Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 1.djvu/295

 about the beginning of the twelfth century. In his discourse on the Supper, he joins together the outward form of the Sacrament, and the spiritual efficacy of it, as the shell and the kernel, the sacred sign, and the thing signified; the one he takes out of the words of the Institution, and the other, out of  Sermon in the sixth of St. John. And in the same place explaining, that Sacraments are not things absolute in themselves without any relation, but mysteries, wherein by the gift of a visible sign, an invisible and divine grace with the Body and Blood of is given, he saith, "That the visible sign is as a ring, which is given not for itself or absolutely, but to invest and give possession of an estate made over to one."……Now, as no man can fancy that the ring is substantially changed into the inheritance, whether lands or houses, none also can say with truth, or without absurdity, that the Bread and Wine are substantially changed into the Body and Blood of. But in his Sermon on the Purification, which none doubts to be his, he speaks yet more plainly; "The Body of in the Sacrament is the food of the soul, not of the belly, therefore we eat him not corporally: but in the manner that  is meat, in the same manner we understand that he is eaten." Also in his Sermon on St. Martin, which undoubtedly is his also; "To this day," saith he, "the same flesh is given to us, but spiritually, therefore not corporally." For the truth of things spiritually present is certain also.

The thirteenth century now follows; wherein the world growing both older and worse, a great deal of trouble and confusion there was about religion……So that now there remained nothing but to confirm the new tenet of Transubstantiation, and impose it so peremptorily on the Christian world, that none might dare so much as to hiss against it. This Pope Innocent the Third bravely performed. He succeeding Celestin the Third at thirty years of age, and marching stoutly in the footsteps of Hildebrand, called a Council at Rome in St. John Lateran, and was the first that ever presumed to make the new-devised Doctrine of Transubstantiation an Article of Faith necessary to salvation, and that by his own mere authority.

In the fifteenth century the Council of Constance, (which by a sacrilegious attempt took away the sacramental cup from the