The separation of England from the papacy was a more gradual and halting process than were the contemporary revolutions on the Continent; and the new Anglicanism was correspondingly more conservative than Lutheranism or Calvinism. [Sidenote: English Catholicism in 1500] [Sidenote: Church of England] At the opening of the sixteenth century, the word "Catholic" meant the same in England as in every other country of western or central Europe --belief in the seven sacraments, the sacrifice of the Mass, and the veneration of saints; acceptance of papal supremacy and support of monasticism and of other institutions and practices of the medieval Church. During several centuries it had been customary in legal documents to refer to the Catholic Church in England as the _Ecclesia Anglicana_, or Anglican Church, just as the popes in their letters repeatedly referred to the "Gallican Church," the "Spanish Church," the "Neapolitan Church," or the "Hungarian Church." But such phraseology did not imply a separation of any one national church from the common Catholic communion, and for nearly a thousand years--ever since there had been an _Ecclesia Anglicana_--the English had recognized the bishop of Rome as the center of Catholic unity. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, the great majority of Englishmen changed their conception of the _Ecclesia Anglicana_, so that to them it continued to exist as the Church of England, but henceforth on a strictly national basis, in communion neither with the pope nor with the Orthodox Church of the East nor with the Lutherans or Calvinists, abandoning several doctrines that had been universally held in earlier times and substituting in their place beliefs and customs which were distinctively Protestant. This new conception of the Anglican Church-- resulting from the revolution in the sixteenth century--is what we mean by Anglicanism as a form of Protestantism. It took shape in the eventful years between 1520 and 1570. [Sidenote: Religious Opposition to the Roman Catholic Church in England] In order to understand how this religious and ecclesiastical revolution was effected in England, we must appreciate the various elements distrustful of the Catholic Church in that country about the year 1525. In the first place, the Lutheran teachings were infiltrating into the country. As early as 1521 a small group at Cambridge had become interested in the new German theology, and thence the sect spread to Oxford, London, and other intellectual centers. It found its early converts chiefly among the lower clergy and the merchants of the large towns, but for several years it was not numerous.