oved into the middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed.
Under James Archbishop Abbott put the finishing stroke on all attempts
at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer used as a special vestment
in the communion. The Primate and his chaplains forbore to bow at the
name of Christ. The organ and choir were alike abolished, and the
service reduced to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin.

[Sidenote: Puritanism and politics.]

Foiled as it was, the effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of
Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a
clear realization of the impossibility of harmonizing the new temper of
the nation with the system of personal government which had done its
work under the Tudors. With the republican and anti-monarchical theories
indeed that Calvinism had begotten elsewhere, English Calvinism showed
as yet no sort of sympathy. The theories of resistance, of a people's
right to judge and depose its rulers, which had been heard in the heat
of the Marian persecution, had long sunk into silence. The loyalty of
the Puritan gentleman was as fervent as that of his fellows. But with
the belief of the Calvinist went necessarily a new and higher sense of
political order. The old conception of personal rule, the dependence of
a nation on the arbitrary will of its ruler, was jarring everywhere more
and more with the religious as well as the philosophic impulses of the
time. Men of the most different tendencies were reaching forward to the
same conception of law. Bacon sought for universal laws in material
nature. Hooker asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. It was
in the same way that the Puritan sought for a divine law by which the
temporal kingdoms around him might be raised into a kingdom of Christ.
The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his
earnestness to discover a Divine Will which in all things, great or
small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience was
reserved for the Divine Will alone; for human ordinances derived their
strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law of God.
The Puritan was bound by his religion to examine every claim made on his
civil and spiritual obedience by the powers that be; and to own or
reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty which he owed to
God. "In matters of faith," a Puritan wife tells us of her husband, "his
reason always submitted to the Word of God