It is this important question which so many have racked their brains to understand in the Romish sense. The matter resolves itself simply into this: Are the words, "This is my body," "This is my blood," to be understood in a literal sense? Every one must see the absurdity of it. The least consideration will show that Christ said these words in the same sense as he said on another occasion, "I am the bread that came down from heaven," and no one ever supposed that _He_ was actually bread, and subsequently changed, or transubstantiated. A little examination was sufficient to shake my belief in that doctrine which I had hitherto professed. Would Jesus Christ have told us things that were impossible to be? Now it is impossible, absolutely impossible, that what is bread should at one and the same time be His body; and that what is wine should be contemporaneously His blood. This cannot be, either simultaneously or successively. The Church of Rome saw the first to be an absurdity, and therefore held to the second. But how can the body of Christ become bread, and His blood wine, if such change be not in accordance with the laws of nature? Could Christ deceive us? Now it is not true that bread and wine, according to nature, have ceased to exist in the sacrament; for we see they do exist; that which we see, touch, and taste, is natural bread and wine. Can there be faith against nature? And yet that is against nature, which neither is nor can be: whatever is, must be according to nature's laws. There may be substances of a higher nature, and subject to superior laws than those with which we are acquainted; but they can never exist in contradiction to those laws, since nature herself, in that case, would be destroyed. Therefore, what is bread and wine cannot be not bread and wine; God, omnipotent as he is, cannot order it otherwise. But the sacrament, after consecration, remains natural bread and wine; therefore it is not the substance of the body and blood of Christ. And what, I should like to know, would be the use of this pretended transubstantiation? Would it merely be that the faithful might, materially, eat the body and drink the blood of Christ? Now who does not see that this so-called eating and drinking of Christ is entirely metaphorical? "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink,"[39] said St. Paul; "It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing." "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,"[40] said Christ. The expressions, to eat and drink, signify to believe; to identify oneself with; as also to accept anything with pleasure. "Kill, and eat,"[41] said the Spirit to Peter; in the vision at Joppa, figuring under the unclean animals, the Gentiles. Now, all this Peter well understood, and never imagined he was to eat those animals, much less the Gentiles that he might fall in with; but to convert and receive them into the communion of the Christian faith.