saints before men, and merciless traitress to her own native
country."

Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new sense of a
prophetic power, the sense of a divine commission given to the preachers
of the Word to rebuke nobles and kings. At the moment when the policy of
Cromwell crushed the Church as a political power and freed the growing
Monarchy from the constitutional check which its independence furnished,
a new check offered itself in the very enthusiasm which sprang out of
the wreck of the great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of
righteousness and of a divine government of the world, men too whose
natural boldness was quickened and fired by daily contact with the older
seers who rebuked David or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the
presence of wrong. While nobles and statesmen were cowering in silence
before the dreaded power of the kingship the preachers spoke bluntly
out. Not only Latimer, but Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery
remonstrances against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had
threatened them with the divine judgement which at last overtook them.
"'The judgement of the Lord! The judgement of the Lord!' cried he, with
a lamentable voice and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of
the exiles only carried on this theory to its full developement. The
great conception of the mediaeval Church, that of the responsibility of
kings to a spiritual power, was revived at an hour when kingship was
trampling all responsibility to God or man beneath its feet. Such a
revival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later history.
Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created at the close of her reign
that moral force of public opinion which under the name of Puritanism
brought the acts and policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the
Gospel. However ill directed that force might be, however erroneously
such tests were often applied, it is to this new force that we owe the
restoration of liberty and the establishment of religious freedom. As
the voice of the first Christian preachers had broken the despotism of
the Roman Empire, so the voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke the
despotism of the English Monarchy.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth.]

But great as their issues were to be, for the moment these protests only
quickened the persecution at home. We can hardly wonder that the arrival
of Goodman's book in England in the summer of 1558 was follow