Afterwards, the Lord Chancellor, addressing both Houses, extolled the virtue, piety and clemency of their sovereign. The speech was received with enthusiasm, and hopes were entertained that the Queen’s measures would be passed without opposition. Five days later, Mary sent down a bill for the abrogation of all laws concerning religion that had been passed during the two preceding reigns, one clause of the bill dealing especially with her mother’s divorce, and the question of her own legitimacy. The peers passed it without debate, but in the Lower House some stormy scenes attended the reading. The Commons had imagined that Mary would be content to restore religion to the condition in which her father had left it, and now they perceived, in the proposed abrogation of the decree of divorce, not merely a recognition of the Pope’s dispensing power, but an attempt to re-establish his jurisdiction in England. For this, the majority of the nation were unprepared. For twenty years and more, the Pope’s authority had been treated with contempt, his jurisdiction denied, his claims ridiculed, his name converted into a mark of infamy, and only mentioned with the foulest abuse. The language of the Reformers admirably promoted the effect which Henry VIII. wished to produce on the national mind, and by constant repetition of every scurrilous term of opprobrium, they had gained the popular ear. Few, at the beginning of Mary’s reign, were of so judicial a mind as to distinguish the real Pope from the bugbear that had been set up. Moreover, at the back of the prejudice lurked the fear, as yet vague and undefined, of a possible contingency, involving the restoration of Church property, on which so many had become rich. But besides the old and the middle-aged, with whom these things weighed, a fresh generation had sprung up, to whom the Papacy, if not the execrable institution that it was popularly believed to be, yet savoured too much of the past, and of those dreary mediæval times, from which the world was escaping as from a tomb. Too recent to appear picturesque, the Middle Ages were, to the pioneers of the new era, out of date and old-fashioned, terms far more injurious than the most violent word-war of the preachers. Filled with the new wine of the Renaissance, these youthful enthusiasts formed the nucleus of that phalanx of life-loving, exuberant personalities who, throwing all their energies into the glorification of liberty, fame, pleasure, and earthly beauty, gave us subsequently the Elizabethan age. To all of these the very shadow of a spiritual authority was repellant, and the whole session would doubtless have worn itself out in wrangling, had not the Queen, coming unexpectedly to the House, seen how matters stood. She promptly affixed the royal assent to three bills that had been passed, and prorogued Parliament for three days. During this interval, two separate bills were framed in the place of the one