Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/644

 638 LORD'S SUPPER grounds, it would undoubtedly be competent to establish regulations of police which should make abstinence from the customary labor and 1 sports for one day out of seven compulsory upon all classes of the people. LORD'S SUPPER, or Eucharist (Gr. ivxapiaria, thanksgiving), a sacrament instituted by Christ on the night before his death. The former ap- pellation is most common among Protestants, the latter among Roman Catholics. It is also called " holy communion," and its celebration the " communion service." The Greeks name it eiAoy/a, blessing or praise. Luther in his catechism designates it as " the sacrament of the altar," and various phrases in the New Tes- tament are regarded as referring to it, as "the table of the Lord," " the cup of the Lord," and " the breaking of bread." In the Latin church the name eucharist is given to the consecrated elements of bread and wine which constitute the sacrament ; the consecration ser- vice is called " mass," and the receiving of the sacrament is the communion. From the earliest times the vast majority of Christians have celebrated the Lord's supper as an ordi- nance instituted by Christ and enjoined ex- pressly by the words, "This do in remem- brance of me." The Manichseans and Gnostics in the first centuries denied that it was of divine institution, because they regarded wine as coming from the evil principle and its use as sinful; in our own times it has also been set aside by the society of Friends. The institu- tion of this sacrament is recorded in the first three Gospels, and in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians (xi. 24-26). The words of in- stitution, as well as the language of the early fathers in speaking of this ordinance, have given rise to various and opposite interpre- tations. The chief difficulty has been and is still in determining the exact meaning of Christ's words, " This is my body," " This is my blood." Ignatius, Justin, and Irenseus laid great stress on the mysterious connection existing between the Logos and the elements. Other fathers spoke of the elements as the symbols of the body and blood of Christ ; thus Tertullian and Cyprian, both of whom, how- ever^ occasionally call the Lord's supper the body' and blood of Christ. It was especially the Alexandrian school (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, &c.) that advocated the symbolical sense, and even opposed those who made no distinction between x the external sign and the thing itself. The church writers became more explicit on the subject of the Lord's supper when after the 3d century the liturgical part of divine service was more developed. Chry- sostom called it an " awful mystery." Some of the fathers spoke of "a real union " of the communicants with Christ ; others of " a real change" from the visible elements into the body and blood of Christ. The idea that the Lord's supper was also a sacrifice was pro- pounded as early as the end of the 2d century. The first great eucharistic controversy was called forth by a book of Paschasius Radbertus in 831 (De Corpore et Sanguine Domini), in which he advanced the doctrine that the sub- stance of the consecrated bread and wine in the eucharist was changed into the very body of Christ which was born of the Virgin. He was especially opposed by Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie, who adhered to the view that in the Lord's supper there is a communion of the earthly with the heavenly. The controversy was brought before the highest ecclesiastical authorities, when Berengarius, archdeacon of Angers, maintained that there was a change in the sacramental elements only in a figura- tive sense. He contended that not the earthly elements themselves, but their influences, were changed by their connection with Christ in heaven, who was to be received not by the mouth but by the heart. These views "were in particular expressed in a letter to Lan- franc, afterward archbishop of Canterbury, who was the first to propound in formal the- sis the theory that after the consecration the bread and wine retained their sensible prop- erties or " accidents," although their " sub- stance" or "subject" had been changed into the flesh and blood of Christ. Several synods in succession, between 1050 and 1080, con- demned the views of Berengarius. The scho- lastics who came after Lanfranc maintained this distinction between accidents and sub- stance. Finally the term ' ' transubstantiation " was used in the 12th century by Hildebert of Tours, and was soon generally adopted. The fourth council of Lateran, in 1215, declared transubstantiation an article of faith, and in 1267 a special holy day (Corpus Christi) was instituted, to give annually a public manifesta- tion of the belief of the church. Long before it had become customary in the Latin church to give to the laity the Lord's supper only under the form of the bread, though, as the church declared, solely from reasons of expe- diency. The council of Basel expressly con- firmed the doctrine that Christ exists wholly in either of the elements (for which doctrine the theologians used the term "concomitance"). Abbot Rupertus Quotiensis, in the 12th century, had advanced the doctrine of the union of the body and blood of Christ with the bread (im- panation), and was followed by several theo- logians, even after the definition of the dogma of transubstantiation by the Lateran council. Wycliffe opposed both transubstantiation and impanation. The Greek church, when it sepa- rated from the Latin, also believed in a change of the elements into the body and blood of Christ ; and in the efforts for a union of the two churches, the question of leavened or un- leavened bread was the only point of difference with regard to the Lord's supper. "With the reformation of the 16th century the contro- versy respecting this doctrine began anew/ The reformers agreed in rejecting the mass and. transubstantiation, and demanded, as the Hus- sites had done before them, that the sacrament