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Hooker, then that learned man of deep thought"

agrees herein with the Anglican Church: and the two together ought to settle the question of substantial multipresence with churchmen, so far as mere authority can settle it.

It is well, however, to state, for various minds, various arguments confirmatory of Hooker's position: for if it be indeed established, it at once disposes of all the other Sacerdotal and dependent doctrines.

First, then, I observe that the substantial or essential presence or absence of a real body can be established only by the senses: which are to man, indeed, the first sources of all knowledge, and they are uniformly appealed to by Scripture.

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Thus it was by miracles, cognisable by the senses, that Christ first manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on Him';3 and if He had not done amongst them such visible works as never man did, they had not had sin' in rejecting Him. It was, again, by a reference to what they heard and saw, that He convinced the disciples of the Baptist:5 and it was the evidence of sense that the Apostles also fundamentally built on:-That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life . . . That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.'6

That our Saviour Christ, the Son of God, was really incarnate and made man, and suffered, and was crucified dead and buried, were truths all proved by the senses only. His resurrection, too, was similarly established by Himself; and even Thomas was, by the senses, recovered from his unbelief.

1 Locke.

3 John ii. 11.

6 1 John i. 1, 3.

Upon the same immovable founda

tion,' the Catholic Church has since believed, that Christ, in rising, ‘took again His body with flesh, and bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's nature; wherewith He ascended into heaven: and there He sitteth with the same body glorified (until the restitution of all things or) until He return to judge all men:1 and until His said return, 'the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ' are in heaven, as Scripture tells us; and they are not here' in the elements, as the same senses incontrovertibly establish.

All our knowledge of the essential qualities of body, as of body itself, is derived exclusively from the senses, by an ultimate law of belief acting in all men, in all places, and at all times; and only disputed by sceptics—who have themselves been overborne by the evidence-or by the vain babblings and oppositions of science, falsely so called,' introduced into religion, against the emphatic caution of the Apostle.2

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This principle of belief is not demonstrable, but intuitive; and it is, therefore, superior to demonstration, which latter requires intuitive evidence for every one of its steps: and if disputes against such intuitive principles be once admitted, arguments would be endless, and all conclusions be suspended, or universal scepticism be the result.

The senses, then, infallibly teach us, that body exists only with its essential qualities—such as those of extension, figure, and occupation of place--and that if you deny to any imaginary body extension, figure, and occupation of place, you thereby deny its existence.

If, then, it be pretended, that in the consecrated elements there be hidden any body, not only invisible. and impalpable, but unextended also and unfigured, and not locally in place; then that pretended body is certainly

not Christ's real body, but a vain imagination, or an idol which is nothing in the world.'1

It was from questioning this intuitive testimony of the senses, that those ancient heresies respecting Christ's body first arose, which the beloved Apostle opposed so zealously.2

The Gnostics and Docetæ, in the lifetime of the Apostles, and afterwards Cerdo, Marcion, Bardesanes, Tatian, Basilides, Valentinus, Apollinaris, Manes; and afterwards the Priscillianists, Messalians, Euchites, and many others, including the Eutychians; and, later still, the Cathari in the twelfth century, denied that Christ had a true human body, chiefly on the ground of His Godhead. But the orthodox Fathers refuted them by the evidence of the senses; which was first given to the Apostles, and by the Scriptures testified to us and when some heretics maintained an essential change in our Lord's body at His resurrection or ascension, one eminent Father, as we shall see hereafter, affirmed that Christ, when He gave His body immortality, took not away its nature;' and another successfully established, that Christ has now a real body, in heaven, as He had on earth; and even Bellarmine admits, as a point of Catholic faith, that the human nature of Christ is, and was, of the same species with ours;' and we know that as the 'Charge' rightly says-man 'is not a phantom: he has a real material body, by which he enters into the world of sense, and becomes visible.'3

As to the comparatively modern fancies of a substantial body being present without accidents; and in a place, but not there locally; or that the presence of Christ's body 'is not that of an organised body, or of a material character, so that our Blessed Lord has at once a body organical in heaven, and on earth not organical'-that 2 1 John iv. 2, 3; John i. 14. 4 Charge, p. 88.

1 1 Cor. viii. 4.

3 P. 31.

is, without organs, or members, or disposition, or distance of parts; so that, as even the authorised Gloss upon the Roman Canon Law incredulously says, 'Where His foot is, there would be His nose: quod non credo !'1 and that His non-organical body is on the earth at once upon 10,000 altars, and therefore divided as often from itself; and brought to the elements by consecration from heaven by as many contradictory motions:-all such new devices seem to have been as much beyond the imaginations of ancient heretics, as of unlearned apostles; and to have been the marvellous inventions of subtler wits, whose great aim, amidst all the perplexing confusion, was however intelligible-viz., to induce man to worship the work of men's hands when consecrated by their own breath; and to give to the priesthood a power superior to Omnipotence.

This implied division of our Lord's body from itself, indeed, has so much perplexed the acutest advocates for the Substantial Presence, that even the 'angelical Doctor' Aquinas, and the schoolmen after him, admit the absolute impossibility of His body and blood being at once locally in more places than one: and thence their jargon of a Substantial Presence in the elements, but not in them locally-i.e. they are indeed there, and they must be there;' 2 but then not as in a place-a position, indeed, harder to understand than to answer.

There is a doctrine also superadded to the Substantial Presence by the Council of Trent-viz. that this presence of our Lord's body is not only in the whole consecrated elements, but in every part thereof; and therefore the infinity of parts in each of the elements would infer in a single Church an infinity of bodies, each of them outside the other: an imagination which Augustine of old

1 Decret. de Consecr. dist. ii. in can. lxxviii. : Ubi pars est corporis, est et totum. 2 Rev. Dr. Pusey.

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strangely anticipated, when he observed of bodies that, from their innumerable parts, none can be whole everywhere' and that whatever body occupies a place, 'it so fills the same place, that in no part of it is the whole.'1 But any objections, to protect Christians from such imaginations and their results, are now, conveniently, by Sacerdotalists designated as 'floods of blasphemy against holy truth.'2

The impossibilities in this case multiply upon the least reflection. Thus, each loaf consecrated might possibly be as large as our Lord's glorified body and if so, His really human body might exist at once in 10,000 places in its full dimensions. Indeed, it has been said, that if a priest with intention' pronounce the words of consecration looking at a whole market of bread, every loaf therein would become a sacrament, with the same inward part and thus Sacerdotalism would surpass in extravagance even Eutychianism; for Eutyches, in maintaining the ubiquity of our Lord's body, did not thereby either multiply it or divide it from itself.

The power of working miracles, though insinuated, is not a satisfactory explanation of such imaginations. The 'Charge' says:-'The assumption that the successors of the Apostles do not possess such a power lacks all Scriptural authority. If miracles are not worked among us, this would be sufficiently accounted for . . . by a want of faith in the one invisible miracle-worker.'3 It reminds us also of the instrumentality of man, which God has been pleased to take up into, and to employ in, the supernatural order. But if this be applied to the supposed supernatural effects of consecration, it may be answered, that all the miracles recorded in Scripture were visible; and not one is mentioned against or without the evidence of

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1 Epist. 3 Volusiano. 3 P. 42.

2 Preface to Sermon by Rev. E. B. Pusey, in 1843. 4 P. 58.