Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/269

 1565.] THE EMBASSY OF DE SILVA 249 shocked her at Cambridge, and had many times expressed her determination to bring the Church to order. Her own creed was a perplexity to herself and to the world. With no tinge of the meaner forms of superstition, she clung to practices which exasperated the Reformers, while the Catholics laughed at their inconsistency ; her crucifixes and candles, if adopted partly from a politic motive of conciliation, were in part also an expression of that half belief with which she regarded the symbols of the faith ; and while ruling the clergy with a rod of iron, and refusing as sternly as her father to tolerate their pretensions to independence, she desired to force upon them a special and semi-mysterious character ; to dress them up as counterfeits of the Catholic hierarchy ; and half in reverence, half in contempt, compel them to assume the name and character of a priesthood, which both she and they in their heart of hearts knew to be an illusion and a dream. Elizabeth's view of this subject cannot be called a fault. It was the result of her peculiar temperament ; and in principle was but an anticipation of the eventual attitude into which the minds of the laity would subside. But the theory in itself is suited only to settled times, when it is safe from the shock of external trials : from the first it has been endured with impatience by those nobler minds to whom sincerity is a necessity of exist- ence ; and in the first establishment of the English Church, and especially when Elizabeth attempted to insist on conditions which overstrained the position, she tried the patience of the most enduring clergy in the world.