‘… I have been reading a good deal lately about your friends the Puritans in Queen Elizabeth’s time; and really I like poor Penry very much. I think of writing An Apology for the Early Puritans, whose case I think to be this. The Church of England had relinquished its claim to the _jus divinum_, and considered Ordination to emanate ultimately from the Queen. These poor fellows, _i.e._, Penry and Co. (not Beza and Co., nor Knox and Co.), detested so abominable a notion: but what could they do? They had been bred up in a horror of trusting history in matters of religion, so they could look for a divine institution and a priesthood nowhere except in the Bible. Here, then, they looked, assuming as an axiom that they must find; and finding nothing more reasonable than the platform, they caught at this. In the meantime our people, and the smug[152] fellows on the Continent, were going on with their civilities to one another, and servilities to their respective Governments, and left these poor men to fight for a _jus divinum_, though not the true one. It seems to me that Saravia and Bancroft are the revivers of orthodoxy in England, and that the Puritans shielded them from martyrdom. Had it not been for their pertinacity in claiming a _jus divinum_, that tyrant[153] would certainly have smothered the true one. Such are my crude speculations, on a rough survey: if you think me hopelessly wrong, floor me at once, and save me from wasting my time. How do you like my “Appointment of the Bishops?”[154] I have sent one on “State Interference in Matters Spiritual,” very dry and matter-of-fact, and mean to have a touch at the King’s supremacy, which I think Hooker would not justify under present circumstances. I think, if we manage well, we may make the idea of a Lay Synod popular. Its members should be elected by universal suffrage among the communicants, _more primitivo_. I find this view most effective in conversation. I am very well, and don’t think of going abroad this winter, though you seem to say I must. Time and money are two good things, and I don’t like wasting more of them. I have done enough in that line already…. I am quite surprised to see how much less of a conservative [Rose?] is than he was six months since. I do believe the progress of events is converting every one, and that we shall not have much longer to encounter the stigma of ultraism.’