II. From the buildings and their furniture we turn to the worship, including its vestments and mode of celebration. Whatever may be the exact meaning of the rubric prefixed to the Order of Morning Prayer, chasubles and other priestly attire used in the second year of King Edward, were not worn after the Restoration, nor did any of the Anglican prelates attempt to enforce their use. Copes, according to the Twenty-fourth Canon, were prescribed to be worn by the principal ministers at the Holy Communion in cathedrals; but in other churches ministers were to read the Divine service, and administer the sacraments, in a decent and comely surplice with sleeves, and wearing University hoods according to their degrees. With such an arrangement the visitation articles of the prelates are in accordance. Croft, Bishop of Hereford, that very low Churchman, took care to express his decided approbation “of a pure white robe on the minister’s shoulders,” emblematical of the purity of heart which became the service.[263] Wind instruments were, for a time used in some cathedral choirs, but they soon gave place to organs; and the boys failed not to bring “a fair book of the anthem and service, and sometimes the score,” to distinguished strangers.[264] Baptism was performed according to the Prayer Book, and a public administration of it in the case of those who had passed the age of childhood sometimes attracted considerable notice. The following anecdote on this subject occurs in a letter:--“Mr. John Harrington (whose father was some time since one of the serjeants-at-arms to His Majesty) had his boy baptized in the church; he being about fifteen years old, and not baptized before, and the son of a Nonconformist. To see which the church was fuller than it useth to be at other times; he having God-fathers and God-mothers according to the ceremony of the Church.”[265] The Lord’s Supper was administered from the table placed by the wall, at the east end of the church, in accordance with Laudian precedents, in spite of the rubrical direction that it “shall stand in the body of the church, or in the chancel; where morning and evening prayers are appointed to be said.” In some churches, the Communion Service, on non-communion days, was read from the desk, it being alleged, “that it was indecent to go to the altar and back, with the surplice still on, to the homily or sermon”--a reason which implies that the surplice was worn in the pulpit, even by those who read the Communion Service in the desk. Clergymen left the desk, after the second lesson, to baptize in the font at the west end of the church.[266] [Sidenote: WORSHIP.]