Читать книгу The Beginners of a Nation - Eggleston Edward - Страница 36

Religious propagandism. We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about American exploration and colonization the English church caught its first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of the savages from devil-worship and semi-nudity, there was added the natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion in America. 35 English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of infidels."

Zeal of the clergy. Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the first minister in Virginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely equaled in the history of martyrdom the accumulating miseries of Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a nation of dissenters.