“Likewise you hold obedience due to the Bishop of Rome, instead of only unto your own Prince, as with us,” objected Blanche, growing a shade bolder.
“That, again, is but in matters ecclesiastical. In secular matters, I do assure your Grace, the Pope interfereth not.”
Blanche, who had no answers to these subtle explainings away of the facts, felt as if all her outworks were being taken, one by one.
“Yet,” she said, bringing her artillery to bear on a new point, “you have images in your churches, Don John, and do worship unto them?”
The word worship has changed its meaning since the days of Queen Elizabeth. To do worship, and to do honour, were then interchangeable terms.
Don Juan smiled. “Have you no pictures in your books, Doña Blanca? These images are but as pictures for the teaching of the vulgar, that cannot read. How else should we learn them? If some of the ignorant make blunder, and bestow to these images better honour than the Church did mean them, the mistake is theirs. No man really doth worship unto these, only the vulgar.”
“But do not you pray unto the saints?”
“We entreat the saints to pray for us; that is all.”
“Then, in the Lord’s Supper—the mass, you call it,”—said Blanche, bringing up at last her strongest battering-ram, “you do hold, as I have been taught, Don John, that the bread and wine be changed into the very self body and blood of our Saviour Christ, that it is no more bread and wine at all. Now how can you believe a matter so plainly confuted by your very senses?”
“Ah, if I had but your learning and wisdom, Señora!” sighed Don Juan, apparently from the bottom of his heart.