Dr. Wren busied himself in the completion of the 'Defence,' to which allusion has been made in the first chapter.[38] It is too long to allow of being set out in full, but a few points may be touched upon. Of the 'fifty painful ministers' whom he was said to have excommunicated, for some of the sentences there was, as has been said, very sufficient reason. As the Bishop says, 'Excommunication doth by law fall upon those that are absent, either from visitation, or synods; and suspension is a censure which in the practice of those courts is incurred in one hour and taken off in another, and is of little or no grievance at all except it be wilfully persisted in.' He complains of so vague a charge, not stating who the clergy were, and proceeds as well as he can recollect to mention those who had fallen under his censure. For those whose licence to preach had been withdrawn, the greater number ought never to have received it at all; one had been a broken tradesman in Ipswich, one a country apothecary, another a weaver, another 'no graduate, not long translated from common stage-playing to two cures and a publick lecture.' Yet still when all were reckoned who had ever been censured or admonished, the Bishop thinks that the fifty will hardly be made up.[39] [BOWING TO THE ALTAR.] It is a curious instance of the temper of the times that one head of so serious an indictment should be that 'To manifest his Popish Affections, he in 1636, caused a crucifix to be engraven upon his Episcopal seal.' Bishop Wren carefully addresses himself to the defence of this point, and to that of bowing at the name of our Lord, and to the Altar. 'He began so to do by the example of that learned and holy Prelate Bishop Andrewes, now with God, under whom this defendant was brought up from his youth, and had depended upon him more than forty years since, and constantly and religiously practised the same upon all occasions ... as his own years and studies increased he found first, the bowing at the name of the Lord Jesus, had not only been practised by the clergy but had also been enjoined to all the people, ever since the first reformation, as appeareth by the Injunctions, 1^o Eliz. Cap. 52, thereby to testify our due acknowledgment that the Lord Jesus Christ, the true and Eternal Son of God, is the only Saviour of the world, in whom alone the mercies, graces and promises of God to mankind for this life and the life to come are fully and wholly comprised, 1^o Jac. Can. 18.' For bowing to the Altar, while setting out how old a practice of the Church it was, designedly continued at the Reformation, how a like reverence was paid always to the King, or to his chair of estate if he was not in the Presence Chamber,