The Commonwealth passed away, and Scotland had once more its Covenanted King. The irony of fate used the Committee of Estates, the body which Charles I had known as an enemy, to deliver the country to an absolute monarchy. The Committee of Estates was followed, when the king's commissioner arrived, by the meeting of the Restoration Parliament. The main difficulty was the religious one. Parliament was reduced to the position it had occupied before 1638. In 1661 it passed an act which rescinded all its own statutes since 1640. It humbly confessed the king's right to choose all officers of state, and members of the privy council; it acknowledged his right to call and prorogue Parliament; it re-established the tyranny of the Lords of the Articles. It recalled bishops to Parliament, and proscribed the national religion. Even when the English Parliament had recovered from its emotional loyalty, and begun to resume its old attitude to the king, the Scottish Estates remained absolutely at his disposal. When, later still, the succession was disputed in England, an act was passed in Scotland to declare that it could not be altered "without involving the subjects in perjury and rebellion." When Charles II died, Parliament addressed James VII in terms ludicrously obsequious. "The death of that our excellent monarch is lamented by us to all the degrees of grief that are consistent with our great joy for the succession of your sacred majesty." Between 1660 and 1689 the Scottish Parliament was once more the merest instrument for official sanction. A contemporary has left us his impressions of the time. He tells us that the methods of the Lords of the Articles were not quite so secret as they used to be. Of late times matters have been at full length and freely debated in Parliament. They sit all in one House, and every one answers distinctly to his name and gives his vote, which is in these terms, _I approve_ or _not_; only those who are not satisfied one way or another, say _Non liquet_, which is a great ease to those who are conscientious, and a common refuge to the cunning Politicians; the major vote carries it. No dissents or protests are allowed in public acts, but are accounted treasonable.[131] The arm of the Government was all-powerful, and they had not even to guard against opposition. A caricature of the General Assembly was maintained to give a further ecclesiastical ratification to the king's acts, "But," adds our informant, as the calling of this synod is wholly in the Crown, so there is little need of it, since the King's Supremacy is so large, that He needs not there concurrence, to adde their Authority to anything that He shall think fit to doe about Church affairs.