Rastell challenged Jewel along the same lines concerning both the
veneration of the Virgin and what the ancient liturgies reveal about the
Faith of the Church in its first centuries. Rastell addressed the aspersions
Jewel cast on the Mass, and then turned from them to his own libel of
Cranmer’s Communion service and the English Prayer Book. Jewel had
condemned the ordinary of the Mass by a comparison of the Mass with
the Liturgy of St James, concluding that nothing of Christ’s institution
resided in the Mass, since clearly, Jewel argued, the Liturgy of St James
is of apostolic provenance, and what is in the Mass is absent from the
Liturgy of St James. This was too easy for Rastell, who pointed out that
what had been added to Christ’s institution in the ordinary of the Mass,
namely Kyrie, Sanctus,Agnus Dei, Credo in Deum and Gloria in
Excelsis, along with the reading of Scripture, while not ‘of Christ’s
institution’, were nonetheless perfectly acceptable. But this is hardly
Rastell’s damning point: after all, he queried, what was the Communion
service but a ragtag rearranging of the Mass according to Thomas
Cranmer’s wishes? And if the Jacobean liturgy were of apostolic
appointment, indeed, if not of Christ’s own appointment, why did
Cranmer not translate that into English? Yet what is replete in St James’s
Liturgy, the genuflecting, incense, commemorations of the Blessed Virgin
Mary and prayers for the dead, along with silent prayers, curtains,
communion in the chalice, and so on, never appear in the English
Communion service.^13 Thus, if Jewel would appeal to St James’s Liturgy,
then to St James he shall go.
Rastell employed the same argument as regards the use of the Latin in
the Liturgy. Jewel had maintained that nowhere in the Fathers was it ever
commanded that the Latin tongue be used in the service. Rastell’s retort
showed the weakness of Jewel’s arguments from silence (what each of his
27 challenges in some way entailed) in that they would open Jewel up to
similar countercharges. Rastell wanted to know when exactly were other
languages used, and where is the record of Spanish, English or French
ever used in the first 600 years?
And it should be a demonstration to all reasonable men, that
undoubtedly the publike Service here in the west was in Latin from
the beginning, because, no other beginning thereof can be shewed,
nor the ceasing of those vulgar tongues, which (as M. Jewel gesseth)
were once used, can anywhere be found, or espied.Rastell, beating the same horse, then asked Jewel whether he can show
124 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
Fowler, 1566), f. 2a–2b.
(^13) Ibid., ff. 155a–58b. Rastell was mistaken about the bread being in the Chalice for the
Liturgy of St James. While this is how the elements are distributed in the Liturgies of St
Basil and St John Chrysostom, by use of a spoon, in the Liturgy of St James the bread is
distributed to the hands of the communicants.
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