Page:Anglo-Saxon version of the Hexameron of St. Basil.djvu/18

Rh drinc druncon. Hi druncon of ðam gastlicum stane. and se stan wæs Christ.' Se Apostol sæde. swa swa ge nu gehyrdon. ðæt hi ealle æton ðone ylcan gastlican mete, and hi ealle druncon ðone gastlican drenc. Ne cwæð he na lichamlice ac gastlice. Næs Christ ða gyt geboren. ne his Mod næs agoten," &c. "Nevertheless, the life-like bread is not after a bodily fashion the same body, wherein Christ suffered. And the consecrated wine is not the blood of the Saviour, which was shed for us, in a bodily state; but is so in a spiritual sense. Both the bread is truly His body, and the wine also His blood, as was the heavenly bread, which we call manna, which for forty years fed God's people. And that clear water which then ran from the stone in the wilderness, was truly His blood. As St. Paul wrote in one of his Epistles, 'All our fathers did eat in the wilderness, the same spiritual meat, and drank the same spiritual drink. They drank of the spiritual rock, and that rock was Christ.' The Apostle hath said, as you now have heard, that they did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink. He said not after a bodily but after a spiritual manner, Christ was then not yet born, nor was His blood shed," &c. (See "The Testimonie of Antiquitie," edited — according to Strype — by Archbishop Parker in A.D. 1566, and Lisle's "Monuments," &c. A.D. 1623.)

It has been objected by some writers that Ælfric never mentions himself by a higher title than that of abbot; but it is to be borne in mind that he was devotedly attached to monastic institutions from his education under Æthelwold, that he was himself a monk of the order of St. Benedict, and that, as the discriminating Mores asserts, it was common to assume a title of humility, as indeed in the 13th century John Peckham, archbishop of Canterbury, frequently styled himself "Johannis gratiâ Dei humilis sacerdos." That Ælfric was a most devoted partisan, a who had lately been introduced in