1. I am not quite certain, whether you yourself do not hint at something of this nature, when you write as follows.

Our Lord, after mentioning the true bread from heaven, the bread of God that giveth life unto the world, describes HIMSELF as the bread of life, of which his faithful followers were to participate and thereby live for ever. When, afterward, he mentions, for the first time, his flesh, he makes a pointed reference to all that he had previously said of himself: by again declaring, that HE is the living bread, coming down from heaven, giving eternal life to those who eat of it; adding, that THE BREAD WAS HIS FLESH which he would give for the life of the world *.

2. At all events, the entire matter, so far as I have considered it, turns upon our Lord's declaration that THE BREAD WAS HIS FLESH : for, in the management of this declaration, is

* Roman Cathol. Doctr. of the Euchar. part i. sect. 2. p. 55, 56.

contained what I suppose to be Dr. Wiseman's suicide.

In order, then, that my meaning may be fully understood, I have given at some length what I conceive must be the true sense of the entire Discourse, provided we start from what all parties have ever considered the indisputably true sense of its earlier phraseology: and this, in its application to a leading tenet of the Roman Church, makes the latin divines themselves, by a necessary train of consequences, scripturally confute the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

3. One great value of our Lord's Discourse is that, without any ground for that species of dispute which may be maintained touching the import of the words of Eucharistic Institution, it demonstrates, even on the allowed hermeneutic basis of the Roman Theologians themselves, Transubstantiation to be an erroneous doctrine. If we take it up as the ground

work of our argument, we require nothing, beyond the cheap ordinary faculty of drawing, from divinely enunciated premises, their logically necessary conclusion.

Christ declares the bread from heaven to be his flesh.

Here we have the undeniable premises.

THEREFORE, the Eating of the flesh must unavoidably be the same as the Eating of the bread.

Here we have the logically necessary conclusion.

Dr. Wiseman, through a very extraordinary medium, as you well know, contends: that the two phrases, Eating the Bread and Eating the Flesh, although thus inseparably connected, bear two entirely different meanings. But no efforts of ingenuity can avail him. When the fifty-first verse of the chapter is, as it must be,

taken into the account, the fatal syllogism will still run as before.

Christ declares the bread from heaven to be his flesh and he, furthermore, speaks alike of Eating the bread and of Eating the flesh. Therefore, since the Bread is his Flesh, the Eating of his flesh must inevitably be the same as the Eating of the bread.

From this syllogism, based upon premises divinely laid down by Christ himself, I venture to think, that Dr. Wiseman cannot possibly escape. For, let the two phrases, Eating the bread and Eating the flesh, mean concretely what they may, their import, abstractedly, must needs be identical. And thus, without the calling in of extraneous attestation to propriety of interpretation, the Discourse of Christ at Capernaum, nakedly and just as it stands, is, according to the confessedly universal understanding of the phrase Eating the Bread from heaven,

fatal to the Romish doctrine of Transubstan

tiation.

4. But, while such is the case, it is still, even though here a work of supererogation, satisfactory to consult ancient expositors as to how they understood the entireness of the Dis

course.

This, accordingly, I have done: and, if the process adds nothing to the independent force of the argument, it nevertheless may usefully serve to shew, that the interpretation advocated by Dr. Wiseman is not the interpretation delivered by the Early Catholic Church.

II. The somewhat wide field of Dr. Wiseman's Lectures on the Doctrines and Practices of the (Roman) Catholic Church, as delivered, apparently to a mixed congregation of Romanists and Anglicans, in the chapel at Moorfields, you have left, for the occupation and exercise of inferior labourers, almost wholly unreaped.