The Commons, conscious of strength, perhaps a little over-estimating it, were not slow in pressing Church reforms, though they proceeded with some caution. At the end of August, they resolved that churchwardens should remove communion-tables from the east end of churches where they had stood altar-wise, and that they should take away the rails, level the chancel floors, and altogether place the buildings in the same state as they were in before the recent innovations. Perhaps excitement in our own day, respecting usages adopted at St. George's in the East, may serve as an illustration of the feeling awakened in the middle of the seventeenth century, by Anglican worship. Only it is to be remembered that instead of one St. George's in the East at that time, there were a hundred in different parts of the country. In villages and towns with High Church clergymen, and Low Church congregations, where semi-Popish arrangements had been adopted in the chancel, while rigid and ultra-Protestant Puritans sat in the nave, or absented themselves altogether--such feuds arose, that, to preserve the peace, as well as to check "innovations," the Lower House deemed it necessary to interfere. The opposition to Sunday afternoon lecturing, and the refusal of incumbents to admit lecturers into their pulpits, increased the strife; and, in reference to this, the Commons interfered by declaring it lawful for the people to set up a lecturer at their own charge.[217] Bishops inhibited such proceedings; but the Commons declared the inhibition void. As bishops were members of the Upper House, all this tended to make the breach between the two branches of the legislature wider than before. [Sidenote: 1641, September.]