, 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:

In the midst of the market-place, a store-house, a
"Corps-du-Garde", and a pretty chapel, all which the Lord
Governour ordered to be put in good repair. The chapel was
in length s