916 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
| worthy communicants (of course, with opposite effects). He denied a miraculous change of the substance of the elements, but maintained the co-existence of the body and blood in, with, and under bread and wine, both being real, the one invisible and the other visible! In this book he claims toleration for both theories, with a personal preference for the latter. ‘Christians are at liberty, without peril to their salvation, to imagine, think, or believe in either of the two ways, since here there is no necessity of faith.” ... “I will not listen to those, or make the slightest account of them, who will cry out that this doctrine is Wiclifite, Hussite, heretical, and opposed to the decisions of the Church.” The Scripture does not say that the elements are transubstantiated: Paul calls them real bread and real wine, just as the cup was real. Moreover, Christ speaks (figuratively), “This σι is the new covenant in my blood,” meaning his blood contained in the cup. ‘Transubstantiation is a scholastic or Aristotelian. figment of the twelfth century.2, “Why should Christ not be able to include his body within the substance of bread, as well as within the accidents? Fire and iron, two different substances, are so mingled in red-hot iron, that in every part of it are both fire and iron. Why may not the glorious body of Christ much more be in every part of the substance of the bread?” Common people do not understand the difference between substance and accidents, nor argue about it, but “believe with simple faith that the body and blood of Christ are truly contained in the elements.” So also the incarnation does not require a transubstantiation of the human nature, that so the Godhead may be contained beneath the accidents of the human nature; “but each nature is entire,
1 This view is usually called consubstantiation ; but Lutherans object to the term in the sense of impanation, or local inclusion, mixture, and circumscription. They mean an illocal presence of a ubiquitous body.
2 This is not strictly historical. Transubstantiation was clearly taught by Paschasius Radbertus in the ninth century, though not without contradiction from Ratramnus. See Schaff, Ch. Hist., vol. IV. 544 sqq.
ὃ 45. BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY OF THE CHURCH. 217
and we can say with truth, This man is God; this God is man.”
(c) The sacrifice of the mass: that is, the offering to God of the very body and blood of Christ by the hands of the priest when he pronounces the words of institution ; in other words, an actual repetition of the atoning sacrifice of the cross, only in an unbloody manner. This institution is the very heart of Roman-Catholic (and Greek-Catholic) worship. Luther _ attacks it as the third bondage, and the most impious of all. He feels the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of a task which involves an entire revolution of public worship. ‘“ At this day,” he says, “there is no belief in the Church more generally received, or more firmly held, than that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice. This abuse has brought in an infinite flood of other abuses, until faith in the sacrament has been utterly lost, and they have made this divine sacrament a mere subject of traffic, huckstering, and money-getting contracts; and the entire maintenance of priests and monks depends upon these things.” He goes back to the simplicity of the primitive institution of the Lord’s Supper, which is a thankful commemoration of the atoning death of Christ, with a blessing attached to it, namely, the forgiveness of sins, to be appropriated by faith. The substance of this sacrament. is promise and faith. It is a gift of God to man, not a gift of man to God. It is, like baptism, to be received, and not to be given. The Romanists have changed it into a good work of man and an opus operatum, by which they imagine to please God; and have surrounded it with so many prayers, signs, vestments, gestures, and ceremonies, that the original meaning is obscured. ‘They make God no longer the bestower of good gifts on us, but the receiver of ours. Alas for such impiety!” He proves from the ancient Church that the offering of the eucharist, as the name indicates, was originally a thank-offering of the gifts of the communicants for the benefit of the poor. The true sacrifice which we are to offer
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