Page:The Church of England, its catholicity and continuity.djvu/136

 give a similar account of these miserable doings. Mr. Lane reminds us that at Hereford Cathedral the Puritans shattered the windows, "tore up the brasses and carried off the ornaments." At Winchester the soldiers broke into the Church as service was going on, marched up the nave with drums beating and banners flying; they destroyed the tombs, and used the bones of the dead as hammers to break up the stained-glass windows. The altar was taken away to an ale-house, and was burnt there with the service books. The soldiers then put on the surplices of the clergy and the choir, and took the crosses and banners of the Church, and, with awful mockery, wended their way in this guise through the streets of the town. The men who did this were Cromwell's soldiers, godly men, as he called them in another connection. Similar scenes happened at Chichester and Norwich. "At S. Asaph the Cathedral was used as a stable for the horses of one Miller, a postmaster, who occupied the Bishop's Palace as an inn, fed his calves in the Bishop's throne, and removed the font into his yard for use as a watering trough." In 1653 the Puritans ordered "All the Cathedral Churches in England, where there are other Churches sufficient for the people to meet in for the worship of God," to be to surveyed, pulled down, and the materials sold." Fortunately the order was not carried out. Some of you will think that I have said quite enough to convince you of the sacrilege of the Puritans.

Dissatisfaction was everywhere expressed at their tyrannical rule, and it was not without good reason that the Church people of those days cried out: "O God, the