The reader was authorized to conduct morning and evening prayer and to read a printed sermon, or a "homily." He could not celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion. Rather frequently, and especially during the era of the Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II, several adjoining parishes would be vacant at the same time; and at one time about the end of the Commonwealth period the statement was made that there were only some ten clergymen in Virginia to serve fifty parishes. Under such circumstances the reader was called upon to perform many duties. He might baptize a dying child, conduct a funeral, or perform a marriage ceremony. There was also in those early days no way of screening out unworthy men who appeared occasionally as clergymen in the colony; men who perhaps had been forced out of parishes in England because of immorality or drunkenness; and occasionally men with forged credentials. Such men were occasionally appointed to parishes by vestries who had no way of learning their true status; and if the man was thenceforth morally decent and had no great fault except occasional drunkenness, he would be allowed to stay on because of the need of a priest to celebrate the sacraments. The vestries protected their parishes from unworthy clergymen by the uncanonical appointment of a minister as incumbent of a parish for a year at a time, rather than present him canonically to the Governor of the colony for induction into the rectorship of the parish. Under the law of England, and under the law of the Church of England, no rector could be forced out of a parish after induction except after an ecclesiastical trial by the bishop or his commissary. In 1656 John Hammond published a pamphlet entitled _Leah and Rachel_, extolling the attractiveness of Virginia and Maryland as places of residence at that time. He described vividly the difficulties which the older colony had suffered in the earlier years of Charles I. He wrote: They then began to provide and send home for Gospel ministers, and largely contributed for their maintenance. But Virginia savouring not handsomely in England, very few of good conversation would adventure thither, (as thinking it a place wherein surely the fear of God was not), yet many came, such as wore black coats, and could babble in a pulpet, roare in a tavern, exact from their parishioners, and rather by their dissolutenesse destroy than feed their flocks. Loath was the country to be wholly without teachers, and therefore rather retain these than to be destitute; yet still endeavours for better in their places, which were obtained, and these wolves in sheeps cloathing, by their Assemblies questioned, silenced, and some forced to depart the country.