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.ÿþnumbers that exaggerated their portion of the social order.Nonetheless, con-temporary accounts of Sunday worship confirm that congregations includedVirginians of all ranks and conditions.7 The Anglican establishment, DanielBoorstin suggests, was a catholic church practically coextensive with the com-munity.Theirs was not a violent passion inspiring men to rebuild Zionor to make a City of Brotherly Love, but a quietly pervasive sentiment whichsuffused the institutions of the colony with a mild aura of divine sanction.Thefabric of Virginia society was held together by ancient and durable threads ofreligion. 8Through liturgy, sermon, and sacrament, parishioners had their origins,purposes, and destinies defined.A coherent rationale for their mutual privi-leges, duties, and responsibilities was spread before them.Moral and didacticelements were enfolded in the language of religious faith and ritual, receivingthereby their authentication.9 In the face of Baptist and Methodist attacks onthe church, the evangelical Devereux Jarratt who shared their evangelical zealoffered a passionate defense: I dearly love the church.I love her on many ac-counts particularly for the three following.Ist.I love her, because her mode ofpublic worship is so beautiful and decent, so well calculated to inspire devo-tion, and so complete in all the parts of a public worship.2d.I love her, becauseof the soundness of her doctrines, creeds, articles, &c.3d.I love her, because allher officers, and the mode of ordaining them, are, if I mistake not, truly primitiveandapostolic.These three particulars, a regular clergy, sound doctrine, and adecent comprehensive worship, contain the essentials, I think, of a christianchurch. 10Unquestionably, colonial Virginians related amongst themselves and to theoutside world as individuals and households, as producers, purchasers, andconsumers, as gentry, yeomen, common folk, and slaves.Yet, an added dimen-sion contributed fundamentally to their understanding of these relationships,to their interpretation of the social order and to the spiritual content of theirlives.It was provided by a pervasive Anglicanism working through the rituals ofweekly worship and the institutional fabric of the parish.11 Willing or not, con-sciously or not, Virginians viewed their world through Anglican lenses.Thus12they were, among other things, a blessed Company. Rhys Isaac vividly por-trays a patriarchal Anglican Virginia as an inclusive community in which allmembers shared in a corporate responsibility to maintain worship and to re-ceive instruction in duties that were at once religious and social. 13Some students of Virginia s colonial past have argued that the unepiscopal.292 parishioners
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