and vastly more confidence in themselves, and when they had once taken up the false principle that they ought to make their worship as unlike that of the old Church as they could, and that they could draw the exact type of their Church government and discipline from the Bible itself, it soon became obvious that, good men as many of them were, they could not be brought under any uniform and orderly government at all, and would perpetually differ, even amongst themselves. The trials which many of the men of this party had undergone under the Act of Six Articles, and afterwards in Mary's reign, together with the circumstances of their exile at Frankfort, Strasburg, Geneva, Zurich, and elsewhere, had both intensified their hatred of Popery, and attached many of them greatly to one or another of the Continental forms of Protestantism, and had thus accentuated the differences between them and the moderate party.
We must remember, nevertheless, that these differences, in the times with which we are now dealing, were only as those between the different wings of a modern political party, and were scarcely yet ready to be displayed in the face of the enemy. It was Elizabeth's own decided adherence to the former party which at once gave it a decisive preponderance, and aggravated the discontent of its rival. It would be entirely inconsistent with Elizabeth's character and intellect to suppose that she really cared one jot for the points in controversy between the tw^o; but she did care for order and pomp and appearances in other things, and in religion too; and, above all, being a Tudor, she did care to have her own way, and she looked upon the Church of England as her own Church, over which her own personal authority was supreme, and to find
