Facts and Assertions: or a Brief and Plain Exhibition of the Incongruity of the Peculiar Doctrines of the Church of Rome / With Those Both of the Sacred Scriptures and of the Early Writers of the Christian Church Catholic

by George Stanley Faber

Therefore they are not me same. [22]

IV. The plain inquirer will now judge for himself: whether the romish doctrine of Transubstantiation, with the associated practice of adoring as God the consecrated elements, be taught either in Scripture, or by the early Fathers.

As for Scripture, sufficient has already been said: and, with respect to the evidence afforded by the ancient Doctors of the Catholic Church, those Doctors, we see, protest against any such new-fangled notions, not only during the three first centuries, but down even to the ninth century; and they protest, moreover, in every possible way that could well have been either required or imagined.

1. According to their interpretation of Scripture, which manifestly was the interpretation received as orthodox by the universal Church at the times when they respectively flourished, we have the following very distinct and very important results.

(1.) The consecrated elements are IMAGES or SYMBOLS or TYPES or SIGNS or REPRESENTATIONS of the body and blood of Christ.

(2.) Communicants do NOT partake of that literal body and blood, in which the Lord suffered and which he shed on the cross.

(3.) The symbols of bread and wine, AFTER consecration, STILL REMAIN UNCHANGED IN THEIR ORIGINAL SUBSTANCE: and, consequently, they are NOT transubstantiated.

(4.) Christ called the bread and wine his body and blood, IN THE SAME SENSE and ON THE SAME PRINCIPLE that he called himself a vine.

(5.) When the early writers style the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ; or when they say, that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ; or when they affirm, that the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ: they themselves state, by way of explanation, that they only speak metonymically and figuratively. For they distinctly tell us: that they are wont to call the bread and wine Christ’s body and blood; NOT BECAUSE THE BREAD IS PROPERLY HIS BODY, OR BECAUSE THE WINE IS PROPERLY HIS BLOOD; but only because they contain the sacrament of his body and blood within themselves, or because the IMAGE and SIMILITUDE of his body and blood are exhibited in the due celebration of the Eucharist.

(6.) Hence, in strict consistency, the sole change in the elements, produced by consecration, is said, by the same early writers, to be a MORAL and not a PHYSICAL change. For they pronounce it to be such a change, as is produced in the confirmatory chrism or in the stone of an altar-table or in the baptismal water; when, by consecration, they cease to be secular, and are devoted to sacred purposes: and, even yet more remarkably, they pronounce it to be such a change, as is produced in a man; when, by ordination, he ceases to be a laic, and becomes a clerk.