Articles and .Prayer Book, attach much weight to right and true views of
invention of man (Col.2:23). The clergyman who persists in using these illegal ceremonial acts, in defiance of his bishop's monitions, causes divisions, offences, strife, and controversy in the Church about things not essential, and is justly deserving of censure.
32. Did the reformers of the Church of England, to whom we owe our Articles and .Prayer Book, attach much weight to right and true views of the lord's Supper, and especially of the real meaning of the presence of Christ in that sacrament?
Yes! most certainly. It was precisely on this point that our Protestant Reformers differed most widely from the Church of Rome. It was precisely because they would not admit that the natural body and blood of Christ were corporally present under the forms of bread and wine after the words of consecration were pronounced, that many of them were condemned to death and burned at the stake in Queen Mary's reign. Fuller, the famous Church historian, says: -- " The sacrament of the altar was the main touchstone to discover the poor Protestants. This point of the real corporal presence of Christ in the sacrament., the same body that was crucified, was the compendious way to discover those of the opposite opinion." -- Fuller's Church History, vol. iii. p.399, Tegg's edition.
33. Why was John Rogers, the protomartyr, Vicar of St. Sepulchre's and Prebendary of St. Paul's, burned in Smithfield, on February 4, 1555?
Let us hear his own account: --
"I was asked whether I believed in the sacrament to be the very body and blood of our Saviour Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary, and hanged on the cross, really and substantially? I answered, ' I think it to be false. I cannot understand really and substantially to signify otherwise than corporally. But corporally Christ is only in heaven, and so Christ cannot be corporally in your sacrament.'" Foxe in loco, vol. iii. p.101, edit.1684.
And so he was burned.
34. Why was Hugh Latimer, sometime Bishop of Worcester, burned at Oxford, on October 16, 1555?