Though Pilkington kept his Puritanism well under control, he was uncompromising in the assertion of his Protestant principles, and the boldness with which he proclaimed them not unfrequently provoked the anger of the Papal party. The beautiful spire of St. Paul's Cathedral, the loftiest in the kingdom, which had been restored so recently as the year when Queen Mary ascended the throne, was in 1561 stricken, as was alleged, by lightning[18] and destroyed, together with the bells and the roof of the nave and aisles. The Roman Catholics represented the accident as a judgment of Heaven for the discontinuance of the matins and other services which had used to be performed in the church; whereupon the Bishop preached a sermon at Paul's Cross in which he accepted it as a judgment, but on the sins of London in general, and particularly on the abuses by which the church had formerly been polluted, and concluded by exhorting his hearers "to take the dreadful devastation of the church to be a warning of a greater plague to follow if amendment of life were not had in all estates." His observations were supposed to reflect upon the Papists, who immediately circulated a paper about the city declaring the chief cause of the destruction to be "that the old fathers and the old ways were left, together with blaspheming God in lying sermons preached there, polluting the temple with schismatical service, and destroying and pulling down altars set up by blessed men, and where the sacrifice of the Mass was ministered." Pilkington, in vindication of his sermon, published a tract giving an animated description of the practices that had prevailed, and which is interesting at the present day as pourtraying the curious scenes and incidents of which St Paul's was then the theatre. "No place," he said, "had been more abused than Paul's had been, nor more against the receiving of Christ's Gospel; wherefore it was more wonder that God had spared it so long, than that he overthrew it now.... From the top of the spire, at coronations or other solemn triumphs, some for vain glory had used to throw themselves down by rope, and so killed themselves vainly to please other men's eyes. At the battlement of the steeple, sundry times were used Popish anthems, to call upon their gods, with torch and paper in the evenings. In the top of one of the pinnacles was Lollard's Tower, where many an innocent soul had been by them cruelly tormented and murdered. In the middest alley was their long censer, reaching from the roof to the ground; as though the Holy Ghost came down in their censing, in likeness of a dove. In the arches men commonly complained of wrong and delayed judgments in ecclesiastical causes; and divers had been condemned there by Annas and Caiaphas for Christ's cause. Their images hung on every wall, pillar, and door, with their pilgrimages and worshippings of them; passing over their massing, and many altars, and the rest of their popish service. The south alley