Every measure pursued by the commons, and, still more, every attempt made by their partisans, were full of the most inveterate hatred against the hierarchy, and showed a determined resolution of subverting the whole ecclesiastical establishment. Besides numberless vexations and persecutions which the clergy underwent from the arbitrary power of the lower house, the peers, while the king was in Scotland, having passed an order for the observance of the laws with regard to public worship, the commons assumed such authority, that, by a vote alone of their house, they suspended those laws, though enacted by the whole legislature: and they particularly forbade bowing at the name of Jesus; a practice which gave them the highest scandal, and which was one of their capital objections against the established religion.[*] They complained of the king's filling five vacant sees, and considered it as an insult upon them, that he should complete and strengthen an order which they intended soon entirely to abolish.[**] They had accused thirteen bishops of high treason, for enacting canons without consent of parliament,[***] though, from the foundation of the monarchy, no other method had ever been practised: and they now insisted that the peers, upon this general accusation, should sequester those bishops from their seats in parliament, and commit them to prison. * Rush. vol. v. p. 385, 386. Nalson, vol. ii. p. 482. ** Nalson, vol. ii. p 511. *** Rush. vol. v. p. 359 Their bill for taking away the bishops' votes had last winter been rejected by the peers: but they again introduced the same bill, though no prorogation had intervened; and they endeavored, by some minute alterations, to elude that rule of parliament which opposed them. And when they sent up this bill to the lords, they made a demand, the most absurd in the world, that the bishops, being all of them parties, should be refused a vote with regard to that question.[*] After the resolution was once formed by the commons, of invading the established government of church and state, it could not be expected that their proceedings, in such a violent attempt, would thenceforth be altogether regular and equitable: but it must be confessed that, in their attack on the hierarchy, they still more openly passed all bounds of moderation; as supposing, no doubt, that the sacredness of the cause would sufficiently atone for employing means the most irregular and unprecedented. This principle, which prevails so much among zealots, never displayed itself so openly as during the transactions of this whole period. * Clarendon. vol. ii. p. 304.