ion of much
that they looked on as superstitious and Popish in even the last liturgy
of Edward's reign. That ministers should still wear white surplices,
that litanies should be sung, that the congregation should respond to
the priest, that babes should be signed in baptism with the sign of the
cross, that rings should be given in marriage, filled them with horror.
Hooper, the leader of this party, refused when made bishop to don his
rochet; and had only been driven by imprisonment to vest himself in "the
rags of Popery." Trivial indeed as such questions seemed in themselves,
an issue lay behind them which was enough to make men face worse evils
than a prison. The royal supremacy, the headship of the Church, which
Henry the Eighth claimed for himself and his successors, was, as we have
seen, simply an application of the principle which the states of North
Germany had found so effective in meeting the pretensions of the Emperor
or the Pope. The same sentiment of national life took a new form in the
preservation of whatever the change of religious thought left it
possible to preserve in the national tradition of faith and worship. In
the Lutheran churches, though the Mass was gone, reredos and crucifix
remained untouched. In England the whole ecclesiastical machinery was
jealously preserved. Its Church was still governed by bishops who traced
their succession to the Apostles. The words of its new Prayer-Book
adhered as closely as they might to the words of Missal and Breviary.
What made such an arrangement possible was the weakness of the purely
religious impulse in the earlier stages of the Reformation. In Germany
indeed or in England, the pressure for theological change was small; the
religious impulse told on but a small part, and that not an influential
part, of the population; it did in fact little more than quicken and
bring into action the older and widely-felt passion for ecclesiastical
independence.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and the Supremacy.]

But the establishment of this independence at once gave fresh force to
the religious movement. From denouncing the Pope as a usurper of
national rights men passed easily to denounce the Papal system as in
itself Antichristian. In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a
ground of faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of
faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the Bible opened
up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, and the hatred o