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version of the Psalms. Later, when it was found desirable to erect
chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in
every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday
in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went
his usual round of service in each church or chapel upon regular
schedule. Except in remote chapels the custom was to have service each
Sunday in every church or chapel.

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 hom