A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

THE PURITAN BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH IN VIRGINIA—ITS DECLINE ALMOST TO EXTINCTION.

There is sufficient evidence that the three little vessels which on the 13th of May, 1607, were moored to the trees on the bank of the James River brought to the soil of America the germ of a Christian church. We may feel constrained to accept only at a large discount the pious official professions of King James I., and critically to scrutinize many of the statements of that brilliant and fascinating adventurer, Captain John Smith, whether concerning his friends or concerning his enemies or concerning himself. But the beauty and dignity of the Christian character shine unmistakable in the life of the chaplain to the expedition, the Rev. Robert Hunt, and all the more radiantly for the dark and discouraging surroundings in which his ministry was to be exercised.

For the company which Captain Smith and that famous mariner, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, had by many months of labor and "many a forgotten pound" of expense succeeded in recruiting for the enterprise was made up of most unhopeful material for the founding of a Christian colony. Those were the years of ignoble peace with which the reign of James began; and the glittering hopes of gold might well attract some of the brave men who had served by sea or land in the wars of Elizabeth. But the last thirty years had furnished no instance of success, and many of disastrous and sometimes tragical failure, in like attempts—the enterprises of Humphrey Gilbert, of Raleigh, of John White, of Gosnold himself, and of Popham and Gorges. Even brave men might hesitate to volunteer for the forlorn hope of another experiment at colonizing.

The little squadron had hardly set sail when the unfitness of the emigrants for their work began to discover itself. Lying weather-bound within sight of home, "some few, little better than atheists, of the greatest rank among them," were busying themselves with scandalous imputations upon the chaplain, then lying dangerously ill in his berth. All through the four months' passage by way of the Canaries and the West India Islands discontents and dissensions prevailed. Wingfield, who had been named president of the colony, had Smith in irons, and at the island of Nevis had the gallows set up for his execution on a charge of conspiracy, when milder counsels prevailed, and he was brought to Virginia, where he was tried and acquitted and his adversary mulcted in damages.

Arrived at the place of settlement, the colonists set about the work of building their houses, but found that their total number of one hundred and five was made up in the proportion of four carpenters to forty-eight "gentlemen." Not inadequately provisioned for their work, they came repeatedly almost to perishing through their sheer incapacity and unthrift, and their needless quarrels with one another and with the Indians. In five months one half of the company were dead. In January, 1608, eight months from the landing, when the second expedition arrived with reinforcements and supplies, only thirty-eight were surviving out of the one hundred and five, and of these the strongest were conspiring to seize the pinnace and desert the settlement.

The newcomers were no better than the first. They were chiefly "gentlemen" again, and goldsmiths, whose duty was to discover and refine the quantities of gold that the stockholders in the enterprise were resolved should be found in Virginia, whether it was there or not. The ship took back on her return trip a full cargo of worthless dirt.

Reinforcements continued to arrive every few months, the quality of which it might be unfair to judge simply from the disgusted complaints of Captain Smith. He begs the Company to send but thirty honest laborers and artisans, "rather than a thousand such as we have," and reports the next ship-load as "fitter to breed a riot than to found a colony." The wretched settlement became an object of derision to the wits of London, and of sympathetic interest to serious minds. The Company, reorganized under a new charter, was strengthened by the accession of some of the foremost men in England, including four bishops, the Earl of Southampton, and Sir Francis Bacon. Appeals were made to the Christian public in behalf of an enterprise so full of promise of the furtherance of the gospel. A fleet of nine ships was fitted out, carrying more than five hundred emigrants, with ample supplies. Captain Smith, representing what there was of civil authority in the colony, had a brief struggle with their turbulence, and recognized them as of the same sort with the former companies, for the most part "poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving-men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth than either begin one or help to maintain one." When only part of this expedition had arrived, Captain Smith departed for England, disabled by an accidental wound, leaving a settlement of nearly five hundred men, abundantly provisioned. "It was not the will of God that the new state should be formed of these materials."[41:1] In six months the number of the colonists was reduced to sixty, and when relief arrived it was reckoned that in ten days' longer delay they would have perished to the last man. With one accord the wretched remnant of the colony, together with the latest comers, deserted, without a tear of regret, the scene of their misery. But their retreating vessels were met and turned back from the mouth of the river by the approaching ships of Lord de la Warr with emigrants and supplies. Such were the first three unhappy and unhonored years of the first Christian colony on the soil of the United States.

One almost shrinks from being assured that this worthless crew, through all these years of suicidal crime and folly, had been assiduous in religious duties. First under an awning made of an old sail, seated upon logs, with a rail nailed to two trees for a pulpit, afterward in a poor shanty of a church, "that could neither well defend wind nor rain," they "had daily common prayer morning and evening, every Sunday two sermons, and every three months the holy communion, till their minister died"; and after that "prayers daily, with an homily on Sundays, two or three years, till more preachers came." The sturdy and terrible resolution of Captain Smith, who in his marches through the wilderness was wont to begin the day with prayer and psalm, and was not unequal to the duty, when it was laid on him, of giving Christian exhortation as well as righteous punishment, and the gentle Christian influence of the Rev. Robert Hunt, were the salt that saved the colony from utterly perishing of its vices. It was not many months before the frail body of the chaplain sank under the hardships of pioneer life; he is commemorated by his comrade, the captain, as "an honest, religious, and courageous divine, during whose life our factions were oft qualified, our wants and greatest extremities so comforted that they seemed easy in comparison of what we endured after his memorable death." When, in 1609, in a nobler spirit than that of mere commercial enterprise, the reorganized Company, under the new charter, was preparing the great reinforcement of five hundred to go out under Lord de la Warr as governor of the colony, counsel was taken with Abbot, the Puritan Bishop of London, himself a member of the Virginia Company, and Richard Buck was selected as a worthy successor to Robert Hunt in the office of chaplain. Such he proved himself. Sailing in advance of the governor, in the ship with Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, and wrecked with them off the Bermudas, he did not forget his duty in the "plenty, peace, and ease" of that paradise. The ship's bell was rescued from the wreck to ring for morning and evening prayer, and for the two sermons every Sunday. There were births and funerals and a marriage in the shipwrecked company, and at length, when their makeshift vessel was ready, they embarked for their desired haven, there to find only the starving threescore survivors of the colony. They gathered together, a pitiable remnant, in the church, where Master Buck "made a zealous and sorrowful prayer"; and at once, without losing a day, they embarked for a last departure from Virginia, but were met at the mouth of the river by the tardy ships of Lord de la Warr. The next morning, Sunday, June 10, 1610, Lord de la Warr landed at the fort, where Gates had drawn up his forlorn platoon of starving men to receive him. The governor fell on his knees in prayer, then led the way to the church, and, after service and a sermon from the chaplain, made an address, assuming command of the colony.

Armed, under the new charter, with adequate authority, the new governor was not slow in putting on the state of a viceroy. Among his first cares was to provide for the external dignity of worship. The church, a building sixty feet by twenty-four, built long enough before to be now in need of repairs, was put into good condition, and a brave sight it was on Sundays to see the Governor, with the Privy Council and the Lieutenant-General and the Admiral and the Vice-Admiral and the Master of the Horse, together with the body-guard of fifty halberdiers in fair red cloaks, commanded by Captain Edward Brewster, assembled for worship, the governor seated in the choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet cushion on a table before him. Few things could have been better adapted to convince the peculiar public of Jamestown that divine worship was indeed a serious matter. There was something more than the parade of government manifested by his lordship in the few months of his reign; but the inauguration of strong and effective control over the lazy, disorderly, and seditious crowd to be dealt with at Jamestown was reserved for his successor, Sir Thomas Dale, who arrived in May, 1611, in company with the Rev. Alexander Whitaker, the "apostle of Virginia."

It will not be possible for any to understand the relations of this colony to the state of parties in England without distinctly recognizing that the Puritans were not a party against the Church of England, but a party in the Church of England. The Puritan party was the party of reform, and was strong in a deep fervor of religious conviction widely diffused among people and clergy, and extending to the highest places of the nobility and the episcopate. The anti-Puritan party was the conservative or reactionary party, strong in the vis inertiæ, and in the king's pig-headed prejudices and his monstrous conceit of theological ability and supremacy in the church; strong also in a considerable adhesion and zealous coöperation from among his nominees, the bishops. The religious division was also a political one, the Puritans being known as the party of the people, their antagonists as the court party. The struggle of the Puritans (as distinguished from the inconsiderable number of the Separatists) was for the maintenance of their rights within the church; the effort of their adversaries, with the aid of the king's prerogative, was to drive or harry them out of the church. It is not to be understood that the two parties were as yet organized as such and distinctly bounded; but the two tendencies were plainly recognized, and the sympathies of leading men in church or state were no secret.