longer simply cover over by some appeal to the truth of the gospel itself,
de re vero ipsa, which all in England held.
Like the tract against Jewel’s sermon, and arising from the dissension
in the Parliament of 1571, a short tract appeared purportedly outlining
the proper government of the Church. It, along with Jewel’s response,
was printed for the first time in Whitgift’s Answere to a Certen Libell
intituled An Admonition, &c.^140 The tract is also reprinted in the Parker
Society edition of Whitgift’s works, forming the basis of the extended
arguments between Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright over the nature of
ecclesiastical polity. The Presbyterians annexed four arguments against
the prelacy and Erastianism of the Church of England: that God had left
a perfect pattern of church government in Ephesians IV, and therein is
never mentioned pope, archbishop, or archdeacon; that the synagogue
was a figure of the Church, and God omitted nothing from the figure so
that the Church did not lack in its pattern;^141 that where the substance of
anything is perfect, so are its accidents, and as the primitive Church in
its substance was most pure, and as it had no archbishops, so the purest
of churches should have no archbishops; and finally, that the civil and
ecclesiastical offices cannot be confounded.^142
The arguments that Jewel used in his replies both materially and
formally echo those he had made against the Catholics. To the first Jewel
used a simple plea by negation: Ephesians 4 does not mention presbyters,
but it does mention prophets, so therefore the Presbyterians were equally
condemned by their own text. Jewel denied the primacy of Ephesians 4
as any sort of pattern for Church government, and by this that there was
no normative pattern for Church polity, but only what may be so
determined by the needs of any region. This point is simply the same as
the second proposition of the Westminster disputation, now applied to
Presbyterianism.^143 In the rebuttal of the second point, Jewel followed the
identical line of argumentation as in the first: the synagogue did lack
perfection, for it had not the titles of apostles and evangelists. Again, if
the Presbyterians wished to be consistent, then there was a necessity that
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 199
(^140) Whitgift,An Answere to a Certen Libell, pp. 322–25. And in Jewel, Works, IV, pp.
1299–300.
(^141) The emphasis upon the synagogue betrays a basic Puritan/Presbyterian emphasis
upon the dogmatic and intellectual nature of the Christian faith to the detriment of the
sacral or sacramental. Thus the synagogue and not the temple becomes the pattern.
(^142) Southgate believes this last article was not denying the right of the civil magistrate in
religious affairs, but that the clergy had any civil prerogatives. This would clear the way
for the Presbyterian notion of the ruling elder whose chief function was moral discipline.
SeeJewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority, p. 101. I think that if this were the case,
then Southgate’s arguments would equally apply to even the ruling elder.
(^143) See Chapter Two, section one: The Prospects and Duties of an Elizabethan
Protestant.