the Articles of the Christian Faith
according to the Church of England and to be of Anglican ordination. By
reason of sheer inability at times to provide sufficient Anglican
clergymen for the parishes, clergymen of Presbyterian ordination were
permitted to serve in Virginia parishes; and that was true throughout
the whole seventeenth century. The last Presbyterian clergyman to hold
an Anglican parish in Virginia, Rev. Andrew Jackson of Christ Church
Parish, Lancaster County, died in 1710. Throughout the century the law
required every citizen to attend the parish church, but there was never
an ecclesiastical court in which a layman could be tried, convicted or
punished as a dissenter.

CHAPTER THREE

Making Bricks Without Straw

The colony of Virginia, after the protective and guiding influence of
the Virginia Company was taken away, found itself in an almost
impossible situation so far as religious organization was concerned.
The leaders of colonial life realized all the more clearly as time
passed that King Charles I, who succeeded his father King James I in
1625, was not the least interested in the religious welfare of the
colony. America was entirely outside the bounds of any diocese or
province in England, and consequently there was no bishop of a diocese,
or archbishop of a province with any personal responsibility for the
guidance or help of the parishes which were being organized in the
colony. The Church in Virginia was left to itself to live or to die. It
believed, according to the teachings of the Church, that bishops were
necessary for the ordination of men to the ministry and for the
performance of the spiritual rite of confirmation, whereby alone under
the law of the Church of England baptized Christians could be admitted
to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. A bishop was also necessary for
the organization and leadership of a diocese, which was the governing
body to which every parish and congregation must belong. But no bishop
was ever sent by the Church of England to Virginia or to any other part
of America throughout the entire colonial period.

The lack of a bishop left the Anglican Church, which was the
Established Church of the whole colony, unable to organize for the
enactment of its own laws or the management of its own affairs. There
being no diocesan organization the clergymen in charge of parishes had
no ecclesiastical authority over them. That fact tended to have the
effect of ma