11th. Up, and by water to Sir W. Coventry to visit him, whom I find yet
troubled at the Commissioners of Accounts, about this business of Sir W.
Warren, which is a ridiculous thing, and can come to nothing but contempt,
and thence to Westminster Hall, where the Parliament met enough to
adjourne, which they did, to the 10th of November next, and so by water
home to the office, and so to dinner, and thence at the Office all the
afternoon till night, being mightily pleased with a little trial I have
made of the use of a tube-spectacall of paper, tried with my right eye.
This day I hear that, to the great joy of the Nonconformists, the time is
out of the Act against them, so that they may meet: and they have declared
that they will have a morning lecture

[During the troubled reign of Charles I., the House of Commons gave
parishioners the right of appointing lecturers at the various
churches without the consent of rector or vicar, and this naturally
gave rise to many quarrels. In the early period of the war between
the king and the parliament, a course of sermons or lectures was
projected in aid of the parliamentary cause. These lectures, which
were preached by eminent Presbyterian divines at seven o'clock on
the Sunday mornings, were commenced in the church of St. Mary
Magdalen in Milk Street, but were soon afterwards removed to St.
Giles's, Cripplegate. After the Restoration the lectures were
collected in four volumes, and published under the title of the
"Cripplegate Morning Exercises," vol. i. in 1661; vol. ii. in 1674;
vol. iii. in 1682; and vol. iv. in 1690. In addition there were two
volumes which form a supplement to the work, viz., "The Morning
Exercises methodized," preached at St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, edited
by the Rev. Thomas Case in 1660, and the "Exercises against Popery,"
preached in Southwark, and published in 1675 (see Demon's "Records
of St. Giles's, Crinnlegate," 1883, pp. 55-56).]