It explains the difficulty of Elizabeth’s position and the inconsistency of her political action.  Burghley, Walsingham, Mildmay, Knolles, the elder Bacon, were believing Protestants, and would have had her put herself openly at the head of a Protestant European league.  They believed that right and justice were on their side, that their side was God’s cause, as they called it, and that God would care for it.  Elizabeth had no such complete conviction.  She disliked dogmatism, Protestant as well as Catholic.  She ridiculed Mr. Cecil and his brothers in Christ.  She thought, like Erasmus, that the articles of faith, for which men were so eager to kill one another, were subjects which they knew very little about, and that every man might think what he would on such matters without injury to the commonwealth.  To become ’head of the name’ would involve open war with the Catholic powers.  War meant war taxes, which more than half her subjects would resent or resist.  Religion as she understood it was a development of law—­the law of moral conduct.  You could not have two laws in one country, and you could not have two religions; but the outward form mattered comparatively little.  The people she ruled over were divided about these forms.  They were mainly fools, and if she let them each have chapels and churches of their own, molehills would become mountains, and the congregations would go from arguing into fighting.  With Parliament to help her, therefore, she established a Liturgy, in which those who wished to find the Mass could hear the Mass, while those who wanted predestination and justification by faith could find it in the Articles.  Both could meet under a common roof, and use a common service, if they would only be reasonable.  If they would not be reasonable, the Catholics might have their own ritual in their own houses, and would not be interfered with.

This system continued for the first eleven years of Elizabeth’s reign.  No Catholic, she could proudly say, had ever during that time been molested for his belief.  There was a small fine for non-attendance at church, but even this was rarely levied, and by the confession of the Jesuits the Queen’s policy was succeeding too well.  Sensible men began to see that the differences of religion were not things to quarrel over.  Faith was growing languid.  The elder generation, who had lived through the Edward and Mary revolutions, were satisfied to be left undisturbed; a new generation was growing up, with new ideas; and so the Church of Rome bestirred itself.  Elizabeth was excommunicated.  The cycle began of intrigue and conspiracy, assassination plots, and Jesuit invasions.  Punishments had to follow, and in spite of herself Elizabeth was driven into what the Catholics could call religious persecution.  Religious it was not, for the seminary priests were missionaries of treason.  But religious it was made to appear.  The English gentleman who wished to remain loyal, without forfeiting his faith, was taught to see that