“The want of wisdom shown in the persecution of the Nonconformists was demonstrated by the event. Puritanism was a living force in England; Catholicism was a dying superstition. Puritanism had saved Elizabeth’s crown; Catholicism was a hot-bed of disloyalty. She found herself compelled against her will to become the patron of heretics and rebels, in whose objects she had no interest and in whose theology she had no belief. She resented the necessity while she submitted to it, and her vacillations are explained by the reluctance with which each successive step was forced upon her on a road which she detested. It would have been easy for a Protestant to be decided. It would have been easy for a Catholic to be decided. To Elizabeth the speculations of so-called divines were but as ropes of sand and sea-slime leading to the moon, and the doctrines for which they were rending each other to pieces a dream of fools or enthusiasts. Unfortunately her keenness of insight was not combined with any profound concern for serious things. She saw through the forms in which religion presented itself to the world. She had none the more any larger or deeper conviction of her own. She was without the intellectual emotions which give human character its consistency and power. “Elizabeth could rarely bring herself to sign the death-warrant of a nobleman, yet without compunction she could order Yorkshire peasants to be hung in scores by martial law. She was most remorseless when she ought to have been most forbearing, and lenient when she ought to have been stern. “Vain as she was of her own sagacity, she never modified a course recommended to her by Burleigh, without injury both to the realm and to herself. The great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy which was not her own, and which she starved and mutilated when energy and completeness were needed. “The greatest achievement in English history, the ‘breaking the bonds of Rome,’ and the establishment of spiritual independence, was completed without bloodshed under Elizabeth’s auspices, and Elizabeth may have the glory of the work.