In 1735 a book was published entitled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. It was anonymous, but was understood to be the work of Benjamin Hoadly. Hoadly had been appointed Bishop of Bangor in 1716, Bishop of Hereford in 1721, Bishop of Salisbury in 1723, and Bishop of Winchester in 1734. He continued Bishop of Winchester until his death in 1761. He was a prominent member of the Latitudinarian party which by 1735 had become influential in the Church of England. There is little doubt that the Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was written by him. The main object of the book was practical. Its aim was to show that an exaggerated stress was laid by many on the need of preparation and devotion in connection with Communion, and that scruples which held back those who might otherwise communicate were unnecessary and groundless. In maintaining this thesis the writer stated his view of the doctrine of the Sacrament. He rejected any assertion of the presence of Christ or of a gift of grace. He advocated the purely Zwinglian position that our Lord’s words at the institution of the Sacrament were wholly figurative, that an act done in remembrance of Christ required the bodily absence of Christ, and that a memorial could not be a sacrifice. He asserted that the Lord’s Supper was a token and pledge of the promises of Christ and of the duties and privileges of Christians, and denied that it was anything more. Among the statements about doctrine which the book contained were the following:—
“This remembrance of Christ, during the time of His bodily absence, was by Himself and His Apostles declared to be the end of this positive institution.”
“The very essence of this institution being remembrance of a past transaction, and this remembrance necessarily excluding the corporal presence of what is remembered, it follows that, as the only sacrifice and the only sacrificer in the Christian dispensation are remembered, and therefore not present in the Lord’s Supper, so the only Christian altar (the cross upon which Christ suffered) being also by consequence to be remembered, it cannot be present in this rite, because that presence would destroy the very notion of remembrance.”
“Christians, meeting together for religious worship, and eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of Christ’s body and blood, and in honour of Him, do hereby publicly acknowledge Him to be their Master, and themselves to be His disciples; and by doing this in an assembly own themselves, with all other Christians, to be one body or society under Him the Head; and consequently profess themselves to be under His government and influence, to have communion or fellowship with Him as Head, and with all their brethren as fellow-members of that same body of which He is the Head.”
“As bread and wine, taken at an ordinary meal, are the food of our bodies, so this bread and wine, taken in a serious and religious remembrance of Christ as our Master, may (in a figurative, spiritual, or religious sense) be styled the food of our souls, or the nourishment of us considered as Christians; as the receiving them duly implies in it our believing and receiving the whole doctrine of Christ, which is the food of the Christian life; and leads our thoughts to all such obligations and engagements on our part, and all such promises on God’s part, as are most useful and sufficient for our improvement in all that is worthy of a Christian. And Almighty God on His part requiring and accepting our due performance of this part of our duty, does by this assure us who come to profess ourselves the disciples of Christ that we are in His favour. Or, in other words, the Lord’s Supper, being instituted as the memorial of His goodness towards us in Christ Jesus, may justly be looked upon as a token and pledge to assure us of what it calls to our remembrance, namely, that God is ready to pardon and bless us upon the terms proposed by His Son; and consequently that we are received by Him as the disciples of Christ, members of His body the Church, and heirs of His heavenly kingdom; in a word, as persons entitled to all the happiness promised to Christians, if we be not wanting to ourselves in other parts of our duty.”
“This bread and wine, considered and taken as memorials of the body and blood of Christ our Master, lead us by their peculiar tendency to all such thoughts and practises as are indeed the improvement and health of our souls.”
The publication of this book was followed by a vigorous controversy. Out of the large number of pamphlets which appeared in attack on and in defence of the Plain Account, it may be sufficient to mention only a few, selecting those which are representative of different lines of thought. Much of the controversy had to do with the practical questions which the writer of the Plain Account had raised, or with the allegations of disbelief in the doctrines of the Atonement and of the deity of our Lord which were brought against him; and it is often difficult to ascertain the opinions with regard to the doctrine of the Eucharist of those who took part in it. Several of the pamphleteers who attacked the Plain Account asserted with greater or less definiteness a gift in Communion. At any rate two of them took up a position practically the same as that of John Johnson. Some of those who defended the Plain Account advocated Zwinglian views.
The writer of Remarks on a Book lately published entituled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, published in 1735, is one of the opponents of the Plain Account whose doctrinal views are expressed with little definiteness; but he held a fuller belief than the author of the Plain Account in regard to the Eucharist and the Eucharistic elements as sealing the covenant of God. In his first pamphlet just mentioned he says:—
“It is true the blood of Christ is not itself present, but there is that present which is appointed by Christ to represent it, and which He Himself calls His blood. And why the bread and wine may not be called the seal of the new covenant for the same reason that they are called Christ’s body and blood, I cannot for the heart of me see. Nothing is more common than to call the representatives of things by the names of the things themselves which they represent. If then the bread and wine are representatives of the seal of the new covenant, what forbids that they should be termed the seal? And, since we receive these by the express command of God, why may it not be said that we receive His seal, or that God puts to His seal?”
And in his A Second Letter to the Author of a Book entituled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, published in 1735, he implies that the elements become “the representative body and blood of Christ” when “the Eucharistical Prayer” is said over them; and he calls them “the representatives of the great Christian sacrifice”.
A differently expressed explanation of the gift in Communion emphasising that Communion is the means not only of “a renewal of the new covenant between God and man” but also of bestowing immortality, through the union of the Spirit of God with our spirits, is given by the author of A Letter to a Lord in Answer to his late Book entitled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, published in 1736. After quoting passages from St. Ignatius and St. Irenæus, he goes on:—
“The assistance of God’s Spirit is in them annexed by the promise of our Lord to the due partaking of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This is grounded on (St. John 6:56) ‘He that eateth My body and drinketh My blood dwelleth in Me, and I in him’. ‘And hereby,’ says the same St. John (explaining these his words in another place) (1 Ep. iv. 13), ‘Hereby know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us, by His Spirit which He hath given us’. Here the Evangelist plainly tells us that by those His words, namely, ‘our dwelling in Christ and Christ in us,’ we are to understand God’s Spirit united to our spirit; or, which is the same thing, as we are told by the great Apostle (Rom. 8:9), ‘the Spirit of Christ’ (united to our souls) ‘which if any want, he is none of His’. ‘For know ye not,’ saith the same Apostle (1 Cor. 3:16), ‘that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?’ And (2 Cor. 13:5) ‘know ye not that Jesus Christ is in you, unless ye be reprobates?’ But I suggested that something more (if possible) is promised to us by our Lord in this passage of St. John’s Gospel; and is it not plainly affirmed in it by our Lord, and by those first Christian writers which we cited, interpreting His words, that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper produces in us the principles of immortality? Is not this plainly and fairly inferred from these words (verse 54), ‘He that eateth My body and drinketh My blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day’? Is it not plainly affirmed that the Eucharist duly received is the medicine of immortality, the antidote against eternal death, that will make us live alway in God through Jesus Christ? For, as the great Apostle speaks to the Romans (8:11), ‘If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you’.”
In the first of the three dialogues entitled The Winchester Converts, published in 1735 as a satirical attack on the Plain Account, the position of the writer is evidently stated when the Eucharist is described as
“An awful and tremendous institution designed not only for a bare remembrance of the death of Christ, but also a seal of that pardon which God had promised to repenting sinners, and a renewal of that covenant which He first made with them in Baptism, and a means of conveying to them that spiritual grace and assistance which was the thing covenanted to be granted, and which the Church in all ages has declared the very best of men to stand in need of and must necessarily obtain before they can offer up to God any sacrifice that will be truly acceptable”;
and as the means through which “sins” are “blotted out by” the
“Partaking of the body and blood of Christ in some such mysterious manner as the original sin of our first parents is washed away by Baptism.”
One of the pamphlets in which a position resembling that of John Johnson is taken up is entitled The Sacrament of the Altar: or the Doctrine of a Representative Sacrifice in the Holy Eucharist vindicated: in Answer to a late Book entituled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. It was published in 1735. The writer speaks of the consecrated elements as being “in power and effect” the body and blood of Christ; and in his preface gives the following clear statement of his views:—
“The primitive doctrine, which I have endeavoured to vindicate in the following tract, is most directly opposite to the present doctrine of the corrupt Church of Rome. The Church of Rome in their sacrifices of the Mass pretend to offer up to God very Christ, whole Christ, God and Man hypostatically. Hence, according to them the sacrifice of the Mass is propitiatory in its own nature, and to be worshipped as being the very natural substantial body and blood of Christ. On the other hand, the primitive doctrine maintains that not the very natural substantial body and blood of Christ is offered to God in the Eucharist, but that bread and wine, as the appointed representatives of Christ’s body and blood, are to be offered according to Christ’s own institution, and that this representative sacrifice is therefore propitiatory, not in its own nature, not from any intrinsic worth in itself, but by institution by virtue of the grand, personal sacrifice of Christ, which by His institution it is appointed to commemorate and represent; and that therefore the materials of this representative sacrifice are not to be worshipped, as not being substantially the body and blood of Christ, though they are indeed made so in power and effect by the presence and blessing of the life-giving, eternal Spirit.”
A similar view was advocated in A True Scripture Account of the Nature and Benefits of the Holy Eucharist, in Answer to a Book entituled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, by the famous Dr. Thomas Brett, which was published in 1735. Dr. Brett was born in 1667. He was ordained in 1690, and took the oath of allegiance to William and Mary with some scruple, although in his case there was not, as in the case of many, the complication of having taken an oath to King James II. When George I. came to the throne in 1714, he had made up his mind that he could no longer give allegiance to a sovereign of the new succession; and he consequently vacated his benefices of Betshanger and Ruckinge. He was admitted to the communion of the Nonjurors in 1715, and was consecrated a Nonjuring bishop in 1716. He died in 1743. In his pamphlet against the Plain Account Brett, whose earlier work A Discourse concerning the Necessity of discerning the Lord’s Body in the Holy Communion had been published in 1720, fifteen years before, closely follows John Johnson, from whom he quotes largely. He vigorously attacks the Plain Account as contrary to Scripture, the fathers, and the Catechism of the Church of England. He maintains that the consecrated elements are “in some sense the body and blood of Jesus Christ,” and His “body and blood in power and virtue”; and that the Eucharist is
“A commemorative sacrifice, or sacrifice of remembrance, a sacrifice whose whole virtue and efficacy is derived from that sacrifice of which it is the memorial.”
These and other attacks on the Plain Account led to much being written in defence of it. Some of the writers who thus replied to the attacks did not deal with matters of doctrine touching the Holy Eucharist. Others frankly avowed the Zwinglian tenet that the Holy Communion is merely a sign. The authors of two pamphlets published in 1735 entitled A Defence of the Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper against the Objections contained in the Remarks on that Book and A Proper Answer to a Late Abusive Pamphlet Entitled The Winchester Converts, both quote at length as expressive of their own opinion a definitely Zwinglian statement of John Hales, the famous Latitudinarian divine of the seventeenth century. The writer of An Apologetical Defence, or a Demonstration of the Usefulness and Expediency of a Late Book Entitled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which was published in 1735, defended the Plain Account on explicitly doctrinal grounds, and described that book as necessary because of what he considered extravagant teaching about preparation for Communion which was current; to refute ideas contained in such books as Horneck’s The Crucified Jesus, The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice, and the Week’s Preparation, that in the Sacrament Christ gives Himself, that there is the “most true and real presence” of “Christ’s body and blood” and the reception of the “very Godhead” of Christ, and that the Eucharist is “a propitiatory sacrifice”; to make clear that the Church of England does not favour “the absurd doctrine of a true and real presence,” and that “to teach any bodily presence of Christ in this holy Supper is to pervert the very nature of the institution which was appointed to be observed in remembrance of Christ”; and because he had himself frequently seen “persons bow down in the humblest posture of adoration” “as the minister officiating drew near to them with the bread or wine”. This writer interpreted the manuals which he condemned as teaching “Transubstantiation,” and a doctrine equivalent to that of the Council of Trent; his own opinion evidently was that the Eucharist is a mere memorial, in which the remembrance made of Christ is inconsistent with His presence.
This war of pamphlets which followed the appearance of the Plain Account is of considerable importance as illustrating that the Latitudinarian movement in the Church of England in the first half of the eighteenth century, like the position taken up by John Hales in the seventeenth, included Zwinglian opinions about the Holy Eucharist. A work from the pen of William Law, which also resulted from the publication of the Plain Account, is of interest for a different reason.
William Law was born in 1686 and died in 1761. From 1711 to 1713 he was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; and he was ordained in 1711. Before the death of Queen Anne on 1st August, 1714, he appears to have doubted the lawfulness of the rule of the existing dynasty; and he refused to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration on the accession of George I. In 1735, when the Plain Account appeared, he was already known as an acute controversialist and as a writer on practical religion; and as early as 1717 he had sharply attacked Bishop Hoadly in his famous Letters, His work A Demonstration of the Gross and Fundamental Errors of a Late Book Called a Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which was published in 1735, was one of the most important of the answers to the Plain Account. In this work Law severely criticises the arguments used by the author of the Plain Account, and charges him with disbelief in the “great foundation doctrine that Christ was truly and essentially God, very God of very God,” and in the doctrines that Christ is “a true and real atonement for sins” and “a true and real principle of life to us”. He shows signs of the mystical theology which he afterwards more fully developed. The following are among the passages which express his own beliefs in regard to the Eucharist:—
“When our Saviour says, ‘Do this,’ it is the same thing as if He had said, Do these two things appointed in the Sacrament as your act of faith that I am both the atonement for your sins and a principle of life to you. Don’t say bare and outward words when you say, ‘This is My body which is given for you,’ and ‘This is My blood which is shed for the remission of sins’; but let faith say them and acknowledge the truth of them. When you eat My body and drink My blood, don’t let your mouth only eat or perform the outward action, but let faith, which is the true mouth of the inward man, believe that it really partakes of Me, and that I enter in by faith. And, when you thus by faith perform these two essential parts of the Sacrament, then, and then only, may what you do be said to be done in remembrance of Me, and of what I am to you.… Since our Saviour says, ‘This is My body which is given for you,’ ‘This is My blood which is shed for the remission of sins,’ what He says, that we are to say, and what we say, that we are to believe, and therefore what we are here to do is an act or exercise of faith. And, since in these words He says two things, the one, that He is the atonement for our sins; the other, that this bread and this wine are the signification or application of that atonement, or that which we are to take for it; therefore we in doing this are by faith to say and believe these two things; and therefore all that we here do is faith, and faith manifested in this twofold manner. Again, seeing our Saviour commands us to eat His body and drink His blood, we are to say and believe that His body and blood are there signified and exhibited to us; and that His body and blood may be eaten and drunk as a principle of life to us; and therefore faith is all, or all is faith, in this other essential part of the Sacrament; and we cannot possibly do that which our Saviour commands us to do unless it be done by faith.”
“The institution consists of those two essential parts just mentioned; that is, in offering, presenting, and pleading before God by faith the atonement of Christ’s body and blood, and in owning Him to be a principle of life to us by our eating His body and blood: this is the entire, whole institution.”
“This poor man (for so I must call one so miserably insensible of the greatness of the subject he is upon) can find nothing in the institution but, first, bread and wine, not placed and offered before God as first signifying and pleading the atonement of His Son’s body and blood, and then eaten and drank in signification of having our life from Him, but bread and wine set upon a Table to put the people that see it in mind that by and bye they are to exercise an act of the memory. And then, secondly, this same bread and wine afterwards brought to every one in particular, not for them to know or believe that they are receiving anything of Christ or partaking of anything from Him, but only to let them know that the very instant they take the bread and wine into their mouth is the very time for them actually to excite that act of the memory for the exciting of which bread and wine had been before set upon a Table.”
“If we are in covenant with Christ, and have an interest in Him, as our atonement and life, not because He once said that this was His body and blood given and shed for our sins, or because we once owned it and pleaded it before Him, but because He continues to say the same thing in the Sacrament and to present Himself there to us as our atonement and life, and because we continue to own and apply to Him as such, it necessarily follows that the Sacrament rightly used is the highest means of finishing our salvation, and puts us in the fullest possession of all the benefits of our Saviour, both as He is our atonement and life, that we are then at that time capable of.”
“Do not the Scriptures plainly and frequently enough tell us of the benefit of the new birth in Christ, of the putting on Christ, of having Christ formed in us, of Christ’s being our life, of our having life in Him, of His being that bread from heaven, that bread of life, of which the manna was only a type, of His flesh being meat indeed and His blood drink indeed, of our eating His flesh and drinking His blood, and that without it we have no life in us; and are not all these things so many plain and open declarations of that which we seek to obtain by eating the body and blood of Christ? For we eat the sacramental body and blood of Christ to show that we want and desire and by faith lay hold of the real spiritual nature and being of Christ; to show that we want and desire the progress of the new birth in Christ; to put on Christ, to have Christ formed and revealed in us, to have Him our life, to partake of Him, our second Adam, in the same fulness and reality as we partake of the nature of the first Adam. And therefore all that the Scripture says of the benefits and blessings of these things, so much it says of the benefits and blessings that are sought and obtained by the eating the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. For to eat the body and blood of Christ is neither more nor less than to put on Christ, to receive birth and life and nourishment and growth from Him, as the branch receives its being and life and nourishment and growth from the vine.”
“You must therefore consider the Sacrament purely as an object of your devotion, that is to exercise all your faith, that is to raise, exercise, and inflame every holy ardour of your soul that tends to God. It is an abstract or sum of all the mysteries that have been revealed concerning our Saviour from the first promise of a seed of the woman to bruise the serpent’s head to the Day of Pentecost. As you can receive or believe nothing higher of our Saviour than that He is the atonement for our sins and a real principle of life to us, so every height and depth of devotion, faith, love, and adoration which is due to God as your Creator is due to God as your Redeemer. Jacob’s ladder that reached from earth to heaven, and was filled with angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth, is but a small signification of that communion between God and man which this Holy Sacrament is the means and instrument of. Now here it may be proper for you to observe that whatever names or titles this institution is signified to you by, whether it be called a sacrifice propitiatory or commemorative, whether it be called an holy oblation, the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the heavenly banquet, the food of immortality, or the Holy Communion, and the like, matters not much. For all these words or names are right and good, and there is nothing wrong in them but the striving and contention about them. For they all express something that is true of the Sacrament, and therefore are every one of them in a good sense rightly applicable to it; but all of them are far short of expressing the whole nature of the Sacrament, and therefore the help of all of them is wanted.”
“The reason why this Sacrament is said in one respect to be a propitiatory or commemorative sacrifice is only this, because you there offer, present, and plead before God such things as are by Christ Himself said to be His body and blood given for you. But, if that which is thus offered, presented, and pleaded before God is offered, presented, and pleaded before Him only for this reason, because it signifies and represents both to God and angels and men the great sacrifice for all the world, is there not sufficient reason to consider this service as truly a sacrifice?”
Law expressed his Eucharistic beliefs more fully in his work entitled An Appeal to All that Doubt or Disbelieve the Truths of the Gospel, whether they be Deists, Arians, Socinians, or Nominal Christians, which was published in 1742. He alluded in passing to “the reality of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Sacrament under the notion of the Transubstantiation of the bread and wine” in a way which implied that he held the doctrine of Transubstantiation to be untrue. He explained that in our Lord’s incarnate life there was “a holy humanity of heavenly flesh and blood veiled under” His “outward flesh and blood”; and that this “heavenly flesh and blood” is the gift in Communion.
“This great and glorious Redeemer had in Himself the whole humanity both as it was before and after the Fall, namely, in His inward man the perfection of the first Adam, and in His outward the weakness and mortality of the fallen nature.”
“By the Fall of our first father we have lost our first glorious bodies, that eternal celestial flesh and blood which had as truly the nature of paradise and heaven in it as our present bodies have the nature, mortality, and corruption of this world in them. If therefore we are to be redeemed, there is an absolute necessity that our souls be clothed again with this first paradisical or heavenly flesh and blood, or we can never enter into the kingdom of God. Now, this is the reason why the Scriptures speak so particularly, so frequently, and so emphatically of the powerful blood of Christ, of the great benefit it is to us, of its redeeming, quickening, life-giving virtue; it is because our first life, or heavenly flesh and blood, is born again in us, or derived again into us from this blood of Christ. Our Blessed Lord … had not only that outward flesh and blood which He received from the Virgin Mary, and which died upon the cross, but … also a holy humanity of heavenly flesh and blood veiled under it, which was appointed by God to quicken, generate, and bring forth from itself such a holy offspring of immortal flesh and blood as Adam the first should have brought forth before his Fall.… Our common faith, therefore, obliges us to hold that our Lord had the perfection of the first Adam’s flesh and blood united with and veiled under that fallen nature which He took upon Him from the Blessed Virgin Mary.… Our Blessed Lord had a heavenly humanity, which clothed itself with the flesh and blood of this world in the womb of the Virgin; and from that heavenly humanity or life-giving blood it is that our first heavenly immortal flesh and blood is generated and formed in us again; and therefore His blood is truly the atonement, the ransom, the redemption, the life of the world, because it brings forth and generates from itself the paradisical immortal flesh and blood as certainly, as really, as the blood of fallen Adam brings forth and generates from itself the sinful vile corruptible flesh and blood of this life. Would you farther know what blood it is that has this atoning life-giving quality in it? It is the blood which is to be received in the Holy Sacrament.… There is but one redeeming, sanctifying, life-giving blood of Christ, and it is that which gave and shed itself under the veil of that outward flesh and blood that was sacrificed upon the cross; it is that holy and heavenly flesh and blood which is to be received in the Holy Sacrament; it is that holy immortal flesh and blood which Adam had before the Fall, of which blood if we had drank, that is, if we had been born of it, we had not wanted a Saviour, but had had such flesh and blood as could have entered into the kingdom of heaven.… Does not the Holy Sacrament undeniably prove to us that He had a heavenly flesh entirely different from that which was seen nailed to the cross, and which was to be a heavenly substantial food to us; that He had a blood entirely different from that which was seen to run out of His mortal body, which blood we are to drink of, and live for ever?… Here therefore is plainly discovered to us the true nature, necessity, and benefit of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, both why, and how, and for what end we must of all necessity eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ. No figurative meaning of the words is here to be sought for, we must eat Christ’s flesh and drink His blood in the same reality as He took upon Him the real flesh and blood of the Blessed Virgin; we can have no real relation to Christ, can be no true members of His mystical body, but by being real partakers of that same kind of flesh and blood which was truly His, and was His for this very end, that through Him the same might be brought forth in us.… What flesh and blood are we to eat and drink? Not such as we have already, not such as any offspring of Adam hath, not such as can have its life and death by and from the elements of this world; and therefore not that outward visible mortal flesh and blood of Christ which He took from the Virgin Mary and was seen on the cross, but a heavenly immortal flesh and blood, which came down from heaven, which hath the nature, qualities, and life of heaven in it.… As the flesh and blood which we lost by his [Adam’s] Fall was the flesh and blood of eternal life, so it is the same flesh and blood of eternal life which is offered to us in the Holy Sacrament, that we may eat and live for ever. This is the adorable height and depth of this divine mystery, which brings heaven and immortality again into us, and gives us power to become sons of God.… Thus is this great Sacrament, which is a continual part of our Christian worship, a continual communication to us of all the benefits of our Second Adam; for in and by the body and blood of Christ, to which the divine nature is united, we receive all that life, immortality, and redemption which Christ, as living, suffering, dying, rising from the dead, and ascending into heaven, brought to human nature, so that this great mystery is that in which all the blessings of our redemption and new life in Christ are centred. And they that hold a Sacrament short of this reality of the true body and blood of Jesus Christ cannot be said to hold that Sacrament of eternal life which was instituted by our Blessed Lord and Saviour.”