Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/215

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REIGN OF ELIZABETH
191

intended, apparently, not to hinder it, but to ensure it against any possible scandal.

These are evidently the result of the remonstrances of the Protestant divines, some of which are preserved to us by Strype[1] and Burnet,[2] and are instances of that remarkable tact which so often enabled Elizabeth to yield her own opinions exactly at the right moment. Two other provisions may be noticed, the source of which is, perhaps, not quite so evident. Thus, in 20 the clergy are bidden to teach their parishioners 'that they may with a safe and quiet conscience, after their common prayer in the time of harvest, labour upon the holy and festival days, and save that thing which God hath sent,' &c. Surely a wholesome and truly Christian doctrine, which must, however, have been as unwelcome to the Puritans of that age as some other provisions in these Injunctions were to the Papists, or as it would now be to the less-excusable Sabbatarians of our own days. In 45, again, there is a direction to the Ordinary to 'exhibit unto our Visitors their books, or a true copy of the same, containing the cause why any person was imprisoned, famished, or put to death for religion'— a provision apparently intended to put on record what had actually taken place in Mary's reign, to be published, probably, should there appear any danger of a serious reaction in favour of the old religion.

Elizabeth's Injunctions are not only anti-Papal—they are thoroughly Protestant, and that is a fact which we shall have to consider when we come to sum up the ecclesiastical results of her reign. To these same early years—the interval between the first and second Parlia-

  1. Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. p. 331.
  2. Burnet, vol. ii. p. 629.