Article xxviii.—“Transubstantiation, or the change of the substance of bread and wine, in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.”
What is here opposed as “Transubstantiation,” is the shocking doctrine that “the body of Christ,” as the Article goes on to express it, is not “given, taken, and eaten, after an heavenly and spiritual manner, but is carnally pressed with the teeth;” that It is a body or substance of a certain extension and bulk in space, and a certain figure and due disposition of parts, whereas we hold that the only substance such, is the bread which we see.
This is plain from Article xxix., which quotes St. Augustine as speaking of the wicked as “carnally and visibly pressing with their teeth the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ,” not the real substance, a statement which even the Breviary introduces into the service for Corpus Christi day.
This is plain also from the words of the Homily:—“Saith Cyprian, ‘When we do these things, we need not whet our teeth, but with sincere faith we break and divide that holy bread. It is well known that the meat we seek in this supper is spiritual food, the nourishment of the soul, a heavenly refection, and not earthly; an invisible meat, and not a bodily: a ghostly substance, and not carnal.’”
An extract may be quoted to the same effect from Bishop Taylor. Speaking of what has been believed in the Church of Rome, he says,—
“They that deny the spiritual sense, and affirm the natural, are to remember that Christ reproved all senses of these words that were not spiritual. And by the way let me observe, that the expressions of some chief men among the Romanists are so rude and crass, that it will be impossible to excuse them from the understanding the words in the sense of the men of Capernaum; for, as they understood Christ to mean His ‘true flesh natural and proper,’ so do they: as they thought Christ intended they should tear Him with their teeth and suck His blood, for which they were offended; so do these men not only think so, but say so, and are not offended. So said Alanus, ‘Assertissime loquimur, corpus Christi vere a nobis contrectari, manducari, circumgestari, dentibus teri [ground by the teeth], sensibiliter sacrificari [sensibly sacrificed], non minus quam ante consecrationem panis,’ [not less than the bread before consecration] … I thought that the Romanists had been glad to separate their own opinion from the carnal conceit of the men of Capernaum and the offended disciples … but I find that Bellarmine owns it, even in them, in their rude circumstances, for he affirms that ‘Christ corrected them not for supposing so, but reproved them for not believing it to be so.’ And indeed himself says as much: ‘The body of Christ is truly and properly manducated or chewed with the bread in the Eucharist;’ and to take off the foulness of the expression, by avoiding a worse, he is pleased to speak nonsense: ‘A thing may be manducated or chewed, though it be not attrite or broken.’ … But Bellarmine adds, that if you will not allow him to say so, then he grants it in plain terms, that Christ’s body is chewed, is attrite, or broken with the teeth, and that not tropically, but properly … How? under the species of bread, and invisibly.” 1—Taylor, Real Presence, iii. 5; also Dedic. x. 8, xi. 18.
Take again the statement of Ussher:—
“Paschasius Radbertus, who was one of the first setters forward of this doctrine in the West, spendeth a large chapter upon this point, wherein he telleth us, that Christ in the sacrament did show himself ‘oftentimes in a visible shape, either in the form of a lamb, or in the colour of flesh and blood; so that while the host was a breaking or an offering, a lamb in the priest’s hands, and blood in the chalice should be seen as it were flowing from the sacrifice, that what lay hid in a mystery might to them that yet doubted be made manifest in a miracle.’” 2—Ussher’s Answer to a Jesuit, pp. 62-64. Johnson’s Miracles, pp. 27, 28.
The same doctrine was imposed by Nicholas the Second on Berengarius, as the confession of the latter shows, which runs thus:—
“I, Berengarius … anathematize every heresy, and more particularly that of which I have hitherto been accused … I agree with the Roman Church … that the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are, after consecration, not only a sacrament, but even the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; and that these are sensibly, and not merely sacramentally, but in truth, handled and broken by the hands of the priest, and ground by the teeth of the faithful.” 3—Bowden’s Life of Gregory VII., vol. ii. p. 243.