Parliament poured out vials of wrath on all these canons. They included protests against popery--the third being for the suppression of its growth, and the seventh charging the Church of Rome with "idolatry committed in the mass for which all popish altars were demolished," but the Puritans overlooked or regarded all this as only a pretence for covering assaults upon themselves. To have done so seems to us unfair, though considering the character of the men framing the canons, with whom members of the House of Commons were well acquainted, everybody must believe the authors of the new laws hated Puritanism more than Popery. The truth is, Anglicanism, though thoroughly opposed to papal supremacy, and to some of the dogmas and superstitions of Rome, fostered sympathy with much of the faith and worship characteristic of that church, while it had not a breath of kindness for Puritan sentiments. Such a state of things drove the two parties wide as the poles asunder, and we cannot wonder that on the question of the canons the House of Commons, revolting at Anglo-Catholicism, read all which Convocation had done in the light of those well-known principles by which Convocation was actuated. Whatever the bishops and clergy there, might honestly say about popish ceremonies and the idolatry of the mass, they were chiefly bent on crushing the Puritans, and accordingly the Puritans grappled with the Anglicans as in a struggle for life. Matter enough existed in these new laws to provoke destructive criticism. The first propounded the divine right of kings, and claimed for them powers inconsistent with the English constitution. The canon against sectaries was extremely intolerant, and was so ingeniously contrived as to turn statutes for suppressing popery against all sorts of nonconforming Protestants. [Sidenote: _Debates on Religion._] No one, however, of this ill-fated assembly's enactments had to run the gauntlet, like the canon relative to the et cetera oath.[119] It speedily sank under torrents of argument and invective, ridicule, and satire. Also, the prolonging of convocation as a synod, after the dissolution of Parliament, incurred condemnation as wholly illegal; the canons were pronounced invalid; and the entire proceedings subversive of the laws of the realm.[120] Heylyn declares that the _et cetera_ was introduced in the draft to avoid tautology, and that the enumeration was to be perfected before engrossment, but the king hastened its being printed, and so occasioned the mischief.--_Heylyn's Life of Laud_, 444.