As early as 1746, Zinzendorf was anxious to have the Moravians legally acknowledged by the British parliament, and to secure for them a legal standing. To accomplish this, he, with effrontery worthy of a better cause, made friends with Potter, the archbishop of Canterbury; with Sherlock, bishop of London; with Thomas Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania; and with General Oglethorpe, governor of Georgia. He succeeded in bringing the cause of the Brethren before the king’s privy council, and, in 1747, contrived to get an act through parliament, exempting the Moravians, in British North America, from taking oaths. But even this was not enough to satisfy Zinzendorf’s ambition. In this act there was only a _tacit_ and _indefinite_ acknowledgment of his church. He wished for more, and, in order to get it, agreed with his friends to petition that the Moravians in England might have the same exemption, as those in the American colonies; and that they should have the further privilege of not bearing arms. The petition stated, that the Brethren were descended from the ancient Bohemian and Moravian church; that, in their doctrinal views, they followed the Augsburg Confession of 1530, and the synod of Berne in 1532; that they consisted of the _threefold_ union of Moravians, Lutherans, and Reformed, or, in other words, the three principal sections of the protestant church; that their proper ecclesiastical title was “_Unitas Fratrum_”; and that, in support of these pretensions, they could adduce, before a parliamentary committee, not fewer than one hundred and thirty-five different documents.