Rome did not strike its flag without a struggle. As Demetrius was shocked when Paul, a wandering preacher from Tarsus, impeached his Diana, so the Vatican professed to be horrified when the reformers inveighed against the popedom. “Socrates”—so runs the old Grecian indictment—“is guilty of crime for not worshipping the gods whom the city worship, but introducing new divinities of his own.”[4] The adherents of the ancient faith tacked a similar indictment upon the front of the reform. Where they dared, they invoked the thumb-screw and kindled an _auto da fé_. When they could not fight with these congenial weapons, they made faces at their opponents, and hurled epithets. The iconoclasts were called “infidels.” Hooker and Hales, Stillingfleet, and Cudworth, and Taylor were thus stigmatized.[5] And indeed, “this is a cry which the timid, the ignorant, the indolent, and the venal are apt to raise against those who, faithful to themselves, go boldly forward, using the past only to show them what the present is, and what the future should be.” These men recast the ecclesiasticism of their age. The essence of Romanism was extracted from their creed, but many of its forms were retained. Then, within the new-built temple of the English church, there arose two parties. The _Puritans_ demanded the complete divorce of the reformed church from Rome, in its ceremonies and in its belief. They strove to inaugurate the purity and simplicity of what they conceived to be the primitive worship. They esteemed the retained forms to be pregnant with mischief, in that they were the badges of their former servitude, and because they tended to bridge over the chasm between Rome and the Reformation.[6] At the outset, the Puritans did not quarrel with the English Establishment; they all claimed to be within its pale,[7] and many of their leaders were men of high ecclesiastical standing, of the truest lives, and of the loftiest genius; but they held to the spirit rather than to the letter; to the substance of the church, not to its forms.[8] The _Conformists_ considered the ceremonies to be non-essential; but they desired to retain them, partly because they were enamoured of those old associations which they symbolized, but chiefly because they dreaded the effect of too sudden and radical a change upon the peace of the island. Besides, to facilitate the passage from Romanism to the reformed church, they were willing to step to the verge of their consciences in the retention of the old forms, and in the incorporation of those features of the ancient faith into the outward structure of the new theology which were not intrinsically bad.[9]