N00426:30
A companion for communicants. Discourses upon the nature, the design, and the subject of…
A companion for communicants. Discourses upon the nature, the design, and the subject of the Lords Supper; with devout methods of preparing for, and approaching to that blessed ordinance. / By Cotton Mather, Pastor of a church at Boston. ; [Seven lines from Augustine]
Boston: printed by Samuel Green for Benjamin Harris, 1690
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
But blessed be our God, That I now speak to some Hundreds, who are like to live unto the Day, When this Heresy shall go out of the World again. All the Wheels now move apace towards that Revolution, when mankind shall no more be Inebriated with the Cup •f Abominations in the Hand of the old Scarlet romish Where. And give me cave to bestow a little Battering upon this that long prevailing, but, I hope now •••ring piece of P•pery. Let us then reflect upon the […] of this Transubstan•••. It is […] a Doctrine made up of […], and contradictions, which 'tis beyond, or, be••• Almighty power it self to give a Being unto. Yea, there are more than many millions of them in […] Who can with any patience recite the […] ••• leries and Blasphemies of those worse than D• ceived Miscreants, whose Litany is, […] Omnipotent•• Dei car• factus miserere nobis? But let us penetrate a little into their Mystery; which […] thousand times in a year Crucifies […] again Him that was to Die, but once for […]. It makes a Body to be every where; which is a perfection peculiar unto God; but i• a Body may be God, then God may be a […] too It makes the Body that was born sixteen hundred ⟨p. 11⟩and ninety years ago, to be Created but yesterday; and the causes of that Body such as a Baker, a Wafer, a Charm, are not, until many Ages after the Effect it self was upon the Stage. It makes a Body, without Extension of parts, tho' Extension belong to the very Essence of a Body; and it crowds a quantity of near six foot long, into a room far smaller than the smallest Grain of Corn affords. It makes ten thousand Bodies of One, and a thousand circumstances both absent and present with the same point of Time. Yea, it makes the glorified Body of our Lord Jesus, capable of having deadly poisons mixed with it, as in the well known Story of both a Pope and an Emperor, poisoned with the Eucharist. Indeed, The Papists have no more Scripture for the Breads being Transubstantiated, than there is for the Priests being so; when he Mutters, This is my Body. Truly, is one single such Impossibility or Contradiction must be swallowed, we altogether lose all the use of common sense, and Natural Reason, in those very things which God Himself has made them judges in; and we can be sure of Nothing, all the World must Evaporate into Nothing with us.