The opening of the General Assembly in the fall of 1785 was greeted with a flood of anti-establishment petitions. Of nearly one hundred memorials submitted, only eleven were in favor of the bill for “teachers of the Christian religion.” The bill was officially dead. Madison took advantage of this anti-establishment momentum to enact Jefferson’s bill “for Establishing Religious Freedom.” The conservatives had insufficient support to defeat it but were able to alter the preamble. They had tried and failed several times to entirely remove the preamble with its strong separationist message. By altering it, they hoped to narrow the scope of the legally binding section of the bill. The conservatives were somewhat successful in obscuring its separationist message, but they were unable to destroy it outright. Today some scholars ignore the preamble for the same reason, namely to achieve a narrow interpretation of the enacting clauses. But the preamble, as the conservatives understood, explained the purpose and meaning of the enacting clauses, which was to separate religion and government. Religious freedom, at least in theory, had finally been established in Virginia.