Christus in corde, or, The mystical union between Christ and believers considered in its…

The other is this; The Body of Christ is present virtually, and in the Holy Spirit communicated to us. St. Cyprian sets out Christ by the Sun, the great Luminary of the world;¹ Totum apud se manens totum se omnibus commodat, remaining whole in himself, he communicates himself whole to all his members. His Sacred Body, which is locally in Heaven, comes down to us in healing and quickening beams, in the special presence and operations of the Spirit; there goes out from it a divine virtue, which reaches down to all the Believers in the world, and upon every touch of Faith is present to heal them: Evigilet fides & praestò est Christus; let Faith awake, and Christ is at hand. Aquinas, a great man among the Papists, asserts, that the passion of Christ operates per spiritualem contactum, by a spiritual contact. Scheckius, ²a learned Lutheran. saith, that the Body of Christ is present with us, not locally and corporally, but spiritually and in Energy. But here it ⟨p. 232⟩will be said, that thus the body of Christ is present in its effect only. To which I answer, there is more in it than so; the Spirit communicated is not a mere effect, but a copula or unitive bond; it operates not merely upon believers as objects, but in them as parts of Christ. When the Sun lets down his rays to the earth, those rays are effects, and operate upon the earth as an object; but when the head lets down the animal spirits to the feet, those spirits are an unitive bond, and operate in them as parts of the body. Thus it is between Christ and Believers; the Spirit is not a mere effect, but an unitive bond; it joins them intimately to Christ, it makes them members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones, mystical parts of him, and a kind of appendants of his humane nature, not indeed hypostatically, but spiritually joined to it; the distance between Heaven and Earth can no more impede this conjunction, than the distance between the head and feet can impede that union which is between them. The Immense Spirit can more easily unite at a vast distance, then finite spirits can at a less; the humane nature of Christ cannot by local distance be separated from the Divine, because the Divine is Immense; Believers cannot by local distance be separated ⟨p. 233⟩