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decide on the meaning of His words on any occasion, by assuming that their accomplishment was impossible to him?

Furthermore, we find Him making this the great test of Hi false and true disciples; that the first, as we read in the 6th chapter of John, went away from Him, remarking," this is a hard saying, and who can hear it?" and the second remained faithful, in spite of their not being able to comprehend His doctrine. Wherefore He formally approved of the twelve, saying: "Have I not chosen you twelve?" Although evidently in some darkness and perplexity, they persevered, and remained attached to Him; they yielded up their judgment and reason to His authority; "To whom shall we go, for thou hast the words of eternal life?" Again, then, our Saviour had accustomed his apostles to this argument on every occasion; "Although this thing may appear impossible to us, as our divine Master says it, it must be so." Can we believe then, that on this one occasion of the institution of the Eucharist, he made use of expressions, the only key to whose right interpretation was to be precisely the inverse of this their usual argument, namely; "although our divine Master says, 'this is my Body and Blood,' because the thing is impossible it cannot be so." If our Saviour could not possibly have expected His apostles to reason on the true meaning of His words from any question of the possibility or impossibility of what He seemed to say, if such a consideration cannot have been the key to a right understanding, which they could possibly have thought of using, then of course it cannot be the instrument of interpretation, or the key to their meaning with us; because that only is the true meaning which the apostles attached to His words, and that only is the process of arriving at it, whereby they could reach, and must have reached, it.

But, my brethren, as I before hinted, are we safe in at all admitting this principle of contradiction to the law of nature, of apparent violation of philosophical principles, as a means of interpreting Scripture? What, I will ask, becomes of all mystery? Once let go the curb, and where, or how, will you

stop, or check your career ? If the clearest words of Scripture are thus to be forced, because, as they stand, we conceive them to contain an impossibility, how will you vindicate the Trinity or the Incarnation, each of which is no less at variance with the apparent laws of nature? And after all, what do we know of nature, we who cannot explain the production from its seed of the blade of grass on which we tread; who cannot penetrate the qualities of an atom of air which we inhale? Perplexed in our enquiries after the most simple elements of creation, baffled in every analysis of the most obvious properties of matter, shall we, in our religious contests, make a magic wand of our stunted reason, and boldly describe with it a circle round omnipotence, which it shall not presume to overstep? But until we can be certain that we are perfectly acquainted with all the laws of nature, and what is more, with all the resources of omnipotence, we have no right to reject the clearest assurances of the Son of God, because they happen to be at variance with our established notions.

Again, I ask, what becomes of that very mystery which we observed Faber put in a parallel with that of Transubstantiation when he commented upon this argument? What becomes of the Trinity? What becomes of the incarnation of our Saviour? What of his birth from a Virgin? And, in short, what of every mystery of the Christian religion? Who will pretend to say that he can, by any stretch of his imagination, or of his reason, see how, by possibility, three persons in one God can be but one Godhead? If the contradiction, the apparent contradiction, to the laws of nature, is so easily received, without being understood by us here, is it to be a principle for rejecting another doctrine as clearly laid down in Scripture? And if the doctrine of the Eucharist, which is even more plainly expressed than it, is to be rejected on such a ground, how is it possible for one moment to retain the other? Its very idea appears at first sight repugnant to every law of number; and no philosophical, mathematical, o speculative reasoning, will ever show how it possibly can be.

You are content, therefore, to receive this important dogma, shutting your eyes, as you should do, to its incomprehensibility: you are content to believe it, because the revelation of it from God was confirmed by the authority of antiquity; and therefore, if you wish not to be assailed on it by the same form of reasoning and arguments as you use against us, you must renounce this method; and, simply because it comes by revelation from God, receive the Real Presence at once in spite of the apparent contradiction to the senses; for He hath revealed it, who hath the words of eternal life.

It is repeatedly said, that such a miracle as that of the Eucharist, the existence of Christ's Body in the way we suppose it to be there, is contrary to all that our senses, or that experience, can teach us. Now, suppose that a heathen philosopher had reasoned in that manner, when the mystery of our Saviour's incarnation, the union of God with man, was first proposed to him by the apostles; he would have had a perfect right to disbelieve it on such grounds; for he would have had not merely theory, but the most uninterrupted experience, on his side. He could have said it is a thing that never happened, which we cannot conceive to happen, and consequently so far as the unanimous testimony of all mankind, to the possibility or impossibility of the doctrine goes, it is perfectly, decisive. When, therefore, any mystery is revealed by God, and the observation applies chiefly to those mysteries which have their beginning in time, such as the incarnation, it is evident that up to that time, there must be against it, all the weight of philosophical observation, all the code or canon of laws, called the law of nature, which can be deduced solely from experience or philosophical observation. For, as the law of nature is composed of that code of rules by which experience shows us nature is constantly guided, it is manifest that, experience not having given examples of such a fact, the law of nature must necessarily appear to stand in contradiction to the mystery. The only question is, cannot a mystery be instituted by God? Or cannot it be revealed by him? And

is not that a sufficient modification of the law of nature? And the more so, when it pleases God to make it dependent on a consistent, however supernatural, action?

Or, to take an illustration from the sacrament of Baptism, who would say, that, were it to be tried by the laws of Nature, or even by the connexion between the spiritual and material world, that sacrament would not stand to all appearance in contradiction with them? Who will pretend to say, that there is any known connexion between those two orders of being, which could prove, or make it even appear possible, that by the bare action of water applied with certain words to the body, the soul could be cleansed from sin, and placed in a state of grace before God? It is manifest, on the contrary, that our experience in the physical and material world would lead us to conclude that such a thing could not be. But has not God in this case modified the law of Nature? Has He not allowed a moral influence to act under certain circumstances? Has He not been pleased, that the moment the sacramental act is performed, certain consequences should flow, as necessarily as the consequence of any physical law must succeed to the act that produces it; has He not bound Himself by a covenant, in the same way as in the material world, that when certain laws are brought into action, He will give them their supernatural effect? And does not the same rule precisely apply here? If He who enacted the law of Nature chooses to make this modification of it-chooses to make certain effects dependent on certain spiritual causes-it no more stands in opposition to it, than other superhuman exceptions to philosophical laws: for both stand exactly on the same strong grounds.

In fact, my brethren, this seems so obvious, that several writers, and not of our religion, agree that on this point it is impossible to assail us; and observe that this doctrine of Transubstantiation does not, as is vulgarly supposed, contradict the senses. One of these I wish most particularly to

mention; it is the celebrated Leibnitz. He left behind hira

a work entitled "A System of Theology,” written in the Latin tongue, which was deposited in a public library in Germany, and was not laid before the public until a very few years back; when the manuscript was procured, by the late King of France, and published by M. D'Emery, in the original, with a French Translation. Leibnitz, in this work, examines the Catholic doctrine on every point, and compares it with the Protestant; and on this matter, in particular, enters into very subtile and metaphysical reasoning; and the conclusion to which he comes is, that in the Catholic doctrine there is not the smallest opening for assailing it on philosophical principles; and that these form no reasons for departing from the literal interpretation of the words of institution.

Thus, it would appear, that the ground on which it is maintained that we must depart from the literal sense, is untenable, -untenable on philosophical grounds, as well as on principles of Biblical interpretation. But besides this mere rejection of the motives whereon the literal sense is abandoned, we have ourselves strong and positive confirmation of it.

1. In the first place, the very words themselves, in which the pronoun is put in a vague form, strongly uphold us. Had our Saviour said, "this bread is my body, this wine is my blood," there would have been some contradiction,—the apostles might have said, "wine cannot be his blood,-bread cannot be a body;" but when our Saviour uses this indefinite word, we arrive at its meaning only at the conclusion of the sentence, by that which is predicated of it. When we find that in Greek there is a discrepancy of gender between that pronoun and the word "bread," it is more evident that He wished to define the pronoun, and give it its character, as designating His body and blood; so that, by analysing the words themselves, they give us our meaning positively and essentially.

2. But, this is still further confirmed by the explanations which He adds to it, for persons using vague symbolical language, would be careful not to define too minutely the object pointed at. Now, our Saviour says, "this is my Body

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