Page 20 - MABE GENEALOGY

The Mabe genealogy line, from England (1600’s) to the United States (1700’s), Virginia and North Carolina.

Calvinism, modern scholars have begun to debate whether the church's
theology tended more toward Calvinism or Lutheranism.)
Unlike many other Protestant groups, the Church of England developed no
particular creed to define its beliefs and was united more by shared forms of
worship set down in the *Book of Common Prayer than by a common
theology. By the time of Virginia's founding in 1607, a number of religious
parties coexisted in the Church of England: Anglicans were generally
content with the extent of reform in their national church,
while Puritans believed that the reformation of the church should continue
and remove all vestiges of Roman Catholicism from the Church of England,
including the prayer book's set liturgies, the use of the sign of the cross at
baptism, the use of vestments, and kneeling to receive communion.

Arrival in Virginia

The Church of England came to Virginia with the first colonists who settled
Jamestown. They soon set aside a makeshift worship space described
by John Smith: "Wee did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to three or
foure trees to shadow us from the Sunne, our walls were rales made of
wood, our seats unhewed trees, till we cut plankes, our Pulpit a bar of wood
nailed to two neighbouring trees, in foule weather we shifted into an old
rotten tent, for we had few better … this was our Church." Most of the
colony's early settlers likely sympathized with the Anglican wing of the
church—Smith did, as did John Rolfe and Thomas West, baron De La
Warr. A Spanish spy in 1609 claimed that a majority of the settlers refused
to attend services led by a minister whom they suspected was "somewhat a
puritan." That is not to say that the colony enjoyed a religious homogeneity.
It did not. Brownists, Separatist Puritans, and at least a few Roman Catholics
lived in Virginia during the 1610s. In fact, the Pilgrims (a group of
Separatist Puritans) who eventually settled in Plymouth had intended to
settle in the James River Valley of Virginia.

Although the Church of England was not formally established by the House
of Burgesses until 1619, earlier charters assumed that it would be Virginia's
church and directed settlers to follow its practices "in all fundamentall
pointes." Leaders of the Virginia Company of London, in fact, took seriously
their obligation to provide for the religious instruction and solace of the
colony's settlers, and from the time of the colony's founding in 1607 until the
company's dissolution in 1624, company leaders tried to maintain a religious
presence in Virginia. Ministers who wished to serve in Virginia under the

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