The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

able to do with their imaginary arguments for her what they could not do
with her real arguments for herself. They have found that upsetting the men
of straw, of their own making, was very different from uprooting the
everlasting foundations of the temple reared by God. One of these weak
inventions is, that our Church adopts this ungrammatical construction of a
neuter pronoun with a masculine noun, and that hence she after all deserts
the literal sense of the word, and that her interpretation really is: "This
(bread) is not My body, but in, with, and under it My body is given." But
as the Church does not consider the neuter pronoun as qualifying the
masculine noun, and does not interpolate the word bread, but takes our
Lord's words precisely as He utters them, all this ingenuity is thrown
away. It only shows how she might have argued, had she possessed as
little grammar, as little logic, and as little reverence for her Master's words
as is exhibited by such antagonists. From the words: "This is My body,"
she only gathers this: "This is Christ's body;" and neither on the one hand
that the bread is not His body, nor on the other that His body is given in,
with, and under it. She acknowledges that the ecclesiastical (not Biblical)
phrase “This bread is Christ's body," sets forth a truth, as the Church uses
and understands it; and from a comparison of text with text, she knows that
the bread is the medium by which, in which, with which, under which the
body is imparted, but she reaches this by no reading out of the text what is
in it, nor reading into it, what is no part of it; but by interpreting every word
in that natural and proper sense, which is fixed by the laws of language.
Our Saviour says, Take, and we take; He says, Eat, and we eat; He says:
This (which He has just told us to take, eat) is My body, and we believe it.
The affirmation is as literal as the command, and we believe the one as we
obey the other, to the letter, no more understanding His affirmation to be,
This is not My body, than we understand His command to be, Do not take,
Do not eat.
"My body," some have interpreted to mean “symbol of My body,"
but as this would make the Saviour say that the "symbol