Prefatio Crimina I prior part: Fundamental Supper consensus defended from Reformed confessions and doctors

So then, as to the PRIOR PART of the FIRST CRIMINATION: Ah! how grave and hard a matter is here brought forward — namely, that I labored to this end: that it should be established that a Fundamental Consensus in the Doctrine of the Holy Supper really obtains between Lutherans and Reformed. I confess freely that I most earnestly gave myself to that work; but what crime is there in this, when, fully convinced in Conscience in this cause, I so acted, and may be understood to have so acted?

For when from the Confessions of the Reformed in part — the Anglican, Gallican, Brandenburg (Marchica), and Torun — and in part from the most evident expositions of many doctors of the Reformed Church, both older (Calvin, Bucer, and Zwingli himself) and more recent (Forbes, Trelcatius, Cosin, and others), brought forward everywhere in my writings and in those of the Lutherans themselves, it can be doubtful to no one (except to him who, against Christian Charity that hopes all things, calls into doubt all their faith and sincerity) that the Reformed sincerely believe and confess a real and substantial Presence of Christ's Body itself — not of the bare Virtue and Efficacy of that Body — and that Presence as preceded even by the Faith of the Communicants themselves, and accordingly a like Manducation, yet both Spiritual and Supernatural, not Corporal and Dimensional and Oral: what more can be wanting or desired, so that they may be understood to conspire Fundamentally with the Lutherans in the Doctrine of the Lord's Supper?

Does it belong to the Foundation of the Christian Faith to believe that Christ's Body is present in the Holy Supper also Corporaliter — that is, in a corporal and dimensional mode — and likewise manducated Oraliter, in a Corporal and Oral mode? But such a Presence and Manducation of Christ's Body many among the Lutherans themselves, at least the Scriptural ones, deny to be real — much less that they believe them, or require them to be believed, concerning the faith and the foundation of the Christian faith. Indeed all those Lutherans who, with Luther, teach that Christ's Body is present in the Holy Supper neither by Inclusion in the bread, nor by Descent from heaven and Ascent into the same, nor by Ubiquity (which slipped from Luther only once, and from which he afterward judged he should abstain — as the Helmstadt theologians note everywhere, adding that the Ubiquity dogma damns the novelty itself and all the remaining inhabitants of East and West for error) — inculcating only the Coexistence of Christ's Body with the Eucharistic bread, and indeed not so much with the bread as with the Communicants — a Coexistence admitted also by all those Reformed who contend that the Sacramental Signs are not nude-significant, but exhibiting of the things they signify, even Substantial ones. And this, as far as I know, all the Reformed to a man do; and by this very thing they interpret Christ's definitive Eucharistic proposition, "This is my body" (however you take its Subject as the Complex of bread and body), as remaining improper and synecdochic, through this of theirs: "This bread signifies — that is, exhibitively — my Body"; or: "This bread is the exhibiting Sign of my Body" — most evidently declaring the Eucharistic Complex from a heavenly and an earthly thing (what Thomas Pierce, the Reformed theologian, in his Pacificatorio Orthodoxo, called the AGGREGATE, and what is to be held as the prow and stern of the truly Lutheran sentence in this place).