sibly be veering towards their opinions. Yet I confess it seems hardly fair to say of her, with Mr. Froude,[1] that 'she constructed her Church for a present purpose, with a conscious understanding of its hollowness. The next generation might solve its own difficulties—Elizabeth was contented if she could make her way, undethroned, through her own.' Her conduct admits of a more charitable, as well as a more probable, explanation, and one, at the same time, far more consistent with the complete despotism over the Church which she assumed in the years then approaching. Thus, if we take the main alteration made in her Prayer-book—that, namely, in the words used in the administration of the Communion — the words themselves might be understood, as, in fact, they now are, and have been in a greater or less degree ever since her time, in a quasi-Roman, or in a purely Protestant, or in any possible intermediate sense; and they were no doubt intended, as Mr. Froude would have us suppose, to be as comprehensive as possible, the object of the framers being to add one more inducement to conformity, which should smooth the way of the half-hearted Catholics, whose children, it was no doubt expected, would thus, in the course of a few years, become habituated to the Service, with all its Protestant characteristics, and would gradually forget the original gloss which had enabled their fathers to conform. Such conduct may savour more of policy than of godliness, but it is a very different thing from the deliberate construction of a delusive Church for the mere purpose of retaining the Crown, and is far more likely to have been acquiesced in by the divines who actually made the revision of the Prayer-book, and whom, because they were not martyrs, we need not stigmatise as
- ↑ Short Studies, vol. iii. p. 108.
