A petition came from a churchwarden cited and punished for not prosecuting parishioners who refused to stand while hearing the creed, to bow at the name of Jesus, to kneel at public prayer, and to sit uncovered during sermon time. These breaches of prescribed ecclesiastical decorum were taken as proofs of Puritan irreverence; but when Puritans were threatened in consequence with legal penalties, such acts appeared to them to be full of heroic virtue. [Sidenote: _Debates on Religion._] The growth of popery formed a fruitful topic of quaint declamation. The approach of any great personage, it was said, may be known by the sumpter mules sent on before. And when the Pope travels, altars, copes, pictures, and images precede his progress. High Church ceremonies announced the coming Mass. Clerical tricks of this description prepared for the revival of papal domination. Resistance had provoked persecution. Fire had come out of the bramble, and devoured the cedars of Lebanon.[115] Stories, too, were told of a parsonage worth three hundred a year, where not even a poor curate remained to read prayers, catechise children, or bury the dead; and of a vicarage, where the nave of the church had been pulled down, the lead sold, the bells profaned, the chancel made into a dog-kennel, and the steeple turned into a pigeon-house.[116] The debate of the 14th and 15th of December, on the canons, was conducted in the same spirit as other proceedings. Convocation had met in April, at the opening of the Short Parliament; one of the first measures adopted being an imposition on the clergy of six subsidies of four shillings in the pound for six years. Canons had then been prepared, relative to the regal power for suppressing popery, also against Socinianism and sectaries, and further, for preventing Puritan innovations and for promoting uniformity. While discussions on these subjects were proceeding, Parliament had been dissolved, but Convocation had unconstitutionally determined as a royal synod, to persevere sitting until it should be dissolved by the King's writ.[117] Some of the clerical body had protested against this procedure, but the King, with the opinion of certain judges, had confirmed it, and Convocation, then acting as a synod under royal sanction, had completed the new canons.[118] [Sidenote: 1640, November.]