parture is not only nor chiefly towards Rome. The drift is much stronger in the direction of a vague formalism, which makes the holy ordinances instituted by Christ mere outward signs having no divinely appointed connection with an inward and spiritual grace. "Low Churchmen" in all denominations vie with each other in making the Sacraments simply memorials of Christ and badges of a Christian profession. (The Church, Her Ministry and Sacraments, p. 162.)

It is difficult to understand how it is possible for the body and blood of Christ to be eaten and drunk by faith. It is easy enough to understand how faith with the aid of the memory and the imagination can recall to mind and vividly realise the presence of the Christ of the cross, and of the Lord's Supper, or even imagine the Lord as priest and victim at the right hand of the Father; but that is the going forth of faith to the absent Christ, not the coming of the body and blood of Christ to us in the Eucharist. If this were all there is in the Lord's Supper, the Friends and Salvationists would be correct when they say, "We can remember our Lord and realise his presence much better apart by ourselves in prayer and religious meditation than we can in the public ceremonies of the Eucharist."

The official doctrine of the Reformed Churches is altogether different from this. As the Gallican Confession says:

Although he be in heaven until he come to judge all the earth, still we believe that by the secret and incomprehensible power of his Spirit, He feeds and strengthens us with the substance of his body and blood. We hold that this is done spiritually, not because we put imagination and fancy in the place of fact and truth, but because the greatness of this mystery exceeds the measure of our senses, and the laws of nature. In short, because it is heavenly, it can only be apprehended by faith. (xxxvi.)

Thus the Reformed Churches recognise the real presence of the body and blood of Christ our Lord in the Eucharist, and that his body and blood are discerned by faith and eaten and drunk by faith. Now it is easy to understand that they may be mentally discerned by faith in the use of the religious memory and imagination; but it is difficult to understand,

on any principle of Philosophy, how faith can feed upon the body of our Lord. In fact, there is no avoidance of the conclusion that faith can feed upon the body and blood of our Lord, after all, only in a figurative sense, and in no real sense. Calvin himself, and the Gallican Confession, and other Reformed theologians and Confessions, state distinctly enough that they mean, as has been shown, that there is a sacramental feeding which is distinct from faith, although mediated by faith. But without this qualification the ordinary Calvinistic statement, that we eat and drink of the body and blood of our Lord by faith, is exposed to the following criticism of the Formula of Concord:

Under these high-sounding phrases, they hide and hold fast the same gross opinion (as the Zwinglians), to wit, that besides the bread and wine, there is nothing more present, or taken with the mouth, in the Lord's Supper. For the term "spiritually" signifies nothing more than the spirit of Christ, or the virtue of the absent body of Christ and his merit which is present. . . . But they think that the body of Christ itself is in no way present, but is contained above in the highest heaven, and they affirm that it behooves us by the meditation of faith to rise on high and ascend into heaven, and that this body and blood of Christ are to be sought there, and nowise in union with the bread and wine of the Holy Supper. (Art. vii.)

It is necessary for the Calvinists to go further and define what they mean by eating and drinking as distinguished from believing. The Calvinistic theory is too indefinite to be altogether satisfactory.

It should be admitted that the Lutheran and Calvinistic conceptions of the Eucharist have no philosophy whatever to sustain them. These theories were efforts to conserve the Biblical teaching without the complication and inconvenience of the Roman dogma. The Roman Catholic conception has at least the Scholastic Philosophy at its back. This is doubtless the reason why the Zwinglian conception has to so great an extent taken possession of the modern Protestant world, especially in Great Britain and America. It is intelligible, it is rational so far as communion with

Christ is concerned; but then, in fact, the Sacrament ceases to be a real Sacrament altogether, because such communion may be enjoyed much better apart from the Sacrament than by the use of it.

It ought to be evident that the Christian Church has not yet solved the problem of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, so far as his relation to the elements of bread and wine is concerned, and that it is better to adhere to the ancient Catholic term Conversion as a basis for further investigation, as Spinola and Leibnitz urged, rather than the Roman Catholic Transubstantiation, the Lutheran Consubstantiation or the Calvinistic feeding by faith.

2. The Eucharistic Sacrifice

We must now take up the question of Sacrifice in connection with the Eucharist; for the doctrine of the presence really depends upon that of Sacrifice. The theologians in the Middle Ages had lost in great measure the Biblical doctrine of sacrifice. The doctrine of a substitutionary atonement had led them to emphasise and exaggerate substitution in sacrifice, and to regard the death of the victim as the essential thing; just as in the doctrine of Christ, the Middle Ages thought more of the Cross than they did of the Incarnation or of the Resurrection. The Mass thus became to them essentially an expiatory sacrifice and the immolation of the victim the essential element. Such conceptions, prevalent in the pre-Reformation Church, were open to the objections made by Protestants on the basis of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and stated rather rudely in the Articles of Religion:

The offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual, and there is none other satisfaction for sin but that alone: Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that. the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. (xxxi.)

The Protestant Churches, when they rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass, owing to the common errors connected with it, did not substitute for it the Biblical doctrine of Sacrifice, or give their just value to the Biblical elements contained in the Catholic doctrine. According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ is at once the great High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek, and also the sacrificial victim, who sums up in himself the significance of the entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament.

Biblical Theology has entirely transformed the conceptions of priesthood and sacrifice in recent times. It was not the function of the priest to slaughter the victim, but to present the flesh and blood of the victim at the divine altars. The significance of the sacrifice did not consist so much in the immolation of the victim, as in the use that was made of the flesh and blood of the victim after it was slaughtered. This use of the flesh and blood gradually originated four kinds of sacrifice: the Peace offering, the Whole Burnt offering, the Sin offering and the Trespass offering. In addition to these there were the unbloody offerings of bread and wine which usually accompanied the bloody offerings, but which might be offered by themselves, under certain conditions and circumstances.

Now, in the New Testament, Jesus Christ is represented as summing up all the sacrifices in himself. This is distinctly recognised by the Council of Trent, when it says:

This, in fine, is that oblation which was prefigured by various types of sacrifices during the period of nature and of the Law; inasmuch as it comprises all the good things signified by those sacrifices, as being the consummation and perfection of them all. (Sess. xxii, cap. 1.)

At the same time the Council of Trent puts the emphasis upon the propitiatory sacrifice, and does not give the other sacrifices their proper value and importance.

(a) The most primitive and wide-spread of the ancient sacrifices was the so-called Peace offering, whose chief signifi1See Briggs, Messiah of the Apostles, pp. 525 f.

cance was in the communion meal, in which God shared with the offerer and his friends. This kind of sacrifice branched out into several kinds: the Covenant sacrifice, in which, besides the eating of the flesh of the victim, the blood was scattered about upon the people to consecrate them to the Covenant of Horeb, once for all at the origin of the national religion; the Passover sacrifice, where the flesh and blood were used in a similar way at the annual commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt; and numerous thank-offerings, votive and festal offerings, in which the blood went to the divine altar, but the greater portion of the flesh of the victim was eaten at the communion meal. Now there can be no doubt that the Christian Eucharist was connected by our Lord according to the Gospels with the Covenant Sacrifice, and the Passover;1 and by St. Paul in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, not only with these but also with the thank-offerings and festal offerings.

The two essential features of the Sacrifice are the offering of the flesh and blood to God by the priest, and the partaking of the flesh and blood by the people. Now it is evident that the Holy Eucharist has these two essential features.

But before considering these, it is important to consider the relation of the unbloody sacrifice of bread and wine to the bloody sacrifice of flesh and blood. The earliest Christian writers regarded the Eucharist as that unbloody sacrifice, the pure Minchah predicted in Messianic times by the prophet Malachi. This opinion has always persisted in the Christian Church, and reappears in the Council of Trent, when it says:

This is, indeed, that clean oblation, which cannot be defiled by any unworthiness or malice of those that offer, which the Lord foretold by Malachias was to be offered in every place, clean to his name, which was to be great among the Gentiles. (Sess. xxii, cap. 1.)

'Mk. xiv. 22-25; Mt. xxvi. 26-29; Lk. xxii. 15-20. See Briggs, Messiah of the Gospels, pp. 120 sq.

'XI. 23-26; x. 16-21; v. 7. See Messiah of the Apostles, pp. 100 sq. 'I, 11. See p. 64.