Of course, it was not proper for me to infect the young student with my doubts; he was better pleased in having discovered, as he fancied, the mystery of that religious impossibility than an alchymist would have been in finding the philosopher's stone.
I had none in whom I could confide. My colleague and friend, Professor Borg, was a man who would rather have renounced his reason, or doubted of his very existence, than have denied a dogma of faith; besides which, he was of opinion that such points ought not to be too freely discussed.
"What did you think of our controversy?" said I.
"All went off well," he replied; "he is an excellent young man, that Conti. What he said pleased me very much; and very true is that famous verse of Salomone Fiorentino with which he concluded:
Vedi che in fronte ha scritto: adora e taci."
It would evidently have been useless to enter upon any discussion with such a man as my good friend Borg; I therefore came to the conclusion that I had better study the thing by myself, and endeavour to ascertain the real truth.
It is this important question which so many have racked their brains to understand in the Romish sense. The matter resolves itself simply into this: Are the words, "This is my body," "This is my blood," to be understood in a literal sense? Every one must see the absurdity of it. The least consideration will show that Christ said these words in the same sense as he said on another occasion, "I am the bread that came down from heaven," and no one ever supposed that He was actually bread, and subsequently changed, or transubstantiated. A little examination was sufficient to shake my belief in that doctrine which I had hitherto professed. Would Jesus Christ have told us things that were impossible to be? Now it is impossible, absolutely impossible, that what is bread should at one and the same time be His body; and that what is wine should be contemporaneously His blood. This cannot be, either simultaneously or successively. The Church of Rome saw the first to be an absurdity, and therefore held to the second. But how can the body of Christ become bread, and His blood wine, if such change be not in accordance with the laws of nature? Could Christ deceive us? Now it is not true that bread and wine, according to nature, have ceased to exist in the sacrament; for we see they do exist; that which we see, touch, and taste, is natural bread and wine. Can there be faith against nature? And yet that is against nature, which neither is nor can be: whatever is, must be according to nature's laws. There may be substances of a higher nature, and subject to superior laws than those with which we are acquainted; but they can never exist in contradiction to those laws, since nature herself, in that case, would be destroyed. Therefore, what is bread and wine cannot be not bread and wine; God, omnipotent as he is, cannot order it otherwise. But the sacrament, after consecration, remains natural bread and wine; therefore it is not the substance of the body and blood of Christ.
And what, I should like to know, would be the use of this pretended transubstantiation? Would it merely be that the faithful might, materially, eat the body and drink the blood of Christ? Now who does not see that this so-called eating and drinking of Christ is entirely metaphorical?
"The kingdom of God is not meat and drink,"[39] said St. Paul; "It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing."