that the Liturgy was said in any other tongue in the ancient Church other
than the Latin or Greek, for while it can be shown that hymns were sung
in other tongues (though this is only witnessed to with respect to the
Syriac language), yet was the Liturgy ever said in another language?^14
Later in his text Rastell defended Harding who had tentatively begun
this line of questioning with Jewel, by asking Jewel where were the
English service books from ancient times and that if the English service
were of ancient constitution, why had none of its remains survived?
Jewel turned Harding’s question back on him and replied that by this
logic the Druids of France, who have no record of their Gallic prayer
books, must have prayed in Latin. Rastell came to Harding’s defense. He
noted that Jewel used Harding’s logic to its wrong end, indeed twisting
what Harding had said. He then counters:
But that you may not escape so, I will not aske you for Bookes, nor
Monuments, nor relikes, nor tokens of the English service: But in
this one, and reasonable, and easy question to be answered, I would
faine perceive, what sense you have or understanding. When you
were borne, and long before that, the Service in England was in the
Latine tonge: If therefore it had not ben so, from the beginning:
when began the Latine? when ceaseth the English?^15
According to the Catholic polemicists, Jewel’s imprecise theological
language and loose rhetoric had also failed him in regard to the matter
of images. Jewel raised the issue of the worship of images in his
Challenge Sermon with a completely poisoned point: ‘that [at no time
beforeAD600] images were set up in the churches to the intent the
people might worship them.’^16 Harding was quite happy to agree with
Jewel, that he would find no worship of images before the year AD 600
in the church; for, maintained Harding, as with the faithful after 600,
Christians venerated and did not worship images. Jewel conceded
Harding’s point that images existed, but not the point that they were not
worshiped. As with other Protestant polemicists, Jewel was quite
unwilling to accept the distinction between the worship and the
veneration of images, instead shifting the question from the use of
images to their abuse. In doing this, he took up the position of both the
Henrician and the Edwardian polities regarding images. Initially,
England’s was a disinterested, if not to say, an irreligious iconoclasm.
Though certainly Protestant, its impetus arose not from religion per se,
but from royal directives: for example, under Henry VIII, the goal of the
dissolution of the monasteries was royal enrichment, not a reformation
THE CATHOLIC REACTION TO JEWEL 125
(^14) John Rastell, A treatise entitled, Beware of M. Iewel(Antwerp: John Fowler, 1566),
ff. 20b–21a, 22b–23a.
(^15) Ibid., f. 39b.
(^16) Point 14. Cf. Defense of the Challenge SermoninWorks, II, pp. 644–68.