colony in 1610 after Lord De la Warr had arrived as the new governor presents the following picture:

Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the first rector of the City of Henrico from its foundation in 1611 until his death by drowning in 1617, and who is still remembered as the clergyman who baptized the Indian princess Pocahontas, after her conversion to the Christian faith, described his services as follows:

This method of daily and Sunday services, as the regular rule of the Church of England, was adopted in Virginia as far as colonial conditions would permit. But apart from Jamestown itself, and the schools which came into existence, there would not be many parishes in which daily services would be feasible. The people lived too far apart on their farms. They might drive or walk three or five miles to Church on Sundays, but could not give the time for that on work-days. The same objection worked against having two services on Sunday. So the custom became general of having a single service in every church and chapel every Sunday. The statement made by Rev. Alexander Whitaker, that he "catechized" every Sabbath afternoon, is illustrative of the usual method of instructing young people of the parish in the Church Catechism as preparation for admission to the Holy Communion. Such "catechetical classes" might be held as frequently on Sunday afternoons as the needs of the parish children, both white and Negro, might require: or perhaps sometimes, as frequently as the zeal, or lack of zeal of the incumbent minister might determine. When in 1724 the Bishop of London sent a questionary to every Anglican clergyman incumbent of a parish in America, one of the questions was, "At what times do you Catechize the Youth of your Parish?"

So wrote Captain John Smith a number of years after his return to England. There may have been an excess of imagination in describing new and raw settlements as "faire villages," but the salary which was to be paid to the ministers was a provable fact. Tithes from the culture of the land by the parishioners amounted to as much as £120, and the minister had a glebe of 100 acres from the cultivation of which his tenants and servants through "mundall industry" might greatly increase his income.

The London Company had carried to Virginia and fixed for the whole duration of the colonial period the parish system of the Church of England. Under that system each community became a parish and the people of the parish, as the land-owners of the community, supported the church and paid the salary of the minister by tithes from the produce of the land. There was, however, one change from the custom in England. There the tithes of a parish might produce a salary for the incumbent in