The Elizabethan Settlement opposed the nonconformist Puritans who attempted to out-reform the English reformers, as well as denied the strongest force in the world at the time, Catholic Spain and the Spanish Armada.

The ecclesiastical leaders and theologians of her realm believed and wrote that the Church of England was more catholic - more faithful to the Bible's teaching and ancient consensual Christianity - than her mother church, the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, wrote (Apology, 1562), "It is true that we have departed from them, and for so doing we both give thanks to Almighty God and greatly rejoice on our own behalf.

But yet for all this, from the primitive church, from the apostles, and from Christ we have not departed." Richard Hooker, as a respected theologian in the Elizabethan Settlement, called the pope a schismatic idolator "who hath made the earth so drunk that it hath reeled under us." He went on to say, "that which they call schism, we know to be our reasonable service unto God" (Laws, 1595).

Elizabeth established the English church on the sure foundation of Holy Scripture, and committed the church once-and-for-all to the Formularies that have defined Anglicanism ever since: the Book of Common Prayer (which includes the Ordinal), the Articles of Religion as the Church of England's confessional statement, and the Edwardian and Elizabethan books of Homilies that serve as commentaries on the Articles. The church that seeks a new identity and a new grounding in the novelties of a 1830s Catholic interruption or an early 20th century Holy Spirit revival open the door to any and all innovations that blow our way. The church that stands for nothing will surely fall for anything.

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