Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tate. In all these cases there was a principle of divided Chap. in. allegiance. In all, if there were things which were to be given to Cassar, there were also things which were to be given only to God. There were seasons in which the queen would gladly have coerced all these parties, so as to have rendered them powe
...rless; but together, they made up nearly her whole people. To have crushed them would have been to have left herself without subjects. Among all these delinquents, the Independents must have been, according to the feeling of Elizabeth, the most delinquent. The Catholic who resisted her will in favour of his ancient church ; and the Puritan who did so in favour of his limited scheme of freedom, must have been, in her view, modest men, compared with the man who presumed to oppose his private judgment to the sovereign wisdom of the state, and of her majesty as its head. Apart from this doctrine concerning the divine right of conscience, the doctrine concerning the divine right of kings in our history would have had the field very largely to itself. The Puritan, both in the pulpit and in the senate, was to place the curb that was needed on the power of Elizabeth, and was to have his mission in that form when the sceptre passed from the Tudors to the Stuarts. The religion of the Romanist in that age was the religion of secrecy. The priest moved abroad in every sort of disguise. His rites were administered in concealed apartments, and under the cover of the night, where no eye could see, no ear could listen. The loss of all things, even of life itself, was the hazard incurred by the practice of the most sacred observances of that church. Religion in such circumstances often became a religion of intense passion, of endless intrigue, of bitter disloyalty, and of Book. i. ...
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