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

Second. Is the reason of quality in the substance, so that essentially
different qualities prove essentially different substances, and essentially
different substances must have essentially different qualities? The answer
is affirmative.
Third. Does the character of a quality, as determined by the
substance, have a real correspondence with the phenomenon in which the
human mind is cognizant of the quality? The answer is, Yes.
VI. Objection: that the same line of argument can be urged for
transubstantiation.
If these answers be tenable, then the doctrine of transubstantiation
goes to the ground; for it assumes that the qualities of bread and wine do
not inhere in bread and wine, and may consequently exist abstractly from
bread and wine: not only that a something which is not bread and wine
may have all their qualities, but that a nothing, a non-essence, may have all
their qualities. This theory, which is practically so materializing, runs out
speculatively into nihilism. It assumes that the reason of the qualities of
bread and wine is not in the substance of bread and wine; and that,
consequently, the connection is purely arbitrary; that the reason of the
qualities of body and blood is not in the substance or nature of body and
blood, and that consequently there is no reason in the essential nature of
things why all bread should not have the qualities of human body and all
body the qualities of bread. If the seeming loaf of bread may be Christ's
body really, the seeming body of Christ might have been really a loaf of
bread. We may be in a world in which nothing that seems is in
correspondence with what is. The innocent family which thinks that it is
eating bread is indulging in cannibalism, and some unfortunate wretch is
hung on supposition of his having committed murder, when, in fact, what
he plunged his knife into was but a loaf of bread, clothed with the
accidents of a man. Transubstantiation unsettles the entire ground of belief
and thought, and conflicts with the veracity of God in nature, as it does
with His testimony in His Word.
A little reflection will show that not one of these metaphysical
difficulties connects itself with the doctrine of the true sacramental
presence. It grants that all the attributes of