All but
Unitarian Christians hold as an essential article of faith, that in him
dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily, in other words, that our
Redeemer and our Creator; though two persons are one God. It is true
that Divines of our 'Reformed Protestant Church,' call everything but
gentlemen those who lay claim to the equivocal privilege of feasting
periodically upon the body and blood of Omnipotence. The pains taken by
Protestants to show from Scripture, Reason and Nature, that Priests
cannot change lumps of dough into the body, and bumpers of wine into the
blood of their God, are well known and appreciated. But the Roman
Catholics are neither to be argued nor laughed out of their 'awful
doctrine' of the real presence, to which they cling with desperate
earnestness. Proselytes are apt to misunderstand, and make sad mistakes
about, that doctrine. Two cases are cited by Hume in his 'Essay of the
Natural History of Religion,' which he announces as 'pleasant stories,
though somewhat profane.' According to one, a Priest gave inadvertently,
instead of the sacrament, a counter, which had by accident fallen among
the holy wafers.
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