practice of the apostles and their successors, it could not have been introduced later without controversy, and of such controversy there is no record. The conclusion is inevitable that infant baptism has been the continued practice of the Church from the days of Christ until now, and that it will prevail to the end of time.

ARTICLE XVIII

OF THE LORD'S SUPPER

The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another, but rather is a Sacrament of our redemption by Christ's death; insomuch that, to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ; and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation, or the change of the substance of bread and wine in the Supper of our Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper, only after a heavenly and spiritual manner. And the means whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.

The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshiped.1

I. THE ORIGIN

This Article, written by the English Reformers, first appeared as the twenty-ninth of the Forty-two Articles of 1553. It then contained the following argument: "The body of one and the selfsame man cannot be at one and the same time in divers places, but must needs be in some one certain place; therefore the body of Christ cannot be present at one time in many divers places.

1A singular change was made in Article XVIII. By a misprint the word "scriptural" displaced the word "spiritual." It occurred in 1803, and was corrected in 1844.

And because Christ was taken up into heaven, and there shall continue to the end of the world, a faithful man ought not either to believe or openly to confess the real and bodily presence of Christ's flesh and blood in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper." This was supposed to favor too much the views of Zwingli and his followers, and in 1562 it was expunged, when the Article took its present form. It passed into the Thirty-nine Articles in 1571. It was adopted by Wesley without abridgment.

II. THE AIM

The purpose of the Article was to condemn the various and opposing doctrines concerning the Lord's Supper, to properly define its nature, and to safeguard its administration as a holy rite. It is directed first against the Zwinglian doctrine of the sacrament, as being but a partial and inadequate statement of the nature and purpose of the Eucharist, and second against the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. These two doctrines are at opposite poles of belief and represent the two extremes of error.

The doctrine of transubstantiation had been taught for centuries before the Reformation, and was accepted in its grossest form by the Roman Church. The fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, defined the term "transubstantiation" as follows: "There is only one universal Church, beyond which no man can in any way be saved; in which Jesus Christ is himself the priest and sacrifice, whose body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar, under the form of bread and wine, being transubstantiated, the bread into the body and the wine into the blood, by divine power." "The change effected by transubstantiation is declared to be so perfect and complete that, by connection and concomitance, the soul and

divinity of Christ coexist with his flesh and blood under the species of bread and wine; and thus the elements, and every particle thereof, contain Christ whole and entire divinity, humanity, soul, body, and blood, with all their component parts. Nothing remains of the bread and wine except the accidents. The whole God and man Christ Jesus is contained in the bread and wine, and in every particle of the bread and every drop of the wine."1

The formularies of the Church of England in the reign of Henry VIII maintained the doctrine. In 1550 the partisans of the Roman Church were satisfied with the first Prayer Book of Edward VI, because, "Touching the truth of the very presence of Christ's most precious body and blood in the sacrament, there was as much spoken in that book as might be desired.”

The question of the exact nature and means of the communicant's participation-whether he partakes of Christ's body and blood literally or figuratively-became, however, one of the storm centers of the Reformation. The tenth Article of the Augsburg Confession reads: "In regard to the Lord's Supper they teach that the body and blood of Christ are actually present under the emblem of bread and wine, and are dispensed to the communicants." While the German Reformers agreed to this statement, they differed as to the mode of the presence of Christ in the sacrament.

To transubstantiation Luther opposed a doctrine known as consubstantiation. This is regarded by some as a resort to a modified form of transubstantiation in order to avoid antagonizing the prejudice or conviction in the public mind in favor of the Roman theory of the "real presence." Luther was not given to compromise with Rome, and no doubt he was fully persuaded that his the

1 McClintock and Strong, article "Transubstantiation."

ory was true. He insisted upon the literal interpretation of the words of institution of the Supper, and as a consequence upon the actual reception with the mouth of the glorified body of Christ present in the bread, and of his real blood in the cup. He thought that, accordingly, no change takes place in the bread or in the wine, but that with, and by means of, the consecrated elements the true body and blood of Christ are communicated to the recipient. It is not held that Christ is present in that form nor with those properties which belonged to the Saviour's body on earth, such as visibility and tangibility (for these it no longer possesses), but present with the new and elevated properties which now belong to its glorified state.

The Swiss Reformers, in their bitter opposition to the doctrine of the real presence, went to the opposite extreme. The view held by Zwingli and his followers is that there is no presence of the human nature of Christ of any kind in the Lord's Supper, nor any peculiar spiritual influence connected with this ordinance other than that accompanying the truths which it symbolically represents. The opinions of the early English Reformers, Cranmer and Ridley, leaned toward the views of Zwingli, if they did not wholly indorse them, as is seen in the original form of the Article, but the formularies adopted by them in the reign of Edward were changed in the time of Elizabeth, when Cranmer and Ridley had won the crown of martyrdom.

The framers of the Article chose the true middle course between extremes, condemning error while asserting a spiritual real presence and communion of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament. Their further object was to declare unmistakably that certain practices in the Church of Rome in relation to the Eucharist have no foundation in the ordinances of Christ.