The safe religion, or, Three disputations for the reformed catholic religion against popery proving…The safe religion, or, Three disputations for the reformed catholike religion against popery proving…

And let me add, that if I prove not (in a ⟨p. 159⟩fair debate upon a just call) that the ancient Church for many hundred years after Christ, was against Transubstantiation, I will give all the Papists in England leave to spit in my face (for all the high expressions of the Eucharist that some fathers have.) 2. What is there in those words [This is my body] that can persuade any sober Christian to their strange belief? What is it, because that they are properly and not figuratively to be understood? And how is that proved? Is it because we must not force the Scripture, but take it in the plainest, obvious sense? I easily grant it. But who knows not that both in Scripture and in all our common speech, the figurative sense is oft the most plain and obvious, and the literal the most improbable? What three sentences do we use to speak together without some figurative expression? I will appeal to any unprejudiced man of reason, whether a Christian that should newly read those words of Christ, and had never heard them or read them before, would not sooner take them in our sense, then in the Papists? They may easily try this upon a new convert, if they please: and I dare make their own consciences judge, if they have any left to befriend a common truth. What is there more in [This is my Body] being a Sacramental business, then for a man that is in a room among many Images, to say [This is Peter or Paul, or this is Augustine or Hierom or Chrysostom?] And would not any unprejudiced stander by suppose that the most obvious sense of those words is [This is the picture of Peter, Paul, &c.?] Or would a man easily believe that it was the meaning of the speaker, that this Picture was the very real flesh and blood of Peter and Paul, and all other Pictures that ever should ⟨p. 160⟩be made after the same exemplar, should be so transubstantiated? So what is the obvious signification of those words [This is my body] but [This is the Sacrament or Representation of my Body?] Especially when his real body was distinctly there present, and he expressly biddeth them [Do this in remembrance of me.] 3. I would desire any Papists living to tell me, why the Text doth not as much oblige him to believe that [The Cup is the New Testament] substantially without a figure, as that [The Bread is his Body] For the Text as expressly saith one as the other, Luk. 22.20. This Cup is the new Testament in my Blood.]