M. Arnauld, say you,
talks very well about transubstantiation; but he understands, perhaps,
only "a significative transubstantiation." True, he professes to
believe in "the real presence"; who can tell, however, but he means
nothing more than "a true and real figure"? How now, fathers! whom,
pray, will you not make pass for a Calvinist whenever you please, if
you are to allowed the liberty of perverting the most canonical and
sacred expressions by the wicked subtleties of your modern
equivocations? Who ever thought of using any other terms than those in
question, especially in simple discourses of devotion, where no
controversies are handled? And yet the love and the reverence in which
they hold this sacred mystery have induced them to give it such a
prominence in all their writings that I defy you, fathers, with all
your cunning, to detect in them either the least appearance of
ambiguity, or the slightest correspondence with the sentiments of
Geneva.
Everybody knows, fathers, that the essence of the Genevan heresy
consists, as it does according to your own showing, in their believing
that Jesus Christ is not contained in this sacrament; that it is
impossible he can be in many places at once; that he is, properly
speaking, only in heaven, and that it is as there alone that he
ought to be adored, and not on the altar; that the substance of the
bread remains; that the body of Jesus Christ does not enter into the
mouth or the stomach; that he can only be eaten by faith, and
accordingly wicked men do not eat him at all; and that the mass is not
a sacrifice, but an abomination.
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