This chapter lays out the Laudians’ view of what they took to be the currently deleterious physical and liturgical condition of the English church, which they attributed, in about equal part, to lay neglect and parsimony and puritan error. Having evoked the Laudian critique, the chapter then critically evaluates it, arguing that the Laudian account should not be taken as an accurate reflection of how things were but rather as a combination of anecdote and hyperbole, prompted, in part, by the Laudians’ own, very exalted, view of what true order should look like, and, in part, by the polemical demands of their situation and the intensity of their hatred for puritanism and all its works.