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

and the faith of the apostles themselves. The more difficult to reason the
doctrine of the true presence is shown to be, the stronger is the
presumption that the doctrine was reached neither by the exercise of
reason nor by the perversion of it, but by the witness of the New Testament
writings and the personal teachings of the apostles.
IV. Objection from the visible presence of Christ.
It is objected that it is inconceivable that Christ, then present, visibly
and locally, could have given His body sacramentally in a true, objective
sense. There is a strong appeal made to the rationalism of the natural mind.
Christ in His human form is brought before the mental vision, sitting at the
table, holding the bread in His hand; and men are asked, "Can you believe
that the body which continued to sit visibly and palpably before them, was
communicated in any real manner by the bread?" It is evident at first sight
that the objection assumes a falsity, to wit, that the body of Christ, though
personally united with Deity, has no mode of true presence but the visible
and palpable. The objection, to mean anything, means, "Can you believe
that what continued in a visible and palpable mode of presence before their
eyes, was communicated in a visible and palpable mode of presence with
the bread?" To this the answer is: "We neither assert nor believe it!" If, to
make the argument hold, the objector insists, "That, if the body were not
communicated in that visible and palpable mode, it could be
communicated in no true mode," he abandons one objection to fly to
another; and what he now has to do is to prove that the palpable and
visible mode of presence is the only one possible to the body of our Lord
which is in personal union with Deity. It is interesting here to see the lack
of consistency between two sorts of representations made by the objectors
to the sacramental presence of Christ. The first is, We cannot believe that
He was sacramentally present then at the first Supper because He was
bodily so near. The second is, He cannot be sacramentally present now,
because His body is so far off. But alike to the argument from mere natural
proximity, or from mere natural remoteness, the answer is: The whole
human nature of our Lord belongs on two sides, in two sets of