fault with which was to call in question her own judgment and her own arrangements.
Many, if not even most, of Elizabeth's bishops and divines, at least in the earlier part of her reign, sympathised in a great degree with the Puritans, even while they were unwilling, for the sake of a square cap or the use of the sign of the Cross in baptism, to risk the whole cause of establishing a national Church which should at once, as they hoped, be pure from the corruptions of Rome, and maintain a position of dignity and influence in the nation and avoid anarchical and fanatical extravagances. Jewell may safely be taken as an example of the very best of the Elizabethan divines, and Jewell's sentiments are thus expressed[1] in his own words: 'The contest, about which I doubt not you have heard either from our friends Abel or Parkhurst, respecting the linen surplice, is not yet at rest. The matter still somewhat disturbs weak minds; and I wish that all, even the slightest, vestiges of Popery might be removed from our churches, and above all from our minds. But the Queen, at this time, is unable to endure the least alteration in matters of religion.' It seems, then, that it was to Elizabeth's personal caprice, rather than to any scruples on the part of the divines of the Church of England, that the first beginnings of organised Puritan discontent are due; but, as usually happens, the longer the dispute continued, the more bitter it became, and those who at first differed about mere questions of habits or ceremonies, by dwelling constantly upon their points of difference, and forgetting their far more numerous and important subjects of union, drew gradually farther apart until the Puritan
- ↑ Zurich Letters, pp. 148-9, Jewell to Bullinger and Lavater, Feb. 3 1566.
