These reproachful accusations should have been allowed to sleep in oblivion, but when we read in an historical discourse in our day, that it was "this moral condition of things which led to the passage, on the 24tb of March, 1673, of the act entitled, ' An Act for settling a Ministry and raising a maintenance for them, in the city of New York, counties of Westchester, Richmond and Queens,' " a brief statement of the facts, in relation to the passage of this law and its subsequent enforcement, seems proper.
A few months previous to the passage of this act there arrived in New York Benjamin Fletcher, with a commission as Governor (recalled in 1698 to answer numerous charges of mal-administration), and Caleb Heathcote. The Governor came with special instructions to introduce the Book of Common Prayer among the Presbyterians, Huguenots and Dutchmen,
> Bolton's " Church History," 158.
HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.
where, perhaps, James II. would have been glad to have introduced a Mass-Book.' Governor Fletcher proposed to the Assembly " that provision be made by law for the settlement and support of an able ministry,'' but the majority of the Assembly were Dissenters and not inclined to aid him in his schemes.
At the next following session of the Assembly the Speaker, Mr. James Graham, who had the drawing of all their bills, so managed the title and induction of this one, that, although it did not do very well for the Dissenters, yet it did not appear to make any concessions to the Church, and the honest, simple-minded Dissenters, not suspecting the fraud and trickery of the Governor, passed the bill as above entitled. As Colonel Lewis Morris wrote, in a letter to the Propagation Society, " It was the most that could be got at the time, for had more been attempted, the Assembly had seen through the artifice, and all had been lost."