Now understand ye the words of our Savior Christ, as He spake them one after another—­as Christ spake them.  For He took bread and blest, and yet what blest He?  The Scripture saith not that Christ took the bread and blest it, or that He blest the bread which He had taken.  Therefore it seemeth more that He blest His disciples and apostles, whom He had ordained witnesses of His passion; and in them He left His blest word, which is the bread of life, as it is written, “Not only in bread liveth man, but in every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”  Also Christ saith, “I am the bread of life that came down from heaven.”  And Christ saith also in John, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”  Therefore it seemeth more that He blest His disciples, and also His apostles, in whom the bread of life was left more than in material bread, for the material bread hath an end.  As it is written in the Gospel of Matthew xv. that Christ said, “All things that a man eateth go down into the belly, and are sent down into the draught;” but the blessing of Christ kept His disciples and apostles, both bodily and [ghostly] spiritual.  As it is written, that none of them perished but the son of perdition, that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, and often the Scripture saith that Jesus took bread and brake it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take ye, eat ye, this is my body that shall be given for you.”  But He said not this bread is my body, or that bread should be given for the life of the world.  For Christ saith, What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before?  “It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.”  Also Christ saith in the Gospel, “Verily, verily I say unto you except the wheat corn fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit”

Here men may see by the words of Christ that it behooved that He died in the flesh, and that in His death was made the fruit of everlasting life for all them that believe on Him, as it is written “For as by Adam they all die, even so by Christ shall all live, and every man in his own order; for as one clearness is in the sun, another in the moon, and a star in clearness is nothing in comparison to the sun; even so is the rising again of the dead for we are sown in corruption and shall rise again incorruptible, we are sown in infirmity, and shall rise again in strength; we are sown in natural bodies, and shall rise again spiritual bodies.”  Then if Christ shall change thus our deadly bodies by death, and God the Father spared not his own Son, as it is written, but that death should reign in him as in us, and that he should be translated into a spiritual body, as the first rising again of dead men; then how say the hypocrites that take on them to make our Lord’s body?  Make they the glorified body?  Either make they again the spiritual body which is risen from death to life or make they the fleshy body as it was before he suffered