focused not merely upon certain points of controversy, for example,
papal supremacy, transubstantiation, the use of images, inter alia; but
upon particular heuristic matters, prolegomena of theological debate in
which they showed Jewel deficient. Jewel had defined the parameters of
the debate in such a way that he thought himself within a safe arena in
which to confront the Catholics, and that the weapons of the contest,
chosen by him, were all to his advantage. The Catholic response hardly
accommodated Jewel, for while they certainly accepted several terms of
his challenge such as limiting debate to the first 600 years of the Church’s
existence, in the end they chose also to show that how Jewel cast the
debate itself was defective, and that what Jewel sought to denounce
could not be so easily slighted, even given Jewel’s own assumptions. It
must be stated that this survey can hardly do justice to the weight of the
Catholic response to Jewel, as 13 different writers produced 34 separate
volumes, a number of them running over 800 pages, and none of them
mere cursory replies.^10 Some of the texts, such as Heskyns’ The
Parliament of Christ, Sander’s The Supper of the Lordand Stapleton’s
The Images of Christ and his Saintes, each ostensibly addressed but one
issue of Jewel’s Challenge, though numerous of Jewel’s specifics could be
answered whenever the topic of the Eucharist was addressed, for Jewel
sought to capitalize on the vast field of Catholic Eucharistic theology to
paint it as riddled with novelties and thus unfaithful to the Patristic
tradition. Regardless of the number of challenges Jewel proffered, and
aside from the answers to the particulars of each challenge and the
general assertion that Jewel suffered from defects in his theology, the
Catholic responses largely fall into several distinct categories: that Jewel
had overreached with his rhetoric and that he had thus based his
responses on equivocal arguments and wrongly used texts, that he had
abused logic, that he had proceeded from a faulty sacramental theology,
that he lacked a Catholic and Patristic ecclesiology and that he had
wrongly apprehended the axioms and presuppositions of the Fathers and
had thus fallen from the right path. Indeed, apart from Harding’s first
response to Jewel, dominated by his consideration of the several initial
assertions of Jewel’s Challenge Sermon, none of the subsequent Catholic
works treated each of Jewel’s 27 challenges. This was consciously done.
To confute any parte of the Replie, it is easy. By due examination to
stay at euery Untruth, it is paineful. He doth not so much wring vs
with heape of loose sayinges. He presseth not with weighte, but122 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^10) Southern,Recusant Prose, pp. 61–66, lists all the works from both sides, 64 in
number, though he includes each piece of correspondence between Jewel and Cole as
separate items, as well as each of Jewel’s sermons in 1565 against Harding’s Confutation,
given just prior to the publication of his Replie unto M. Hardinges Answeare.
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