catechumens, but the baptized who did not communicate left the
church before the communion of the faithful began (? after the
communion of the clergy). In Anglican churches non-communicants
used to leave the church after the prayer for the Church
Militant. Ritualists now keep unconfirmed children in church
during the entire rite, through ignorance of ancient usage, in
order that they may learn to adore the consecrated elements.
For this moment of homage to material elements ritually filled
with divine potency may be so exaggerated as to obscure the
rite’s ancient significance as a communion of the faithful in
mystic food.
Ideas of Reformers.—The 16th-century reformers strove to avoid the literalism of the words “This is my body,” accepted frankly by the Roman and Eastern churches, and urged a Receptionist view, viz. that Christ is in the sacrament only spiritually consumed by worthy recipients alone, the material body not being actually chewed. This is seen by a comparison of other confessions with the Profession of Catholic Faith in accordance with the council of Trent, in the bull of Pius IV., which runs thus:—
“I profess that in the Mass is offered to God a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice, for the living and the dead, and that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there is truly really and in substance the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that there does take place a conversion of the entire substance of the bread into the body, and of the entire substance of the wine into the blood, which conversion the Catholic Church doth call Transubstantiation. I also admit that under one of the other species alone the entire and whole Christ and the true sacrament is received.”
The 28th Article of Religion of the Church of England is as follows:—
“The Supper of the Lord . . . is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ’s death; insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ, and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ.
“Transubstantiation . . . cannot be proved by holy writ. . . .
“The Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten, in the Supper, only after a heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.
“The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.”
At the end of the communion rite the prayer-book, in view of the ordinance to receive the Sacrament kneeling, adds the following:—
“It is hereby declared, that thereby no adoration is intended, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental Bread or Wine, there bodily received, or unto any Corporal Presence of Christ’s natural Flesh and Blood. For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored (for that were idolatry, to be abhorred of all faithful Christians); and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ’s natural Body to be at one time in more places than one.”
These monitions and prescriptions are rapidly becoming a dead-letter, but they possess a certain historical interest.
The Helvetic Confession[1] of A.D. 1566 (caput xxi. De sacra coena Domini) runs as follows:—
“That it may be more rightly and clearly understood how the flesh and blood of Christ can be food and drink of the faithful, and be received by them unto eternal life, let us add these few remarks. Chewing is not of one kind alone. For there is a corporeal chewing, by which food is taken into the mouth by man, bruised with the teeth and swallowed down into the belly. . . . As the flesh of Christ cannot be corporeally chewed without wickedness and truculence, so it is not food of the belly. . . . There is also a spiritual chewing of the body of Christ, not such that by it we understand the very food to be changed into spirit, but such that, the body and blood of the Lord abiding in their essence and peculiarity, they are spiritually communicated to us, not in any corporeal way, but in a spiritual, through the Holy Spirit which applies and bestows on us those things which were prepared through the flesh and blood of the Lord betrayed for our sake to death, to wit, remission of sins, liberation and life eternal, so that Christ lives in us and we in him. . . .
“In addition to the aforesaid spiritual chewing, there is also a sacramental chewing of the Lord’s body, by which the faithful not only partakes spiritually and inwardly of the true body and blood of the Lord, but outwardly by approaching the Lord’s table, receives the visible sacrament of his body and blood. . . . But he who without faith approaches the sacred table, albeit he communicate in the sacrament, yet he perceives not the matter of the sacrament, whence is life and salvation. . . .”
The Augustan Confession presented by the German electors to Charles V. in the section on the Mass merely protests against the view that “the Lord’s Supper is a work (opus) which being performed by a priest earns remission of sin for the doer and for others, and that in virtue of the work done (ex opere operato), without a good motive on the part of the user. Also that being applied for the dead, it is a satisfaction, that is to say, earns for them remission of the pains of purgatory.”
The Saxon Confession of Wittenberg, June 1551, while protesting against the same errors, equally abstains from trying to define narrowly how Christ is present in the sacrament.
Consubstantiation.—The symbolical books of the Lutheran Church, following the teaching of Luther himself, declare the doctrine of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist, together with the bread and wine (consubstantiation), as well as the ubiquity of his body, as the orthodox doctrine of the church. One consequence of this view was that the unbelieving recipients are held to be as really partakers of the body of Christ in, with and under the bread as the faithful, though they receive it to their own hurt. (Hagenbach, Hist. of Doctr. ii. 300.)
Of all the Reformers, the teaching of Zwingli was the farthest removed from that of Luther. At an early period he asserted that the Eucharist was nothing more than food for the soul, and had been instituted by Christ only as an act of commemoration and as a visible sign of his body and blood (Christenliche Ynleitung, 1523, quoted by Hagenbach, Hist. of Doctr. ii. 296, Clark’s translation). But that Zwingli did not reject the higher religious significance of the Eucharist, and was far from degrading the bread and wine into “nuda et inania symbola,” as he was accused of doing, we see from his Fidei ratio ad Carolum Imperatorem (ib. p. 297).
Original Significance of the Eucharist.—It is doubtful if the attempts of reformers to spiritualize the Eucharist bring us, except so far as they pruned ritual extravagances, nearer to its original significance; perhaps the Roman, Greek and Oriental churches have better preserved it. This significance remains to be discussed; the cognate question of how far the development of the Eucharist was influenced by the pagan mysteries is discussed in the article Sacrament.
That the Lord’s Supper was from the first a meal symbolic of Christian unity and commemorative of Christ’s death is questioned by none. But Paul, while he saw this much in it, saw much more; or he could not in the same epistle, x. 18-22 assimilate communion in the flesh and blood of Jesus, on the one hand, to the sacrificial communion with the altar which made Israel after the flesh one; and on the other to the communion with devils attained by pagans through sacrifices offered before idols. It has been justly remarked of the Pauline view, that—
“The union with the Lord Himself, to which those who partake of the Lord’s Supper have, is compared with the union which those who partake of a sacrifice have with the deity to whom the altar is devoted—in the case of the Israelites with God, of the heathen with demons. This idea that to partake of sacrifice is to devote oneself to the deity, lies at the root of the ancient idea of worship, whether Jewish or heathen; and St Paul uses it as being readily understood. In this connexion the symbol is never a mere symbol, but a means of real union. ‘The cup is the covenant’” (Prof. Sanday in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, 3, 149).
Paul caps his argument thus:—“Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons: ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?” And these words with their context prove that Paul, like the Fathers of the church, regarded the gods and goddesses as real living supernatural beings, but malignant. They were the powers and principalities with whom he was ever at war. The Lord also is jealous of them, if any one attempt to combine their cult with his, for to do so is to doubt the supremacy of his name above all names. Both in its inner nature then and outward
- ↑ This represents the views of Calvin.
