But the establishment of this independence at once gave fresh force to the religious movement. From denouncing the Pope as a usurper of national rights men passed easily to denounce the Papal system as in itself Antichristian. In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a ground of faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the Bible opened up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, and the hatred of Rome drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical institutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride, could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended more and more to supersede its political one. All that is generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same direction. To statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the acceptance of one form of faith or worship after another as one sovereign after another occupied the throne seemed, no doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance of the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there must have been something false and ignoble in the sight of a statesman or a priest who had cast off the Mass under Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and who was ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. If worship and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they had any semblance of connexion with divine realities, men must have felt that it was impossible to put them on and off at a king's caprice. It was this, even more than the natural pity which they raised, that gave their weight to the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out in emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, of a belief dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate of the Church to the "blind girl" who perished at Colchester, three hundred were found in England who chose rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the Queen's will what their individual conscience had renounced as a lie against God. [Sidenote: Calvin.]