Spain of ‘private Masses’ in the last 50 years, yet did this mean that
neither of these were true?^46
With respect to the question of the adoration of the consecrated
elements, Rastell, who certainly employed logic and dialectic more than
his compeers (and thus makes for less engrossing reading), beats Jewel
with the same stick. He noted that according to Jewel, since Christ or
Paul did not command adoration of the elements to be done, it should
not be done. Here Jewel had employed the same form of argumentation
as had Hooper when balking at the wearing of episcopal garb, that is,
that a regulative principle drawn from the Scriptures, negative in
construction, should limit theological activity. Yet, retorted Rastell,
Christ nowhere gave commandment that he be worshiped either, even
though it was done. And St Paul gave no command in regard to the
posture to be taken when receiving the elements, yet the English Prayer
Book prescribed one.^47
For the Catholics, Jewel’s conclusions, based on the putative silences
of the Fathers, were not merely non sequiturs, but indeed were
dangerous to the Faith. Jewel had done what the Puritans themselves did,
that is to affirm that the want of any positive commandment was the
same as a prohibition. Jewel may not have been consciously arguing this,
but the coincidence of his thought with that of the Puritan and later
Presbyterian notion of a regulative principle in doctrine, worship and
Church order, here applied to the Church Fathers, essentially left no
room for theology itself. For after all, Rastell would argue, what was the
assertion of the Arians against
, but that it was not in the
scriptures, and that it had no antiquity. Similarly Rastell had proffered
that doctrines now professed by the Catholics, though perhaps not
explicit, nonetheless were clearly contained in the Fathers, noting in his
Confutationthat ‘whereas owt of one principle a hundred conclusions
may be deducted, it is not necessary, that every conclusion be expresselie
writen in the auncient fathers workes, or ells that we make doubte of the
principle, which afterwardes I will make more playne and probable.’^48
Jewel himself had been defended by the bishop Thomas Cooper, in his
An Answere in Defence of the Truth, which itself had been penned
THE CATHOLIC REACTION TO JEWEL 137
(^46) Stapleton,A return of untruthes,f. 34a.
(^47) Rastell,Confutation70a–73a.
(^48) Ibid., f. 144a. The principle he was going to make plain was the corporal presence of
Christ in the Eucharist, the point he was there arguing. Rastell leaned heavily upon both
St Cyril of Alexandria and St Ambrose of Milan in his arguments. For Cyril the arguments
had actually run the other way, in that he sought to guard the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist, and thus sought in his defence of the hypostatic union of the Incarnation a
guarantor of Christ’s physical presence in the Eucharist. Rastell was arguing the other way
round.