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Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts a grace before Milton a grace before Shakspeare a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen? but, the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelæsian Christians, no matter where assembled.

Hence, a rigidly literal meaning was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo.

Speaking of the Lord's Supper, his remarks are of great importance. "It is not the outward manducation that makes a Christian, but the inward and spiritual eating, which works by faith, and without which all forms are mere show and grimace," he observed.

He knew already that the cultivated taste objects to the use of a table-knife save for purposes of cutting; on the whole he saw grounds for the objection. He knew, moreover, that manducation and the absorption of fluids must be performed without audible gusto; the knowledge cost him some self-criticism.

Here we made it out on kabobs, and a sort of cake like a large crumpet; the cake doing the office of a plate. Kabobs are things better in a story than in manducation, being excessively greasy compositions of odd pieces of meat stuck on skewers, a poor imitation of the sausage. We found the town rising in our estimation as we viewed it by daylight.

But spare us the repetition of those stale legends that man was made and unmade in the space of a few moments, and that ever since the manducation of the forbidden fruit his powers have withered, and that there is no remedy available for their recovery but incessant prayer and sacramental ordinances. Our reading of history is exactly the reverse.

Peucer, for his opinions, suffered ten years of imprisonment in the severest manner. In 1577 a form of concord was produced in which the real manducation of Christ's body and blood in the eucharist was established and heresy and excommunication laid on all that refused this as an article of faith, with pains and penalties to be enforced by the secular arm. Crellius, in 1601, was put to death.