Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/295

 seems to be what it is not—seems to be wheaten bread when it is actually and really my Lord and God."

To Wyclif, even as a young man, this savoured of idolatry. In vain his friends would assure him that it was no idolatry, but the very sublimity of faith. "I grant," he began by saying, "that the substance is altered. The hoc est corpus. enables me to see the body of Christ—a spiritual body, seen with spiritual eyes. But what, then, do I see with my physical sight? I am a realist; I see a body, with attributes and mathematical dimensions—but what body? No longer a mathematical body, you say, if the consecration has annihilated all the mathematical and physical qualities of wheaten bread? Then I cannot tell you what the body is, but sure I am that a body is there. To say that it is physically God is idolatry. To say, as some of us do, that what I see and handle are accidents without a subject is only another way of saying that the hoc est corpus, which made Christ visible to the eye of faith, also made that wheaten bread into something infinitely inferior in the scale of nature—lower than the peasant's bean-bread, lower than the soil in which the grain of wheat germinated; for they have substance as well as accidents, but this unhappy phenomenon retains its accidents after losing its substance."

Such, in part, was to be his reasoning in 1381, when he had pronounced his "eureka," and committed himself to what was deemed the most pestilent of his heresies. In 1378, when he came back to Oxford to ruminate on the meaning and the riddle of his