In December 1641 the Puritan preachers petitioned Parliament to establish regular monthly fast days with prayer and preaching and to call a synod of divines in order to reconstitute the Church. Parliament approved the first proposal at once but delayed adopting the second until a year and a half later. By that time war had begun with the King but, contrary to the assurances put forth by the preachers, the Lord had so far withheld victory from his professed servants, and in June 1643, a royalist plot was exposed in London only just in time to save Parliament from being overthrown by violence. Moved by this with sermons at St. Margaret's by Stephen Marshall and Obadiah Sedgwich and then at last voted to call the long desired Assembly of Divines. This body convened at Westminster on July 1, and a special fast day in honor of the event was held a week later with sermons by Matthew Newcomen and Oliver Bowles.

It we were to choose the two most important allegorists of the twelfth century in Western Europe, one of them would certainly be Bernard of Clairvaux, and the other would probably be Hugo of Saint-Victor (1096–1141); for they are the two most influential mystical exegetes of their time. While these two men have points of contact, their careers and their writings offer many contrasts. Both are mystics: both seek after the vision beatific. But the one is a true monk, who shuns secular learning, is blind to the natural beauty about him; the other, as a canon-regular teaching in a busy Paris school, lives on the threshold of the outside world; and finds an important, if ancillary, place for the secular learning of the day in his program of studies. Each had his part to play in the quickening of piety and learning which characterized the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Western Europe.