of New York for his cordial interest and kind help in the publication of this volume. For want of time, considerable portions of the opening address, and also of the historical paper upon the Colonial Church, which are printed here, were omitted in the delivery. As an expression of the spirit, and a contribution to the history, of the oldest Episcopal community in America, we publish this book, and pray for God's blessing upon it. A. M. R., Chairman of Endowment Committee. OPENING ADDRESS. BY A. M. RANDOLPH, D.D., LL.D., ASSISTANT BISHOP OF VIRGINIA. We have expressed, in the lessons from Scripture and in the hymns and prayers of this service, our sense of God's goodness and mercy to our Church in Virginia for the past one hundred years, since its independent establishment. The committee to whom was assigned the duty of arranging religious services for this centennial of our Church have appointed speakers and writers, who have kindly consented to treat the subjects committed to them before the several meetings to be held during the Council. They will review the history of the Diocese from its organization to the present year, the history of the Church in the colony of Virginia from the settlement at Jamestown to the close of the American Revolution, the life and character of some of its representative men whose names are distinguished in that history, and then the origin and growth and present condition of the religious institutions of our Church in the Diocese. They have done their best to make these centennial services profitable and helpful and warming to the heart of the Church in Virginia. God grant that the retrospect may be wise and useful! Memory has its blessed uses in the growth of individual character, and in the providential training and progress of nations and communities. In Revelation it is enjoined as a command of God, that we keep green in our memories the great facts of our religious history. It is one purpose, perhaps the main purpose, in the positive institutions of religion, whose history we have in our Bibles. It is an essential element in the plan of redemption. "Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness," was the command to the people of Israel. We are to observe the religious principle in the command if the remembrance is to be a means of grace and a channel of the Divine blessing. The memory is to be a religious memory. When we look back over the past, it must be to find God in that past if the retrospect is to be salutary: "Thou shalt remember the Lord thy God that led thee," is the command. Memory must work under the distinct recognition of Divine guidance in every stage of the journey. We are prone to abuse memory. We use it to look at the human side of things, and at that alone, to exalt the men whom we paint as the heroes of the past, and, in glorifying them, we glorify ourselves, their children, and the supposed inheritors of their spirit; or we use it to pick out the dark things that lie in the distance behind us, the disappointments and losses, the pains and sorrows and wrongs, of the past. When we do this, memory becomes a hinderance instead of a help. Some people, in looking either at their own lives or at the world around them, may be said to have a talent for |