they would have proceeded, as they actually did, to demand, one after another, the abolition of the liturgy, the establishment of lay elders, the abolition of bishops, and the equality of ministers; and thence to that complete exaltation of the ministry above the Parliament and the sovereign which, as we have seen, they proposed, and which a century or so later was actually realised to no slight degree in Scotland. All this could not, of course, be patent to the eyes of Elizabeth and her advisers, but they may well have felt that concession is often a two-edged weapon, and, in the act of disposing of one enemy, not unfrequently arouses others.
As we read the evidence in contemporary documents, it appears almost incredible that Elizabeth could have maintained as she did throughout her reign, with constantly increasing narrowness and rigidity, the system of universal repression which it displays to us. But the era of toleration had not yet dawned: none but a very few of the most enlightened minds had even dreamed of it: and the Puritans themselves insisted upon the universal obligation of their own system as strongly as did the Papists on theirs. Elizabeth's religious system, which was, in the first instance, merely a revival of Edward VI. 's, and is so spoken of constantly by those most intimately concerned in its establishment,[1] was treated from the first by the Papists as mere Protestantism, and was accepted as such by the foreign Protestants; but it retained a sufficient amount of the external forms and ceremonies of the old religion to maintain the decency and order of public worship, while the definitions of doctrine were elastic enough to admit
- ↑ E.g., Parkhurst to Bullinger, Zurich Letters, p. 29; Jewell to the same, ib. p. 33.
