Viewed objectively, it early became the cen tral act of worship of the Christian Church. The feast was kept every Lord's Day, or even more frequently. The first converts continued stead fastly not only "in the Apostles' doctrine and fellowship," hut also in "the breaking of bread and in the prayers" (Acts ii. 42). Around the Lord's Supper gathered and grew the ancient liturgies of the Christian faith. It proclaimed in unmistakable imagery the Lord's death, and, by implication, His resurrection and ascension. It attracted to it all that was richest and best in symbolic ceremony and holy song.
Subjectively, it became the Church's greatest and most precious means of grace. It was a new covenant, and, like the old. was a feast upon a sacrifice. "The one was on the lamb, the other on the Lamb of God. The one true. the other true. The one carnally true, the other spiritual ly, and therefore even more true." As in the physical life the waste of bodily tissues is re paired by food, so in the spiritual life the waste in the finer tissues of man's higher nature was said to be repaired by the body and blood of Christ, as "verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful" in the Lord's Supper. The spir itual nourishment—the divine element—in the sacrament. has been almost universally understood to be, in some real sense. the body and blood of the Saviour, and by receiving it Christians have from the beginning believed themselves to he united to God and in fellowship to one another in Jesus Christ.
This is made plain by Justin Martyr. After giving a detailed account of the service as it was celebrated in his day, including the distribution, among those present, of the loaf and the wine and water, he says: "And this food is called among us eucharist, and no one is allowed to take it unless he believes that what we teach is true, and has been washed in the laver for the remission of sins and for regeneration, and is living as Christ enjoined. For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink, hut just as Jesus Christ our Saviour, by the word of God made flesh, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so we have been taught that the food over which thanks have been given by the word of prayer which comes from Dim—that food from which our flesh and blood are by as similation nourished—is both the flesh and the blood of that Jesus who was made flesh." The greatest devotional unanimity on the sub ject prevailed for nearly eleven centuries. Then
followed eight centuries or more of uninter rupted controversy. "That presence." says Mil man, "had as vet, in the eleventh century, been unapproached by profane or searching contro versy, had been undefined by canon, neither agi tated before council nor determined by Pope." The early Fathers were not trained theologians. They were not careful and precise in their lan guage regarding the Lord's Supper. But that the entire primitive Church believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament there appears to be no doubt. The schoolmen, on the other hand, were philosophers. They aspired to reduce the Chureh's body of doctrine to an intellectual system. They sought to show that the doctrine of the Eucharist involved no rational antago nism. Speculation, too, was rife; and it natural ly found expression in the language of the domi nant or Aristotelian school of philosophy. The result was the metaphysical doctrine of tran substantiation. The term was first officially used by the Latin Church at the Lateran Council of 1215, and the doctrine became her recognized and authoritative teaching, so defined by the aetion of the Council of Trent (A.D. I55t ).
The subtle distinctions of theology were un known to the common people, and the Reformers found it easy to persuade many that they were substituting for this doctrine a more primitive and spiritual one. But they met the same dif ficulties as the schoolmen, and found it impos sible to explain the mystery of the sacrament. The doctrine of transubstantiation, as popu larly understood, at any rate, annihilated the natural. The bread and wine were, to all intents purposes, no longer present. But Zwinglia n ism destroyed the supernatural. and made the Lord's Supper an empty symbol or lane memorial of a past event. It found no place for the rcs seeramenti, the very heart of the saerament—the 'inward and spiritual grace' so inseparable from the suerumcatuin or 'outward and visible sign.' Another view, commonly but erroneously called the Lutheran. was known as eonsubstantiation. The word appears to have been coined by the opponents of Lutheranism and was derived from an expression of Luther's in his letter to Henry VIII. It represents the substance of the body and blood of Christ as coexisting in union with the substance of bread and wine, just as iron and tire are united in a bar of heated iron.