And to explain what your forefathers meant,
  By real presence in the sacrament,
  After long fencing push’d against the wall. 
  Your salvo comes, that he’s not there at all: 
  There changed your faith, and what may change may fall. 
  Who can believe what varies every day,
  Nor ever was, nor will be at a stay?

    Tortures may force the tongue untruths to tell,
  And I ne’er own’d myself infallible,
  Replied the Panther:  grant such presence were, 40
  Yet in your sense I never own’d it there. 
  A real virtue we by faith receive,
  And that we in the sacrament believe. 
  Then, said the Hind, as you the matter state,
  Not only Jesuits can equivocate;
  For real, as you now the word expound,
  From solid substance dwindles to a sound. 
  Methinks an AEsop’s fable you repeat;
  You know who took the shadow for the meat: 
  Your Church’s substance thus you change at will, 50
  And yet retain your former figure still. 
  I freely grant you spoke to save your life;
  For then you lay beneath the butcher’s knife. 
  Long time you fought, redoubled battery bore,
  But, after all, against yourself you swore;
  Your former self:  for every hour your form
  Is chopp’d and changed, like winds before a storm. 
  Thus fear and interest will prevail with some;
  For all have not the gift of martyrdom.

    The Panther grinn’d at this, and thus replied:  60
  That men may err was never yet denied. 
  But, if that common principle be true,
  The canon, dame, is levell’d full at you. 
  But, shunning long disputes, I fain would see
  That wondrous wight Infallibility. 
  Is he from Heaven, this mighty champion, come;
  Or lodged below in subterranean Rome? 
  First, seat him somewhere, and derive his race,
  Or else conclude that nothing has no place.

   Suppose (though I disown it), said the Hind, 70
  The certain mansion were not yet assign’d;
  The doubtful residence no proof can bring
  Against the plain existence of the thing. 
  Because philosophers may disagree
  If sight by emission or reception be,
  Shall it be thence inferr’d, I do not see? 
  But you require an answer positive,
  Which yet, when I demand, you dare not give;
  For fallacies in universals live. 
  I then affirm that this unfailing guide 80
  In Pope and General Councils must reside;
  Both lawful, both combined:  what one decrees
  By numerous votes, the other ratifies: 
  On this undoubted sense the Church relies. 
  ’Tis true, some doctors in a scantier space,
  I mean, in each apart, contract the place. 
  Some, who to greater length extend the line,
  The Church’s after-acceptation join. 
  This last circumference appears too wide;