This success was providential.  They next invited English exiles abroad to join them at Frankfort, saying nothing about their mutilations of the service book.  If these brethren came in, when they were all restored to England, if ever they were restored, their example, that of sufferers, would carry the day, and their service would for ever be that of the Anglican Church.  The other exiled brethren, on receiving this invitation, had enough of the wisdom of the serpent to ask, “Are we to be allowed to use our own prayer book?” The answer of the godly of Frankfort evaded the question.  At last the Frankfort Puritans showed their hand:  they disapproved of various things in the Prayer Book.  Knox, summoned from Geneva, a reluctant visitor, was already one of their preachers.  In November 1554 came Grindal, later Archbishop of Canterbury, from Zurich, ready to omit some ceremonies, so that he and his faction might have “the substance” of the Prayer Book.  Negotiations went on, and it was proposed by the Puritans to use the Geneva service.  But Knox declined to do that, without the knowledge of the non-Puritan exiles at Zurich and elsewhere, or to use the English book, and offered his resignation.  Nothing could be more fair and above-board.

There was an inchoate plan for a new Order.  That failed; and Knox, with others, consulted Calvin, giving him a sketch of the nature of the English service.  They drew his attention to the surplice; the Litany, “devised by Pope Gregory,” whereby “we use a certain conjuring of God”; the kneeling at the Communion; the use of the cross in baptism, and of the ring in marriage, clearly a thing of human, if not of diabolical invention, and the “imposition of hands” in confirmation.  The churching of women, they said, is both Pagan and Jewish.  “Other things not so much shame itself as a certain kind of pity compelleth us to keep close.”

“The tone of the letter throughout was expressly calculated to prejudice Calvin on the point submitted to him,” says Professor Hume Brown. {56} Calvin replied that the quarrel might be all very well if the exiles were happy and at ease in their circumstances, though in the Liturgy, as described, there were “tolerable (endurable) follies.”  On the whole he sided with the Knoxian party.  The English Liturgy is not pure enough; and the English exiles, not at Frankfort, merely like it because they are accustomed to it.  Some are partial to “popish dregs.”

To the extreme Reformers no break with the past could be too abrupt and precipitous:  the framers of the English Liturgy had rather adopted the principle of evolution than of development by catastrophe, and had wedded what was noblest in old Latin forms and prayers to music of the choicest English speech.  To this service, for which their fellow-religionists in England were dying at the stake, the non-Frankfortian exiles were attached.  They were Englishmen; their service, they said, should bear “an English face”:  so Knox avers, who could as yet have no patriotic love of any religious form as exclusively and essentially Scottish.