passionate exclamation of the Psalmist, 'Thou hast saved me from among the horns of the unicorns,' has been turned by the Rabbis into an elaborate chronicle of adventures. 'Imagination and defect of imagination have each contributed to the result.'2 The whole history of early Millenarianism implies the same incapacity for distinguishing between poetry and prose. The strange tradition of our Lord's words which Irenæus quoted from Papias, and which Papias quoted from the Apostles, in the full belief that they were genuine, is a sample of some such misunderstood metaphor : 3 'The days shall come when each vine will grow with ten thousand boughs, each bough with ten thousand branches, each branch with ten thousand twigs, each twig with ten thousand bunches, each bunch with ten thousand grapes, each grape shall yield twenty-five measures of wine.' A statement like this provokes only a smile, because it never struck root in the Church; but it is not in itself more extravagant than the Sacramental theories built on figures not less evidently poetic

6

Prevalence of magic.

II. A second cause of the persistency of this physical limitation of the Sacramental doctrine lay in the fascination exercised over the early centuries of our era by the belief in amulets and charms which the Christians inherited, and could not but inherit, from the decaying Roman Empire. In a striking passage in Cardinal Newman's Essay on Development,' written with the view of identifying the modern Church of Rome with the Church of the early ages, he shows, with all the power of his eloquence, and with a remark. able display of historical ingenuity, the apparent affinity between the magical rites which flooded Roman society during the three first centuries, and what seemed to be their counterparts in the contemporary Christian Church. Doubtless much of this similarity was accidental; much also was due to the vague terror inspired by a new and powerful religion. But much also was well grounded in the likeness which the aspect of early Christianity inevitably bore to

2 Gould's Legends of the Old Testament, p. vi.

A striking explanation is given of this in Philochristus.

the influences by which it was surrounded. It was not mere hostility, nor mere ignorance, which saw in the exorcisms, the purifications, the mysteries of the Church of the first ages, the effects of the same vast wave of superstition which elsewhere produced the witches and soothsayers of Italy, the Mithraic rites of Persia, the strange charms and invocations of the Gnostics. In these likenesses it is a strange inversion, instead of recognising the influence of the perishing Empire on the rising Church, not only to insist on binding down the Church to the effete superstitions of the Empire, but to regard those superstitions as themselves the marks of a divine Catholicity.

Another theologian, with a far truer historical insight, in noticing the like correspondence of the anarchical tendencies of that period with the regenerating elements of Christianity, has taken a juster view of their relation to each other. Whilst fully acknowledging that the Christian movement to the external observer appeared to embrace them both, he has endeavoured not to confound the lower human accretions with Christianity itself, but to distinguish between them. 'Christianity,' says Dr. Arnold, shared the common lot of all great moral changes; perfect as it was in itself, its nominal adherents were often neither wise nor good. The seemingly incongruous evils of the thoroughly corrupt society of the Roman Empire, superstition and scepticism, ferocity and sensual profligacy, often sheltered themselves under the name of Christianity; and hence the heresies of the first age of the Christian Church.'4

The sensual profligacy' and the 'scepticism' no doubt remained amongst the heresies'; but the 'ferocity' and the superstition' unfortunately lingered in the Church itself. The ferocity' developed itself somewhat later in hordes of monks that turned the council-hall at Ephesus into a den of thieves, and stained the streets of Alexandria with the blood of Hypatia. The 'superstition' clove to the sacramental ordinances, and too often converted the emblems

• Fragment on the Church, pp. 85, 86.

of life and light into signs of what most Christians now would regard as mere remnants of sortilege and sorcery. The stories of sacramental bread carried about as a protection against sickness and storm can deserve no other name; and it was not without reason that in later times the sacred words of consecration, which often degenerated into a mere incantation, became the equivalent for a conjuror's trick. And to this was added a peculiar growth of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, which was gradually consolidated amidst the lengthening shadows of the falling Empire, the sacerdotal claims of the Christian clergy. In themselves these clerical pretensions had no necessary connection with the material view of the Sacramental rites. The administration of Baptism is not regarded even by Roman Catholics as an exclusive privilege of the clergy. In early times, indeed, it was practically confined to the bishops, but this was soon broken through, and in later ages it has in the Roman Church been viewed as the right, and even in some cases as the duty, of the humblest layman or laywoman. But the celebration of the Eucharist, although there is nothing in the terms of its original institution to distinguish it in this respect from the other sacrament, has yet been regarded as a peculiar function of the priesthood. In the second century, like that other sacrament, its administration depended on the permission of the bishops, yet when emancipated from their control, unlike Baptism, it did not descend beyond the order of presbyters, and has ever since been bound up with their dignity and power. Even here there can be found in the Roman Catholic Church those who maintain that there is no essential and necessary connection between their office and the validity of the Sacrament. But this has not been the general view; and it is impossible not to suppose that the belief in the preternatural powers of the priesthood, and the belief in the material efficacy of the sacramental elements, have acted and reacted upon each other, culminating in the extraordinary hyperbole which regards the priest as the maker of his Creator, and varying

with the importance which has been ascribed to the second order of the Christian clergy, and through them to the hierarchy generally

III. These two tendencies-the early tendency to mistake parable for prose, and the early superstitious regard for exterThe spiritual nal objects are sufficient to account for the lower view. forms of the irrational theories respecting the Sacrament of the Eucharist. But there is a third cause of a nobler kind which will lead us gradually and naturally to the consideration of the other side of the question. It is one of the peculiarities of this Sacrament that partly through its long history, partly from the original grandeur of its first conception, it suggests a great variety of thoughts which cling to it with such tenacity as almost to become part of itself. To disentangle these from the actual forms which they encompass to draw precisely the limits where the outward ends and the inward begins, where the transitory melts into the eternal and the earthly into the heavenly—is beyond the power of many, beside the wish of most. An example may be taken from another great ordinance which belongs to the world no less than to the Church, and which by more than half Christendom is regarded as a sacrament-Marriage. How difficult it would be to analyse the ordinary mode of feeling regarding the ceremony which unites two human beings in the most sacred relation of life; how many trains of association from Jewish patriarchal traditions, from the usages of Imperial Rome, from the metaphors of Apostolic teaching, from the purity of Teutonic and of English homes, have gone to make up the joint sanctity of that solemn moment, in which the reality and the form are by the laws of God and man blended in indissoluble union. Even if there are mingled with it customs which had once a baser significance; yet still even these are invested by the feeling of the moment with a meaning above themselves, which envelops the whole ceremonial with an atmosphere of grandeur that no inferior associations can dispel or degrade. Something analogous is the mixture of ideas which has sprung up

round the Eucharist. It has, by the very nature of the case, two sides: its visible material aspect, of a ceremony, of a test, of a mystic chain by which the priest brings the Creator down to earth, and attaches his followers to himself and his order; and its noble spiritual aspect of a sacred memory, of a joyous thanksgiving, of a solemn self-dedication, of an upward aspiration towards the Divine and the Unseen. We have already spoken of the legends which have represented in an outward form the spiritual presence of the Founder in the world at large. We have also spoken of those which have represented the same idea in connection with the sufferers or the heroes of humanity. There are also legends on which we may for a moment dwell as representing in a vivid form both the baser and the loftier view of the same idea in the Eucharist. The lowest and most material conception of this Presence is brought before us in the legend of the miracle of Bolsena, immortalised by the fresco of Raphael, in which the incredulous priest was persuaded by the falling of drops of blood from the consecrated wafer at the altar of that ancient Etruscan city. Such stories of bleeding wafers were not unfrequent in the Middle Ages, and it is not impossible that they originated in the curious natural phenomenon, which was described in connection with the appearance of the cholera in Berlin-the discoloration produced by the appearance of certain small scarlet insects which left on the bread which they touched the appearance of drops of blood. Some such appearance, real or supposed, suggested, probably, the material transformation of the elements into the flesh and blood of the outward frame of the Founder. This is the foundation of the great festival of Corpus Christi, which from the thirteenth century has in the Latin Church commemorated the miracle of Bolsena, and with it the doctrine supposed to be indicated therein. Another class of legend rises somewhat higher. It is that of a radiant child appearing on the altar, such as is described in the lives of Edward the Confessor, and engraved on the screen which incloses his shrine in