“The Church of England,” said Dr. Stanley, the Protestant Dean of Westminster, in a sermon recently preached at Battersea, “is what she is by the goodness of Almighty God and of his servant Queen Elizabeth.” If he had said, “of Henry VIII. and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth,” we could have agreed with him, particularly as the riper years of the Establishment continue so suitably to fulfil the promise of such parentage; but to Catholics there is a revolting profanity in classing together the goodness of God with that of one of the most implacable persecutors of his church—a persecutor, not from conviction of the justice, but the iniquity, of her cause, and from a persistent determination to extinguish in her realm the ancient faith, whose very existence was a condemnation of the state religion arranged by her father and Cranmer, improved by her brother and his Genevese assistants, and re-fashioned to her own liking by herself. The sentence pronounced by the Protestant historian Chalmers upon this powerful and unprincipled queen is that “she was a woman without chastity, a princess without honor, and a sovereign without faith”; and, as if by way of a satanic parody on the vision of the Immaculate Virgin in the Book of Revelations, we see Elizabeth, the offspring of an adulterous union, trampling under her despotic foot the Bride of Christ. “The Church of England,” continued the dean, “was, it is true, a compromise,” and “he was not a true son thereof who used it as a weapon for promoting this or that doctrine, but, _after the example of Elizabeth_, and for the interests of the nation, used it as a broad shield under which he might work for good,”[23] etc., etc. The sense of which, in plain English, appears to be that the said church prefers general indifference to doctrinal truth, the “interests of the nation” to the glory of God, and the “example of Elizabeth” to purity of faith and life. Footnote 23: Hentzner furnishes us, by the way, with a singular testimony to Elizabeth’s “goodness” when, among other things of the same nature, he tells us that, in the latter years of her reign, executions for high treason (this being the term applied to denial of the royal supremacy in the church fully as much as in the state) were so frequent that he counted at one time on London Bridge no fewer than 300 heads. She herself on one occasion pointed out to the French ambassador the same ghastly trophies adorning the gates of her own palace.