Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/318

 In the course of this dignified and moderate document, one of the last of his Latin treatises (for he still shrank from disturbing the belief of unlettered persons on so critical a point of faith), Wyclif fully admitted that there was a sense in which Christ's body was really present in the host. But he "could not venture to say that the consecrated bread was essentially, substantially, corporeally, and identically the body of Christ." There were, he said, three modes of presence in the host—virtual, spiritual, and sacramental. The second mode implies (præexigit) the first, and the third implies the other two. Christ's body was more really present in this than in the other sacraments; but it was still more really present in heaven. And this declaration he makes in agreement with the true meaning (logicam) of Scripture, of the holy doctors, and of the canon of the Roman Church. It was only such as could not believe on all this evidence who started the idea that an accident might be the body of Christ. We may well hold that "by virtue of the words of Christ, the bread becomes and is, in miraculous fashion, the body of Christ," in the sense that the parts of that body are spiritually and severally in the consecrated bread and, if the parts of the body, yet more certainly those of the soul. Yet foolish persons continue to raise the old question (idiotæ remurmurant), asking how this could possibly be, unless Christ were present in very substance, and in the natural sense. To which Wyclif replies that he explains it precisely as the Roman doctors explained the incarnation.