to assert the divine rights of episcopacy, they laboured to deprive of that pre-eminence in the Anglican synod which the ecclesiastical constitution of the kingdom had bestowed on them.[351] None was more prominent in their debates than Atterbury himself, whom, in the zenith of tory influence, at the close of her reign, the queen reluctantly promoted to the see of Rochester. The new government at first permitted the convocation to hold its sittings. But they soon excited a flame which consumed themselves by an attack on Hoadley, Bishop of Bangor, who had preached a sermon abounding with those principles concerning religious liberty, of which he had long been the courageous and powerful assertor.[352] The lower house of convocation thought fit to denounce, through the report of a committee, the dangerous tenets of this discourse, and of a work not long before published by the bishop. A long and celebrated war of pens instantly commenced, known by the name of the Bangorian controversy; managed, perhaps on both sides, with all the chicanery of polemical writers, and disgusting both from its tediousness, and from the manifest unwillingness of the disputants to speak ingenuously what they meant.[353] But, as the principles of Hoadley and his advocates appeared, in the main, little else than those of protestantism and toleration, the sentence of the laity, in the temper that was then gaining ground as to ecclesiastical subjects, was soon pronounced in their favour; and the high-church party discredited themselves by an opposition to what now pass for the incontrovertible truisms of religious liberty. In the ferment of that age, it was expedient for the state to scatter a little dust over the angry insects; the convocation was accordingly prorogued in 1717, and has never again sat for any business.[354] Those who are imbued with high notions of sacerdotal power have sometimes deplored this extinction of the Anglican great council; and though its necessity, as I have already observed, cannot possibly be defended as an ancient part of the constitution, there are not wanting specious arguments for the expediency of such a synod. It might be urged that the church, considered only as an integral member of the commonwealth, and the greatest corporation within it, might justly claim that right of managing its own affairs which belongs to every other association; that the argument from abuse is not sufficient, and is rejected with indignation when applied, as historically it might be, to representative governments and to civil liberty; that in the present state of things, no reformation even of secondary importance can be effected without difficulty, nor any looked for in greater matters, both from the indifference of the legislature, and the reluctance of the clergy to admit its interposition.