I also proved that the canon of Scripture used by the church of Rome, the Pope's supremacy, Transubstantiation, and depriving the Laity of the cup in the Lord's Supper, were innovations unknown for ages after the resurrection of Christ. Of course it follows that the church guilty of these anti-christian innovations, has so far, corrupted the religion of Christ.

1. In prosecution of this plan thus begun, I pass to expose the doctrine of TRANSUBSTANTIATION. In my last letter I proved that it was not promoted into a doctrine, as your Scotus affirms, until A. D. 1215! Surely then it is not an ancient doctrine; yet is it taught in your church that novelties are subversive of Christianity, and that those who teach them must fall under the divine anathema, and are of the school of Satan !"

The doctrine according to the Council of Trent is this: "That by the consecration of the bread and wine there is effected a conversion of the whole substance, the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. Which conversion is fitly and properly termed by the Holy Catholic church, TRANSUBSTANTIATION." Sess. 13. C. 3. and Can. 1. "If any one shall deny that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, there are contained, truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ; or say that he is in it only as a sign or figure, or by his influence, let him be accursed."

The following shocking and humiliating extract from the Missal, which is the authorized book of the church for the celebration of masses, will show how the consecrated bread is regarded. It is one of many such things. "If the priest vomit the Eucharist and the species appear entire, they must reverently be swallowed again, unless nausia prevent it; if so let the consecrated species be cautiously separated, and put in some holy place, until they be corrupted, and then let them be cast into holy ground; but if the species do not appear, the vomit must be burned, and the ashes thrown into holy ground." (Missale De. Def. in cel. Mass. occ.)

Now can any one in his senses need proof that this doctrine and this illustration, are contrary to the word of God? You say it is deduced from the institution of the supper, where our Lord said of the bread, "this is my body." But so it is said "that rock was Christ." 1 Cor. x. 4. Is this literal? John x. 9. and xv. 1. Christ says, "I am the door," "I am the TRUE vine." Heb. xii. 29. " Our God is a consuming fire." Num. xiv. 9. The spies said on their return to the camp "the people of the land are bread for us." Is this all figure or all fact? for they stand or fall together. Isaiah xl. 6. says, all flesh is grass." Peter explains this, 1 Peter i. 24. “All flesh is AS GRASS.' Indeed I remember that you said in letter No. 7, "Just lend me the Protestant rule of faith for a few minutes, and I will prove from Scripture that it is right to call the Pope God. "You are gods. I have appointed thee god of Pharaoh." P. 71. 6. Exodus vii. 1. Such was your language when figure was conveni To see the unscriptural character of this doctrine, you have only to look at 1 Cor. x. 16. and also xi. 26-29. where the element

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of bread is called bread after consecration," As oft as you eat this bread," &c.; and where by another figure the cup is put for the wine, "as oft as ye drink this cup ;" and according to your doctrine the wine which was first made the real blood of Christ, is then transmuted into a real cup; and then this cup is changed into the New Testament! We are referred for proof of Transubstantiation to John vi. 53, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you." But it is most clear that this cannot mean transubstantiation. 1. For in verses 32-3, he tells us this bread came down from heaven; but his natural body was born on earth. 2. Whoever eats this bread has eternal life. But do all that take the Eucharist, have eternal life? 3. Whoever eats not this living bread (verse 53,) is forever lost-but surely some are saved who never received the sacrament. 4. As you deprive the people of the cup, so if this means the Eucharist and Transubstantiation, you destroy all their souls, for it says, "except ye drink his blood ye have no life in you." 5. To drink the blood of Christ at that time or at the institution was impossible-for it was not then shed; and if it be as you say, then Christ drank his own blood, and eat his own flesh! 6. In this same chapter Christ tells us that it is a figure, and has a spiritual meaning; v. 63. The words that I speak unto you they are spirit, and they are life."

I have already produced the admission of Bellarmine and the testimony of Scotus (see last letter) against this doctrine. Cardinal Cajetan (Notes on Aquinas, p. 3. q. 75. Art. 1. &c.) says, "The other point which the gospel has not expounded expressly, that is, the change of the bread into the body of Christ, we have received from the church." Here is the church against the gospel! Again: "There appears nothing in the gospel to compel any man to understand these words, this is my body, in a proper sense. Nay, that PRESENCE (of Christ) which the church holdeth, cannot be proved, unless the declaration of the church be added." Bishop Fisher, also Vasquez, Alphonsus de Castro, Erasmus, Durand, Melchoir, Cane, &c. &c. all of your church, not to mention others, bear the same testimony. By order of Pope Pius V. the above concession of Cajetan was expunged from the Roman edition of his works! Such is the testimony of Scripture and your own writers, against a doctrine which we are cursed by your church for rejecting. But this doctrine invades the testimony of the senses. If it be true, that the bread by consecration becomes "substantially the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ," and yet appears bread, and retains all the qualities of bread, then am I ever to believe my senses again? I see, and handle, and eat the bread—a little piece of wafer, and yet you tell us that a few words by a priest have made it the body, soul, and divinity of Christ? If the properties of one substance may become those of another, an utterly different substance, and yet those properties remain, then I can be certain of no substance; nor of any thing I see, feel, taste, or touch. If transubstantiation is true, Christianity may be falsefor the evidence of miracle appeals to, and rests on the testimony of the senses. As for example, after Christ rose from the dead, he said

to his disciples, (Luke xxiv. 39,) "Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have." Now this was appealing to their senses, that he was not a disembodied "spirit," (as they feared) but had a real body. Here the proof rested on the testimony of the senses. But the senses tell us the bread is bread. blessed or not blessed. But if it be the real body of Christ, then they deceive us in this important case, and they may have deceived the disciples in the Lord's resurrection: and then all miracles are vain, and Christianity which rests on them is vain; and David Hume is right in resolving all religion and all nature into illusions and ideas. And is there any thing more abhorrent than to suppose that a priest can make his God, by uttering a few words? And when he has thus made a wafer of senseless matter into the soul and divinity, as well as body of Jesus Christ, what becomes of them after the wafer is eaten? Does the wafer become our creator, possessed of the attributes, and capable of the acts of God? And does that wafer ever cease to be God after once becoming so? No doctrine of your church is more strenuously and exclusively pressed; none with less evidence, or greater absurdity; and nothing has more contributed to degrade the Christian religion, and make men infidels. There was more of wisdom than of Christian honesty in the confession of Mr. Cressy, when he said, "I have not learned to answer such arguments, but to despise them." Cicero says, "When we call the fruits of the earth Ceres, and the wine Bacchus, we use but the common language-but do you think any man so mad as to believe that which he eats to be God?" (De nat. Deornum b. 3.) Yet in that very Rome, where a wise heathen thus spoke, the infallible head of the church does this very thing. Amazing indeed!

Averroes, an Arabian philosopher, who lived after this doctrine was invented, says: "I have travelled over the world, and have found divers sects but so sottish a sect, or law, I never found as is the sect of the Christians; because with their own teeth they devour the God whom they worship."

Such is the testimony of Scripture, and of your own writers, of reason, and of the senses, against this cardinal doctrine of the church of Rome. Is it not then a glaring novelty? Is it not most corrupt and anti-christian?

2. This doctrine leads directly to another equally novel, and corrupt, (for errors come in a chain, one drawing after it another,) viz: the sacrifice of the Mass. In chap. I. of the Council of Trent, on the institution of the sacrifice of Mass, we are told that "our Lord, in the last supper on the night in which he was betrayed, declared himself to be constituted a priest forever after the order of Melchisedek-offered his blood and body to God the Father, under the species of bread and wine, and by these symbols delivered the same to be received by his Apostles whom he then appointed priests of the New Testament, and commanded them and their successors in the Priesthood to offer the same, saying, "this do in commemoration of me," Luke xxii. 19. Chap. 2. "And since the same Christ who once offered himself by his blood, on the altar of the cross, is contained in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass and

offered without blood, the holy Council teaches that this is really propitiatory, and made by Christ himself."

"We therefore confess that the sacrifice of the Mass is one and the same sacrifice, with that of the cross; the victim is one and the same Christ Jesus.........and the oblation of the cross is daily renewed in the Eucharistic sacrifice........The priest also is the same Christ our Lord." (Catechism, Coun. Trent, on the Eucharist.)

Such are the infallible decrees, &c., on this awful profanation, for I cannot truly call it by a better name. The substance is this, that every priest has power to turn bread and wine, by uttering a few words, into the real Lord Jesus, the Son of Mary, and the Son of God, who is now enthroned in heaven; and that having thus made his Maker, he offers him up to God as an atoning sacrifice for the living and the dead, who are in purgatory!

Now is this less than crucifying to themselves the Son of God afresh, which Paul tells us, (Heb. vi. 6.) is putting Him to an open shame ? Is it not written (Heb. ix. 24-28.) expressly, "that Christ did not offer himself often, as the High Priest entereth into the holy place every year, with blood of others, for then must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world; but now once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself; and as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after that the judgment, so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many." "For such a high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself." (Heb. vii. 26, 27.) “And every priest standeth daily ministering, and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, forever sat down on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool." (Hebrews x. 11-13.) The repetition then of the sacrifice, if it were possible, by the priest's hands, would be antichristian and absurd. Is not this most express; that daily sacrifices were not needed or designed; that this was to be done but once; and that He was to do it; not frail priests? And having done it once, He forever sat down at God's right hand, to die no more.

Again, (in Hebrews chap. ix. verse 22,) it is expressly said "without shedding of blood is no remission." But Christ had not shed his blood, at the last supper; and "the vain oblation" of the Mass, is called a bloodless sacrifice; yet in the extracts given above, your church says the Mass is a real propitiatory sacrifice. Query. Does Christ now suffer when he is sacrificed in the Mass? It is said, "that it is the same Christ, who is the victim, in the oblation of the Mass, as in the oblation on the cross." If he suffer not, he is not a victim; to say he suffers now is blasphemy. Let any man compare the Epistle to the Hebrews, especially the ten first chapters, with the decrees of the Council of Trent, and he will see at every step, the Gospel tortured; the order of things turned backward; the Pope and his priesthood caricatured into a Levitical household; Christ

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degraded; his death dishonoured, his worship polluted, men exalted to gods, and God reduced to the creature of men's hands, and then alternately worshipped, offered up, and consumed by those who made

him.

One dreadful feature in this system is the profane power it puts into the Priest's hands. The transubstantiation depends on the consecration of the Priest; and if "his intention" be wanting, then there is no real sacrament, and the poor people are all deceived, they idolatrously worship the bread and wine, and the sacrifice is lost. But supposing the true intention and proper forms, the priest offers up as a true propitiatory sacrifice for the living the Christ he has made, and the dead." He does all that Christ need do for the poor sinner. TO HIM he confesses his sins, from HIM he receives absolution, and HE offers up the victim even Christ, and by his sacrificing act, the pardon of the sinner is secured. Hence masses abound. Hence preaching, pastoral visitation, studying the Bible, all things are secondary to the Mass, and to celebrate it, (as a certain distinguished priest recently told an astonished friend of mine) is the chief business of the priest.

Add to this that these masses are sold for money. I gave a speci"In the Laity's Dimen from the churches in Madrid in my last. Those who contribute to the erection of rectory," 1830, p. 22. 31. a chapel are assured" that every Sunday, prayers shall be offered up for them publicly, and that a mass will be said every year within the octave of saints for the repose of their souls after death :" and "four masses in each month are regularly offered for the benefactors (subscribers for a particular fund) living and dead :" i. e. Christ is sacrificed thirty-six times annually in these masses, in return for their money! I have before me at this moment, the form of constitution of a "PURGATORIAL SOCIETY" in Dublin, A. D. 1815. The 22d rule Every person wishing to contribute to the relief of is as follows: " the suffering souls in purgatory shall pay one penny per week, which shall be appropriated towards PROCURING MASSES, to be offered for the repose of the souls of the parents and relations of THE SUBSCRIBERS to the institution, and all the faithful departed in general.' The 3d chap. of Dec. Coun. Trent is headed, "Of Masses in That is, Christ is offered up, in honour of honour of the Saints." his sinful creatures! Thus the Missal (the Roman Directory containing masses for the various days and occasions, and sanctioned by Popes and used every where) under the title of "the feast of St. Peter's chair in which he first sat at Rome," has these prayers: May the intercesssion of thy blessed Apostle PETER, we beseech thee, O Lord, render the prayers and oblations of thy church acceptable to thee, that what we celebrate (the masses) for his glory (pro illius gloria) may prevail for the pardon of our sins." Again, Sanctify, O Lord, the offerings of thy people by the prayers of thy Apostle Paul, that what is acceptable to Thee, because by Thee instituted, may become still more acceptable by his intercession." Here is the authorized Directory for your church worship; and the prayer it prescribes is, that "the offerings of the people," that is, Christ sacrificed in the mass, offered up in honour of Peter, and Paul, may

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