Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653, voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously erring agt the Docktrin & Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth." Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of "Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed, as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church, complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned. Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this, Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except the otherwise all-powerful parson.