The conservative and Catholic feeling which animated the Anglican Reformers very soon, however, came into conflict with a radical and mere Protestant spirit. I desire not to repudiate “Protestantism” as an attribute of the Anglican Church. Our Reformers did most stoutly protest—by speech, by deed, by enactment, by suffering—against prevailing corruptions and superstitions; specially they protested against the tyrannical assumption of universal dominion by the Bishop of Rome, and the capricious and lawless issuing by him of ecclesiastical prohibitions and indulgences. But their Protestantism only asserted _what they were not_; and certainly they never prided themselves in or contented themselves with the mere assertion of the _negative_ and the _diverse_. In that they put away what was wrong, or corrupt, or unedifying or distracting or burthensome, they were Protestant; but in their maintenance of the one faith in its integrity and the due proportion of its several parts, in their strict adherence to the principle which had ever guided the service and ritual of Christ’s Church, they were true Catholics—much more worthy of the name than those who henceforth claimed the exclusive right to it. But growing up all around them, and fostered and strengthened by importations from the Continent, (where the Reformation had unhappily been brought about in a very different spirit, and was in fact almost another thing,—not the reforming of the Church but the abandoning of it) was a revolutionary and indiscriminate Protestantism which sought to destroy, root and branch, whatever was old, and was intolerant even of the most harmless conformity to the Church against which it was a reaction. Let us speak with all charity and fair allowance of those earnest and holy men. Almost all the doctrines of the faith had been perverted or leavened with corruption; almost all the ordinances and ceremonies were associated with gross abuses. In the intensity of their awakened feeling against these things, it was natural that many among our own people, unable to distinguish between the truth and the corruption, the use and the abuse, should think that their rulers had not gone far enough in the way of change; while the foreign Protestants, left to act as individuals, driven to form communities of their own (as their Church would not reform itself) unguided by Catholic influence, directed by no intelligent principle (save that which would _anyhow_ get rid of false traditions and gross abuses) in the construction of their creed and the ordering of their services, determined, as the easiest and most congenial course, to reject the whole system from which they had come out, and to make all things new for themselves.