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Christ;) so likewise our bodies, nourished by it, laid in the ground and dissolved, shall rise again in their time." Again; "We are fed by the creature, but it is He Himself that gives it. He hath ordained and appointed that Cup which is a creature, and His Blood also, and that Bread which is a creature, and also His Body. And so when the Bread and the Cup are blessed by God's word, they become the Eucharist of the Body and Blood of Christ, and from them our bodies receive nourishment and increase." Now that our flesh is fed and encreased by the natural Body of Christ, cannot be said without great impiety by themselves that hold Transubstantiation. For naturally nothing nourisheth our bodies but what is made flesh and blood by the last digestion, which it would be blasphemous to say of the incorruptible Body of Christ. Yet the sacred Elements, which in some manner are, and are said to be the Body and Blood of Christ, yield nourishment and encrease to our bodies by their earthly nature, in such sort, that by virtue also of the heavenly and spiritual food which the faithful receive by means of the material, our bodies are fitted for a blessed Resurrection to immortal glory.
Tertullian, who flourished about the two hundreth year after Christ, when as yet he was Catholic, and acted by a pious zeal, wrote against Marcion the Heretic, who, amongst his other impious opinions, taught that Christ had not taken of the Virgin Mary the very nature and substance of a human body, but only the outward forms and appearances; out of which fountain the Romish Transubstantiators seem to have drawn their doctrine of accidents abstracted from their subject hanging in the air, that is, subsisting on nothing. Tertullian, disputing against this wicked heresy, draws an argument from the Sacrament of the Eucharist, to prove that Christ had not a phantastic and imaginary, but a true and natural body, thus: the figure of the Body of Christ proves it to be natural, for there can be no figure of a ghost or a phantasm. "But," saith he, "Christ having taken the Bread, and given it to his Disciples, made it His Body by saying, 'This is my Body, that is, the figure of my Body.' Now, it could not have been a figure except the Body was real, for a mere appearance, an imaginary phantasm is not capable of a figure." Each part of this argument is true, and contains a necessary conclusion. For, 1. The bread must remain bread, otherwise Marcion would have returned the argument against Tertullian, saying as the Transub-
