"NEW JERUSALEM" - CHAPTER # 2 __From the overhanging limbs of a riverside tree, Robert Hunt rigged a canopy from an unwanted sail, declared the crude shelter a "church," and called his congregation to worship. It was 1607, and Hunt was the chaplain of what would be the first successful English colony in America__the newly founded Jamestown settlement on the forested coast of Virginia. An Anglican minister who had been educated at Cambridge University, he had answered a call to leave his parish church and accompany three shiploads of English colonists to the foreboding wilds of the New World. No English colony had yet survived in North America, and only males were allowed on the maiden voyage to Jamestown. So taking the post of chaplain or vicar meant assuming grave risks, and saying good-bue to his wife and two children for an unknown period. Even so, Hunt had felt led to accept the call. On December 19, 1606, he and 104 other colonists had left England aboard the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed__bound for the distant, mysterious New World.
# 2 _Calamity befell Hunt almost immediately. Stormy weather forced the ships to hug the English coast for two weeks, and the chaplain became seriously ill with an unidentified shipboard malady while still a mere twenty miles from home. The other passengers expected him to die, but Hunt surprised them and recovered. He then set about winning their trust. That was no small achievement: they were a boisterous, bickering lot, and, according to one of their number, a few were "little better than Atheists." By the time they made landfall in Virginia's Cape Henry in April 1607, however, they were willing to join Hunt in their first collective action in the New World: they erected a cross at Cape Henry, and thanked God for safe passage. The chaplain's love for the Lord and his pastor's heart for the people reportedly won their respect. So too, perhaps, did his pluck__he was described as "courageous" as well as "honest
[and] religious."
# 3 _Whether by patience, pluck, or providence__or all three __the determined chaplain brought light into the "darkness" of the New World wilderness. Sobered by an Indian attack that killed two of their number, the settlers moved inland from Cape Henry and established a crude settlement on the James River, which they named Jamestown in honor of the king. Immediately, the Reverend Hunt took an active role. As Jamestown's chaplain and vicar, he dedicated the selected site "in the name of God" and shouldered a share of the physical labor__"We are all laborers in a common vineyard," he told the colonists. In his ministry, he summoned the settlers to public prayer mornings and evenings, preached two sermons every Sunday, oversaw regular communion, and tended to the colonists like a shepherd to his flocks. Eventually, he moved worship services to a church that boasted four walls, even though one worshipper called it a "homely thing like a barne."
# 4 _Hacking out a life in the North American forest was far more grueling than Jamestown's colonists had imagined. Amid the harsh, hardscrabble conditions, morale teetered, but Hunt remained faithful and uncomplaining__even when a fire consumed his church, clothes, and precious books. As conditions turned deadly and the colonists were struck down by New World illness and hardship, Hunt nursed the ill and ministered to the dying. He also eased the colonists' contentious ways. "Many were the mischiefs that daily sprung from their ignoranr (yet ambitious) spirits," a Jamestown leader would report, "but the good Doctrine and exhortation of our preacher Mr Hunt reconciled them. . . " According to Jamestown's Captain John Smith, the courageous chaplain "quenched those flames of envie, and dissention." After more than a year of God's work in the wilderness, Robert Hunt was stricken by illness and died. His ministry had been brief, but the faith he followed would prove critical to the colony's survival.
# 5 _Along with its capitalist mission, the colony of Virgina was also faith-based from the beginning. Named for Queen Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen," it had been chartered in 1606 to the London Company by King James 1. The company intended to employ colonists to harvest gold and other natural resources, and find a water passage through the New World to expand the lucrative trade with the farway East Indies. Critical support for colonization of Virginia was fueled by the preaching of the Reverend William Crashaw, a prominent Puritan pastor and scholar in early-seventeenth-century England. From 1605 to 1613, Crashaw was rector of London's renowned Temple Church. There, in 1609, he preached a sermon that compared English colonization of the New World with the call of the Israelites into the Promised Land. "I say, many greater States than this is likely to prove hath as little or less beginning," he predicted. Printed and distributed throughout England, Crashaw's call to colonize the New World for Christ proved instrumental to the struggling colony, helping infuse it with financial support and new settlers.
# 6 _The original charter for the Virginia colony officially cited the "propagating of Christian Religion" as a goal for colonization and called it a "noble" work. Jamestown's early days were more desperate than "noble," but the Judeo-Christian worldwiew was central to the colony's creation and its survival. An Anglican minister named Richard Hakluyt was the colony's chief visionary in the beginning. A member of an influential family of merchants and investors, Hakluyt was an English authority on overseas navigation, exploration, and colonial development. A principal in the London Company, he believed New World colonization would enrich England, gave it world dominance, reward its investors__and enable Englishmen to carry the Gospel to untold scores of Native American people. Although noble efforts to Christianize Virginia's Indians were indeed made by some__including an attempt to establish an Indian "college"__Anglo-Indian relations were marked more by conflict than conversions. Even so, Jamestown's settlers came to America equipped with the biblical world__view, and, eventually, the application of biblical principles gave the colonists the discipline necessary to survive.
# 7 _They sorely needed assistance. Most were former city dwellers untrained in farming, hunting, and other survival skills. They managed to survive an early Indian attack, but most were soon struck down by fatal diseases. They had built their settlement on low, swampy land up the James River from Chesapeake Bay, and dysentery, scurvy, and malaria killed scores of them. So did starvation, which was encouraged by indolence and attitude. The Old World artisans and gentry among them refused to do the hard work that was necessary for survival__clearing trees, uprooting stumps, planting, weeding, construction. Even so, a socialistic form of government__the common store system__entitled everyone to equal rations from a common storehouse regardless of how much they worked. Amid constant squabbling and demoralizing dissension, the colonists began starving to death. When theyhad consumed all their livestock, they turned to dogs, cats, rats, and mice. Eventually, some reportedly restorted to cannibalism. Almost two-thirds of them died.
# 8 _Finally, Captain Smith, a professional soldier and explorer, saved the volony by obtaining food from neighboring Indians__and by enforcing a compulsory work program based on a New Testament admonition: "if any would not work, neither should he eat." Discarding the common-store system, Smith insisted that settlers had to work in order to draw rations. So they held on__barely: when Smith returned to England in 1609, the starving resumed and within months, the colony was again in peril. A relief expedition arrived in 1610, however, and Virginia's new governor, Lord De La Warr, secured the colony with fresh supplies and several hundred more colonists. Captain Smith considered the timing of the rescue to be providential. "God inclineth all casual events to worke the neccessary helpe of his Saints," he proclaimed. Two and a half centuries later, Pulitzer Prize__winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison would conclude: "The only thing that kept Virginia alive in these difficult years was the patriotism and deep religious faith of some of the leaders."
# 9 _Two of those leaders who "kept Virginia alive" were Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, both knighted English military officers appointed by the London Company to preserve the Virginia colony during its desperate early years. Destruction seemed imminent on several occasions, and Jamestown's serve conditions reduced some colonists to personal savagery__described by one of their number as "disordered persons, so prophane, so rioutous, so full of treasonable Intendments." In 1609, Governor Gates established a code of laws for the colony, which Governor Dale expanded two years later during his administration. Both governors oversaw harsh, military-style law enforcement, which embittered many Virginia settlers__but the laws produced the discipline necessary for the colony's survival.
# 10 _Gates and Dale believed that biblical principles were the cure for frontier savagery, and that Christianity was the proper foundation for an orderly society. To Dale, wildness Virginia offered the opportunity to establish what he envisioned as a "new Jerusalem." Building on statutes implemented earlier by Gates, he established a code of laws for Virginia__the Laws Divine, Moral and Martial. It was the first formal criminal and civil code in America. Like English law, it was based on the Bible. "First," stated the introduction to the Laws, Since we owe our highest and supreme duty, our greatest, and all our allegeance to him, from whom all power and authoritie is derived . . . the King of kings, the commaunder of commanunders, and Lord of Hosts, I do strictly commaund and charge all Captaines and Officers . . . to have a care that the Almightie God bee duly and daily served, and that thy call upon their people to beare Sermons, as that also they diligently frequent Morning and Evening praier themselves by their owne exemplar and daily life, and dutie herein, encouraging others thereunto. . . .
# 11 _Governor Dale returned to England in 1616. His successor eased the harsh military penalties for wrongdoings in Virginia, but kept Dale's laws in place. Virginia was hardly the "new Jerusalem" Dale had envisioned, but his Bible-based code of laws eventually transformed the colony from a desperate state of rebellion, starvation, disease, and desperation to a "tranquil and prosperous" colony. It was a long and arduous transformation, marked at times by disasters and disillusionment, but also by a determination, perseverance, and faith that were indeed "noble" at times. Jamestown evolved into the first successful English colony in America and established a precedent for American law and culture, both of which began at Jamestown with a faith-based foundation__the Judeo-Christian worldview.
# 12 _That worldview helped established another important American precedent in Virginia__self-government. By 1619, the colony was relatively stable and was expanding inland. Gone were the slovenly ways of the common-store system, which had been replaced by free enterprise and biblically inspired accountability. "When our people were fed out of the common store," oberved a colonial leader, "glad was he who could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske . . . the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a week as now for themselves they will doe in a day." The Virginia colonists learned to grow tobacco, which gave the colony an expanding economy. To provide wives for the Virginia settlers, the London Company recruited English women__"young and incorrupt maids," they were called__and the colony was infused with the stability of family life. Within a dozen years, Virginia had been transformed from desperation to development, thanks to rule of law, family life, free enterprise__all of which were faith-based. So too was the dramatic jump forward in political freedom that occurred in 1619.
# 13 _That year, Virginia governor George Yeardley convened the first legislative assembly in America. Known as the House of Burgesses, it was composed of twenty-two elected representatives, or burgesses, chosen by the Virginia colonists. Governor Yeardley was acting at the direction of Sir Edwin Sandys, the London Company's new treasurer and chief officer. The son of an Anglican archbishop who had helped translate the Bible into English, Sandys was the author of a popular and respected book on the state of Christianity in Eurpoe and a book of hymns. He was also a principal leader in the English Parliament, who believed the Virginia Colony would prosper if its colonists could own land and exercise self-government.
# 14 _Under Sandys's direction, the London Company restructured the colony under what was called the Great Charter, which allowed private land ownership, implemented a strategy to Christianize Virginia's Indian tribes, and established the House of Burgesses, which was also called the General Assembly. Company officials in London initially held veto power, and the legislature was under nominal oversight of the king__but England's monarchs took little interest in distant Virginia's fledgling General Assembly. Gradually, the law of the land in Virginia was determined by the House of Burgesses__which grew into a bicameral legislature elected by the people. It became the cornerstone of American government and established two fundamental precedents for the future American nation: America's political tradition would be self-government, and it would be based on the biblical world-view.
# 15 _ The English common law that inspired American law and government was also based largely on the Bible. The English constitution was not a single document, but was a collection of legal traditions, judicial rulings, and historic statutes the developed from Anglo-Saxon culture, Christianity's canon law, and milestone legal statutes__especially the Magna Carta. In 1215, a group of English barons foeced England's King John to sign a document that guaranteed basic God-given or inalienable freedoms to his subjects, and officially proclaimed that even the English monarchy was under rule of law, The Magna Carta, as King John's concession would be known, was the legal cornerstone of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was drafted by a leading Christian theologian and authority on canon law__Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury__and was rooted in the Higher Law of Scripture.
# 16 _The English common law that inspired American law and government was also based largly on the Bible. The English constitution was not a single document, but was a collection of legal traditions, judicial rulings, and historic statutes that developed from Anglo-Saxon culture, Christianity's canon law, and milestone legal statutes-especially the Magna Carta. In 1215, a group of English barons forced England's King John to sign a document that guaranteed basic God-given or inalienable freedoms to his subjects, and officially proclaimed that even the English monarchy was under rule of law. The Magna Carta, as King John's concession would be known, was the legal cornerstone of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was drafted by a leading Christian theologian and authority on canon law__Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury__and was rooted in the Higher Law of Scripture.
# 17 _The legislators enacted dozens of statutes. Among them were laws mandating church attendance on the Lord's Day, a measure requiring that Sundays be kept "in holy and religious order," a provision to financially support Virginia's Anglican clergymen, and regulations outlawing drunkenness and "Gaming with Dice & Cardes." Two years later, in 1621, a new constitution for Virginia dedicated the colony anew to "the Advancement of the Honour and Service of God, and the Enlargement of His Kingdom." The enlargement of the colony faced a severe setback in 1622, when a devastating Indian attack claimed the lives of hundreds of colonists. The attack and mismangement of the colony by the London Company led King James to revoke the colony's charter and make Virginia a royal colony. In 1698, the colony's capital was shifted from Jamestown to nearby Williamsburg. The Jametown settlement eventually disappeared, but the colony of Virginia survived and prospered__and its heritage of Bible-based self-government became a model for the future American nation. Meanwhile, some 450 miles up the forested coasts of America, another model was emerging__and it too was founded on faith.
#
# 2 _Calamity befell Hunt almost immediately. Stormy weather forced the ships to hug the English coast for two weeks, and the chaplain became seriously ill with an unidentified shipboard malady while still a mere twenty miles from home. The other passengers expected him to die, but Hunt surprised them and recovered. He then set about winning their trust. That was no small achievement: they were a boisterous, bickering lot, and, according to one of their number, a few were "little better than Atheists." By the time they made landfall in Virginia's Cape Henry in April 1607, however, they were willing to join Hunt in their first collective action in the New World: they erected a cross at Cape Henry, and thanked God for safe passage. The chaplain's love for the Lord and his pastor's heart for the people reportedly won their respect. So too, perhaps, did his pluck__he was described as "courageous" as well as "honest
[and] religious."
# 3 _Whether by patience, pluck, or providence__or all three __the determined chaplain brought light into the "darkness" of the New World wilderness. Sobered by an Indian attack that killed two of their number, the settlers moved inland from Cape Henry and established a crude settlement on the James River, which they named Jamestown in honor of the king. Immediately, the Reverend Hunt took an active role. As Jamestown's chaplain and vicar, he dedicated the selected site "in the name of God" and shouldered a share of the physical labor__"We are all laborers in a common vineyard," he told the colonists. In his ministry, he summoned the settlers to public prayer mornings and evenings, preached two sermons every Sunday, oversaw regular communion, and tended to the colonists like a shepherd to his flocks. Eventually, he moved worship services to a church that boasted four walls, even though one worshipper called it a "homely thing like a barne."
# 4 _Hacking out a life in the North American forest was far more grueling than Jamestown's colonists had imagined. Amid the harsh, hardscrabble conditions, morale teetered, but Hunt remained faithful and uncomplaining__even when a fire consumed his church, clothes, and precious books. As conditions turned deadly and the colonists were struck down by New World illness and hardship, Hunt nursed the ill and ministered to the dying. He also eased the colonists' contentious ways. "Many were the mischiefs that daily sprung from their ignoranr (yet ambitious) spirits," a Jamestown leader would report, "but the good Doctrine and exhortation of our preacher Mr Hunt reconciled them. . . " According to Jamestown's Captain John Smith, the courageous chaplain "quenched those flames of envie, and dissention." After more than a year of God's work in the wilderness, Robert Hunt was stricken by illness and died. His ministry had been brief, but the faith he followed would prove critical to the colony's survival.
# 5 _Along with its capitalist mission, the colony of Virgina was also faith-based from the beginning. Named for Queen Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen," it had been chartered in 1606 to the London Company by King James 1. The company intended to employ colonists to harvest gold and other natural resources, and find a water passage through the New World to expand the lucrative trade with the farway East Indies. Critical support for colonization of Virginia was fueled by the preaching of the Reverend William Crashaw, a prominent Puritan pastor and scholar in early-seventeenth-century England. From 1605 to 1613, Crashaw was rector of London's renowned Temple Church. There, in 1609, he preached a sermon that compared English colonization of the New World with the call of the Israelites into the Promised Land. "I say, many greater States than this is likely to prove hath as little or less beginning," he predicted. Printed and distributed throughout England, Crashaw's call to colonize the New World for Christ proved instrumental to the struggling colony, helping infuse it with financial support and new settlers.
# 6 _The original charter for the Virginia colony officially cited the "propagating of Christian Religion" as a goal for colonization and called it a "noble" work. Jamestown's early days were more desperate than "noble," but the Judeo-Christian worldwiew was central to the colony's creation and its survival. An Anglican minister named Richard Hakluyt was the colony's chief visionary in the beginning. A member of an influential family of merchants and investors, Hakluyt was an English authority on overseas navigation, exploration, and colonial development. A principal in the London Company, he believed New World colonization would enrich England, gave it world dominance, reward its investors__and enable Englishmen to carry the Gospel to untold scores of Native American people. Although noble efforts to Christianize Virginia's Indians were indeed made by some__including an attempt to establish an Indian "college"__Anglo-Indian relations were marked more by conflict than conversions. Even so, Jamestown's settlers came to America equipped with the biblical world__view, and, eventually, the application of biblical principles gave the colonists the discipline necessary to survive.
# 7 _They sorely needed assistance. Most were former city dwellers untrained in farming, hunting, and other survival skills. They managed to survive an early Indian attack, but most were soon struck down by fatal diseases. They had built their settlement on low, swampy land up the James River from Chesapeake Bay, and dysentery, scurvy, and malaria killed scores of them. So did starvation, which was encouraged by indolence and attitude. The Old World artisans and gentry among them refused to do the hard work that was necessary for survival__clearing trees, uprooting stumps, planting, weeding, construction. Even so, a socialistic form of government__the common store system__entitled everyone to equal rations from a common storehouse regardless of how much they worked. Amid constant squabbling and demoralizing dissension, the colonists began starving to death. When theyhad consumed all their livestock, they turned to dogs, cats, rats, and mice. Eventually, some reportedly restorted to cannibalism. Almost two-thirds of them died.
# 8 _Finally, Captain Smith, a professional soldier and explorer, saved the volony by obtaining food from neighboring Indians__and by enforcing a compulsory work program based on a New Testament admonition: "if any would not work, neither should he eat." Discarding the common-store system, Smith insisted that settlers had to work in order to draw rations. So they held on__barely: when Smith returned to England in 1609, the starving resumed and within months, the colony was again in peril. A relief expedition arrived in 1610, however, and Virginia's new governor, Lord De La Warr, secured the colony with fresh supplies and several hundred more colonists. Captain Smith considered the timing of the rescue to be providential. "God inclineth all casual events to worke the neccessary helpe of his Saints," he proclaimed. Two and a half centuries later, Pulitzer Prize__winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison would conclude: "The only thing that kept Virginia alive in these difficult years was the patriotism and deep religious faith of some of the leaders."
# 9 _Two of those leaders who "kept Virginia alive" were Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, both knighted English military officers appointed by the London Company to preserve the Virginia colony during its desperate early years. Destruction seemed imminent on several occasions, and Jamestown's serve conditions reduced some colonists to personal savagery__described by one of their number as "disordered persons, so prophane, so rioutous, so full of treasonable Intendments." In 1609, Governor Gates established a code of laws for the colony, which Governor Dale expanded two years later during his administration. Both governors oversaw harsh, military-style law enforcement, which embittered many Virginia settlers__but the laws produced the discipline necessary for the colony's survival.
# 10 _Gates and Dale believed that biblical principles were the cure for frontier savagery, and that Christianity was the proper foundation for an orderly society. To Dale, wildness Virginia offered the opportunity to establish what he envisioned as a "new Jerusalem." Building on statutes implemented earlier by Gates, he established a code of laws for Virginia__the Laws Divine, Moral and Martial. It was the first formal criminal and civil code in America. Like English law, it was based on the Bible. "First," stated the introduction to the Laws, Since we owe our highest and supreme duty, our greatest, and all our allegeance to him, from whom all power and authoritie is derived . . . the King of kings, the commaunder of commanunders, and Lord of Hosts, I do strictly commaund and charge all Captaines and Officers . . . to have a care that the Almightie God bee duly and daily served, and that thy call upon their people to beare Sermons, as that also they diligently frequent Morning and Evening praier themselves by their owne exemplar and daily life, and dutie herein, encouraging others thereunto. . . .
# 11 _Governor Dale returned to England in 1616. His successor eased the harsh military penalties for wrongdoings in Virginia, but kept Dale's laws in place. Virginia was hardly the "new Jerusalem" Dale had envisioned, but his Bible-based code of laws eventually transformed the colony from a desperate state of rebellion, starvation, disease, and desperation to a "tranquil and prosperous" colony. It was a long and arduous transformation, marked at times by disasters and disillusionment, but also by a determination, perseverance, and faith that were indeed "noble" at times. Jamestown evolved into the first successful English colony in America and established a precedent for American law and culture, both of which began at Jamestown with a faith-based foundation__the Judeo-Christian worldview.
# 12 _That worldview helped established another important American precedent in Virginia__self-government. By 1619, the colony was relatively stable and was expanding inland. Gone were the slovenly ways of the common-store system, which had been replaced by free enterprise and biblically inspired accountability. "When our people were fed out of the common store," oberved a colonial leader, "glad was he who could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske . . . the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a week as now for themselves they will doe in a day." The Virginia colonists learned to grow tobacco, which gave the colony an expanding economy. To provide wives for the Virginia settlers, the London Company recruited English women__"young and incorrupt maids," they were called__and the colony was infused with the stability of family life. Within a dozen years, Virginia had been transformed from desperation to development, thanks to rule of law, family life, free enterprise__all of which were faith-based. So too was the dramatic jump forward in political freedom that occurred in 1619.
# 13 _That year, Virginia governor George Yeardley convened the first legislative assembly in America. Known as the House of Burgesses, it was composed of twenty-two elected representatives, or burgesses, chosen by the Virginia colonists. Governor Yeardley was acting at the direction of Sir Edwin Sandys, the London Company's new treasurer and chief officer. The son of an Anglican archbishop who had helped translate the Bible into English, Sandys was the author of a popular and respected book on the state of Christianity in Eurpoe and a book of hymns. He was also a principal leader in the English Parliament, who believed the Virginia Colony would prosper if its colonists could own land and exercise self-government.
# 14 _Under Sandys's direction, the London Company restructured the colony under what was called the Great Charter, which allowed private land ownership, implemented a strategy to Christianize Virginia's Indian tribes, and established the House of Burgesses, which was also called the General Assembly. Company officials in London initially held veto power, and the legislature was under nominal oversight of the king__but England's monarchs took little interest in distant Virginia's fledgling General Assembly. Gradually, the law of the land in Virginia was determined by the House of Burgesses__which grew into a bicameral legislature elected by the people. It became the cornerstone of American government and established two fundamental precedents for the future American nation: America's political tradition would be self-government, and it would be based on the biblical world-view.
# 15 _ The English common law that inspired American law and government was also based largely on the Bible. The English constitution was not a single document, but was a collection of legal traditions, judicial rulings, and historic statutes the developed from Anglo-Saxon culture, Christianity's canon law, and milestone legal statutes__especially the Magna Carta. In 1215, a group of English barons foeced England's King John to sign a document that guaranteed basic God-given or inalienable freedoms to his subjects, and officially proclaimed that even the English monarchy was under rule of law, The Magna Carta, as King John's concession would be known, was the legal cornerstone of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was drafted by a leading Christian theologian and authority on canon law__Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury__and was rooted in the Higher Law of Scripture.
# 16 _The English common law that inspired American law and government was also based largly on the Bible. The English constitution was not a single document, but was a collection of legal traditions, judicial rulings, and historic statutes that developed from Anglo-Saxon culture, Christianity's canon law, and milestone legal statutes-especially the Magna Carta. In 1215, a group of English barons forced England's King John to sign a document that guaranteed basic God-given or inalienable freedoms to his subjects, and officially proclaimed that even the English monarchy was under rule of law. The Magna Carta, as King John's concession would be known, was the legal cornerstone of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was drafted by a leading Christian theologian and authority on canon law__Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury__and was rooted in the Higher Law of Scripture.
# 17 _The legislators enacted dozens of statutes. Among them were laws mandating church attendance on the Lord's Day, a measure requiring that Sundays be kept "in holy and religious order," a provision to financially support Virginia's Anglican clergymen, and regulations outlawing drunkenness and "Gaming with Dice & Cardes." Two years later, in 1621, a new constitution for Virginia dedicated the colony anew to "the Advancement of the Honour and Service of God, and the Enlargement of His Kingdom." The enlargement of the colony faced a severe setback in 1622, when a devastating Indian attack claimed the lives of hundreds of colonists. The attack and mismangement of the colony by the London Company led King James to revoke the colony's charter and make Virginia a royal colony. In 1698, the colony's capital was shifted from Jamestown to nearby Williamsburg. The Jametown settlement eventually disappeared, but the colony of Virginia survived and prospered__and its heritage of Bible-based self-government became a model for the future American nation. Meanwhile, some 450 miles up the forested coasts of America, another model was emerging__and it too was founded on faith.
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