Individual participation and private judgment in religion were indeed the essence of Protestantism, which was largely the religious aspect of the revolt of the individual against the collectivism of the Middle Ages. The control exercised by the church had, however, been less the expression of the general will than the discipline by authority of masses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at public worship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But the general emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence by the Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures and to a great deal of private and family religious exercise, without which there could have been no Protestant Reformation. Lollardy, which was a violent outburst of this domestic piety, was never completely suppressed; and it flamed out afresh when once political reasons, which had led the Lancastrians to support the church, induced the Tudors to attack it. Most spiritual of all the factors in the Reformation was the slow and partial emancipation of men's minds from the materialism of the Middle Ages. It may seem bold, in face of the vast secularization of church property and other things in the sixteenth century, to speak of emancipation from materialism. Nevertheless, there was a distinct step in the progress of men's minds from that primitive condition of intelligence in which they can only grasp material symbols of the real conception. Rudimentary jurisprudence had confessed its inability to penetrate men's thoughts and differentiate their actions according to their motives; there had been a time when possession had seemed more real than property, and when the transference of a right was incomprehensible without the transference of its concrete symbols. There could be no gift without its manual conveyance, no marriage without a ring, no king without a coronation. Many of these material swaddling-clothes remain and have their value. A national flag stimulates loyalty, gold lace helps the cause of discipline. Bishop Gardiner, in the sixteenth century, defended images on the ground that they were documents all could read, while few could read the Scriptures. To unimaginative men there could be no priest without vestments, no worship without ritual, no communion of the Spirit without the presence of the Body, no temple not made with hands, no God without an image. To break the image, to abolish the vestments and the ritual, to deny the transubstantiation, was to destroy the religion and reverence of the masses, who could only grasp matter and worship with their senses.