CHAPTER LXV—The Difficulty of the Accidents remaining

IT cannot be denied that the accidents of bread and wine do remain, as the infallible testimony of the senses assures us. Nor is the Body and Blood of Christ affected by them, since that could not be without change in Him, and He is not susceptible of such accidents. It follows that they remain without subject. Nor is their so remaining an impossibility to the divine power. The same rule applies to the production of things and to their conservation in being. The power of God can produce the effects of any secondary causes whatsoever without the causes themselves, because that power is infinite, and supplies to all secondary causes the power in which they act: hence it can preserve in being the effects of secondary causes without the causes. Thus in this Sacrament it preserves the accident in being, after removing the substance that preserves it.⁹⁸¹⁹⁸¹A Domino factum est istud; and how He does it, there are guesses many, but no man knoweth. We must not confound guesses as to the πῶς (the manner how) with articles of faith as to the ὅτι (the fact). We repeat the accredited phraseology of the Church: we believe in that phraseology as expressing truth in the best terms of human intelligence, with an expression accurate and correct, yet inadequate in respect of the further fulness that lies beyond our ken. So we wait in adoration behind closed veils, till the veil be rent and Christ revealed. The scoffer, on the contrary, has made up his mind on what he does not comprehend: in the darkness he has defined for himself one dogma, the absolute incredibility of Christian teaching.