Whilst James secured for his purpose tools of this description he did whatever he could to silence the voice of controversy against the Church of his affections. He caused the Lord Treasurer to reprove Sherlock, and to stop his pension for preaching against Popery;[161] and he wrote to Compton, the Bishop of London, commanding him to suspend the Rector of St. Giles, Dr. Sharp, who had engaged in a pulpit contest with a Roman Catholic priest. This last interference involved consequences more mischievous than itself. It had long been in the mind of the Sovereign to revive the Court of High Commission, as an efficient agent for the control of the clergy. To any one else, the Act of Charles II., confirming the abolition of that Court by the Long Parliament, would have been an insurmountable barrier, yet despising such reasons as would have guided other men, James gradually brought himself to the determination of re-establishing that odious tribunal. The lawyers told him that what he proposed would be found to be unconstitutional. His Ministers shrunk from committing themselves to so perilous an act, but Sharp’s affair fixed his decision. Compton, son of the Royalist Earl of Northampton, himself once an officer of the Guards, had with something of a soldier’s gallantry and dash, opposed the Government, from his seat in the House of Lords; and when receiving the King’s command for the suspension of Sharp, he had declined to take that step without a trial of the denounced clergyman, and had also, by mere private influence, arranged for his submitting to a period of silence. This conduct on the part of the prelate provoked the King to end his hesitation, and to revive the very Court, which had been a chief cause of his father’s ruin. The New Commission conferred an indefinite spiritual jurisdiction, in this case the more dangerous from its being indefinite.[162] [Sidenote: JAMES’ POLICY.] [Sidenote: 1686.]