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217 REIGN OF ELIZABETH (continued)

consideration of the incidental matters referred to in the Litter part of the last chapter, while it has interrupted the proper course of the history, may nevertheless be excused, inasmuch as the history itself could scarcely be intelligible without it. The whole course of legislation, and not of legislation only, but of State policy also, so far as it affected religion, was profoundly modified by the bull of Pope Pius V., and by the Catholic conspiracies which followed it. Up to the time of the publication of that bull, Elizabeth and the Church of England were in the position of a province in rebellion, indeed, against the empire of which it had formed a part, but not yet separated from it. The bull was the final and fatal act—not its own, indeed, but that of the Catholic Mother Church—by which the Church of England was recognised as separate, and by the very recognition condemned as hostile to the Church Catholic, and the enemy of God and man.

Up to this time, however much Catholic Englishmen may have disapproved Elizabeth's ecclesiastical proceedings, they were not called upon peremptorily by authority to oppose them actively; now they were placed once for all under the uncomfortable necessity of taking a decided line one way or the other.

The general result of this bolder line of policy