Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/226

 206 REIGN* OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 43. Elizabeth's sensitiveness. It exposed the dead men's bones which lay beneath the whited surface of Uni- versity good order ; and she went back to London with a heart as heavy as she carried away from it. The vast majority of serious Englishmen, if they did not believe in transubstantiation, yet felt for the sacrament a kind of mysterious awe. Systematic irreverence had in- truded into the churches ; carelessness and irreligion had formed an unnatural alliance with Puritanism ; and in many places the altars were bare boards resting on tressels in the middle of the nave. The communi- cants knelt, stood, or sat as they pleased ; the chalice was the first cup which came to hand ; and the clergy- men wore surplice, coat, black gown, or their ordinary dress, as they were Lutherans, Calvinists, Puritans, or nothing at all. 1 The parish churches themselves, those amazing monuments of early piety, built by men who themselves lived in clay hovels while they lavished their taste, their labour, and their wealth on ' the house of God/ were still dissolving into ruin. The roofs were break- ing into holes ; the stained whitewash was crumbling off the damp walls, revealing the half-effaced remains of the frescoed stories of the saints ; the painted glass was gone from the windows; the wind and the rain swept through the dreary aisles ; while in the church- yards swine rooted up the graves. And now once more had come a reaction like that 1 Varieties used in the administration of the service, 1564 : Lansdoivne MSS.