Proceeding with the business respecting Deans and Chapters, the committee did not drop the question of Bishops. On the 21st of June no change had come over the pleadings of the originator of the whole discussion. Dering's anti-prelatical zeal had not yet begun to wane, although he now complained of his adopted Bill as defective, and insisted on the importance of deciding on a future form of government before abandoning the present. He still alluded to existing Episcopacy in disrespectful terms, and advocated the introduction of a Presbyterian element into ecclesiastical rule. Dioceses, he said, were too large, and diocesans needed grave and able divines, assessors and assistants, amongst whom they were entitled to have the first place and to exercise the chief power. Then turning to the chairman for an illustration, the lively baronet observed: "Mr. Hyde, yourself are now in this great committee; Mr. Speaker is in the House the bishop of our congregation." "You,"--addressing himself to both gentlemen--"are in yourselves but fellow-members of the same House with us, returned hither (as we also are) to sit on these benches with us, until by our election, and by common suffrage, you are incathedrated. Then you have (and it is fit and necessary that you should have) a precedency before us and a presidency over us. Notwithstanding this, you are not diversified into a several and distinct order from us. You must not swell with that conceit. You (Mr. Chairman and Mr. Speaker) are still the same members of the same House you were, though raised to a painful and careful degree among us and above us. I do heartily wish that we had in every shire of England a bishop such and so regulated for Church government within that sphere, as Mr. Speaker is bounded in, and limited by the rules of this House."[201] [Sidenote: 1641, June.] The comparison was as amusing as it was pertinent, and fell in with the prevalent opinion of the Puritan party, that if bishops were retained in England it must be according to a greatly reduced standard of authority and power, and one that should resemble the dimensions of the Episcopal office, as many believed it to have existed in the first and second centuries of the Christian era.