Elizabeth never felt personal fear.  But she was not a private individual.  She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination, from which she never flinched, that England should be independent, spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke.  Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological, for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome.  Her own Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them “doctors,” not prelates.  Although she did not really believe that any human person, or any human formula, was required between the Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the mass and the breviary to the Book of Common Prayer.  The Inquisition was the one part of the Catholic system which she really abhorred.  For the first twenty years of her reign mass was celebrated in private houses with impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law.  No part of her policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and enlightenment than prohibition of the mass.  Nothing shows more clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it.  Even Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth’s death, declared that he would not tolerate the mass, and in general principles of religious freedom he was far ahead of his age.  Cromwell no doubt, unlike Elizabeth, was a Protestant in the religious sense.  But that was not his reason.  The mass to him, and still more to Elizabeth, was a definite symbol of political disaffection.  It was a rallying point for those who held that a heretical sovereign had no right to reign, and might lawfully be deposed, if not worse.  Between the Catholics of our day and the Catholics of Elizabeth’s time there is a great gulf fixed.  What has fixed it is a question too complex to be discussed in this place.  Catholics still revere the memory of Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who gave his blessing to Campian and Parsons on their way to stir up rebellion in England, as well as in Ireland, and to assassinate Elizabeth if opportunity should serve.  God said, “Thou shall do no murder.”  The Pope, however, thought that God had spoken too broadly, and that some qualification was required.  The sixth commandment could not have been intended for the protection of heretics; and the Jesuits, if they did not inspire, at least believed him.  Campian is regarded by thousands of good men and women, who would not hurt a fly, as a martyr to the faith, and to the faith as he conceived it he was a martyr.  He endured torture and death without flinching rather than acknowledge that Elizabeth was lawful sovereign over the whole English realm.  His courage was splendid.  There never, for the matter of that, was a braver man than Guy Fawkes.  But when Campian pretended that his mission to England was purely religious he was tampering with words in order to deceive.