vouchsafe to hear one’. Jewel emphasized again the parameters of his
challenge, limiting the number of councils to which appeal can be made
and the time frame in which the disputants may garner evidence.^81
Cole’s second response takes up the basic nature of Jewel’s negative
argument: that these certain items as listed are nowhere found within the
constraints given. Cole objected that Jewel as a bishop should ‘first
approve it (Protestant doctrine) unto such as doubt’ and that ‘I stand in
place and case to learn, and you a man appointed to teach’, that is, Jewel
had asserted nothing positive and had only set about to tear down: the
criteria advanced by Jewel are insufficient for a real debate of the
matters. In Cole’s third response he lays out the foundational issues as he
sees them, noting that the primitive church was not the full measure of
what the Church should be:
for the church of Christ hath his childhood, his manhood, and his
hoar hairs; and as that is meet for a man in one age is unmeet in
another, so were many things meet requisite, and necessary in the
primitive church, which in our days were like to do more harm than
good.This concept, says Cole, he has drawn from St Ambrose.^82
After a brief response to several of Cole’s items, Jewel took up his
challenge in a more substantial manner, returning to the several points
Cole raised, but never moving from the position he had maintained in
the various Challenge Sermons, calling merely for the traditionalists to
proffer one authority to show that on these points he was mistaken. To
Cole’s point about the Church having a life which passes through stages
of maturity, Jewel merely responded that ‘I never heard before now that
Christ and his apostles were called infants; or that every man before now
took it upon him to set them to school’. He further answered that how
was the Church in its infancy if it were the time of the Fathers? Cole’s
seeking to address what Catholics considered Protestant novelties, not
being part of Jewel’s Challenge, was never addressed.
Jewel’s answering Cole by an obfuscation of metaphors – a
commonplace in his writings – betrays either a poor grasp of his
opponents’ implications, a poor ability to see the extent to which their
arguments can be pushed, or a panoply of arguments built more around
rhetorical gamesmanship than theological explication. Jewel’s usual
manner of answering arguments entails listing one authority after
another;^83 he seldom treated the assertions of his antagonists on either
72 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^81) Jewel, letter to Cole, 20 March 1560, in Ibid., pp. 27–28.
(^82) Cole, letter to Jewel, 8 April 1560, Ibid., pp. 36–40. The argument sounds like an
incipient Cardinal Newman.
(^83) In commenting on Dean Colet, Harbison notes that this is what distinguished a
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