To the extreme Reformers no break with the past could be too abrupt and
precipitous: the framers of the English Liturgy had rather adopted the
principle of evolution than of development by catastrophe, and had wedded
what was noblest in old Latin forms and prayers to music of the choicest
English speech. To this service, for which their fellow-religionists in
England were dying at the stake, the non-Frankfortian exiles were
attached. They were Englishmen; their service, they said, should bear
"an English face": so Knox avers, who could as yet have no patriotic love
of any religious form as exclusively and essentially Scottish.

A kind of truce was now proclaimed, to last till May 1, 1555; Knox aiding
in the confection of a service without responses, "some part taken out of
the English book, and other things put to," while Calvin, Bullinger, and
three others were appointed as referees. The Frankfort congregation had
now a brief interval of provisional peace, till, on March 13, 1555,
Richard Cox, with a band of English refugees, arrived. He had been tutor
to Edward VI., the young Marcellus of Protestantism, but for Frankfort he
was not puritanic enough. His company would give a large majority to the
anti-Knoxian congregation. He and his at once uttered the responses, and
on Sunday one of them read the Litany. This was an unruly infraction of
the provisional agreement. Cox and his party (April 5) represented to
Calvin that they had given up surplices, crosses, and other things, "not
as impure and papistical," but as indifferent, and for the sake of peace.
This was after they had driven Knox from the place, as they presently
did; in the beginning it was distinctly their duty to give up the Litany
and responses, while the truce lasted, that is, till the end of April. In
the afternoon of the Sunday Knox preached, denouncing the morning's
proceedings, the "impurity" of the Prayer Book, of which "I once had a
good opinion," and the absence, in England, of "discipline," that is,
interference by preachers with private life. Pluralities also he