ted no wholesale massacre,
like the demented fury of France; she had a loving care of her subjects
that no religious bigotry could suppress. She did not seek to
exterminate Catholics or Puritans, but simply to build up the Church of
England as the shield and defence and enlargement of Protestantism in
times of unmitigated religious ferocity,--a Protestantism that has
proved the bulwark of European liberties, as it was the foundation of
all progress in England. In giving an impulse to this great emancipating
movement, even if she did not push it to its remote logical end,
Elizabeth was a benefactor of her country and of mankind, and is not
unjustly called a nursing-mother of the Church,--being so regarded by
Protestants, not in England merely, but on the Continent of Europe. When
was ever a religious revolution effected, or a national church
established, with so little bloodshed? When have ever such great changes
proved so popular and so beneficial, and, I may add, so permanent? After
all the revolutions in English thought and life for three hundred years,
the Church as established by Elizabeth is still dear to the great body
of English people, and has survived every agitation. And even many
things which the Puritans sought to sweep away--the music of the choir,
organs, and chants, even the holidays of venerated ages--are now revived
by the descendants of the Puritans with ancient ardor; showing how
permanent are such festivals as Christmas and Easter in the heart of
Christendom, and how hopeless it is to eradicate what the Church and
Christianity, from their earliest ages, have sanctioned and commended.

The next great service which Elizabeth rendered to England was a
development of its resources,--ever a primal effort with wise statesmen,
with such administrators as Sully, Colbert, Richelieu. The policy of her
Government was not the policy of aggrandizement in war, which has ever
provoked jealousies and hatreds in other nations, and led to dangerous
combinations, and sowed the seed of future wars. The policy of Napoleon
was retaliated in the conquests of Prussia in our day; and the policy of
Prussia may yet lead to its future dismemberment, in spite of the
imperial realm shaped by Bismarck. "With what measure ye mete, it shall
be measured to you again,"--an eternal law, binding both individuals and
nations, from which there is no escape. The government of Elizabeth did
not desire or aim at foreign conquests,--the great