Prefatio: Three Crimina charged — Supper consensus, oral manducation as cannibalism, and Sandomierz cruelty
But now I must return from the digression into the road; and those thicker clouds of the gravest accusations which my bitterest Adversaries pour out — not yet to be named by me, and without even designating the places and writings that fill and infect them, lest even so I should be said to have done them injury and, by uncovering their nakedness, to have exacted revenge (their words meanwhile being recited, and by them easily recognized) — now come to be calmly discussed, the rest vanishing into air by their own lightness. They are three in number:
FIRST, they charge me in a strange way with this: that I dared to assert that a Fundamental Consensus in the Doctrine of the Holy Supper really obtains between Lutherans and Reformed; and that, using Beza's words, I said the Body of Christ is as far from the Sacred Supper as Heaven is from Earth.
SECOND, with a great imprecation they accuse me of having imputed to their Forum the dogma of the Oral Manducation of Christ's Body and the Drinking of His Blood as Anthropophagy and Theophagy.
THIRD, they paint me as crueler than Nero himself, chiefly on this ground: that I have praised the Sandomierz Consensus of the Evangelicals, whose patrons they boast behaved cruelly toward Lutherans.
Latin
Caeterum e diverticulo in viam redeundum mihi nunc est, et gravissimarum accusationum nebulae, crassiores illae, quas acerbissimi Adversarii (nondum a me nominandi, citra etiam Locorum Scriptorumque, quae opplent inficiuntque, designationem, ne vel sic injuriam illis intulisse, nuditateque eorum detecta, vindictam exercuisse dici possim, verbis interim eorum recitatis, ab iis nullo negotio dignoscendis) offundunt, placide nunc veniunt discutiendae, reliquis suamet levitate in auram abituris. Sunt autem numberó Tres: PRIMO, mirum in modum hoc homine me criminantur, quod ausus fuerim asserere Consensum in Doctrina de S. Coena Fundamentalem, Lutheranos inter et Reformatos, re ipsa intercedere; et Bezae verbis usus, Corpus Christi a Coena Sacra tam procul abesse, quam a Terra Coelum est. SECUNDO, Magna cum imprecatione accusant me imputatae, in Forum, de Orali Corporis Christi Manducatione Sanguinisque ejus Bibitione Dogmati, Anthropophagiae et Theophagiae. TERTIO, Ipso Nerone crudeliorem me fingunt, hoc potissimum nomine, quod Sendomiriensem Evangelicorum Consensum laudaverim, cujus Patronos erga Lutheranos crudelem se gessisse jactitant.