e for Gospel
ministers, and largely contributed for their maintenance.
But Virginia savouring not handsomely in England, very few
of good conversation would adventure thither, (as thinking
it a place wherein surely the fear of God was not), yet many
came, such as wore black coats, and could babble in a
pulpet, roare in a tavern, exact from their parishioners,
and rather by their dissolutenesse destroy than feed their
flocks.

Loath was the country to be wholly without teachers, and
therefore rather retain these than to be destitute; yet
still endeavours for better in their places, which were
obtained, and these wolves in sheeps cloathing, by their
Assemblies questioned, silenced, and some forced to depart
the country.

Another problem which the Church faced in Virginia resulted from the
character of the immigrants who came to the colony. It is a well
established fact that the men who came in three ships to Jamestown in
1607 were from various strata of society in England. They all entered
James River on equality of opportunity and of danger. Some at least had
come from the higher classes of society; younger sons, perhaps, or
relatives of stockholders in the London Company, attracted to Virginia
because of the newness of the adventure and the spice of danger; sons
of professional men and men of business, intrigued by a new business
life and opportunity; men from the laboring classes and the peasantry
of rural sections. But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown
settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be
attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the families of
today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia descend
from or married into the families of the men and women who came to the
colony in these earliest years of settlement, and have ancestors buried
among the unknown dead of the Jamestown cemetery and churchyard.

There were three sources from which the settlers came; and these
sources were more or less in effect throughout the whole of Virginia's
first century. First and foremost in numbers and importance were the
sons of small farmers and tenant farmers, and younger sons of the
laboring classes and small merchants. No matter how large the
population may be, always there are positions of employment with a
normal wage; but when the younger sons of a mechanic or other working
man grow to