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

their name before the Lord's Supper, during the Lord's Supper, and after
the Lord's Supper, he insists that there is neither bread nor wine there, but
only their accidents. While our Lord says "This is my body," the
Romanist in effect makes it: This seeming bread is no longer bread, but has
become, has been transubstantiated into, My body. He deserts the letter
and reaches Transubstantiation. The Rationalist wishes to retain the bread
and wine, and therefore holds that what the Scripture calls bread and wine,
is bread and wine; but he wishes to do away with the Scripture testimony
in regard to the body and blood; and although the Scripture says, that of
that which the Saviour tells them to Take, eat, He declares most explicitly,
This is My body; and of that which He tells them to drink, He says, This is
My blood--though it says that the bread is the communion of His body
and the cup the communion of His blood--though it declares that the guilt
of the heedless communicant is that he does not "discern the Lord's body,"
and that he that eateth and drinketh unworthily is guilty of the body and
blood of Christ; in the face of all this he insists that there is in the Lord's
Supper only the shadow, image, or sign of the body and blood of Christ,
not the true body and true blood. With what face can a Rationalist meet a
Romanist, or a Romanist meet a Rationalist? No wonder that the
Rationalist, after all, is less violent against Romanism than against the pure
doctrine of our Church. There is the secret affinity of error between them;
and Romanism does not so hate Rationalism, Rationalism does not so
hate Romanism, as both hate unswerving fidelity to the Word of God. That
the Romish and rationalizing modes of interpretation are nearer to each
other than either is to the Lutheran, is admitted by both Rationalists and
Romanists. The rationalizing interpreters make it one of the commonplaces
of objection to the Lutheran view that it has less in a literal
interpretation of the Scripture to sustain it than the Romish view has: that
is, the Romish view is less decisively opposed than the Lutheran is to
rationalistic modes of literal interpretation.
On the Romish side, Bellarmine and others take the ground