In the course of debate, Sir Harry Vane advocated the abolition of Episcopacy, inveighing against it as a plant which God's right hand had not planted, but one full of rottenness and corruption, a mystery of iniquity fit to be plucked up and removed out of the way. Yet he did not advocate what would now be called the separation of Church and State; nor did he enter upon the defence or exposition of any broad principle of religious liberty. At the same time, Waller, the poet--a lively speaker, who, even at the age of eighty, could amuse the House with his badinage and wit--protested against further attacks on Episcopacy, now that its horns and claws were cut and pared. He was, he said, for reform, not for abolition. Upon the close of the debate on the 11th--which lasted from early in the morning till late at night--the committee, in spite of Mr. Hyde's expedients, resolved on the preamble of the Bill: "Whereas the government of the Church of England by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors, and commissaries, deans, archdeacons, and other ecclesiastical officers, hath been found, by long experience, to be a great impediment to the perfect reformation and growth of religion, and very prejudicial to the civil state and government of this kingdom."[199] [Sidenote: _Debates by the Commons._] On the 15th June, during an earnest discussion relative to the abolition of cathedral chapters, Mr. William Thomas, member for Carnarvon, related to the House the history of Deans, tracing them up to the time of Augustine, who describes each as having the care of ten monks; and then he asked, "whether the office, as now it is exercised, be the same as then?" "They are deceived that urge it," the Welsh representative proceeded to say, "and they should know that this judicious House is able to discern and distinguish a counterfeit face of antiquity from the true. In vain do they, with the Gibeonites, labour to deceive us by old sacks, old shoes, old garments, old boots, and old bread that is dry and mouldy; therefore to no purpose and causelessly do they charge us to affect novelty, by our offering to take away church governors and government." He narrated stories of wicked deans; and said much about church music, as tickling the ear, without touching the heart, "whilst, as Augustine complaineth of himself, most were more moved by the sweetness of the song, than by the sense of the matter--working their bane like the deadly touch of the asps in a tickling delight--or as the soft touch of the hyena, which doth infatuate and lull asleep and then devoureth." Sir Benjamin Rudyard, who had before declared himself for Church reform, and still advocated it, offered some defence of cathedral establishments on the ground of their being conducive to the promotion of piety and learning. He deplored the selfishness which, in certain cases, led to the alienation of ecclesiastical property at the time of the Reformation;