There were, again, branch controversies from some of these. For instance: on the office of bishops, the question at first was whether bishops are allowable as they stand in the Church of England? But Bancroft, afterward archbishop of Canterbury, asserted that bishops are superior to all other offices in the church, by divine right of the appointment of God himself. To sustain this claim, they were compelled to hold, not the Bible alone as authority, but the Bible and the church of the first five centuries, especially as illustrated in the forms of church government.
The Puritans and Presbyterians, in denying this, and asserting the sufficiency of the Bible alone, and charging all these other things to the account of Rome, as being
"vain, superstitious, idolatrous, and diametrically opposite to the injunctions of the Gospel,"
were involved in a serious dilemma. When they inveighed so heavily against the rites, ceremonies, and festival days of the Conformists, as being of Rome, and "superstitious, idolatrous," etc., the Episcopalians retorted upon them, that the observance of Sunday was only an ordinance of the church, and that therefore if they renounced the authority of the church, and held "the Bible and the Bible only," they must give up the observance of Sunday.