longing to it. In the fourth century, it was thought wrong to commit the blood of Christ to so frail a thing as glass. The elements were given to the sick for medicinal purposes. They were carried about the person as a means of preservation in journies, and upon voyages. They were held up to the public view, before they were distributed, that they might be contemplated with religious respect. And sometimes the sacramental bread was buried with the dead.

The manner of administering the ordinance received a corresponding attention. In the primitive times, all the faithful received the eucharist every Lord's day. Young children, and indeed infants, communed, which is still the custom in the Eastern churches, but it was abolished in the Western shortly before the Reformation. The catechumens, or uninitiated, were dismissed after the common services, with the words Ite Missa est; whence by corruption we have the English word Mass; and the Lord's supper was then administered to the initiated. In the time of Tertullian, the celebration took place in the morning, and it was thought wrong to eat any thing before they partook of the elements. It was generally believed by the ancients that the wine was mixed with water in the Savior's own administration of the eucharist, and therefore they did the same. Some used water entirely, and were hence called Aquarians. The bread and wine being thus superstitiously regarded, it became a question of some moment, at what precise instant they were changed into the veritable body and blood of Christ; and some decided it was at the prayer, others at the pronouncing of the words, this is my body. The custom of using lights at this service began in the East soon after Gr. Nazianzen, and in the fifth century wax candles were employed. A set form was used to bless the lights. The long prayer which preceded the ordinance, gave it the name of Eucharist. Before communion, the kiss of peace was given, men kissing men, and women women. They also used to kiss the hand of the priest. The deacons anciently administered the elements, but it afterwards fell to the lot of the priests. Women served in some places as late as the tenth century. In the time of Jerome, the bread was kissed. Among the Greeks, it was directed

that the hand of the deacon, serving the elements, should The hand itself was to be held in the form of

be kissed.

a cross. Cyril of Jerusalem exhorted his communicants to receive the bread in the hollow of the hand, to support the right hand by the left, and beware of dropping the crumbs on the ground. The wine was to be taken with the body a little bowed, as a token of veneration. But it is needless to note the progress of superstition in all these minute ob

servances.

The Agapes or love-feasts, were entertainments, to which every person brought what he thought proper, and at which all Christians eat in common, before their celebration of the Lord's supper, or when that was thought improper, after it. This custom was forbidden by the council of Laodicea in 360. We have thus far seen how the pagan notion of mysteries, together with that of a sanctifying power in the elements themselves, contributed to introduce a long train of superstitious usages into the Christian church, in relation to one ef its simple ordinances.

SECTION II.

THE HISTORY OF THE EUCHARIST FROM THE TIME OF AU GUSTINE TO THAT OF PASCHASIUS.

In this period, a considerable advance was made towards the doctrine of Transubstantiation, which was afterwards established in the Western church, but which was extensively promoted in the East first. Anastasius, a monk of Mount Sinai, said in a treatise, that the elements of the Lord's supper were the true body and blood of Christ; for that when Christ instituted the eucharist, he did not say, this is the type or antitype of my body, but my body. John Damascenus, another celebrated monk of the East, and influential writer, declared that "Jesus had joined to the bread and wine his own divinity, and made them to be his body and blood." He illustrated it thus: Isaiah saw a lighted coal; now a lighted coal is not mere wood, but wood joined to fire; so the bread of the sacrament is not mere bread, but bread joined to the divinity; and the body united to the divinity is not one and the same nature, but the nature of the body is one, and that of the divinity united to it another." From his day to ours, it has been the faith of the Greek church, that the sacrament after consecration, was no image, but properly Christ's body and blood.

In the West, Christ was believed to be, in some extraor

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dinary manner, present with the elements, but in what manner, they had not perhaps any distinct idea.

The eucharistical elements being considered so peculiarly sacred, it was natural to adopt methods to prevent the loss or waste of them. One was to take the bread dipped in the consecrated wine. The Armenians still receive the eucharist in this way, and the Muscovites take the bread and wine together in a spoon. Amongst other superstitions of that time, we find that sometimes the consecrated wine was mixed with ink, in order to sign writings of a peculiarly solemn nature.

In the early days of Christianity, the celebration of the Lord's supper was a part of the public worship, in which all the congregation of the faithful joined, but in the present Roman Catholic church the priest alone communicates in general, while the people are mere spectators, and join in no part of the service except the prayers. This kind of mass appears first in history about 700. It was supposed that this service would avail for the pardon of sin, and the redemption of souls out of purgatory. For its performance, large sums of money were given and bequeathed to the priests, yielding them immense riches. Nor did the monks, when allowed by Pope Gregory to perform the office of priests, counteract the abuse, but enlarged it. They originated private chapels, and multiplied altars in churches, so that several masses might be celebrated at the same time. To induce the common people to continue their offerings after they ceased to communicate, a substitute for the real communion was given them, something of a much less awful nature, which was called hallowed bread. The priests performed the sacramental service in a suppressed tone of voice.

The liturgy, called the canon of the mass, now used in the Roman Catholic church, was chiefly composed by Gregory the Great, who introduced into it many pompous ceremonies.

As the supper was now deemed a proper sacrifice, the table on which it was offered came naturally to be called an altar. And as the Jews and pagans consecrated their altars, the christians must do the same. Stone was the only

material allowed for their erection. To their due consecration, it finally became necessary that there should be relics in them. Bede mentions portable altars. Incense, as well

as lights, in conformity to heathen customs, was burnt at the Lord's Supper. To prevent loss, and to preclude the necessity of breaking it, the bread was made in the shape of small round cakes, or wafers, as the technical phrase is. For the ancient kiss of peace, Leo III. substituted, in the ninth century, the kissing of a plate of silver or copper, with the figure of the cross upon it, or the relic of some saint, after the consecration of the elements. Pope Vigilius ordered in 536 that those who celebrated mass should face the East, as that quarter of the compass was held particularly sacred, as had been the case always among the heathens. At first, the bread was taken in the naked hand, but the custom arose of receiving it in vessels of gold, or silver.-Glass was considered too brittle for so high an office. What to do with the remainder after communion, was a point about which the busy superstition of the times employed itself. Some churches burnt what remained. At Constantinople, it was eaten by young scholars, sent from the school for that purpose. It was decreed that none of the sacred elements should be left till the next day.

One would imagine that the ridiculous abuses of this simple and beautiful ordinance had reached their acme, but we shall witness in the next period those of a greater magnitude, and which are, notwithstanding the greater light of the present day, still unreformed.

SECTION III.

THE HISTORY OF THE EUCHARIST, FROM THE TIME OF PASCHASIUS TO THE REFORMATION.

THE succeeding era is the most important one in the history of this ordinance. We have seen how the elements gained, in ages of darkness, increasing sacredness and solemnity, until at last the privilege of communicating was restricted almost solely to the priests and monks, except on the great festivals, and especially that of Easter. There was a confused notion that the bread and wine were, in some sense or other, the body and blood of Christ, and therefore that Christ himself was present in them. The precise manner was not settled, until Paschasius Radbert, a monk of the Benedictine order, and afterwards Abbot of Corbie in France, undertook to explain it in a treatise on the subject, published in the year 818. He maintained that the bread

and wine became the real body and blood of Christ, the identical body, that had been born of Mary, crucified, and raised from the dead. "It is no other flesh," said he, "than that which was born of the virgin Mary, which suffered upon the cross, and which was raised from the grave." He depended for the support of his bold opinion not upon argument solely, but upon a supernatural vision-a method of proof far more persuasive in those days than the best reasons. It may be related as a good specimen of the impositions of those times.

A priest whose name was Plecgills officiating at the tomb of St Ninus, wished out of love, and not infidelity, to see the body of Jesus Christ; and falling upon his knees, he asked of God the favor to see the nature of the body of Jesus Christ, in this mystery, and to hold in his hands the form of that little child which the virgin had borne in her lap; when an angel cried to him, "Get up quickly, and look at the infant, which that holy woman hath carried, for he is clothed in his corporeal habit." The priest declared, that being quite terrified, he looked up, and saw upon the altar the child that Simeon had held in his arms, that the angel told him he might not only see, but touch the child, and that accordingly he took him and pressed the breast of the child to his own, and after embracing him frequently, he kissed the God, joining his lips to the lips of Jesus Christ. After this, he replaced the beautiful limbs of the God upon the altar, praying to God that he might resume his former figure, and that he had scarcely finished his prayer, when rising from the ground, he found the body of Jesus Christ was restored to its former figure, as he had requested.

The opinion of Paschasius was, however, novel and strange, and met with a vigorous opposition. The emperor, Charles the Bald, was much offended at it, and employed two of the ablest writers of the day, Ratram and John Scotus, to investigate and refute it. In the eleventh century, Berenger wrote earnestly against the doctrine of the real presence, but he was condemned by several councils, and obliged to sign a recantation of his opinion, though he died in the belief of it. The Albigenses rejected the doctrine, and in 1155, Arnold of Brescia was burnt at Rome for denying it, and for declaiming against the church of Rome in general. By a decree of Innocent III. at the