George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States, Vol. 1, 17th edition.

[283] asserted the real presence; and, on a revision of the

Chap. VIII.}

creed of the English church, the tenet of transubstantiation was no longer expressly rejected. To calm the fury of religious intolerance, let it be forever remembered, that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, which, by the statutes of the realm in the reign of Edward VI., Englishmen were punished for believing, and in that of Henry VIII. were burned at the stake for denying, was, in the reign of Elizabeth, left undecided, as a question of national indifference. She long struggled to retain images, the crucifix, and tapers, in her private chapel; she was inclined to offer prayers to the Virgin; she favored the invocation of saints.¹ She insisted upon the continuance of the celibacy of the clergy, and, during her reign, their marriages took place only by connivance.² For several years, she desired and was able to conciliate the Catholics into a partial conformity.³ The Puritans denounced concession to the Papists, even in things indifferent; but during the reign of her sister, Elizabeth had conformed in all things, and she still retained an attachment for many tenets that were deemed the most objectionable. Could she, then, favor the party of rigid reform?

Besides the influence of early education, the love of authority would not permit Elizabeth to cherish the new sect among Protestants—a sect which had risen in defiance of all ordinary powers of the world, and which could justify its existence only on a strong claim to natural liberty. The Catholics were friends to monarchy, if not to the monarch; they upheld the forms of regal government, if they were not friends to