John
Jewell, a foremost champion of the Calvinists of England, with
incredible arrogance challenged the Catholics at St. Paul's,
London, invoking hypocritically and calling upon the Fathers, who
had flourished within the first six hundred years of
Christianity. His wager was taken up by the illustrious men who
were then in exile at Louvain, hemmed in though they were with
very great difficulties by reason of the iniquity of their times.
I venture to assert that that device of Jewell's, stupid,
unconscionable, shameless as it was, qualities which those
writers happily brought out, did so much good to our countrymen
that scarcely anything in my recollection has turned out to the
better advantage of the suffering English Church. At once an
edict is hung up on the doors, forbidding the reading or
retaining of any of those books, whereas they had come out, or
were wrung out, I may almost say, by the outcry that Jewell had
raised. The result was that all the persons interested in the
matter came to understand that the Fathers were Catholics, that
is to say, ours. Nor has Lawrence Humphrey passed over in silence
this wound inflicted on him and his party.
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