It
might be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was far
more difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect the
severance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream,
some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but all
mingling imperceptibly with one another. The revolt of the nation
against a foreign authority is the most easily distinguished of these
tendencies; another is the revolt of the laity against the clerical
specialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded as
consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the
clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they
had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The
Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of
clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write
and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles,
secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth
and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of
military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services
was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latin
of ecclesiastical experts, that a Book of _Common_ Prayer was used,
that congregational psalm-singing replaced the sacerdotal solo,
and a communion was substituted for a priestly miracle.
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