and of the councilors of Edward, there will hardly be any seriously to question that the movements directed by these men soon came to be infused with more serious and spiritual influences.
The Lollardy of Wycliffe and his fellows in the fourteenth century had been severely repressed and driven into "occult conventicles," but had not been extinguished; the Bible in English, many times retouched after Wycliffe's days, and perfected by the refugees at Geneva from the Marian persecutions, had become a common household book; and those exiles themselves, returning from the various centers of fervid religious thought and feeling in Holland and Germany and Switzerland, had brought with them an augmented spiritual faith, as well as intensified and sharply defined convictions on the questions of theology and church order that were debated by the scholars of the Continent.

It was impossible that the diverse and antagonist elements thus assembled should not work on one another with violent reactions.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century not less than four categories would suffice to classify the people of England according to their religious differences.

First, there were those who still continued to adhere to the Roman see.

Secondly, those who, either from conviction or from expediency or from indifference, were content with the state church of England in the shape in which Elizabeth and her parliaments had left it; this class naturally included the general multitude of Englishmen, religious, irreligious, and non-religious.