The Apology of the Church of England (Dodo Press) - John Jewel

John Jewel (1522-1571), bishop of Salisbury, was educated under his uncle John Bellamy, rector of Hampton, and other private tutors until his matriculation at Merton College, Oxford, in July 1535. Under Elizabeth's succession he returned to England, and made earnest efforts to secure what would now be called a low-church settlement of religion; he was strongly committed to the Elizabethan reforms. He now constituted himself the literary apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement. He had on November 26, 1559, in a sermon at St Paul's Cross, challenged all comers to prove the Roman case out of the Scriptures, or the councils or Fathers for the first six hundred years after Christ. He repeated his challenge in 1560, and Dr Henry Cole took it up. The chief result was Jewel's Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae, published in 1562, which in Bishop Creighton's words is the first methodical statement of the position of the Church of England against the Church of Rome, and forms the groundwork of all subsequent controversy.