CHAPTER XXXIX.

PERPETUITY OF FAITH IN THE REAL PRESENCE.-INVENTORS OF THE FIGURATIVE PRESENCE.-CONTRADICTION AND DISHONESTY OF THE SACRAMENTARIANS.

Ir may be said, "We allow that the real presence is a touching belief and has wonderful power over the heart, but can the mind accept it?" How can a just mind consent to deprive the human heart, a prey to so many sorrows and subject to so many frailties of so divine a balm, of so efficacious a source of strength! Is not the well authenticated power of the remedy, a strong proof, to every judicious mind of its divine origin? How long since, and from whom did error receive her commission to benefit man and lead him to God!

I readily acknowledge that this dogma, considered in itself, is strange, inconceivable and even incredible; but what should we conclude from that? That it is not of human invention, that only the Divine voice could announce to man a thing so unimaginable, and make it accepted.—The first visionary who should dream of such an extravagance could not have found a second to adopt it; and if such had been found, universal opinion would have given him and his fellow believers the first rank in the history of human follies.

Let those who consider this doctrine as absurd explain, then, how the christian world has believed it for sixteen centuries, and still believes it with very few exceptions. Is reason

a Calvinistic creation! As to sense and genius, our old Christians have established their claims to them, as well as the Catholics of modern times. To deny them reason would be to want it oneself.

If this doctrine were not as clearly stated in the Gospel, as in fact it is, its divine origin would be no less satisfactorily

demonstrated by the uniform and constant faith of Christians of all ages, from those who had the happiness to hear these words uttered by the mouth of the Savior on the evening of his death: Receive and eat, this is my body, &c., even to the Christians of the sixteenth century, who, not without surprise, heard Carlstadt and Zwingle translate thus the words of Christ; This is the figure of my body. This belief, the Oriental Churches who have been separated from Catholicism since the fifth and the ninth century, have carefully preserved till our day, as has been proved to the sacramentarians with a force of erudition which has reduced them to silence.*

If the peaceable and immemorial possession of a doctrine so popular, and concerning which every believer must necessarily have a fixed and established faith, was disturbed for a moment, in the eleventh century, at only one point of the Church, the attempt of Berenger, only more fully confirmed the universal harmony, and the teacher in the schools of St. Martin of Tours, hastened to abjure an opinion whose novelty provoked the anathemas of pastors and people.†

As to those miserable journalists, strangers to all knowledge of men and history who dare yet to assert that faith in the real presence was imposed on the Catholic Church by a monk of Mount Sinai or of the convent of Corbie, between the seventh and ninth centuries, or even by a religious of the thirteenth, I hold them as irrefutable as those ancient geolo

"Dis

It is sufficient to quote the great work De la Perpétuité de la foi de l'Eucharistie, on the subject of which Leibnitz wrote. tinguished learned men have recently demonstrated that all the churches of the world, with the exception of those that are called reformed, and others which by their innovations have gone farther than the reformed, at the present day admit the real presence of the body of Christ; it has been proved, I repeat, by such evidence, that the fact must be acknowledged as established, or we can never hope to prove any assertion with regard to foreign countries. (Systeme de Theol., art. Euchar.) ↑ See Bergier, Dictionn. Theol. art. Berengarians.

gists who taught that the universe was brought forth from a crocodile's egg.

The two men to whom it was given to tear from the heart of many millions of christians this ancient and touching be lief, were Carlstadt and Zwingle; the first Archdeacon of Wittemberg-a barbarian, without talent, without faith, destitute even of common sense, living in intoxication among pots and glasses, as Melancthon has said;* the other, an old curate of Glacis and Einsiedlen, from which he was banished on account of misconduct. They were the first to applaud the invectives of Luther against the indulgences of the Roman Pontiff; the first also, who, using the very plenary indulgence accorded by the Pope of Wittemberg to his priests, transformed their maid-servants into wives.

If this wonderful effect of the love of Jesus Christ must be denied, what more natural than that it should be by such men! The unhappy man who dares to approach the altar with impure heart and hands, is peculiarly interested to find on the altar only an insignificant image of what we adore there.

However this may be, the commentary which Zwingle gave of the words of the Eucharistic institution, was a little less absurd than the burlesque interpretation of Carlstadt, which threw Luther into fits of laughter, and drew down on its author a deluge of burning sarcasm.‡

* See Audin, Vie de Calvin, vol. i. ch. xxii.

† Ib.-De Haller, Histoire de la Reforme Protestante dans le Suisse occidentale, ch. iii.

‡ See Audin, as above quoted. Carlstadt thus explained the supper: Jesus Christ, after saying to his Apostles, when giving them bread: Take and eat, pointed to himself, saying: This is my body; then passing the cup of wine, inviting them to drink, he probably showed them his arteries and veins, saying: This is my blood, &c.!!! Here is a charming application of the principle of individual interpretation.

Discomfited by Luther, who armed himself with the express words of Jesus Christ, and also with universal tradition, which he considered decisive, when it was favorable to himself, Carlstadt and Zwingle found an aid in Calvin, who endea vored at first to reconcile, by his hybrid doctrines, Lutheran realism with Zwinglian symbolism,* and finally decided in favor of the latter.

Luther, who so bravely defended the reality of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, was, however, in despair at finding himself agreeing on this point with those Papists, whose name alone whitened his lips with foam. He then denied transubstantiation, and maintained that the bread and the wine remained on the altar after the consecration, conjointly with the body and blood. For these words: this is my body, the pure and simple acceptation of which he preached so strongly to the Zwinglians; he, in fact, substi tuted the following: With this, or under this, or in this is my body.

It belonged to the sixteenth century to decide between these three masters: the Son of God affirming, of the Eucharistic bread, that it is his body; Luther pronouncing that it contains his body; and again, Carlstadt, Zwingle, and Calvin, teaching that it is only the image, the type of the body. Is it aston

It is however to this profound commentator that the Sacramentarians, that is to say, three-quarters of the Protestants, are indebted for the dogma of the figurative presence.

* See Bossuet, Histoire des Variations, liv. ix.

A painter of that period had the happy idea of uniting the three suppers on the same canvass. In the centre the divine Savior was represented distributing the sacred bread to the Apostles, and uttering these words: This is my body; on the right, a little lower, Luther administering the supper to his followers, saying: This contains my body; on the left Calvin, in the same act, murmuring: This is the type of my body. In the back ground the artist wrote in large letters: Which of the three speaks the truth? This picture caused many con

ishing, that, of two hundred and sixty millions of christians, then existing, more than two hundred millions have decided to hold to the words of Christ, as the christian world had hitherto understood them!

I have no intention to bring forward here the passages of Scripture and the monuments of tradition which establish the real presence as an eminently scriptural and christian doctrine. It would be impossible for me to add anything to the very complete demonstrations of our theologians and controversialists; and to collect them, a volume would be needed. I shall limit myself to one reflection on the singular conduct of the theologians of the Reformation.

For three entire centuries they enforce upon us the necessity of referring, in matters of faith, not to old traditions, but to Scripture, to the pure word of Christ. They are continually repeating to us, as a Jewish Rabbi would do these words of Moses: You shall not add, nor take away from the word that I speak to you.

Catholics take them literally. It is Christ himself, who, on the occasion of the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, speaks of the far more miraculous food that he is preparing for his disciples. The people whom he has just exhorted to believe in him as in the ambassador of God, judge that the versions. The truth, indeed, is never more eloquent than when reduced to its simplest expression. A few years later the artist would have been able to crowd his canvass with a hundred and ninety-eight other personages; for in the time of Bellarmine, two hundred different interpretations of the words of the supper could be enumerated among Protestants.

Among the moderns I shall mention here only those of our controvertialists who appear to me to have included the most in the fewest pages. Lettres du P. Scheffmacher, 6th and 7th. Discussion amicale, by Mgr. le Pappe de Trevern, Lettres 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th. Lectures on the Church, by Dr. Wiseman, 14, 15, 16. Guide du Catechumene Vaudois, by Mgr. Charvaz, tom. iii. Entretiens, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th. † Deuter. iv. 2.