the motion for the King's supply, was spent wholy in debate, whether
they should do so or no, and concluded at last in a consent, that
the sitting in a grand Committee upon the motion for the King's
supply should be put of till Friday next, and so it was ordered. The
reason of which kind of proceeding, lest you should thinke to arise
from an indisposition of the House, I shall tell you as they appeare
to me, to have been the expectation of what Bill will come from the
Lords in stead of that of ours which they threw out, and a desire to
redresse and see thoroughly into the miscarriages of mony before any
more should be granted. To-day the House hath bin upon the second
observation, and after a debate till foure a'clock, have voted him
guilty also of misdemeanor in that particular. The Commissioners are
ordered to attend the House again on Munday, which is done
constantly for the illustration of any matter in their report,
wherein the House is not cleare. And to say the truth, the House
receives great satisfaction from them, and shows them extraordinary
respect. These are the things of principall notice since my last."

Carteret eventually was censured and suspended and dismissed.

The sudden incursion of religion during a financial debate is highly
characteristic of the House of Commons.

Whilst Queen Elizabeth and her advisers did succeed in making some sort
of a settlement of religion having regard to the questions of her time,
the Restoration bishops, an inferior set of men, wholly failed. The
repressive legislation that followed upon the Act of Uniformity,
succeeded in establishing and endowing (with voluntary contributions)
what is sometimes called, absurdly enough, Political Dissent. On
points, not of doctrine, but of ceremony, and of church government, one
half of the religiously-minded community were by oaths and declarations,
and by employing the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper as "a picklock to a
place," drawn out of the service of the State. Excluded from Parliament
and from all corporate bodies, from grammar-schools and universities,
English Dissent learned to live its own life, remote from the army, the
navy, and the civil service, quite outside of what perhaps may be fairly
called the main currents of the national life. Nonconformists venerated
their own divines, were reared in their own academies and colleges, read
their own books, went, when the modified l