On leaving Thomas, Bull applied to Robert Skinner, the ejected bishop of Oxford, for episcopal ordination, and was ordained by him deacon and priest the same day, aged 21.

William Master performed the ceremony of marriage according to the form prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, although that usage was forbidden under penalty at the time.

In 1659 the rectory at Siddington became one of the many places of meeting at which the friends of the exiled dynasty assembled to concert measures for the Restoration of Charles II of England.

After the publication of the Defensio (1685), dedicated to Heneage Finch, 1st Earl of Nottingham who had presented him in 1678 to a prebend at Gloucester, Bull was given the rectory of Avening.

[1] After the 1688 Glorious Revolution he was placed on the commission of peace, and continued to act as a magistrate until he was made a bishop, in connection with the Society for the Reformation of Manners.

He started to tour his diocese, but illness detained him at Brecknock, where he resided: his son-in-law, Mr. Stevens, and Mr. Powell went as his commissioners, and during the whole period he was failing.

[1] He wrote his first book, the Harmonia Apostolica, in an attempt to reconcile the apparent discrepancies between St Paul and the Epistle of James on the relationship of faith and good works in Christian justification.

The context was that Petavius and Simon Episcopius, to take two examples, denied that the ante-Nicene Church Fathers held the same doctrines as those which were established at the Council of Nicaea.

[1] A substantial excerpt from the Defensio Fidei Nicaenae was reprinted by Abbé Migne in his seventh volume devoted to Origen in the Patrologia Graeca (vol.

Episcopius held that the Nicene fathers did not consider a belief in our Lord's true and proper divinity as an indispensable term of catholic communion; Bull wrote the Judicium to prove that they did.

His last work on the trinitarian question, entitled Primitiva et Apostolica Traditio, was directed against the opinion of Daniel Zwicker, that Christ's divinity, preexistence, and incarnation were inventions of early heretics.