od, who took our nature upon him in the form
of a man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, a beast, a herb,
or a stone? and were it so possible that the Godhead had appeared in any
shape of an inanimate substance, how he should then have preached his
gospel? or how have been nailed to the cross? whether if St. Peter had
celebrated the eucharist at the same time our Saviour was hanging on the
cross, the consecrated bread would have been transubstantiated into
the same body that remained on the tree? whether in Christ's corporal
presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity be not abstracted from
his Godhead? whether after the resurrection we shall carnally eat and
drink as we do in this life?

There are a thousand other more sublimated and refined niceties of
notions, relations, quantities, formalities, quiddities, haeccities, and
such like abstrusities, as one would think no one could pry into, except
he had not only such cat's eyes as to see best in the dark, but even
such a piercing faculty as to see through an inch-board, and spy out
what really never had any being. Add to these some of their tenets and
opinions, which are so absurd and extravagant, that the wildest fancies
of the Stoicks which they so much disdain and decry as paradoxes, seem
in comparison just and rational; as their maintaining, that it is a less
aggravating fault to kill a hundred men, than for a poor cobbler to set
a stitch on the sabbath-day; or, that it is more justifiable to do
the greatest injury imaginable to others, than to tell the least
lie ourselves. And these subtleties are alchymized to a more refined
sublimate by the abstracting brains of their several schoolmen; the
Realists, the Nominalists, the Thomists, the Albertists, the Occamists,
the Scotists; these are not all, but the rehearsal of a few only, as a
specimen of their divided sects; in each of which there is so much of
deep learning, so much of unfathomable difficulty, that I believe the
apostles themselves would stand in need of a new illuminating spirit, if
they were to engage in any controversy with these new divines. St. Paul,
no question, had a full measure of faith; yet when he lays down faith
to be the substance of things not seen, these men carp at it for an
imperfect definition, and would undertake to teach the apostles better
logic. Thus the same holy author wanted for nothing of the grace
of charity, yet (say they) he describes and defines it but very
inacc