The Lutherans, though vnaintaining the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament, do not represent them as offered a propi tiatory sacrifice for sin. Some high Lutherans have on this subject, as on some others, used language not unlike that of Catholic divines, but they generally regard the benefit of the Eucharist to consist in eating the flesh of Christ and drinking his blood. It would not be right to charge them with holding the old notion of some of the fathers that by our eating the body of Christ some par ticles of it become incorporated with our bodies, and so make them immortal, though it is not easy to say what other than some such physical benefit can be attributed to the actual eating of the true body or drinking of the true blood of Christ.
The doctrine of the Greek church respecting the Eucharist, with which con-esponds generally the doctrine of the Eastern churches, is thus stated in The Orthodox Doctrine of the Apostolic Eastern Church, translated by A. Coray, and re commended by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Greek Church in England, The Holy Eucharist is a sacrament in which the believer receives, under the form of bread, the body itself of Christ ; and under the form of wine, the blood itself of Christ. to the remission of sins and eternal life' (Article xxxiv.) In the exposition of this article is the following account of the celebration of the Eucharist in the Greek Church As soon as the community of the Lord are assembled, the Psalms are sung to the glory of the Highest ; the priest then, after reciting several prayers from Scripture, begins, in conformity with the example of Cluist, to glorify and thank the heavenly Father, to relate his benefits to mankind, and especially his having sent on earth for our salvation his only begotten Son to die for our sins, thanking God most heartily, in the name of the whole Church, for all these privi leges. After this he blesses the holy gifts, invokes the Holy Ghost, partakes himself first of the Holy Eucharist, and then administers it to all the other communicants in both kinds.' In the same expo sition the benefits of communicating are thus stated, The Holy Eucharist causes our obtaining Christ. Accordingly the communicant becomes spiritually one with Christ, as he himself saith, He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in him.' The doctrine of Zwingle is sufficiently plain, though wherein it differed from that of Calvin is not so obvious. According to him the Lord's Supper
is the authorised commemoration of the death of Christ, in which the bread and wine are appro priate emblems of his body broken for us and his blood shed for us, suggesting to the devout com municant profitable thoughts of evangelical truth, and so strengthening the divine life within him. Of Calvin's views of the sacrament, Dr. Hill in his ` Theological Lectures' says, He (Calvin) thought that the system of Zwinglius did not come up to the force of the expressions used in Scripture, and although he did not approve of the manner in which the Lutherans explain those expressions, it appeared to him that there was a sense in which the full significance of them might be preserved, and a great part of the Lutheran language might continue to be used. As Ile agreed with Zwinglius in thinking that the bread and wine were the signs of the body and blood of Christ, which were not locally present, he renounced both transubstantia tion and consubstantiation. He agreed further with Zwinglius in thinking that the use of these signs, being a memorial of the sacrifice once offered on the cross, vvas intended to produce a moral effect. But he taught that, to all who remember the death of the Saviour in a proper manner, Christ is by the use of these signs spiritually pre sent—present to their minds ; and he considered this spiritual presence as giving a significancy that goes far beyond the Socinian sense to the words.' In this statement of Calvin's doctrine there appears nothing which Zwingle would not readily have acknowledged. If Calvin thought with Zwingle that the body of Christ was not locally present, Zwingle would quite as readily have agreed with Calvin that it was ` epiritually present to the minds ' of devout communicants—that is, it was the object of their devout contemplations. It is very true that C,alvin sometimes spoke as if he attributed to the emblems of the sacrament a real presence of Christ's body in a more literal sense than Zwingle and Carlostadt, as when he says, 'a spiritud presence may be as real as a coy, pcireal presence.' But the real presence of a body must be a corporeal presence ; and if the body be not corporeally present, it is present only spiritually, in which Zwingle would cordially have agreed with Calvin, although he would not have called it a real presence.