Such are the leading, provision, of the act dividing Georgia into parishes, and erecting, churches in sympathy with the tenents of the Established Church of England. While the patronage of the Crown and of the Colonial Assembly was extended in this special manner in aid of churches professing the Episcopal faith, it was not designed to favor them by an exclusive recognition. The idea appeared to be to accord to that denomination within the limits of Georgia a prestige akin to that which the Church of England enjoyed within the realm, to create certain offices for encouragement of that religious persuasion and the extension of the gospel in accordance with its forms of worship and mode of government, and to provide a method by which faithful registers of births, marriages, christenings, and deaths might be kept and perpetuated. Numerous were the Dissenters then in the province. They were represented by Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Methodists, a few Baptists, and some Hebrews. To all sects, save Papists, was free toleration accorded, and whenever a Dissenting congregation organized and applied for a grant of land whereon to build a church the petition did not pass unheeded. There can be no doubt, however, but that it was the intention of the government, both royal and colonial, to engraft the Church of England upon the province, and, within certain limits, to advance its prosperity and insure its permanency. At the same time an adherence to its rubrics was in no wise made a condition precedent to political preferment.
