mediaeval Catholicism, retaining the same God and the same scriptures,
but rejecting the mediaeval ceremonial and the mediaeval theory of the
sacrifice of the Mass. It did not follow that the Mass was sheer
"idolatry," at which no friend of the new ideas could be present.

As a proof that such presence or participation was not unlawful, was not
idolatry, in the existing state of affairs, was adduced the conduct of
St. Paul and the advice given to him by St. James and the Church in
Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 18-36). Paul was informed that many thousands of
Jews "believed," yet remained zealous for the law, the old order. They
had learned that Paul advised the Jews in Greece and elsewhere not to
"walk after the customs." Paul should prove that "he also kept the law."
For this purpose he, with four Christian Jews under a vow, was to purify
himself, and he went into the Temple, "until that an offering should be
offered for every one of them."

"Offerings," of course, is the term in our version for sacrifices,
whether of animals or of "unleavened wafers anointed with oil." The
argument from analogy was, I infer, that the Mass, with its wafer, was
precisely such an "offering," such a survival in Catholic ritual, as in
Jewish ritual St. Paul consented to, by the advice of the Church of
Jerusalem; consequently Protestants in a Catholic country, under the
existing circumstances, might attend the Mass. The Mass was not
"idolatry." The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course,
and to fatal results, does Knox's analogy between the foreign worships of
Israel and the Mass. "She thinks not _that_ idolatry, but good
religion," said Lethington to Knox once, speaking of Queen Mary's Mass.
"So thought they that offered their children unto Moloch," retorted the
reformer. Manifestly the Mass is, of the two, much more on a level with
the "offering" of St. Paul than with human sacrifices to Moloch! {66}