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Superstition Unveiled by Charles Southwell
page 38 of 74 (51%)
Redeemer and our Creator, though two persons, are but one God. It is
true that Divines of our 'Reformed Protestant Church,' call everything
but gentlemen those who lay claim to the equivocal privilege of feasting
periodically upon the body and blood of Omnipotence. The pains taken by
Protestants to show from Scripture, Reason and Nature, that Priests
cannot change lumps of dough into the body, and bumpers of wine into the
blood, of their God, are well known and appreciated. But the Roman
Catholics are neither to be argued nor laughed out of their 'awful
doctrine' of the real presence, to which they cling with desperate
earnestness.

Locke wrote rather disparagingly of 'many among us,' who will be found
upon Inquiry, to fancy God in the shape of a man fitting in heaven, and
have other absurd and unfit conceptions of him.' As though it were
possible to think of shapeless Being, or as though it were criminal in
the superstitious to believe 'God made man after his own image.'

That Christians as well as Turks 'really have had whole sects earnestly
contending that the Deity was corporeal and of human shape', is a fact,
so firmly established as to defy contradiction. And though every sincere
subscriber to the Thirty Nine Articles must believe, or at least must
believe he believes in Deity without body, parts, or passions, it is
well known that 'whole sects' of Christians do even now 'fancy God in
the shape of a man sitting in heaven, and entertain other absurd and
unfit conceptions of him.'

Mr. Collibeer, who is considered by Christian writers 'a most ingenious
gentleman', has told the world in his Treatise entitled 'The Knowledge
of God,' that Deity must have some form, and intimates it may probably
be the spherical; an intimation which has grievously offended many
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