inclination to form opinions for themselves, and who complied more or less unwillingly with the law which compelled them to attend the English services. The loss of the vestments and ceremonies still retained, might no doubt have disgusted many of these, and have driven them back to the old faith; and of anything calculated to add strength to the Catholic party Elizabeth had throughout her reign a well-founded fear, and this fear came in aid of her own taste and feeling- to prevent the concession. On the other hand, had the concession been made when first demanded, it would have conciliated the bulk of the early Puritans at the time, and it may doubtless be argued that it would have taken at once the brain and the heart out of the Puritan movement, would have enlisted the ablest and best of the Puritans on the side of the Church, and so prevented the formation of that great half-organised body of nonconformity which has played so considerable a part, for evil as well as for good, in the subsequent history of this country[1] But it may be replied that it is by no means certain that all this would have happened.[2] It is at least as likely that the Puritan demands would have grown with the concession just as they did grow without it; that, having obtained the abolition of the vestments and ceremonies,
- ↑ It is argued, by no less a writer than Hallam, that up to the appearance of Cartwright as the leader of the Puritans, concessions to them would have been safe and judicious.
- ↑ Cartwright was not an isolated portent totally unconnected with other men, or with the circumstances of the times. Had he been so, he would have produced no effect; and the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, is to determine how far Cartwright was himself produced by Elizabeth's high-pressure system, or was the natural result of that very peculiar theology which her system had entirely failed to check; and with the example of the Scotch Church before us, we are naturally inclined to the latter explanation rather than the former.
