"But that, in the year 1703, when a new assembly was to be chosen, which, by the constitution, is chosen once in two years, the election was managed with very great partiality and injustice, and all sorts of people, even aliens, Jews, servants, common sailors and negroes, were admitted to vote at elections: That, in the said assembly, an act was passed to incapacitate every person from being a member of any General Assembly that should be chosen for the time to come, unless he had taken the sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the church of England; whereby all Protestant Dissenters are made incapable of being in the said assembly; and yet, by the same act, all persons who shall take an oath that they have not received the sacrament in any dissenting congregation for one year past, though they have not received it in the church of England, are made capable of fitting in the said assembly: That this act was passed in an illegal manner, by the governor calling the assembly to meet the 26th of April, when it then stood prorogued to the 10th of May following: That it hath been ratified by the Lords Proprietors in England, who refused to hear what could be offered against it, and contrary to the petition of one hundred and seventy of the chief inhabitants of the colony, and of several eminent merchants trading hither, though the commons of the same assembly quickly after passed another bill to repeal it, which the upper house rejected, and the governor dissolved the house. "That the ecclesiastical government of the colony is under the bishop of London; but the governor and his adherents have at last done what the latter often threatened to do, totally abolished it; for the same assembly have passed an act, whereby twenty lay-persons, therein named, are made a corporation for the exercise of several exorbitant powers, to the great injury and oppression of the people in general, and for the exercise of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, with absolute power to deprive any minister of the church of England of his benefice, not only for immorality but even for imprudence, or incurable prejudices between such minister and his parish; and the only minister of the church established in the colony, Mr. Edward Marston, hath already been cited before their board, which the inhabitants of the province take to be an high ecclesiastical commission-court, destructive to the very being and essence of the church of England, and to be held in the utmost detestation and abhorrence by every man that is not an enemy to our constitution in church and state.