virtuous families, and building up the social fabric of America!

DESPOTISM AND RELIGION IN VIRGINIA.

There was doubtless something of native independence in the daring adventures of navigators and explorers who found their way to the New World. But loyalty to sovereigns restrained and directed it. The jealous eye of the asserted divine right of kings was everywhere. The earth belonged to them; and the only question was, how it should be divided between them. The right of soil, whether in the form of islands or continents, was in the monarch; and he might grant it to his loyal subjects in such quantities and upon such terms as he pleased. Charters and rights might be conceded and revoked at his royal pleasure; and, however meritorious the discovery, whatever sacrifices were made by the colonists, however exhausting the toil required to subdue and cultivate the soil, the people were all the servants of the crown; and, under such regulations as he should be pleased to make, the ultimate benefits must inure to him.

Additional colonists were about to embark for Virginia, and the rights of the crown must be carefully guarded. "Thus the first written charter of a permanent American colony which was to be the chosen abode of liberty gave to the mercantile corporation nothing but a desert territory, with the right of peopling and defending it; and reserved to the monarch absolute legislative authority, the control of all appointments, and the hope of ultimate revenue. To the emigrants themselves it conceded not one elective franchise, not one of the rights of self-government.

"The summer was spent by the patentees in preparations for planting a colony, for which the vainglory of the king found a grateful occupation in framing a code of laws; an exercise of royal legislation which has been pronounced in itself illegal. The superior council in England was permitted to name the colonial council, which was constituted a pure

aristocracy, entirely independent of the emigrants whom they were to govern; having power to elect or remove its president, to remove any of its members, and to supply its own vacancies. Not an element of popular liberty was introduced into the form of government.” *

In May, 1569, three years later, the company received a new charter from the king. But "the lives, liberty, and fortune of the colonists were placed at the arbitrary will of a governor, who was to be appointed by a commercial corporation. As yet, not one valuable civil privilege was conceded to the emigrants." +

How impossible that this should last forever! How inevitable the inquiry, Is this right? And, if it made a subject of despotism tremble to think it, he nevertheless would think, "The king is a man, - only a man; and I also am a man." How natural and powerful the feeling of the struggling immigrant, "I am glad I am so far away from the centre of this despotism! It cannot reach me quite so easily. This country is very large; the air is very free and the land abundant here. I wonder if some portion of this grand inheritance isn't mine! At least, do I not own myself?"

You can see, in the very forms of the patents and charters secured by the early settlers, this yearning for the rights of a real second party; the petitions, if not demands, of this other high contracting power. It must be very deferential, obsequious even; but you can almost hear it say, "If you will deal fairly with me, I will go; if not, I will not." Governors, proprietors, corporations, did not think, it is true, of any considerable concessions to those below them; but they did show some disposition to take care of themselves, which was something in the cautious advance of personal rights.

Let it, however, be remembered that the aristocratic forms of civil government were fully sustained by ecclesiastical power. The monarch, in the creed of the Church, was "king by the grace of God." The organic life of the Church was ↑ Ibid., i. 137.

* Bancroft, i. 122, 123.

interwoven in every fibre with the life of the State, and demanded the exercise of ecclesiastical authority from the sovereign, as the supreme head of the Church; and no devotion, either of bigotry or patriotism, is so strong as religious devotion. The British government and British aristocracy understood this well; and, though it seemed an accident that the impetuous Henry VIII. had become the sovereign ecclesiastic of the realm, the force of this fact in the British Constitution was ever thereafter too highly valued and too powerful to be waived or modified, except under a pressure that was practically irresistible. And Virginia, the controlling and representative colony of the South, had, as we have seen, received this spiritual despotism as a part of the absolute government under which she was to found a great State, and had undertaken the impossible task of harmonizing it with the vindication and development of personal and civil liberty. Military authority had the right to compel conformity to the Episcopal Church. Indifference was punishable with stripes, and infidelity with death, under the decisions of courts-martial.

In 1619, a legislature met in the Old Dominion for the first time. It was opened by prayer, as all decent legislative bodies should be.

"The Church of England was confirmed as the Church of Virginia. It was intended that the first four ministers should each receive two hundred pounds a year. All persons whatsoever, upon the sabbath days, were to frequent divine service and sermons both forenoon and afternoon; and all such as bore arms, to bring their pieces or swords."*

In 1621, a new constitution was granted; and, "simultaneously with this civil constitution, an ecclesiastical organization was introduced. The plantations were divided into parishes, for the endowment of which contributions were collected in England. A glebe of a hundred acres, cultivated by six indented tenants, was allowed by the company to each clergyman; to which was added a salary, to be paid by a

* Bancroft, i. 155.

6

parish tax. The governor was instructed to uphold public worship according to the forms and discipline of the Church of England, and to avoid all factions and needless novelties,' a caution, no doubt, against Puritan ideas, at this time much on the increase in England, and not without partisans even in Virginia." When "the first extant colony statutes were enacted," "the first acts, as in many subsequent codifications of the Virginia statutes, related to the Church. In every plantation, there was to be a room or house for the worship of God, sequestered and set apart for that purpose, and not to be for any temporal use whatsoever;' also a place of burial, 'sequestered and paled in.' Absence from public worship, without allowable excuse,' exposed to the forfeiture of a pound of tobacco, or fifty pounds if the absence continued for a month. The celebration of divine service was to be in conformity to the canons of the English Church. In addition to the usual church festivals, the 22d of March was to be annually observed in commemoration of the escape of the colony from Indian massacre. No minister was to be absent from his parish above two months annually, under pain of forfeiting half his salary; or the whole of it, and his cure also, if absent four months. He who disparaged a minister without proof was to be fined five hundred pounds of tobacco, and to beg the minister's pardon before the congregation. The ministers' salaries were to be paid out of the first-gathered and best tobacco and corn; and no man was to dispose of his tobacco before paying his church-dues, under pain of paying double. The proclamations formerly set forth against drunkenness and swearing were confirmed as law; and the church-wardens were to present all such offenders."

GRAVE ERRORS.

With our present information, it is easy to see the strange mixture of grave error with elevated truth in this ecclesias

*Hildreth, i. 126, 127.

tical system. It is sad to behold minds so great grappling with the serious questions of man's relation to God and eternity, with the misleading idea that the human will can be coerced, and human beings made devout, and fit for heaven, by State authority. But an established religion, which makes the courts the judges of orthodoxy; which compels attendance at church; which exacts from the people the support of the parish by arbitrary taxes; which gives to the government all authority to create priestly orders and preferments,— wholly disregards the great facts, that all piety must include the voluntary surrender of the heart to God; that nothing is truly Christian which is not free; that whatever in human action is merely the will of another is entirely without a moral element; that a man forced to religious observances is so far merely a machine, with no more right to the immunities of religion than the steam-engine. Upon the contrary, so far as the attempt results in a sense of personal injury, of an unjust interference with the rights of the soul, angry resentments are sure to follow, and men are made worse by the system which proposes to secure their highest interests.

True, there is room for law in the protection of religion, in guarding the rights of religious assemblies, in preventing disturbances on the Lord's Day, and suppressing social disorder, so far as it interferes with good neighborhood, and tends to destroy the religious and social rights of communities; but here the jurisdiction of the courts and the power of the executive must end. However perverse men may be in rejecting the true good, though, indeed, they may go headlong to ruin in the abuse of their freedom, still God permits it; and man cannot, if he would, forcibly prevent it. In the great work of personal humiliation, of reverence and worship, of submission and trust, of preparation for death and eternity, every man must act for himself. To his own. master he must stand or fall.

It is the unquestionable duty of every man to attend