e bishops with an
"Answer" that was full of hard raps and conceded almost nothing.

A few detached paragraphs may serve to illustrate the general tone
of this reply. Here, for instance, is the comment of the bishops
upon the request of the Puritans to be allowed occasionally to
substitute extemporaneous for liturgical devotions. "The gift or
rather spirit of prayer consists in the inward graces of the spirit,
not in extempore expressions which any man of natural parts having
a voluble tongue and audacity may attain to without any special
gift." Nothing very conciliatory in that. To the complaint that
the Collects are too short, the bishops reply that they cannot
for that reason be accounted faulty, being like those "short but
prevalent prayers in Scripture, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.
Lord, increase our faith." The Puritans had objected to the
antiphonal element in the Prayer-Book services, and desired to
have nothing of a responsive character allowed beyond the single
word Amen. "But," rejoin the bishops, "they directly practise the
contrary in one of their principal parts of worship, singing of
psalms, where the people bear as great a part as the minister. If
this way be done in Hopkin's why not in David's Psalms; if in metre,
why not in prose; if in a psalm, why not in a litany?" Sharp, but
not winning.

The Puritans had objected to the people's kneeling while the
Commandments were read on the score that ignorant worshippers
might mistake the Decalogue for a form of prayer. With some asperity
the bishops reply that "why Christian people should not upon their
knees ask their pardon for their life forfeited for the breach of
every commandment and pray for grace to keep them for the time to
come they must be more than 'ignorant' that can scruple."

The time during which the conference at the Savoy should continue
its sessions had been limited to four months. This period expired
on July 24, 1661, and the apparently fruitless disputation was at
an end. Meanwhile, however, Convocation, the recognized legislature
of the Church of England, had begun to sit, and the bishops had
undertaken a revision of the Prayer Book after their own mind, and
with slight regard to what they had been hearing from their critics
at the Savoy. The bulk of their work, which included, it is said,
more than six hundred alterations, most of them of a verbal
character and of no great importance, was accomplished within the
compass of a sin