Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/319

 Wyclif's conclusion is clearly stated. The consecrated host is naturally bread and wine; but sacramentally it is the body and blood of Christ. The sacrament which we worship is not the substance of bread and wine, but the body and blood of Christ. But the "worshippers of accidents" adore it not even as the simple accident, without the substance; they worship the actual sacramental sign—the bread and wine as being the actual body and blood of Christ. We hold to Christ's very words: "This is my body." nd so we worship the body, no longer the visible bread and wine.

Then he quotes in his support the old doctors of the first millennium, Ignatius, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Nicholas II., and the custom of the Church. With these Wyclif contrasts the moderns, who dishonour Christ's body. And he ends with stern words against those who receive the testimony of Innocent and Raymundi rather than the sense of Scripture, and the later rather than the earlier doctrine.

"Above all and once again, woe to the obstinate tongue of the apostate who buries the Roman Church beneath a pile of false utterances, whereby he pretends that the later Church, when opposed to the earlier, has rectified the faith, declaring that this sacrament is an accident without a subject, and not actual bread and wine, as both the Gospel and the canon of the Church affirm. For Augustine is our witness that no priest of Christ can make an accident without a subject. Yet these priests of Baal, falsely after the pattern of their father, so highly extol the