f Rome
drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were
antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in
their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an
echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical
institutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of
ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride,
could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and
personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of
religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation
tended more and more to supersede its political one. All that is
generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same direction. To
statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the acceptance of one form of faith or
worship after another as one sovereign after another occupied the throne
seemed, no doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance of
the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there must have been
something false and ignoble in the sight of a statesman or a priest who
had cast off the Mass under Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and
who was ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. If
worship and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they had any
semblance of connexion with divine realities, men must have felt that it
was impossible to put them on and off at a king's caprice. It was this,
even more than the natural pity which they raised, that gave their
weight to the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out in
emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, of a belief
dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate of the Church to the
"blind girl" who perished at Colchester, three hundred were found in
England who chose rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the
Queen's will what their individual conscience had renounced as a lie
against God.

[Sidenote: Calvin.]

But from the actual assertion of such a right of the individual
conscience to find and hold what was true, even those who witnessed for
it by their death would have shrunk. Driven by sheer force of fact from
the theory of a national and royal faith, men still shuddered to stand
alone. The old doctrine of a Catholic Christianity flung over them its
spell. Rome indeed they looked on as Antichrist, but the doctrine which
Rome had held so long and so firmly, the doctrine that trut