Currently reading: The Caroline Divines and the Church of Rome by Mark Langham 📚
For the Divines, the manner of the Eucharistic change belonged firmly in the area of adiaphora, and it was their frequent complaint that the Roman insistence upon defining the manner of the change had brought division to what had previously been a unified Christendom. John Bramhall pointed out that among the earliest Christians ‘there were no questions, no quarrels, no contentions among them’ because ‘they contented themselves to believe what Christ had said, – “this is My Body” – without presuming on their own heads to determine the manner how it is His Body’. John Cosin voiced the same complaint, lamenting the loss of peace and unity occasioned by the Roman insistence upon transubstantiation, and stating with relief that ‘we that are Protestant and Reformed according to the Ancient Catholic Church do not search into the manner of it with perplexing enquiries’. For the Divines, the change was, and must remain, mystical.