The Eastern question was beginning to simmer when Disraeli came into power, but the symptoms had not yet become acute and he had leisure for internal politics. He desired to strengthen Conservative institutions. Of these the Church of England ought to have been the strongest, but it was distracted by internal disorders. The Romanising party was the counterpart of Radicalism. The original Tractarians had imagined themselves to be champions of old Tory principles, but revolutionary movements draw instinctively together. Romanisers and Radicals had the common belief that they were wiser than their fathers, that they must have something 'deeper and truer than satisfied the last century.' The reformers of the State wished to remodel the Constitution, the Ritualists to restore Church principles and bring back the Mass. The Radical chief sympathised with both of them. They returned his regard; and vast numbers of the clergy fell off from their old allegiance. Disraeli, keenly as he observed the outer features of the situation, was not entirely at home in such subjects. He did not see that the lay members of the Church, who had once been earnest Protestants, had now grown indifferent about it. If the clergy liked to amuse themselves with altars and vestments and elaborate services the clergy might have their way for all that the laity cared about the matter. Old Tory families still hated Puritans and Puritanism, and had not realised the change of front which made Protestants Conservatives and Radicals into allies of the Papacy. Disraeli believed that an Act of Parliament could check a tendency which ran in a current where legislation could not reach. He passed a Public Worship Act to put down ritualism,[11] and it has been scarcely more effective than Lord John Russell's demonstration against Papal aggression. This disease has not been checked; acrimonious lawsuits promoted by a few antediluvian Protestant parishioners have failed, and will continue to fail, because public opinion refuses to support the promoters. Suffering priests and bishops pose as martyrs, and there is unwillingness to punish them. By the Constitution the Church of England rests on an Act of Parliament, but sooner than effectively use its controlling power Parliament will consent to disestablishment. The Public Worship Act exasperated the enthusiastic clergy and their friends. It secretly offended not a few of Disraeli's aristocratic followers. For the purpose for which it was passed it was as ineffectual as, to use President Lincoln's simile, 'a Pope's Bull against a comet,' and demonstrations which are not followed by action do not add to a statesman's influence. [Sidenote: THE BERLIN CONFERENCE]