As Zinzendorf listened to this speech, some curious feelings must have surged in his bosom. At the Synod of Hirschberg, only six years before, he had lectured the Brethren for making business bargains with Governments; and now he was consenting to such a bargain himself. The debate in the Commons was conducted on business lines; the whole question at issue was, not whether the Moravians were orthodox, but whether it would pay the Government to encourage them; and the British Government took exactly the same attitude towards the Brethren that Frederick the Great had done seven years before. The next speaker made this point clearer than ever. We are not quite sure who it was. It was probably Henry Pelham, the Prime Minister. At any rate, whoever it was, he objected to the petition on practical grounds. He declared that the Moravians were a very dangerous body; that they were really a new sect; that, like the Papists, they had a Pope, and submitted to their Pope in all things; that they made their Church supreme in temporal matters; and that thus they destroyed the power of the civil magistrate. He suspected that the Brethren were Papists in disguise. "I am at a loss," he said, "whether I shall style the petitioners Jesuits, Papists, or Moravians." He intended, he declared, to move an amendment that the Moravians be restrained from making converts, and that all who joined their ranks be punished. The fate of England was at stake. If the Moravians converted the whole nation to their superstition, and everyone objected to bearing arms, what then would become of our Army and Navy, and how could we resist invasion? The next speakers, however, soon toned down the alarm. If Pelham's objections applied to the Moravians, they would apply, it was argued, equally to the Quakers; and yet it was a notorious fact that the Colonies where the Quakers settled were the most prosperous places in the Empire. "What place," asked one, "is more flourishing than Pennsylvania?" And if the Moravians objected to bearing arms, what did that matter, so long as they were willing to pay? For these practical reasons, therefore, the motion was easily carried; a Parliamentary Committee was formed; General Oglethorpe was elected chairman; and the whole history, doctrine and practice of the Brethren were submitted to a thorough investigation. For this purpose Zinzendorf had prepared a number of documents; the documents were laid before the Committee; and, on the evidence of those documents, the Committee based its report. From that evidence three conclusions followed.