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.ÿþand phrasing as is true of Charles Carter s will noted earlier suggesting apersonal appropriation of the faith.Even when these preambles employ iden-tical words and phrases, they afford an important opening to the mindset ofeighteenth-century Virginians.The Virginia Anglican consciously distinguished her or his   spiritual goodsor inward estate  from   the material goods or outward estate,  thus enabling  the dutiful to cross the boundary between the everyday material world andthe transcendental spiritual world of the Christian afterlife.    The preparationof the will,  Daniel Beaver suggests,   honored the spirit of the dying personand commemorated and closed the person s place in the social order.A spiri-tual settlement returned the testator s soul to the hands of God.The moralsignificance of the material settlement was expressed in a religious notion ofproperty, an effort to anticipate and avoid conflict among family and neigh-bors, and a general concern to make a judicious settlement in the sight ofGod.  81Anglo-Virginians confronted and accepted death as an ever-present reality.They were not unfeeling or incapable of grief, although some scholars look-ing back upon eighteenth-century behaviors discern an emotional coldness,perhaps even callousness, in recorded responses to the loss of spouses, familymembers, and friends.82 Perhaps these readings betray a too limited or literalresponse to the matter-of-fact accounts such as those recorded in parish regis-ters.Most entries state nothing more than the name and the date.Occasionalinterjections by the clerk or parson of Albemarle Parish, however, bring mo-mentarily into focus the persons dying and the events surrounding the finalrite of passage.Of George Passmore, one hundred years old when he died on10 March1751,the reader is told:   This old man came into the Country a Soldier in the timethe brave Mr.Bacon s being in Arms for his Country.  83 Later that year the re-corder entered the deaths of Mary McInnish on 31 October and her husband,Donald, two days later along with the notation that   These two together withtwo Children, one stillborn the other 8 days old are buried in one grave.  84 The  Flux  was responsible for the deaths of George Denton and his six childrenJames, Elizabeth, Pollard, Martha, Thomas, and Isabel all in the month ofJuly 1756.85 John Ray s death on 17 March 1770, invoked judgment:   The poorMan got drunk at what they called a Treat by James * * * * Candidate for theCounty, fell into Joseph s Swamp and was drowned.I wish others may takewarning from this.  86The deaths of John Jackson, aged ninety, on12 October1770, and of Charles.226 divine services [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]