the right hand of God, should at the same time be on earth in the right hand of the Priest; and that there should be several thousands of those bodies upon earth at many hundreds of miles distance from one another, and yet all these be that very same one body also, this is such talk, that for sober persons in their sober senses to use it, and keep their countenance, is very strange. If one and one be two, then one body of Christ here, and one body of Christ there, make two bodies of Christ, which they own he hath not. And if one body can be in more than one place at one time, we may all of us perhaps be now this very instant at Rome as well as here: a man may be at ever so many thousand miles distance from himself, and afterwards he may come and meet himself, (as two of their pretended real bodies of Christ often do ;) and then pass by himself and go away from himself to the same distance he was at before: he may in one place be standing still, in another be carried along, and so be in motion and not in motion at the same time. Men may say such things as these if they will: and they may believe them if they can. But in order to it, well do they direct their poor people to professs in their English manual of prayers before mass, 1725, p. 409. Herein I utterly renounce the judgment of my senses, and all human understanding. Here therefore we fix our foot: if these things be to every man living evidently absurd and impossible, then let nobody ever regard the most specious pretences of proving such doctrines, or the authority of a Church that maintains them. It is no hard matter for an artful man, a little practised in disputing, so to confound a plain man upon almost any subject, that he shall not well know how to answer, though he sees himself to be right and the other wrong. This is an art which the Priests of the Church of Rome are well versed in. Indeed the chief part of their learning is to puzzle themselves first, and as many others as they can afterwards. But always observe this rule: stick to common sense against the world: and whenever a man would persuade you of any thing evidently contrary to that, never be moved by any tricks and fetches of sophistry, let him use ever so many. He will be for proving to you by round-about arguments, of which you are unqualified to judge, that his Church is infallible, and therefore transubstantiation is true. Do you answer him by a much plainer argument, of which you are very well qualified to judge: that transubstantiation cannot possibly be true, and therefore his Church is not infallible. But they plead; with and therefore this is so. which are not impossible in themselves, are possible with him; but God himself cannot do what in its own nature cannot be done. For instance, he cannot destroy his own Being, he cannot cease to be just and good, because this hath a contradiction in it; and for the same reason he cannot do any thing else that hath a contradiction in it; for that would be doing a thing and at the same time not doing it: to ascribe which to God is not to magnify, but mock his power. God all things are possible, But they say further, that transubstantiation hath no more difficulty than the Trinity hath. But surely the difference is very visible. The doctrine of the Trinity indeed is a mystery: that is, the whole of the subject cannot be fully understood by us. But in transubstantiation there is no mystery at all. For the most evident falshoods are just as clearly understood to be so as the most evident truths. In the Trinity there is nothing we see to be false; only we do not see the particular manner in which some things said concerning it are true: but in transubstantiation there are many things we see to be false, and which can in no manner be true. Let them show us any contradiction in the doctrine of the Trinity, and we will believe it no longer. In the mean time, since we have shewn contradiction in transubstantiation, let them believe that no longer. But they have Scripture to plead for it: now if this were a doctrine of Scripture, it would sooner prove Scripture to be false, than Scripture could prove it to be true; and therefore the Papists, by making such a monstrous absurdity an article of faith, have loaded their religion with a weight, which, did it belong to Christianity, were able to sink it. But, God be thanked, Scripture is no more on their side than reason. We know indeed that our Saviour said when he gave the Sacrament, this is my body. But so at another time he said, verily verily I am the door of the sheep and at a third, I am the vine. And so have all mankind always called a representation of any thing by the name of what it represented. Why then is he not to be understood in the same figure here? How do we think the Apostles understood him but as they were used to do in such cases? They who were so backward at comprehending difficult things, and so ready to ask questions about them, did they without any surprize or any question apprehend that our Saviour then took his own body in his own hand, and gave that one body to each of his twelve Apostles at the same time, and that each of them swallowed him down their throats, though he was all the while sitting at the table along with them? Such things are too ridiculous to be mentioned in a serious place, and yet these men force us to it by gravely requiring us to believe them. The only considerable passage besides, that they plead, is in the sixth chapter of St. John; where many Jews having followed our Saviour because he had fed them with the miracle of the loaves, he bids them labour not for the meat which perisheth, but that which endureth unto everlasting life, which he would give them who is the true bread from Heaven. Now were this meant of the Sacrament, and to be understood literally, we must conclude not bread turned into Christ's body, but his body turned into bread; which is quite the contrary to what they hold. But indeed the whole is only a figurative way of saying that the souls of men receive from the fruits of his death a much more valuable nourishment than their bodies receive from their daily food. Just as he elsewhere says *, whoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, it shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life; which nobody ever understood literally: and just as Wisdom speaks of herself in Ecclus. xxiv. 21. They that eat me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me shall yet be thirsty; that is, they who have tasted the pleasures and benefits of virtue will always desire a still greater experience of them. But the Jews with their usual perverseness, cavilling at these words of our Saviour's, he goes on very strongly to assert the propriety of them, that his flesh is meat indeed, and his blood drink indeed, that he who eateth the one and drinketh the other, dwelleth in him and liveth by him, but he that doth not, hath no life in him. But now these words being spoken, you see, concerning the present time, my flesh is meat indeed, and so on, cannot principally relate to the Sacrament; for there was yet no such thing, nor till a year or two after. Besides; it is * John iv. 14. not true that he, and he only, who eateth the Sacrament, shall dwell in Christ and live by him. For persons may possibly have no opportunity of receiving the Sacrament, and yet be very good Christians, and too many receive it frequently, and yet are very bad. Christians. The meaning therefore plainly is, that our Saviour's coming and suffering in the flesh, and shedding his blood for mankind, is the spiritual life of the world that whoever imbibes the doctrine he taught in his life, and partakes by faith of the benefits he procured at his death, his soul is inwardly strengthened by them, and shall be finally preserved to a happy immortality. For in this spiritual and figutative sense he immediately directs his Disciples to understand his words: when misunderstanding them in a gross and literal one had somewhat staggered them. Doth this, says he, offend you? It is the Spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit and they are life. His manner of expression had the same intent with that passage of St. Paul *, where he says, the Israelites did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink. For they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ. The Papists themselves do not think from hence, that the Jews did eat and drink Christ literally and Christians do it in the same manner they did, only with a clearer and more distinct faith. For in this spiritual sense, Christ himself explains his words we firmly believe his body and blood to be verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper; that is, an union with him, to be not only represented, but really and effectually communicated to the worthy 1 Cor. x. 3, 4. |