Samuel Gardiner articulates the contrasting points of view, History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603-1642, Vol. 7, pp. 14-15:
To the Calvinist the pulpit was clearly the first thing in the Church, the place where the Divine Word, through the intervention of the understanding, was dispensed to hungry souls. To those who recurred to older Church traditions the communion-table, or, as they loved to call it, the altar, was worthy of the highest reverence, the place where holy mysteries were dispensed which raised man into communion with God without the intervention of the understanding. The one party would have had the table either standing permanently under the pulpit or brought out occasionally for its special purpose, to be placed 'table wise,' or east and west. The other party would have had it placed permanently 'altar wise,' or north and south, in the place of honour at the east end.
Those aligned with Archbishop William Laud, who first laid the groundwork for his position in a 1633 Act of Privy Council applicable to the church of St. Gregory beside St. Paul's, London, later enforced in a 1635 ruling applicable to the entire Church of England, argued that the mystical nature of the communion table required its permanent placement at the east end of the church in a north-south direction, set apart with rails, as an altar, attributing thus Popish ceremonial significance to the table. Especially in the context of other Anglo-Catholic measures, Puritans understood the meaning of this as articulated in the December 11, 1640 'Root and Branch Petition':
16. The turning of the Communion-table altar-wise, setting images, crucifixes, and conceits over them, and tapers and books upon them, and bowing or adoring to or before them; the reading of the second service at the altar, and forcing people to come up thither to receive, or else denying the sacrament to them; terming the altar to be the mercy-seat, or the place of God Almighty in the church, which is a plain device to usher in the Mass.
They argued instead of a permanent fixture of the table in a north-south direction, that it be placed in an east-west direction and be moveable, without rails. The theological significance of this position is not that east-west is somehow invested with greater spiritual benefit than north-south; on the contrary, the Laudian altar-wise party claimed that point for themselves. One Puritan, Daniel Cawdrey, was known to place the table altar-wise but move it table-wise at communion (Tom Webster, Godly clergy in early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan movement, 1620-1643, p. 220), thus making the point that the direction was a matter of indifference, except that to the extent that superstitious ceremonial significance was to be resisted and not conceded.
The battle for the placement of the table resulted in not only a war of words, but ecclesiastical and civil enforcement measures and, in some cases, physical violence. Why such conflict over the location of a table which Biblically signifies the unity of Christ's Church? By attributing to it sacerdotal significance, the question of placement of the table was moved from the realm of circumstantial adiaphora to an infringement upon the regulative principle of worship. And thus, it became a battle over the crown prerogatives of Christ to alone dictate the ordinances of worship.
As Matthew Poole rightly stated (A Seasonable Apology of Religion), "What Galen said of Physics is even truer of religion. There is nothing small and trivial in it."
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