er Mr. Stewart's secret arrival at Maxwell
Hall, the Rector was walking up and down the lawn that adjoined the
churchyard.

He had never yet wholly recovered from the sneers of Mistress Corbet; the
wounds had healed but had not ceased to smart. How blind these Papists
were, he thought! how prejudiced for the old trifling details of worship!
how ignorant of the vital principles still retained! The old realities of
God and the faith and the Church were with them still, in this village,
he reminded himself; it was only the incrustations of error that had been
removed. Of course the transition was difficult and hearts were sore; but
the Eternal God can be patient. But then, if the discontent of the
Papists smouldered on one side, the fanatical and irresponsible zeal of
the Puritans flared on the other. How difficult, he thought, to steer the
safe middle course! How much cool faith and clearsightedness it needed!
He reminded himself of Archbishop Parker who now held the rudder, and
comforted himself with the thought of his wise moderation in dealing with
excesses, his patient pertinacity among the whirling gusts of passion,
that enabled him to wait upon events to push his schemes, and his tender
knowledge of human nature.

But in spite of these reassuring facts Mr. Dent was anxious. What could
even the Archbishop do when his suffragans were such poor creatures; and
when Leicester, the strongest man at Court, was a violent Puritan
partisan? The Rector would have been content to bear the troubles of his
own flock and household if he had been confident of the larger cause; but
the vagaries of the Puritans threatened all with ruin. That morning only
he had received a long account from a Fellow of his own college of Corpus
Christi, Cambridge, and a man of the same views as himself, of the
violent controversy raging there at that time.

"The Professor," wrote his friend, referring to Thomas Cartwright, "is
plastering us all with his Genevan ways. We are all Papists, it seems!
He would have neither bishop nor priest nor archbishop nor dean nor
archdeacon, nor dignitaries at all, but just the plain Godly Minister, as
he names it. Or if he has the bishop and the deacon they are to be the
_Episcopos_ and the _Diaconos_ of the Scripture, and not the Papish
counterfeits! Then it seems that the minister is to be made not by God
but by man--that the people are to make him, not the bishop (as if the
sheep should make the shepherd). Then