Old Virginia and her neighbours

264 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.In imputing to his tipsy parson the " vice " ofatheism, Bishop Meade warns us that he does notmean a denial of the existence of God, but merelyirreligion, or " livingwithout God in the world."In 1724 the Bishop of London was officially informedthat there were no " infidels " in Virginia,negroes and Indians excepted. A few years later," when the first infidel book was imported, ... itproduced such an excitement that the governorand commissary communicated on the subject withFreethink-^^^ authorities in England." In those^^'days freethinkers, if prudent, kept theirthoughts to themselves. All over Christendom theatmosphere was still murky with Intolerance, andmen's conceptions of the universe were only beginningto emerge from the barbaric stage.was no exception to the general rule.VirginiaIn respect also of superstition and crime the OldDominion seems to have differed but little fromSuperstitionOther parts of English America. Beliefaud crime.'^^ witchcraft lasted into the eighteenthcentury, and the statute-book reveals an abidingdread of what rebellious slaves might do ;but therewere no epidemics of savage terror, as at Salem In1692, or in the negro panic of 1741 in New York.Of violent crime there was surely much less thanin the England of Jack Sheppard and JonathanWild, but probably more than in the colonies northof Delaware Bay ; and its perpetrators seem tohave been chiefly white freedmen and "outlyingnegroes." ^ Duelling seems to have been iufre-^ It is difficult to obtain exact data. My impression is derivedfrom study of the statutes and from g^eneral reading.