d. Even the older Lutheranism of Germany was threatened; and the
minds of men were already presaging the struggle which was to end in the
Thirty Years War. Such a struggle could be no foreign strife to the
Puritan. The war in the Palatinate kindled a fiercer flame in the
English Parliament than all the aggressions of the monarchy; and
Englishmen followed the campaigns of Gustavus with even keener interest
than the trial of Hampden. We shall see how great a part this sympathy
with outer Protestantism played in the earlier struggle between England
and the Stuarts: but it played as great a part in determining the
Puritan attitude towards religion at home. As hope after hope died into
defeat and disaster the mood of the Puritan grew sterner and more
intolerant. The system of compromise by which the Tudors had held
England together became more and more distasteful to him. To one who
looked on himself as a soldier of God and as a soldier who was fighting
a losing battle, the struggle with the Papacy was no matter for
compromise. It was a struggle between light and darkness, between life
and death. No innovation in faith or worship was of small account if it
tended in the direction of Rome. The peril in fact was too great to
admit of tolerance or moderation. At a moment when all that he hated was
gaining ground on all that he loved, the Puritan saw the one security
for what he held to be truth in drawing a hard-and-fast line between
that truth and what he held to be falsehood.

[Sidenote: Hooker.]

This dogged concentration of thought and feeling on a single issue told
with a fatal effect on his theology. The spirit of the Renascence had
been driven for a while from the field of religion by the strife between
Catholic and Protestant; and in the upgrowth of a more rigid system of
dogma, whether on the one side or on the other, the work of More and
Colet seemed to be undone. But no sooner had the strife lost its older
intensity, no sooner had a new Christendom fairly emerged from the
troubled waters, than the Renascence again made its influence felt. Its
voice was heard above all in Richard Hooker, a clergyman who had been
Master of the Temple, but had been driven by his distaste for the
controversies of its pulpit from London to a Wiltshire vicarage at
Boscombe, which he exchanged at a later time for the parsonage of
Bishopsbourne among the quiet meadows of Kent. During the later years of
Elizabeth he built up in these still r