A discussion of the popish doctrine of transubstantiation wherein the same is declared, by…A discussion of the popish doctrine of transubstantiation vvherein the same is declared, by…

2. Let him show how it implieth an evident contradiction, to say that Christs body is truly given with the sacramental signs, though it be no nearer then heaven-top is to the mouths of the receivers. How this may be, without colour of contradiction, not in the Sacrament only, but out of it also, when as the thing is done spiritually, beside the comparisons that I express it by, his own ^uJansenius will show; yea or his own Albert will inform him, where he saith, that ^xSome eat and yet eat not; and some eat not, and yet eat. The former he meaneth of those that eat unprofitably in the Sacrament; the latter of those that eat spiritually out of it. If out of the Sacrament men may truly receive Christs body, though it be no nearer then heaven top to their mouths; then is it no such strange paradox as should imply contradiction, to say that the self same is done in the Sacrament also. I will tell him of a stranger matter. Many thousands thus did eat Christs flesh a thousand years before he was in the flesh. For howsoever he required before to have it proved; and ⟨p. 184⟩Bellarmine ^yin diverse places would fain deny it, and in ^zeffect sometime doth, though directly and absolutely he dare not: yet it was showed before out of Augustine: to whom I now add Gregory Nyssene: who in his tenth Sermon on the Canticles, speaking of those words, ^aEat and drink my friends, ^bThere is no difference (saith he) between the words here used, and the words used in the Institution of the Eucharist. For that which he exhorteth us to do in the one, ^cwas then also done in that divine meat and drink. And very many, yea the most of their own writers uniformly confess it. Thomas Aquinas on