surprise many, were they aware how
numerous were our ancient families and our eminent characters who
still remained Catholics.[402] The country was then divided, and
Englishmen who were heroic Romanists fell the terrible victims.

On the other side, the national evil took a new form. It is
probable that the Queen, regarding the mere ceremonies of religion,
now venerable with age, as matters of indifference, and her fine
taste perhaps still lingering amid the solemn gorgeousness of the
Roman service, and her senses and her emotions excited by the
religious scenery, did not share in that abhorrence of the paintings
and the images, the chant and the music, the censer and the altar,
and the pomp of the prelatical habits, which was prompting many
well-intentioned Reformers to reduce the ecclesiastical state into
apostolical nakedness and primitive rudeness. She was slow to meet
this austerity of feeling, which in this country at length extirpated
those arts which exalt our nature, and for this these pious Vandals
nicknamed the Queen "the untamed heifer;" and the fierce Knox
expressly wrote his "First Blast Against the Monstrous Government of
Women." Of these Reformers, many had imbibed the republican
notions of Calvin. In their hatred of Popery, they imagined that they
had not gone far enough in their wild notions of reform, for they
viewed it, still shadowed out in the new hierarchy of the bishops.
The fierce Calvin, in his little church at Geneva, presumed to rule a
great nation on the scale of a parish institution; copying the
apostolical equality at a time when the Church (say the Episcopalians)
had all the weakness of infancy, and could live together in a
community of all things, from a sense of their common poverty. Be
this as it may, the dignified ecclesiastical order was a vulnerable
institution, which could do no greater injury, and might effect as
much public good as any other order in the state.[403] My business
is not with this discussion. I mean to show how the republican system
of these Reformers ended in a political struggle which, crushed in
the reign of Elizabeth, and beaten down in that of James, so
furiously triumphed under Charles. Their history exhibits the
curious spectacle of a great religious body covering a political
one--such as was discovered among the Jesuits, and such as may again
distract the empire, in some new and unexpected shape.

Elizabeth was harassed by the two factions of the intriguin