Strangely enough, a committee of the House of Commons was appointed, with Oglethorpe for its chairman. The report of the committee was read and ordered to be printed; and Oglethorpe was commissioned to draw up a bill, founded upon the report presented, and to bring it before the house. The bill passed the House of Commons on the 18th of April, 1749. On being introduced into the House of Lords, the lord chancellor objected to almost every line of it; and especially against the power vested in Zinzendorf, as the _Advocatus Fratrum_, in ecclesiastical matters,—a power authorising him, though a foreigner, to enjoin upon the bishops and ministers of the Church of England to give certificates, that the parties holding them were members of the _Unitas Fratrum_, which certificates the British authorities were to accept as legal. Zinzendorf, in a conversation with Lord Halifax, had said: “Against the will of the king, I would not like to press the matter; but a _limitation of the act_ I will not accept. Everything or nothing! No modifications!” This was German swagger. Finding the lord chancellor earnest in his objection, he was fain, rather than lose his bill, to leave out the words which put the bishops and clergy of the Church of England beneath his power, and proposed the following as a substitute: “that the _verbal declaration_ of the individual, together with the certificate of a bishop or minister of the Brethren, shall be sufficient proof of membership.” With this alteration, the bill became law, on the 12th of May, 1749. By this act of parliament, Zinzendorf gained the following points:— 1. The _Unitas Fratrum_ were acknowledged as an ancient protestant episcopal church. 2. Those of its members, who scrupled to take an oath, were exempted from doing so on making a declaration in the presence of Almighty God, as witness of the truth. 3. They were exempted from acting as jurymen. 4. They were exempted from military service, in the American colonies, under reasonable conditions.[109] This was a singular episode in Moravian history. Zinzendorf was proud of it; and well he might. It was scarcely fifteen years since the Moravians first set foot in England. They had been torn by faction, and persecuted by furious mobs. Their tenets, in many instances, were far from orthodox. Many of their practices were silly and objectionable. Their hymns and literature were loathsomely luscious, and familiarly irreverent. Their leader, though a German noble, and, upon the whole, benevolent and devout, was ambitious and overbearing, if not insane; and yet, the British parliament had already given them not only a legal standing, but an ecclesiastical cognomen of their own selecting, and had granted them exemptions, which they had no right to claim. How was this? We can hardly tell; but a German sat on the British throne, and his court, to a great extent, was a German court.