This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

10THE EPISCOPALIANSdition, and reason as a “threefold cord not quickly broken” soon became one ofthe principal hallmarks of Anglican teaching. 17 In fact, during the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, when other European churches were seeking to narrow thestandards of orthodox belief and practice, the official policies of the Church ofEngland, under the influence of Hooker’s intellectually expansive teachings, remainedremarkably open to diverse understandings and interpretations. 18TRANSPLANTING TO AMERICAWhile Anglicans and Puritans vied for dominance in the domestic affairs oftheir church and nation, many explorers, traders, and settlers traveled overseas,carrying English Protestantism with them to other lands. The European discoveryof America had begun in the late fifteenth century, a generation before the beginningof the Reformation, and over the next two hundred years Spain, France,England, Portugal, and the Netherlands sought to develop worldwide empires.The leaders of those nations not only wanted raw materials and profits from theNew World but also understood their explorations in religious terms. For example,Columbus’s first entry in the diary recording his journey to America in 1492expressed the hope that he would be able to convert the native peoples he encounteredto the Catholic faith. 19 A year later, Pope Alexander VI issued a bulldividing the newly discovered western lands between Portugal and Spain, givingeach nation permission to occupy its allotted territories and convert the inhabitantsof those regions to Christianity.The initial English claim to North America was established by John Cabot,sailing under the auspices of Henry VII, in 1497. While it is likely that an Englishpriest accompanied Cabot’s voyage and celebrated the Latin mass when the explorersreached land, the honor of conducting the first English Protestant servicein North America belonged to a clergyman who celebrated communion at HudsonBay in 1578. 20 During Elizabeth’s reign, the Anglican priest Richard Hakluytbecame the leading proponent of England’s overseas mission. He believed thatEngland had a unique, God-given responsibility to spread its political and religiousvirtues throughout the world. Concerned that two Catholic countries, Spainand France, had moved ahead of England in settling new territories and disseminatingthe wrong kind of Christianity among the native population of America,Hakluyt called his people to send preachers of the gospel “for the salvation ofthose poore people which have sitten so longe in darkenes and in the shadowe ofdeathe.” 21The literature of colonization that Hakluyt’s writings exemplified was intendedto inspire English men to travel to North America for the glory of both God andnation. In the early seventeenth century, Virginia became the primary focus ofEnglish colonial efforts, and it took very little prodding to convince James I toassume control over the process by which the holdings and interests of the crownwere expanded in America. James gave colonization rights in Virginia to twotrading companies in April 1606, and 13 months later the Virginia Company