(1.) The language of St. Paul exactly corresponds with the language of Christ.
Even after consecration, the Apostle, we may observe, still repeatedly calls the elements this bread and this cup or the bread and the cup. Yet he could not truly have thus called them: if, all the while, they had become, by transubstantiation, literal human flesh and literal human blood.
(2.) We may here again note, that the true doctrine of the Eucharist, as undoubtedly delivered by St. Paul to the gentile converts of Corinth, does not appear to have excited either surprise or offence.
Whence the presumption, or rather indeed the certainty, is: that, in delivering it to them, he distinctly taught, on the authority of his Lord and Master, that it is the spirit which quickeneth, that the flesh profiteth nothing, and that the words spoken by Christ are spirit and life.
4. As our Saviour thus fully explains his own phraseology: so, in strict congruity with his explanation; on the existence, of the soul and divinity of Christ in the consecrated elements, and on the adoration of those elements with the very same adoration as that which is paid to the Deity, Holy Scripture is PROFOUNDLY SILENT.
From whatever quarter the duty of such worship was learned by the Romish Priesthood, it assuredly was not learned from the Bible. The written word of God neither enjoins it, nor gives a single instance of its ever having being paid either in the time or with the sanction of the Apostles.
5. Equally silent also is the Bible, respecting the alleged circumstance: that The celebration of the Eucharist is a true propitiatory sacrifice both for the quick and for the dead.
The Church of Rome, indeed, teaches this doctrine: but she did not learn it from Scripture.
III. We may now, with advantage, proceed to hear the declarations of the Fathers concerning the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
1. Clement of Alexandria lived in the second century.