Notwithstanding such considerations, differences in religious opinion within the Church, especially as to those points which the Puritan controversy had brought into prominence, did not fail to find expression in the modes and usages of worship.  Something has been already said on this point, in speaking of the furniture of churches, the decoration of the sanctuary, and the observance of fasts and festivals.  What has now to be added relates rather to varieties in the manner of conducting services.

The rubric which occupies so prominent a place in our Prayer-book, stating ’that such ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof, at all times of their ministration, shall be retained and be in use, as were in the Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI.,’ was of course not forgotten—­as indeed it could not be—­in the eighteenth century.  High Churchmen not unfrequently called attention to it.  John Johnson, writing in 1709, said he was by no means single in his belief that this order was still legally enjoined.[1079] Archbishop Sharp appears to have been of the same opinion, and used to say that he preferred the Communion office as it was in King Edward’s Book.[1080] Nicholls, in his edition (1710) of Bishop Cosin’s annotated Prayer-book, insisted upon the continuous legality of the vestments prescribed in the old rubric, which was ‘the existing law,’ he said, ’still in force at this day.’[1081] Bishop Gibson, the learned author of the ‘Codex Juris Ecclesiastici’ (1711), although he marked the rubric as practically obsolete, steadily maintained that legally the ornaments of ministers in performing Divine Service were the same as they had been in the earlier Liturgy.[1082] In Charles I.’s reign the rubric had been by no means obsolete.  But after the Restoration the use of the more ornate vestments was not revived.  Even the cope, though prescribed for use as an Eucharistic vestment in cathedrals and collegiate churches, had become almost obsolete.  Norwich, Westminster, and Durham seem to have been the only exceptions.  At Norwich, however, the cope, presented by the High Sheriff of Norfolk in the place of one that had been burnt during the Civil War,[1083] does not appear to have been much worn.  Those at Westminster were reserved for great state occasions, such as Coronations and Royal funerals.[1084] It was only at Durham that the cope was constantly used on all festival days.  Defoe wrote in 1727 that they were still worn by some of the residents, and he then described them as ’rich with embroidery and embossed work of silver, that indeed it was a kind of load to stand under them.’[1085] A story is sometimes told of Warburton, when Prebendary of Durham in 1759, throwing off his cope in a pet, and never wearing it again, because it disturbed his wig.[1086] Their use does not seem to have been totally discontinued until 1784.[1087]