A vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat lux

3. Whereas it is certain that our Saviour himself preached on a Text, Luk. 4. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. as also did his Apostles, Act. 8. 35. and the Fathers of the following Ages, it is sufficiently evident that that was also the constant mode of preaching in the first 300. years, as may be made good in the instance of Origen and sundry others.

You go on, and except against me for saying, that we hear nothing of your Sacrifice of the Mass in the Scripture; and say you will neither hear nor see; say you the passion of our Lord is our Christian Sacrifice? do not I say s• too? but that this incruent Sacrifice was instituted by the same Lord before his death to figure out daily before our eyes, that passion of his which was then approaching in commemoration of his death so long as the world should last.

I must desire you to stay here a little; This Sacrifice you make the main of Christian Religion. Protestants for the want of it, you esteem to have no Religion at all. We must therefore consider, what it is that you intend by it, for I suppose you would not have us accept of we know not what, and you seem both in your Fiat and in your Epistola to obscure it ⟨p. 457⟩as much as you are able. 1. You call it an incruent Sacrifice, which (1.) Shows only what it is not, and that in one only instance which is a very lame description of any thing; and this also may be affirmed of any Metaphorical Sacrifice what ever; as offering unto God, the calves of our lips; it is an incruent Sacrifice. 2. Your Expression implies a contradiction. Every proper Propitiatory Sacrifice was bloody; and an incruent proper Sacrifice, such as you would have this to be, is a proper improper Propitiatory Sacrifice. 2. You say it was instituted by our Lord to figure out his Passion. (1.) This is a weighty proof of what you have in hand, being the only thing to be proved. (2.) I suppose in the examination of it, it will appear that you Sacrifice that very body and blood of Christ in your own conceits, which himself offered unto God; and how you can make any thing, to be a figure of it self, as yet I do not perfectly understand. (3.) That the Lord Christ appointed the Sacrament of his body and blood, and our Eucharistical Sacrifice therein to be a Commemoration of his death and Passion, is the Doctrine of Protestants, where with your Sacrifice hath a perfect inconsistency, as we shall find in the Consideration of it. This is the substance of what you are pleased to acquaint us with about this great business of our Religion. But because you shall perceive that it was not without good grounds and reasons that I affirmed the Scripture to be utterly silent of this that you make the great work of Christianity, I shall a little further enquire after the nature of it; that I mean which by you it is fancied to be, for it is a mere creature of your own imagination.