Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/679

Rh EUCHARIST 653 the eucharistic ritual was established with an essential uni formity in all parts of the Catholic Church, and in a form corresponding in its chief outlines with the canon of the extant primitive liturgies. Of these liturgies the most im portant, as having the best grounded claim to a primitive character (though overlaid with later additions from which it is not easy to disentangle the primitive elements), are those which bear the titles of the liturgy of St James, St Mark, Nestorius, the Ambrosiau and Gregorian, and the Gallican liturgies. With regard to the frequency of Holy Communion, although it has been concluded with much probability from Acts ii. 46 that the earliest Christians, in the first fervour of their faith, partook of the Eucharist daily, appearances are rather in favour of a weekly celebration on the Lord s day being the rule in the apostolic and primitive church. It was on &quot;the first day of the week&quot; that the Christians met for breaking bread at Troas (Acts xx. 7) ; and St Paul s direction to the Corinthian Christians to lay by for the poor on that day may be reasonably associated with the obla tions at the time of celebration. Pliny tells us that it was on a &quot; fixed day,&quot; stato die, the Christians in Bithynia came together for prayer and communion, and, as we have seen, Justin Martyr speaks of Sunday by name (r; AeyoyueV?/ yXiov /y/xe pa) as the day of celebration. When Christianity be came the established religion of the Roman warld, the daily celebration of the Eucharist became the general rule, though the words of Augustine &quot; in some places no day passes without an offering ; in others, offering is made on the Sabbath only, and the Lord s day ; in others on the Lord s day only&quot; (Epist. 118, ad Januarium) prove that the rule vas not universal. The liturgy of the Church of England, by providing a collect epistle and gospel, evidently contemplates the celebration of the Eucharist every Sunday and holy day of the year. No strict rule, however, on the subject is laid down in any of her formularies. The frequency of the administration is left to the discretion of the parish priest, with this proviso, that it be frequent enough to enable every parishioner to comply with the rubric which enjoins that &quot; he shall com municate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter to be one.&quot; In the Roman Church, the mass being the chief religious service, absorbing into itself nearly all public acts of worship, the Eucharist is celebrated daily in all churches, and in churches where there are many altars many times a day. This article may be suitably concluded with a brief state ment of the doctrinal views respecting the Eucharist of some of the chief churches of Christendom, drawn from their authoritative documents. To commence with the Roman Church. With regard to the doctrine known as transubstantiation, it must here suffice to say that the Church of Rome teaches that the whole sub stance of the bread and wine in the Eucharist is converted by consecration into the Body and Blood of Christ, in such a manner that Christ in His entirety, including His human soul and His divine nature, are contained in the elements ; and that with such a thorough transmutation that not only is the whole Christ contained in the wine as well as in the bread, but with the same completeness in each particle of the bread, and in each drop of the wine. The denial of the cup to the laity, therefore, does not deprive them of any blessing, inasmuch as whosoever receives even a crumb of the consecrated bread receives Christ in His completeness, and that not only by spiritual, but by actual and real rnanducation. The Church of Rome also teaches that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice offered to God the Father on every occasion when this sacrament is celebrated, and that not only for the sins of those who partake of it, but for those oif all mankind, as well dead as living. (See decrees of Council of Trent, canon 1-6, 8; and Catechismus ad Parochos, pp. 246, 249, 250, ed. 1567, Louvain.) The eucharistical doctrines of the Orthodox Greek Church may be best gathered from the Op06ooo&amp;lt;s 6/toAoyta rr/s TTIO-TCWS TT}S Ka#oAi/c?7&amp;lt;; Kal aTTOCTToAi/oys CKKA^o-tas T-&amp;gt;ys dvaroAt^s, subscribed by the chief patriarchs, and published in 1643. This document shows that the Greek Church is at one with that of Rome with regard to transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass. In Qucestio 107 it is laid down that the intention of the celebrant is essential for the validity of the rite, and that immediately on the pronuncia tion of the Epidesis, transubstantiation takes place, and the bread is changed into the very Body of Christ and the wine into His very Blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining. The same article declares the benefits of the sacrament to be (1) the commemoration of the sinless pas sion and death of Christ ; (2) a propitiation and reconcilia tion before God for the sins as well of the dead as of the living ; (3) the presence of Christ in the communicant fur nishing a safeguard against the temptations and perils of the devil (Kimmel, Monumenta Fidei Ecd. Orient., pp. 180- 184). It was also definitely declared in the Confession of Dositheus, at the synod of Jerusalem, 1672, that un believers as well as believers are partakers of Christ in the Eucharist, the one receiving Him to eternal life and the other to eternal damnation ; and that it is one and the aame Christ, not many, that is partaken of in all the Eucharists throughout the world ; and that He cannot bo divided, but is present in His entirety in the smallest por tion of the bread and wine (Ibid., p. 458-60). While the Continental Reformers were of one mind in re pudiating the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass, very wide differences existed between them in their estimate of the grace imparted by the Eucharist, and the mode of the presence of Christ in that sacrament. The symbolical books of the Lutheran Church, following the teaching of Luther himself, declare the doctrine of the real presence of Christ s body and blood in the eucharist, together with the bread and wine (consubstautatioii), as well as the ubiquity of His body, as the orthodox doctrine of the church. One consequence of this view was that the un believing recipients are held to be as really partakers of the body of Christ in, with, and under the bread as the faithful, though they receive it to their own hurt. (Hagen- bach, Hist, of Doctr., ii., 300). Of all the Reformers, the teaching of Zwingli was the furthest removed from that of Luther. At an early period he asserted that the Eucharist was nothing more than food for the soul, and had been instituted by Christ only as an act of commemoration and as a visible sign of His body and blood (Christenliche Ynleitung, 1523, quoted by Hagenbach, Hist, of Doctr., ii. 296, Clark s translation). But that Zwingli did not reject the higher religious significance of the Eucharist, and was far from degrading the bread and wine into &quot; uuda et inania symbola,&quot; as he was accused of doing, we see from his Fidei Ratio ad Carol um Imperatorem (Ib., p. 297). The views of Calvin were intermediate between those of his two great contemporaries. &quot; Though he pointed out the sacramental character, and together with it the more profound mystical significance of the Lord s Supper more distinctly than Zwingli, according to his own interpreta tion it is the believer only who partakes in a spiritual manner of Christ s body existing in heaven&quot; (Hagenbach, ii. 293, 258). While Zwingli lays principal stress upon the historical fact, and the idea of an act of commemora tion; Calvin attaches greater importance to the intimate union of the believers with Christ. Thus in his opinion