Gary W. Jenkins - John Jewel And The English National Church The Dilemmas Of An Erastian Reformer

Levitical garb, the freedom of the Christian, inter alia. But à Lasco also
notes,

We know that the Roman Pope is the very Antichrist; wherefore his

priesthood also is Antichristian, by which the whole priesthood of

Christ is utterly trampled upon. But forasmuch as the principal part

of the papistical priesthood consists in ceremonies, anointing,

shaving of hair, mitres and vestments, it follows that if we condemn

the Pope’s priesthood because it is Antichrist, we ought also to avoid

all its parts and manifestations.^45

In short, abusus tollit usum.
Edmund Guest,^46 Elizabethan bishop of both Rochester and Salisbury,
continued this line of thought, when prior to the 1559 Parliament, he
wrote Cecil concerning rites and ceremonies,^47 that ‘Ceremonies once
taken away, as evil used, should not be taken again, though they be not
evil of themselves, but might be well used’.^48 Guest further slights certain
rites:

because these ceremonies were devised of men, and abused to

idolatry. For Christ with his apostles would not wash their hands

before meat ... because it was superstitiously used. Paul forbad the

Corinthians to come to the gentiles tables, where they did eat the

meat which was offered to idols: though an idol was nothing, nor

that which was offered to it any thing.^49

For Guest, as for à Lasco, the abuse of the vestments by Rome renders
them illicit.^50
These arguments appear in the two foremost early Elizabethan
Puritans, Thomas Sampson, dean of Christ Church Oxford, and
Laurence Humphrey, president of Magdalen College, Oxford. In letters
sent to Zurich in 1563 and 1566, first Humphrey, and then Humphrey
and Sampson confederate, sought to justify their defiance of archbishop

168 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH

(^45) Ibid., p. 65.
(^46) Guest, one of the eight Protestants at the 1559 Westminster Disputation, and the only
one not a former exile, would eventually be buried next to Jewel (whom he followed at
Salisbury) in the North aisle of the Cathedral. He knew Cecil from their days together at
Cambridge.
(^47) Though otherwise more conservative than his fellow Elizabethan bishops, Guest gave
two explicitly biblically annexed reasons why such an agenda should guide the English
Settlement. Patrick Collinson, in Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 61 notes that like
Cheyney in Gloucester, Guest tended toward consubstantiation in his Eucharistic theology.
(^48) Edward Cardwell, A history of Conferences and Other Proceedings connected with
the Book of Common Prayer: from the year 1558 to the year 1690(Oxford, 1849,
Republished 1966), p. 49.
(^49) Cardwell,Conferences, p. 50.
(^50) Guest’s own arguments against the Puritan position is taken up in Primus, Vestments,
pp. 91–92.
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