The just arguments and fervent appeals of Hooker produced no effect upon the fanatical opponents of the established Church. Under the exasperating conditions which produced the Great Rebellion and the substitution of the Commonwealth for the monarchy, the hatred against everything identified with ecclesiastical and political oppression became tenfold confirmed; and upon the triumph of the most extreme democratic and non-conformist faction, as represented by the army of Cromwell and the “Rump” Parliament, nothing stood in the way of carrying the iconoclastic purpose into effect. In 1644 the House of Lords, under the pressure of the already triumphant opposition, passed an ordinance that the Prayer Book should no longer be used in any place of public worship. In lieu of the liturgy a new form of worship was decreed, in which the congregational singing of metrical psalms was all the music allowed. “It is the duty of Christians,” so the new rule declares, “to praise God publicly by singing of psalms, together in the congregation and also privately in the family. In singing of psalms the voice is to be tunably and gravely ordered; but the chief care is to sing with understanding and with grace in the heart, making melody unto the Lord. That the whole congregation may join herein, every one that can read is to have a psalm-book, and all others not disabled by age or otherwise are to be exhorted to learn to read. But for the present, where many in the congregation cannot read, it is convenient that the minister, or some fit person appointed by him and the other ruling officers, do read the psalm line by line before the singing thereof.”[81]
The rules framed by the commission left the matter of instrumental music untouched. Perhaps it was considered a work of supererogation to proscribe it, for if there was anything which the Puritan conscience supremely abhorred it was an organ. Sir Edward Deering, in his bill for the abolition of episcopacy, expressed the opinion of the zealots of his party in the assertion that “one groan in the Spirit is worth the diapason of all the church music in the world.”
As far back as 1586 a pamphlet which had a wide circulation prays that “all cathedral churches may be put down, where the service of God is grievously abused by piping with organs, singing, ringing, and trowling of psalms from one side of the choir to the other, with the squeaking of chanting choristers, disguised in white surplices; some in corner caps and silly copes, imitating the fashion and manner of Antichrist the Pope, that man of sin and child of perdition, with his other rabble of miscreants and shavelings.”