"We received that the only begotten Son of God, through whom in the beginning all existing things were made, whether visible or invisible, in these last days took upon Himself a human body and soul, and was made man, and suffered for our salvation; and the third day He rose again from the dead in that very flesh which had been laid in the sepulcher. In that very same flesh made glorious He ascended into the heavens. From there we look for His coming to judge the living and the dead. We also confess that He gave us the hope that we too should rise in a similar manner, so that we believe that our resurrection will be in the same manner and process, and in the same form, as the resurrection of our Lord Himself from the dead. The bodies which we shall receive will not be phantoms or thin apparitions, as some slanderously affirm that we say, but our own very bodies in which we live and in which we die. For how can we truly believe in the resurrection of the flesh, unless the very nature of flesh remains in it truly and substantially? Without any equivocation, we confess the resurrection of this real and substantial flesh of ours in which we live.

 

"To give a fuller demonstration of this point, I will add one thing more. It is the compulsion of those who attack me which forces me to exhibit a singular and special mystery of my own church. It is this, that, while all the churches thus hand down the sacrament of the Creed in the form which, after the words 'the remission of sins' adds 'the resurrection of the flesh,' the holy church of Aquileia (as though the Spirit of God had foreseen the attacks against us) puts in a specific pronoun at the place where it delivers the resurrection of the dead. Instead of saying as others do, 'the resurrection of the flesh,' we say 'the resurrection of this flesh.' At this point, as the custom is at the end of the Creed, we touch the forehead of this flesh with the sign of the cross and with the mouth of this flesh, which we have so touched, we confess the resurrection; that so we may stop every entrance through which the poisoned tongue might bring in its lies against us. Can any confession be fuller than this? Can any exposition of the truth be more perfect? Yet I see that this remarkable provision of the Holy Spirit has been of no profit to us. Evil and busy tongues still find room for objecting."