office of his religion a Sacrament,[1] or oath of allegiance, his Greek brother used a word that was already familiar to the people as the title of a secret ritual witnessed only by the initiated and carefully guarded from the intrusion of the vulgar. Thus the word, which in the New Testament always means a truth formerly hidden, but now through Christ publicly revealed,[2] came to be torn entirely away from its primitive Christian signification and used altogether in its conventional pagan sense. Meanwhile there was a growing approximation to pagan ritual in the ceremonials of the Church and the feelings of awe with which they were approached. The homely love feast, at which rich and poor sit down to a common meal side by side, while they commemorate their Lord's death by eating and drinking some of the bread and wine or milk provided for it, has given place to a solemn function of miraculous potency. Baptism precedes the right to share in this tremendous mystery, as an ablution is necessary for those about to be initiated in the secret rites of Demeter at Eleusis. The priest at the altar is regarded as performing a really efficacious act. Although as yet the doctrine of the real presence is not formally and officially pronounced and authorised by the Church, it is now very generally held and very distinctly taught.
It is in the fourth century that we see the mystical character of the body of Christ so treated as plainly to involve the doctrine of transubstantiation, although the notion has to wait long for official definition and confirmation as a dogma of the Church. It had been adumbrated in still more ancient times. Even as early as the first half of the second century we have Ignatius using ecstatic language about the body and blood of Christ that faintly foreshadows the idea which is destined to become the central factor of the Catholic faith.[3] The Alexandrian teachers Clement and Origen are satisfied with the symbolical meaning of the communion; and so is Eusebius in the fourth century, as when he refers to "the memory"[4]
- ↑ Sacramentum.
- ↑ e.g. 1 Cor. xv. 51; Col. i. 26.
- ↑ e.g. Ignatius, Epist. to Rom. vii.
- ↑ τὴν μνήμην.
