But he will say, Cyprian calleth the Roman Church the principal Church whence sacerdotal unity hath her spring; hereunto we answer, that the Roman Church, not in power of overruling all, but in order is the first and principal; and that therefore while she continueth to hold the truth, and encroacheth not upon the right of other Churches, she is to have the priority; but that in either of these cases she may be forsaken without breach of that unity, which is essentially required in the parts of the Church. This is too large a concession. The real ground of the priority of the Roman see was that Rome, for the first three or perhaps four centuries, was the metropolis of the Christian world. Afterwards for the very same reason the Patriarch of New Rome or Constantinople claimed it; and never ceased to assert at least a co-equality. Had the Apostolic foundation been the cause, Jerusalem and Antioch must have had priority; not to add that the Roman Church was not founded by either Paul or Peter as is evident from the epistle to the Romans. Append. B. III. p. 205. I do not think the attack on Transubstantiation the most successful point of the orthodox Protestant controversialists. The question is, what is meant in Scripture, as in 'John' vi. by Christ's body or flesh and blood. Surely not the visible, tangible, accidental body, that is, a cycle of images and sensations in the imagination of the beholders; but his supersensual body, the 'noumenon' of his human nature which was united to his divine nature. In this sense I understand the Lutheran ubiquity. But may not the "oblations" referred to by Field in the old canon of the Mass, have meant the alms, offerings always given at the Eucharist? If by "substance" in the enunciation of the article be meant 'id quod vere est', and if the divine nature be the sole 'ens vere ens', then it is possible to give a philosophically intelligible sense to Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation; at least to a doctrine that might bear the same name;--at all events the mystery is not greater than, if it be not rather the same as, the assumption of the human by the divine nature. Now for the possible conception of this we must accurately discriminate the 'incompossibile negativum' from the 'incompatibile privativum'. Of the latter are all positive imperfections, as error, vice, and evil passions; of the former simple limitation. Thus if '(per impossible)' human nature could make itself sinless and perfect, it would become or pass into God; and if God should abstract from human nature all imperfection, it might without impropriety be affirmed, even as Scripture doth affirm, that God assumed or took up into himself the human nature.