Analyticae Quaestiones & Responsiones de pane vitae

of it, by the three prior Evangelists, and by Paul the Apostle: but concerning the Matter of the Sacrament itself, that is, concerning the true participation of the Body and Blood of our LORD JESUS CHRIST, it was most wisely handled in John 6. He therefore also judged that the Church was not lacking that spiritual food even before the Lord's Supper was instituted, as he perceived clearly.

II. He pronounced it to be calumnious ignorance to think that, because the signs and sacraments were changed, the things themselves were also different—those things which the Prophetic rite announced as promised, and which the Evangelical rite announced as fulfilled: or to think that, because the things are the same, they should not have been announced by other Sacraments as completed than those by which they were announced as still to be completed. Against Faustus the Manichaean, book 19, chapter 16.

III. Concerning the eating of the flesh and the drinking of the blood of Christ, the same in book 3 of On Christian Doctrine, chapter 16: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you will not have life in you." It seems to command a CRIME or a WICKED ACT. It is therefore a Figure, commanding that one must participate in the Lord's passion, and sweetly and usefully store in memory that His flesh was crucified and wounded for us. The same author elsewhere, in order to refute the oral eating of the flesh of Christ, truly says that to eat human flesh is a greater crime than to kill a man, and to drink human blood is a greater crime than to shed it.