During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity; but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John Knox--the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish reformation. [Sidenote: Character of the debates at Frankfort.] This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence--the little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude. Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the United States. [Sidenote: The rise of the two great parties.] [Sidenote: Note 3.]