The one desired to make use of the temporal power to prevent, the other
to promote, further changes in Church government, worship and doctrine.
The result was a compromise, which, like most compromises, satisfied the
more logical and consistent of neither party. As ultimately
established, in the reign of Elizabeth, the Church of England occupied
a sort of middle position between the Church of Rome and the Reformed
Churches of the Continent; and the attempt to enforce conformity to its
demands resulted in the separation from it of the extremists of both
sections. On the one hand, the English Roman Catholics became a distinct
and persecuted religious body, whose members were generally regarded,
despite repeated evidence to the contrary, as necessarily enemies of
England. On the other, despairing of further changes in the direction
they desired, a large number of the extreme Protestants separated
themselves from the National Church--though by so doing they rendered
themselves liable to be accused not only of heresy, but of high treason,
and to suffer death--and formed themselves into different bodies of
Separatists or Independents, differing on many points among themselves,
but united by a common animosity of all outside ecclesiastical control.
Within the Church the Catholic sentiment crystallised into the
Episcopalian, the Protestant sentiment into the Presbyterian section of
the Church of England.
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