worked themselves up into a profound belief that everyone of their own crotchets was directed by the infallible word of God; and the bishops could not yield because to them to yield was to give up the cause altogether. They held their places simply on the condition that they maintained the state of Church doctrine and discipline which had been established by law and which Elizabeth was determined should not be changed. Many of them believed, and not unreasonably believed, that it was far better, in itself, than that which the Puritans would substitute for it, and even those who sympathised most strongly with the latter party, saw plainly that, if they proposed to yield, Elizabeth would simply get rid of them, and supply their places with any men she could find who would undertake to carry out her views, and such men, they might not unreasonably argue, were likely to be worse rather than better than themselves. And thus in the curious mélange of human motives the most disinterested anxiety for the safety of the Christian religion in England may have mingled in the most varying proportion, in the minds of the Elizabethan bishops, with a sordid and worldly care for their own personal profit and dignity.
That a moderate party did exist, and that it numbered, as may be expected, among its members many of the ablest and best men in the country, is evident. At Cambridge, where the influence of Cartwright and Travers had been greatest, we are told: ' We may clearly discern the existence of a not inconsiderable section whose retirement from the ranks of Puritanism was the result of a genuine and far from irrational conviction of the disastrous tendency of the consequences to which that movement was leading.'[1] Chaderton, the first Master of
- ↑ Mullinger, op. cit. p. 299.
