had conflated them.^50 Harding, of course, would have explicitly denied
this division, for the unity of faith, which Jewel said was all that
Augustine and Jerome shared, was effected by Christ, and without it,
union with Christ was impossible.
Harding and Rastell, as well as Dorman and Sander, were rather
pointed in their denials that communion was something effected by the
people or by their faith, the opinion which Jewel embraced and which
certainly was an outgrowth of his Eucharistic receptionism which he had
imbibed of Martyr and Cranmer. For the Catholics, rather, communion
was something accomplished by Christ, through the union of the
Christian with Christ through the Eucharist, that is, with the body and
blood of Christ. Jewel denied that Sir Thomas and Sir Ambrose
communicated with each for he refused to recognize the union
accomplished in them through the Eucharist by their union with Christ.
For Jewel the Eucharist had become little more than it had been for
Zwingli, a communion effected, at best, by faith, but a communion with
other Christians, visibly and locally present in the parish. In this sense
Jewel was far from even Calvin who maintained that Christ was the
main actor in the Eucharist, who spiritually fed the Christian, albeit still
through faith. Harding, Rastell, Sander and Dorman would not have
denied that the spiritual benefits derived from the supper depended on
Christian faith for their realization, but at the same time it was not faith
that effected communion, nor was it faith that effected the presence of
Christ in the elements, but rather the action of God. Thus, as regards the
Eucharist, for Catholics, grace preceded faith, and here ironically the
Catholics were better Calvinists than Jewel; or better put, Calvin showed
himself more of a Catholic than did Jewel and most of the English
Protestants.
The Recusants and Jewel’s sacramentology
In the mind of the Recusants, Jewel departed from the faith of the early
Church in regard to the sacraments, and as a consequence he embraced
a deficient ecclesiology. Though spending a good bit of time on the
question of the papal supremacy, the question of the Mass and how
Christ is present in the elements of the Eucharist consumed most of the
Recusant’s energy. For Dorman the matter was too simple, for what
could be less unambiguous than Hoc est corpus meum, ‘then which
wordes if all the worlde would lay their heades together, to devise howe
he might have spoken more plaineleie, theie shall never finde the
THE CATHOLIC REACTION TO JEWEL 139
(^50) Jewel,Works, I, pp. 131–35.