The English Moral Plays 369 
All these heresies, in fact, New Custom bluntly avows when he 
meets the priest upon the stage immediately after this introduction. 
I said that the mass, and such trumpery as that, 
Popery, purgatory, pardons, were flat 
Against God’s word and primitive constitution. (7d) 
On these points they bicker with no apparent evangelistic pur- 
pose and without result; the good character is not even set in the 
stocks, and reenters at once with Light of the Gospel to discuss 
the Protestant dogma of justification by faith. This Genevan doc- 
tor, in fact, upholds against Catholicism the moderate Puritan 
position of Elizabeth’s early reign.? 
Very similar in spirit and teaching is Wever’s Lusty /uventus. 
Good Counsel and Godly Knowledge brand the traditions of the 
older generation as vain and its teachers as ignorant and false. 
They teach a truer doctrine, with the result that the Devil is forced 
to admit that although the older people followed his laws, the 
younger generation will not, seeking to live instead “as the Scripture 
teacheth.” So Juventus becomes in Hypocrisy’s eyes a “New 
Gospeller,” or in his own “an earnest professor of Christ’s gospel.” 
Both these Puritan plays were written under the influence of Bishop 
Bale. The characters Light of the Gospel and Assurance were 
suggested by Evangelium and Fides Christiana of Bale’s Three 
Laws, God’s Merciful Promises was derivative from Bale’s God’s 
Promises, and Hypocrisy from his Three Laws. 
The Catholic party was not so ready in this form of argument 
as their aggressive opponents, and of the plays they wrote only 

1 There were other anti-Catholic plays. Henry Cheke’s /reew7// was 
a translation from the Italian of Nigri da Bassano (Schelling, 2. 60). 
There is record of a play Zhe Burning of John Huss (Schelling, 1. 72). 
Thomas Wylley, a clergyman of Suffolk, in a letter to Cromwell in 15387 
wrote: “The most part of the priests of Suffolk will not receive me 
into their churches to preach ... since I made a play against the Pope’s 
counselers, Error, Colle Clogger of Conscience, and Incredulity.... I have 
made a play called a Rude Commonalty. I am making of another 
called the Woman on the Rock, in the fire of faith affyning and a 
purging in the true purgatory.” (Letters and Papers. Foreign and 
Domestic. Henry VII, 12. 1. 244). A physician of London, named 
Luke, wrote during Henry’s reign the Znterlude of John Bon & Mast 
Person, a dialogue against the doctrine of transubstantiation. These 
Protestant plays are alluded to in the poem, 4 Pore Help (Strype, LZcc/. 
Mem., 2. 2. 3383-39). 
2 Brandl, Quedlen, \xiv. 
