Moreover, it soon became evident that the Dissenters themselves did not desire Comprehension. Their ministers were petted and made much of by the well-to-do yeomen and the rich merchants in country and town. They lived on the fat of the land, snapped up wealthy widows and bought broad acres. Whereas the needy country parson was hard pressed to wring the tithes from his parishioners. While the walls of exclusion of Jericho stood, the rams' horns brayed against them daily, and seven times on the Sabbath; but so soon as the walls were prostrate, and every man could go up into the city and take up his quarters there where he liked, the rams' horns would have to be laid aside as superfluous lumber. The King was disappointed and offended. What he did was to prorogue Convocation for six weeks, and when those six weeks had expired, to prorogue it again, and many years elapsed before it was again suffered to assemble. That Convocation of 1689 saved the Church of England from dissolution into a formless, gelatinous, and invertebrate mass. Burnet himself, though disappointed at the time, felt afterwards that the determination of the Lower House had saved the Church at a time of crisis. "There was," he says, "a very happy direction of the providence of God observed in this matter. The Jacobite clergy who were then under suspension were designing to make a schism in the Church, whensoever they should be turned out and their places should be filled up by others. They saw it would not be easy to make a separation upon a private and personal account; they therefore wished to be furnished with more specious pretences, and if we had made alterations in the Rubrics and other parts of the Common Prayer, they would have pretended that they still stuck to the ancient Church of England, in opposition to those who were altering it and setting up new models. And, as I do firmly believe that there is a wise providence that watches upon human affairs, and directs them--so I have observed this in many instances relating to the Revolution ... by all the judgments we could afterwards make, if we had carried a majority in the Convocation for alterations, they would have done us more hurt than good." Burnet was morally and intellectually incapable of seeing that it was a case of conscience, of _stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ_, and he attributed the motives of the recalcitrant clergy to political prejudice. On Jane's return to Oxford, he found another opportunity of defending the Church, by framing the decree of 1690, which condemned the "Naked Gospel" of Arthur Burge.