Taking refuge in the chapel of Sir Richard Browne in Paris, while at the same time making a desperate effort to preserve Anglican faith amid a rising tide of conversions, John Cosin, exiled dean of Peterborough and later bishop of Durham, turned to Scripture for both comfort and guidance. Writing in the margins of a form of prayer for services held at Charles II's chapel in The Hague, Cosin singled out passages which reveal the minds of the Royalist exiles to have been locked within a narrative of both sin and divine trial, where correction through God's judgment grappled with fears of being ‘brought to nothing’ by His wrath. Cosin, despite later being praised by Charles II for acting with ‘piety and zeale’ during the Civil Wars, would witness within the same year the defeat of the Church's nominal head at Worcester and the conversion of his only son to Catholicism. Unsurprisingly, Cosin's doubts and reflections crept into his sermons while serving as chaplain in Browne's Protestant chapel: the ever-attentive John Evelyn recorded that Cosin, in a sermon given at the ordination of John Durel and Daniel Brevint by Thomas Sydserff, bishop of Galloway, observed that ‘so greate perfection in a church, [was] not likely to escape the uttermost malice of Sathan, and his cursed Instruments’.