24 September 2015 A.D. Jewel’s “Apology”—Did Peter and Paul practice all the naughtiness which is practiced in Rome?, p.74-75

24 September 2015 A.D. Jewel’s “Apology”—Did Peter and Paul practice all the naughtiness which is practiced in Rome?, p.74-75

Jewel, John. “The Apology of the Church of England.” Project Gutenberg. 5 Aug 2006. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17678/17678-h/17678-h.htm. Accessed 1 Aug 2015.

O holy Scribes and Pharisees, which knew not this kind of holiness! what a Catholic faith is this!  Peter did not thus teach at Rome: Paul did not so live at Rome: they did not practise brothelry, which these do openly: they made not a yearly revenue and profit of harlots: they suffered no common adulterers and wicked murderers to go unpunished.  They did not receive them into their entire familiarity, into their council, into their household, nor yet into the company of Christian men.  These men ought not therefore so unreasonably to triumph against our living.  It had been more wisdom for them either first to have proved good their own life before the world, or at least to have cloaked it a little more cunningly.  For we do use still the old and ancient laws, and (as much as men may do, in the manners used at these days, all things are so wholly corrupt) we diligently and earnestly put in execution the ecclesiastical discipline: we have not common brothel-houses of strumpets, nor yet flocks of concubines, nor herds of harlot-hunters: neither do we prefer adultery before matrimony: neither do we exercise beastly sensuality: neither do we gather ordinary rents and stipends of stews: nor do we suffer to escape unpunished incest and abominable naughtiness, nor yet such manquellers as the Aloisians, Casians, and Diazians were.  For if these things would have pleased us, we needed not to have departed from these men’s fellowship, amongst whom such enormities be in their chief pride and price.  Neither needed we, for leaving them, to run into the hatred of men, and into most wilful dangers.  Paul the Fourth, not many months sithence, had at Rome in prison certain Augustine friars, many bishops, and a great number of other devout men, for religion’s sake.  He racked them and tormented them: to make them confess, he left no means unassayed.  But in the end how many brothels, how many whoremongers, how many adulterers, how many incestuous persons could he find of all those?  Our God be thanked, although we be not the men we ought and profess to be, yet, whosoever we be, compare us with these men, and even our own life and innocency will soon prove untrue and condemn their malicious surmises.  For we exhort the people to all virtue and well-doing, not only by books and preachings, but also with our examples and behaviour.  We also teach that the Gospel is not a boasting or bragging of knowledge, but that it is the law of life, and that a Christian man (as Tertullian saith) “ought not to speak honourably, but ought to live honourably; nor that they be the hearers of the law, but the doers of the law, which are justified before God.”