The most conspicuous cause with which Henson was involved during his time at Durham was, in Anglican terms, of national, and even international, rather than diocesan concern. As a broad churchman he gave strong support in the mid-1920s to a major revision and modernising of the Book of Common Prayer, the Church's prescribed forms of worship, used at all services. The evangelical wing of the Church opposed the revision, which some low-church factions dubbed "popish". Henson, now on the same side as the Anglo-Catholics with whom he had early been in bitter dispute, called the opposition "the Protestant underworld". Despite the clear majority of clergy and laity in favour of the revision, the House of Commons refused to authorise it, and voted it down in 1927 and again in 1928. Henson's colleague Cyril Garbett wrote that the Commons had "made it plain that the Church does not possess full spiritual freedom to determine its worship". The Church instituted damage limitation measures by permitting parishes to use the new unauthorised text where there was a local consensus to do so, but Henson was horrified at what he saw as Parliament's betrayal of its duty to preside impartially over the governance of the Church, giving in to pressure from what he termed "an army of illiterates".