rnment, a form of church
worship, stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the
superstitions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and frugal
life, his enormous industry, his power of government, his quick
decision, his undoubting self-confidence, his unswerving will, remained
for three-and-twenty years till his death in 1564 supreme over
Protestant opinion. His influence told heavily on England. From the hour
of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn
them, not to the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, but to the more
progressive Churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands: and on the
critical question of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two
great branches of the Reformation Cranmer and his partizans became more
definitely anti-sacramentarian as the years went by. At Edward's death
the exiles showed their tendencies by seeking refuge not with the
Lutheran Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic Churches of
Switzerland or the Rhine; and contact with such leaders as Bullinger at
Zuerich or Calvin at Geneva could hardly fail to give fresh vigour to the
party which longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and a
more open breach with the past.

[Sidenote: The troubles at Frankfort.]

The results of this contact first showed themselves at Frankfort. At the
instigation of Whittingham, who in Elizabeth's days became Dean of
Durham, a body of English exiles that had found shelter there resolved
to reform both worship and discipline. The obnoxious usages were
expunged from the Prayer-Book, omissions were made in the communion
service, a minister and deacons chosen, and rules drawn up for church
government after the Genevan model. Free at last "from all dregs of
superstitious ceremonies" the Frankfort refugees thanked God "that had
given them such a church in a strange land wherein they might hear God's
holy word preached, the sacraments rightly ministered, and discipline
used, which in their own country could never be obtained." But their
invitation to the other English exiles to join them in the enjoyment of
these blessings met with a steady repulse. Lever and the exiles at
Zuerich refused to come unless they might "altogether serve and praise
God as freely and uprightly as the order last taken in the Church of
England permitteth and presenteth, for we are fully determined to admit
and use no other." The main body of the exiles who were then gathered at