Paul's, the object of which was to prove the truth of the doctrine of
transubstantiation; and, after the manner of his kind, told the
following little anecdote in support of it:--"A maid of Northgate parish
in Canterbury, in pretence to wipe her mouth, kept the host in her
handkerchief; and, when she came home, she put the same into a pot,
close covered, and she spitted in another pot, and after a few days, she
looking in the one pot, found a little young pretty babe, about a
shaftmond long; and the other pot was full of gore blood."[1]
[Footnote 1: Cranmer, A Confutation of Unwritten Verities, p. 66. Parker
Society.]
34. That the audiences before which these absurdities were seriously
brought, for amusement or instruction, could be excited in either case
to any other feeling than good-natured contempt for a would-be impostor,
seems to us now-a-days to be impossible. It was not so in the times when
these things transpired: the actors of them were not knaves, nor were
their audiences fools, to any unusual extent. If any one is inclined to
form a low opinion of the Elizabethans intellectually, on account of the
divergence of their capacities of belief in this respect from his own,
he does them a great injustice. Let him take at once Charles Lamb's
warning, and try to understand, rather than to judge them. We, who have
had the benefit of three hundred more years of experience and liberty of
thought than they, should have to hide our faces for very shame had we
not arrived at juster and truer conclusions upon those difficult topics
that so bewildered our ancestors.
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