Gillespie, ‘The Clear Leadings of Providence’: Pious Memoirs and the Problems of Self-Realization for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (Summer 1985) on the roles of women; Carleton Hayden, “Black Ministry of the Episcopal Church: An Historical Overview,” in Black Clergy in the Episcopal Church: Recruitment, Training and Deployment, ed. Franklin Turner and Adair Lummis (New York: Seabury Professional Services for the Episcopal Office of Black Ministries, n.d.), J. Kenneth Morris, Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, 1872–1906, Founder of Voorhees College (Sewanee: University of the South, 1983), and OdeII Greenleaf Harris, It Can be Done: The Autobiography of a Black Priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church Who Started under the Bottom and Moved up to the Top, ed. Robert W. Prichard (Alexandria, Va.: Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1985) on the roles of black Episcopalians; Owanah Anderson, Jamestown Commitment (Cincinnati: Forward Movement, 1988) on Native Americans; and Otto Berg, A Missionary Chronicle (Hollywood, Md.: St. Mary’s Press, 1984) on the role of the deaf.
6. For a more detailed discussion of the covenant argument, see Robert W. Prichard, The Nature of Salvation: Theological Consensus in the Episcopal Church, 1801–73 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 71–91.
7. William Wilson Manross, A History of the American Episcopal Church, (New York: Morehouse-Gorham, 1935); and E. Clowes Chorley, Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951).
Founding the Church in anAge of Fragmentation(1585–1688)
Following a series of exploratory visits (Florida, 1565; California, 1579; Newfoundland, 1583; etc.), the English made their first attempt at American colonization at Roanoke Island (1585–87). They named the colony Virginia after Elizabeth the Virgin Queen (1558–1603), though the island is in what is now the state of North Carolina. The Roanoke effort was unsuccessful, in part because of the attempt of Queen Mary’s widower, Philip II of Spain, to take control of England by sending the Spanish Armada (1588). In anticipation of that attack the English government directed all ships to remain in port. No supply ships made the trip to Roanoke until 1590, by which time no surviving colonists of what has come to be called “the Lost Colony” could be found.1 In 1607, however, an English mercantile company (the London Company) did plant a permanent colony further north, which it named Jamestown after James I (James VI of Scotland), who had followed Elizabeth to the English throne.
During James’s reign (1603–25), this Virginia colony was the primary focus of English colonial efforts. It was not, however, the only English settlement. Navigation was still an inexact science in the seventeenth century, and not all the ships headed for the new colony reached their intended destination. In 1612, the wreck of a ship bound for Virginia led to the establishment of an English colony in Bermuda, a collection of islands 580 miles to the east of the coast of North Carolina. In 1620, the Pilgrims, also bound for Virginia, landed at Plymouth, considerably to the north. In 1624 the English first visited the island of Barbados in the Caribbean, establishing a colony there three years later.
Fig. 1 The brick church at Jamestown, Virginia begun 1639
English Christianity and the Reformation
The colonists came from England to America at a time when the faith of the English people was in transition. As was the case with many of the people of Europe, the English of the seventeenth century were attempting to come to terms with a major transformation of the Christian faith that had taken place during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.2
Prior to the Reformation most English men and women accepted a late medieval Catholicism according to which individuals acknowledged their sinfulness and then sought to make themselves acceptable to God by means of good works, pilgrimages, indulgences, and memorial celebrations of the Mass.3 Theologians explained that these disciplines were effective only because of God’s grace but that distinction was often lost on ordinary believers, who had limited understanding of the Bible or the words of the mass (both of which were in Latin) and heard homilies only infrequently (since many parish priests were not licensed by their bishops to preach).
Beginning in 1519, however, a group of theologians at Cambridge University began to question this theology, both as a result of reading work by German reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) and as a result of their own study of scripture. An early member of that group, Thomas Bilney (1495?–1531), later described his understanding of faith in a letter to the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559). Bilney compared himself to the woman with the flow of blood in Mark 5:25–34 who spent all she had on physicians without getting any better. He said that he used up his strength, his money, and his wit following the advice of “unlearned hearers of confession” who “appointed … fasting, watching, buying of pardons, and masses.” He concluded that they did so more for “their own gain, than the salvation of [his] sick and languishing soul.”4 It was at that point that Bilney read of 1 Timothy 1 in a new Latin translation of the Bible by humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1496?–1536):
At the first reading (as I well remember) I chanced upon this sentence of St. Paul (O most sweet and comfortable sentence to my soul!) in 1 Tim. i., “It is a true saying and worthy of all men to be embraced, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am the chief and principal.” This one sentence through God’s instruction and inward working, which I did not then perceive did so exhilarate my heart, being wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair, that immediately I felt a marvelous comfort and quietness, insomuch “that my bruised bones leaped for joy.”5
Bilney understood on a personal level that which Martin Luther had understood several years earlier. God did not despise Bilney because he was a sinner who could not make himself righteous. On the contrary, it was precisely because Bilney was mired in sin that God had sent his only Son. The verse from 1 Timothy that had moved Bilney would later find a place in the Book of Common Prayer as one of the “comfortable words” following the absolution in the Eucharist.6
Bilney was soon joined by a circle of early English Protestants who existed more or less openly in Cambridge during the 1520s.7 Their number came also to include Robert Barnes (1495–1540), John Frith (ca. 1503–33), William Tyndale (1495–1536), Miles Coverdale (1488–1568), Hugh Latimer (ca. 1490–1555), and Richard Cox (ca. 1500–81). At first only mild voices of protest, these early English Protestants made themselves increasingly heard. Barnes warned that the pomp and ceremony of the church could obscure the simple meaning of the gospel. Frith rejected the popular depiction of the Eucharist as a re-sacrifice of the natural body of Christ that produced merit for those who paid the priest for the