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desire to have it proved that God will have it so, and that it is so indeed. For, that God doth it because He can, is no argument; and that He wills it, we have no other proof but the confident assertion of our adversaries. Tertullian against Praxeas declared "that we should not conclude God doth things because He is able, but that we should enquire what He hath done;" for God will never own that praise of His Omnipotency, whereby His unchangeableness and His truth are impaired, and those things overthrown and destroyed, which, in His Word, He affirms to be; for, take away the Bread and Wine, and there remains no Sacrament.
They that say, that the matter and form of the Bread are wholly abolished, yet will have the accidents to remain. But if the substance of the Bread be changed into the substance of Christ's Body by virtue of His words, what hinders that the accidents of the Bread are not also changed into the accidents of Christ's Body? They that urge the express letter, should show that Christ said, "This is the substance of My body without its accidents." But He did not say, that He gave His Disciples a phantastic body, such a visionary figment as Marcion believed, but that very body which is given for us, without being deprived of that extension and other accidents of human bodies, without which it could not have been crucified; since the maintainers of transubstantiation grant that the Body of Christ keeps its quantity in Heaven, and say it is without the same in the Sacrament; they must either acknowledge their contradiction in the matter, or give over their opinion.
Protestants dare not be so curious, or presume to know more than is delivered by Scripture and antiquity, they firmly believing the words of Christ make the form of this Sacrament to consist in the union of the thing signified with the sign, that is, the exhibition of the Body of Christ with the consecrated Bread, still remaining bread; by divine appointment these two are made one; and though this union be not natural, substantial, personal, or local by their being one within another, yet it is so straight and so true, that in eating the blessed Bread, the true Body of Christ is given to us, and the names of the sign and thing signified are reciprocally changed, what is proper to the Body is attributed to the Bread, and what belongs only to the Bread, is affirmed of the Body, and both are united in time, though not in place. For the presence of Christ in this mystery is not opposed to distance but to absence, which only could deprive us of the benefit and fruition of the object.
