hat their religion took in
most cases the form of Calvinism. But the rapid spread of Calvinism was
aided by outer causes as well as inner ones. The reign of Elizabeth had
been a long struggle for national existence. When Shakspere first trod
the streets of London it was a question whether England should still
remain England or whether it should sink into a vassal of Spain. In that
long contest the creed which Henry and Elizabeth had constructed, the
strange compromise of old tradition with new convictions which the
country was gradually shaping into a new religion for itself, had done
much for England's victory. It had held England together as a people. It
had hindered any irreparable severance of the nation into warring
churches. But it had done this unobserved. To the bulk of men the
victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome
had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the
Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome. It was the
Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the
Netherlands. It was the Puritan who broke into the Spanish Main, and who
singed Philip's beard at Cadiz. It was the Puritan whose assiduous
preachings and catechizings had slowly won the mass of the English
people to any real acceptance of Protestantism. And as the war drifted
on, as the hatred of Spain and resentment at the Papacy grew keener and
fiercer, as patriotism became more identified with Protestantism, and
Protestantism more identified with hatred of Rome, the side of English
religion which lay furthest from all contact with the tradition of the
past grew more and more popular among Englishmen.

[Sidenote: Puritanism and the people.]

To Elizabeth, whether on religious or political grounds, Calvinism was
the most hateful of her foes. But it was in vain that she strove by a
rigorous discipline to check its advance. Her discipline could only tell
on the clergy, and the movement was far more a lay than a clerical one.
Whether she would or no, in fact, the Queen's policy favoured the
Puritan cause. It was impossible to befriend Calvinism abroad without
furthering Calvinism at home. The soldiers and adventurers who flocked
from England to fight in the Huguenot camps came back steeped in the
Huguenot theology. The exiles who fled to England from France and from
the Netherlands spread their narrower type of religion through the
towns where they found a refug