After the Commons had resumed their sittings on the 20th of October, the difference which had arisen amongst the Puritan members became very apparent. The very next day, Sir Edward Dering questioned the legality of the recent order of the House respecting Divine worship; and the day after that, he indicated a still wider divergence from the policy of his former political friends. Upon a new bill being then introduced for excluding Bishops from Parliament--a bill which was, in fact, a reproduction of the old measure which the Lords had rejected--the Commons resolved to have a conference with the Upper House, respecting the thirteen accused prelates, and to request that the other occupants of the episcopal bench should be prevented from voting on this particular question, which so vitally affected their own personal interests. All this so alarmed the member for Kent that he hastily rose, and delivered a speech indicative of a still more decided veering toward the conservative point of the compass; for he went so far as to say that he did not conceive the House to be competent and fit to pronounce upon questions of Divinity. It seemed to him, he remarked, a thing unheard of, that soldiers, lawyers, and merchants should decide points which properly belonged to theologians. Laymen, he considered, should maintain only those doctrines which were authorized and established, and should leave the exposition and advocacy of what was new to a regularly constituted ecclesiastical assembly, in short, "a synod of Divines chosen by Divines." Whether or not he was animated in his retrograde course by cheers which came from the conservative benches, Sir Edward the following day bewailed the miseries of the Church between "Papism" on the one hand, and "Brownism" on the other; and instead of dwelling, as he had been wont to do, on "Puritan sufferings," his sympathies were now entirely bestowed on the opposite party. He related a story of two clergymen who had preached thousands of excellent sermons, but who now, like other deserving men, saw their infected sheep, after long pastoral vigilance, straggling from the fold, and mingling with the sects. Government, he complained, had begun to permit a loose liberty of religion; and, amidst varieties of opinion, and the perils of unity, what, he asked, could be thought of but a council--"a free, learned, grave, religious synod?"[223] Such a style of address seems strangely at variance with the speaker's earlier speeches in this very Parliament, and also with proceedings which the House had adopted in accordance with his own impetuous appeals. The course which he now pursued was in decided opposition to his conduct when he spoke from the gallery of the House on behalf of the bill for the abolition of Episcopacy; and subsequent proceedings by this gentleman, in the same new direction, are yet to come under our notice. But, after all, the lapse of four months had not essentially altered his character.