Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/359

I570-] THE RIDOLFI CONSPIRACY. 345 siasm fiercer far to encounter the revival of Catholic fanaticism ; and if the young Puritans, in the heat and glow of their convictions, snapped their traces and flung off their harness, it was they, after all, who saved the Church which attempted to disown them, and with the Church saved also the stolid mediocritv to which the fates then and ever committed and commit the government of it. In the months which followed the suppression of the Northern rebellion,, the peace of Cambridge was troubled by the apparition of a man of genius. Thomas Cartwright, now about thirty-five years old, had entered at St John's in 1550. He left the University during the Marian persecution, and kept terms as a law student in London. He returned on the accession of Elizabeth, became a Fellow, and continued in residence, till the Vestment Controversy of 1564 sickened him for a time with English theology, and he went over to Geneva. In Calvin's atmosphere he recovered his spirits, came back to Cambridge, and by some accident was appointed Margaret Professor of Divinity. Cartwright was no doubt at this time a questionable occupant of an Eng- lish ecclesiastical office. He was at the age when men of noble and fiery natures are impatient of unrealities. He had been ordained deacon, but he had come to un- derstand that the so-called ' Holy Orders,' in their transcendental sense, were things of the past. He de stroyed his license. The sole credentials of a teacher which he consented to recognize were the intellect and spirit which had been received direct from God ; and