Page 21 - MABE GENEALOGY

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

company had to pass a rigorous selection process that included preaching a
trial sermon before the company; only the most qualified ministers were
accepted. In 1619, under the company's auspices, the burgesses passed
statutes that urged clergy to catechize individuals who were not yet ready to
receive the Eucharist, prescribed penalties for violating the moral laws of
scripture, and required ministers to keep accurate records of all baptisms,
deaths, and marriages, thus giving the church responsibility for maintaining
these vital records.

The Development of the Church in Virginia

With the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624, the Church of
England in Virginia began to suffer. For much of the seventeenth century,
neither the English Church nor the English Crown took much interest in the
colony's religious life. The supply of ministers declined and the colony
entered what one historian has called a "religious starving time." The
Church of England that developed in Virginia during the seventeenth
century evolved out of the adaptation of the colony's mother church to the
peculiar circumstances of the colony. This leads to a larger point:
governmental disinterest in the religious life of England's overseas colonies,
combined with the fact that several colonies were established by religious
minorities, meant that the status of the Church of England varied from
colony to colony. It was not so much a single institution in North America as
a series of institutions born out of the church's traditional practices and the
particular economic, political, geographic, and religious circumstances of
each of England's seaboard colonies.

In Virginia, that meant accommodating the church to the colony's tobacco
culture. Planting tobacco required the colonists to abandon England's
traditional settlement pattern, and instead of settling in towns, Virginians
established themselves on plantations scattered throughout the countryside,
often along the banks of one of the many rivers that still divide the
Tidewater and Piedmont regions into a series of peninsulas. This, in turn, led
to the formation of parishes much larger than those typical in England,
which, in turn, meant that it was often difficult for settlers to meet weekly
for public church services because so many people lived far away from the
church building. Clergy, all of whom were immigrants during the
seventeenth century and unfamiliar with the colony's peculiar circumstances,
found the settlement pattern vexing as well. Virginians lived like
"Hermites … dispersedly and scatteringly seated upon the sides of Rivers,"

20