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

great Reformers. In 1520, Luther, in his book on the Babylonish Captivity,
says: "For more than twelve hundred years the Church held the right
faith," (in regard to the Lord's Supper,) "and never do the holy fathers
make mention of that portentous word and dream, Transubstantiation." In
1522, in his book against Henry VIII., he says, "What they (the
Romanists) hold in regard to Transubstantiation is the merest figment of
the godless and blind Thomists;" and again, "I declare it to be impious and
blasphemous for any one to assert that the bread is transubstantiated." It
were easy, if need were, to fill pages with testimony of this kind; but it is
needless.
The Romanists, in their Confutation, objected to the Tenth Article
that it does not teach Transubstantiation, and, what they there say, or what
was said by their great theological representatives at the Diet, is most
important as showing how the Confession was there understood, and, of
course, how it is to be understood now. An examination of their official
Confutation at once silences the pitiful old libel that the Roman Catholics
accepted the Tenth Article without reservation. The latest repeater of this
ignorant, if not malicious, assertion, is Rev. Wm. Good, by whom it has
been the great misfortune of the Low Church Party in England to seem to
be represented. He quotes, at second hand we judge, (from the pages of
one of the bitterest zealots against the Lutheran Church,) four words,
drawn from the Papal Confutation, which would lead his readers to
suppose that the Papists simply assented to the Tenth Article as being
sound, and hence he draws the inference that the Article teaches the
Romish view. All this is built on an isolation of four words out of more
than a hundred. The Romish Confutation, so far as it bears upon this point,
literally translated, runs thus:
"The Tenth Article in words offends nothing, when they confess that
in the Eucharist, after consecration legitimately made, the body and blood
of Christ are substantially and truly present, provided that (si modo) they
believe, that under each species, the entire Christ is present, so that by
concomitance, the blood of Christ is no less under the species of bread
than it is under the species of wine, and so of the other. Otherwise in