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

shall dwell more fully than on the others. The word "Transubstantiation"
was as unknown to pure antiquity as the doctrine couched under it. It first
appears in the Twelfth Century. The first official use of the term was made
in the Lateran Council of 1215. The doctrine of Transubstantiation affirms
that at the consecrating words the substance of bread and wine ceases to
be, and in their place, clothed with their accidents or properties, are the
body, blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ; no bread, but
simply Christ's body, looking like bread, tasting like bread, feeling like
bread, nourishing the body like bread, corrupted like bread, eaten by mice
like bread, conjoined with poison killing the body like poisoned bread,
bearing on it the baker's mark like bread; but no bread, only body; that
there is no wine, but Christ's blood, smelling like wine, red if the wine have
been red, white if the wine have been white, intoxicating like wine, spilling
like wine, leaving permanent stains like wine, poisoning, if mixed with
poison, like poisoned wine, pronounced by chemical analysis to be wine,
depositing the acids and salts like wine, but throughout no wine. The
doctrine of Transubstantiation is a doctrine not only untaught in the
Scriptures, but directly in conflict with their letter. It is in conflict with the
analogy of faith, overthrowing logically indubitable parts of the faith; it is in
conflict with the nature of a sacrament, to which are required two real
elements, the real earthly as well as the real heavenly; it is in conflict with a
fair parallel with Holy Baptism, in which it is not pretended by the Church
of Rome that there is any transubstantiation of the water; it is a doctrine
utterly unknown to Christian antiquity, the demonstrable invention of ages
of corruption, resisted by many of the greatest theologians even under the
Papacy, and the nurse of superstition, and of the grossest idolatry; it is in
conflict with the testimony of the senses, subversive of all the laws of moral
evidence, and by overstretching faith into credulity, tends to produce by
reaction, universal skepticism. An acute nation which swings into
Transubstantiation, may swing out of it into Atheism.
This doctrine, of the mediaeval Church of Rome was very early, and
very positively, rejected by Luther, and our other