He gave, also, notable proofs of his zeal to maintain the honour of the fourth. The liberties taken at Wakes, or annual feasts of the dedication of churches, on Sundays, were grown to a very high excess, and occasioned great and numerous debaucheries. The lord chief justice Richardson,[347] in his circuit, made an order to suppress them, Laud complained of this to the king, as an intrusion upon the ecclesiastical power; upon which Richardson was severely reprimanded, and forced to revoke the order. The justices of the peace upon this drew up a petition to the king, shewing the great inconveniences which would befal the country, if those revels, church-ales and clerk-ales, upon the Lord’s-day, were permitted. But before the petition could be delivered, Laud published by the king’s order, the declaration concerning recreations on the lord’s-day, “out of a pious care for the service of God,” as that declaration expresses it towards the conclusion of it. However, this “pious care” of Laud and the king was resented by the soberest persons in the nation, as irreligious and profane, as those revels had been the occasion of an “infinite number of inconveniences;” and the declaration for publishing the lawfulness of them through all parish-churches, [348]“proved a snare to many ministers, very conformable to the church of England, because they refused to read the same publicly in the church, as was required: For upon this many were suspended, and others silenced from preaching.” An instance of great piety, unquestionably this; first to establish the profanation of the Lord’s-day by a public order, and then to persecute and punish those ministers who could not, in conscience, promote the ends of “so godly a zeal,” by reading the king’s order for wakes and revels on the Lord’s-day out of that very place, where perhaps they had been just before publishing the command of the most high God, not to profane but to keep it holy. ----- Footnote 347: Rushw. vol. I. p. 196. Footnote 348: Rushw. vol. I. p. 196. -----