or an unbeliever: and a person with the intellect, the education, the experience, and, above all, the temperament, of Elizabeth, is predestined, by disposition and circumstances alike, to take the middle course, and does not deserve the stigma of hypocrisy for so doing.
If we now turn from Elizabeth's character to her work, we shall find that, whether good or bad—for on that point men will differ till the end of time—it was great and characteristic, it was of inestimable importance to the English nation, and it has been most wonderfully permanent—for it has not changed in any important feature since her time—and it was her own. That the Church of England as we now see it is as we now see it, is due to Elizabeth herself and to none other. The share of her counsellors was great, and amongst them in this matter, as in others, the foremost place must be assigned to Cecil; but it was not to her counsellors, and certainly not to Cecil, that it was due that the moderate and, at least theoretically, unobjectionable demands of the early Puritans were not conceded. The letters of Jewell and others of the early Elizabethan bishops, show plainly not only that there would have been no great opposition on their part, but that it was the Queen herself and the Queen only who stood between them and concession. To estimate the whole effect of such concession, had it been made, is of course impossible; but it seems clear that it must have changed the whole subsequent history of the Church of England. A large proportion of the nominal members of the English Church in the early part of Elizabeth's reign must have consisted of those more or less indifferent persons who had been brought up in childhood as Catholics, who had lacked ability or
