To a certain class, the larger class, otherwise the thing would have been impossible; these changes were welcomed with the greatest joy because they declared and emphasised the revolution of religious thought. For the majority the pendulum had swung round from the faith and trust in the Fold of the Church, to the sense of individual responsibility. The pendulum is always swinging backwards and forwards. In our own time we have witnessed a partial return to the belief in a Fold. The cold service with its long sermon of doctrine; the private study of the Scriptures; the exercise of individual judgment, free though unlettered, upon points of doubt and apparent contradiction;—all formed part of the same movement and appealed to the majority. At the same time there was another section to whom these things were hateful and horrible and blasphemous. This was the class which was ready to forget the old grievances, the intolerable burden of Church property; the multitudes who lived in sloth, as it appeared; the wide difference between practice and profession; and thought only, as so many at the present day think, of the haven of safety promised to the faithful; the beauty, splendour, and stateliness of the service; the ecstasy of the believer; the yielding of spirit before the Ineffable Presence; the visible power and authority of the Roman Catholic Church. These people looked and prayed daily for a return of the old Faith; they were recusants under Elizabeth; they concealed the priests who came over to concoct their conspiracies; they were Romanists first and Englishmen next, until the horrors of the persecution in Flanders, of the massacres in France, and the designs of the Spaniards upon England, made them Englishmen first and Catholics next. [Illustration: _A. Rischgitz._ QUEEN ELIZABETH AT PRAYER Frontispiece to _Christian Prayers_, 1569. From a copy in the Lambeth Palace Library, which probably belonged to the Queen herself.] An irreparable loss to the world was the wholesale destruction of the libraries. Printing, an invention of no longer standing than fifty years, had as yet produced comparatively few books. When, for instance, the learned Anthony Brockby had written his book _Ad Fratres_ against the King’s Supremacy, he did not get it printed, but had a duplicate copy made, which he presented to the Franciscans, his brothers. By far the greater part of theology, philosophy, science, and literature remained in MS., and these MSS. formed the Monastic Libraries. When the Houses were suppressed, those who obtained them as a gift from the King for the most part cared nothing about the books: they were dispersed without any consideration for their use or value; if they were well bound, the covers were pulled off and the books thrown away, or turned into waste paper. Thus John Bale writes (_Antiq. English Franciscans_):—