flesh, is merely the abstract, explanatory, intellectual expression of what faith accepts and declares, and has therefore no other meaning than this: to the senses or to common perception it is bread, but in truth, flesh. Where therefore the imaginative tendency of faith has assumed such power over the senses and reason as to deny the most evident sensible truths, it is no wonder if believers can raise themselves to such a degree of exaltation as actually to see blood instead of wine. Such examples Catholicism has to show. Little is wanting in order to perceive externally what faith and imagination hold to be real.
So long as faith in the mystery of the Lord’s Supper as a holy, nay the holiest, highest truth, governed man, so long was his governing principle the imagination. All criteria of reality and unreality, of unreason and reason, had disappeared: anything whatever that could be imagined passed for real possibility. Religion hallowed every contradiction of reason, of the nature of things. Do not ridicule the absurd questions of the Schoolmen! They were necessary consequences of faith. That which is only a matter of feeling had to be made a matter of reason, that which contradicts the understanding had to be made not to contradict it. This was the fundamental contradiction of scholasticism, whence all other contradictions followed of course.
And it is of no particular importance whether I believe the Protestant or the Catholic doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. The sole distinction is, that in Protestantism it is only on the tongue, in the act of partaking, that flesh and blood are united in a thoroughly miraculous manner with bread and wine;[1] while in Catholicism, it is before the act of partaking, by the power of the priest,—who however here acts only in the name of the Almighty,—that bread and wine are really transmuted into flesh and blood. The Protestant prudently avoids a definite explanation; he does not lay himself open like the pious, uncritical simplicity of Catholicism, whose God, as an external object, can be devoured by a mouse; he shuts up his
- ↑ “Nostrates, præsentiam realem consecrationis effectum esse, adfirmant; idque ita, ut tum se exserat, cum usus legitimus accedit. Nec est quod regeras, Christum hæc verba: hoc est corpus meum, protulisse, antequam discipuli ejus comederent, adeoque panem jam ante usum corpus Christi fuisse.”—Buddeus (1. c. 1. v. c. 1, §§ 13, 17). See, on the other hand, Concil. Trident. Sessio 13, cc. 3, 8, Can. 4.
