But the Reformation was far more than resistance to Rome. It did not cease when the king triumphed over the Pope. The "dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion" was as incompatible with royal as with priestly authority. In this "reformation of the Reformation" the strength of the movement was everywhere in the towns. It was generally true, and nowhere more so than in England, that Protestantism was the result of a middle-class revolt against the existing regime, a denial of established standards in politics and morality, the determined attempt to effect a transvaluation of all customary values. The quarrel of the middle-class man with the world as he found it was of long standing. In the feudal-ecclesiastical structure, fairly complete in the eleventh century and to outward seeming still intact in the fifteenth, there was no prepared niche for the _bourgeois_. The peasant to obey and serve; the noble to fight and rule; the priest to instruct and pray:--these, all in their different ways respected and respectable careers, completed the sum of God's purpose in arranging the occupations of men. Yet into this trinity the _bourgeois_ had intruded his unwelcome presence. The secret of his rise was the skill of his hand to fashion material things, and his practical intelligence to care for them. Neither personal service nor personal prowess was the source of his power. Untouched by the principle of homage or of _noblesse oblige_, he commanded, or was himself commanded, through the medium of material values. He put money in his purse because it was the measure of his independence, the symbol of his worth; and he kept it there, guarding it as the priest guarded his faith or the noble his honor. Long occupation with the concrete world of affairs had given his mind a peculiar quality; his intelligence was direct and firm, his thinking clear and dry, without atmosphere, unrelieved by poetic imagination or the play of fancy.