Nor was this all. At home as well as abroad troubles were thickening around the Queen. The fanaticism of the Catholic world without was stirring a Protestant fanaticism within the realm. As Rome became more and more the centre of hostility to England, patriotism itself stirred men to a hatred of Rome; and their hatred of Rome passed easily into a love for the fiercer and sterner Calvinism which looked on all compromise with Rome, or all acceptance of religious traditions or usages which had been associated with Rome, as treason against God. Puritanism, as this religious temper was called, was becoming the creed of every earnest Protestant throughout the realm; and the demand for a further advance towards the Calvinistic system and a more open breach with Catholicism which was embodied in the suppression of the "superstitious usages" became stronger than ever. But Elizabeth was firm as of old to make no advance. Greatly as the Protestants had grown, she knew they were still a minority in the realm. If the hotter Catholics were fast decreasing, they remained a large and important body. But the mass of the nation was neither Catholic nor Protestant. It had lost faith in the Papacy. It was slowly drifting to a new faith in the Bible. But it still clung obstinately to the past; it still recoiled from violent change; its temper was religious rather than theological, and it shrank from the fanaticism of Geneva as it shrank from the fanaticism of Rome. It was a proof of Elizabeth's genius that alone among her counsellors she understood this drift of opinion, and withstood measures which would have startled the mass of Englishmen into a new resistance.