A year after the father died, there was a new election of president of Harvard College. Cotton Mather was as anxious as before. The governing board picked out in succession three Boston ministers, and never seem to have considered Cotton Mather. Their first choice was Joseph Sewall, of the Old South, a son of the Judge; “chosen for his piety,” as the disappointed man sneeringly wrote in his diary. The “miserable” college, when Sewall declined, chose the minister of the Manifesto Church, a direct thrust at Matherism; but no choice was accepted till Benjamin Wadsworth was elected. The college had another conflict when Timothy Cutler, after receiving Episcopal ordination in England, came to Boston, and by virtue of his new position as a Church of England ministrant set up his claim to a seat in the Board of Overseers. He sought in vain. Mather meantime was contriving to fortify himself, and determined to have a synod to organize some resistance to this increasing antagonism. Dummer entertained a petition to that end, but John Checkley, one of Cutler’s friends, ferreted out the scheme, and there followed a sharp rebuke from the lords justices, who pronounced the calling of such a body the prerogative of the crown, and the movement came to naught. This same John Checkley, a polemical churchman, in Boston, who kept a toy shop, united with it the publishing of tracts, in which the prevailing theology was attacked. In 1719 he had reprinted Charles Leslie’s _Short and Easy Method with the Deists_, and later accompanied Cutler and his friends to England. While there he caused another edition of Leslie to be printed (1723), but added to it his own Boston imprint, and what was more important, he appended a _Discourse concerning Episcopacy_, which seems to have been a refashioning of another of Leslie’s treatises, by which Checkley had pointedly demonstrated the schism of all ordination except an Episcopal one. With a stock of this book he came back to Boston, and at the “Sign of the Crown and Blue gate, over against the west end of the town house,” he began to sell them. The magistrates found in some expressions “a false and scandalous libel” on themselves. A trial followed with an appeal, which dragged its slow length along; and in the midst of it Checkley delivered a memorable speech in his own defence. It ended in his being fined fifty pounds. Checkley left Boston not long after for England; and came back again to settle in Providence, and administer the rites of the church as he believed they should be administered.