The Church of Rome, and in this the Greek Church is at one therewith, thus defines the term transubstantiation in the Canon of the Council of Trent:
“If any one shall say that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining—which conversion the Catholic Church most fittingly calls Transubstantiation—let him be anathema.”
The Church of England, through the medium of a letter to a well-known newspaper, the British Weekly (29th August, 1895), supplies the following illustration of the position of its “High” section, and this, it is interesting to note, from the church of which Mr. Gladstone’s son is rector, and in which the distinguished statesman himself often reads the lessons:
“A few Sundays ago—8 o’clock celebration of Holy Communion. Rector, officiating minister (Hawarden Church).
“When the point was reached for the communicants to partake, cards containing a hymn to be sung after Communion were distributed among the congregation. This hymn opened with the following couplet:—
Jesu, mighty Saviour,
Thou art in us now.
And my attention was arrested by an asterisk referring to a footnote. The word ‘in,’ in the second line, was printed in italics, and the note intimated that those who had not communicated should sing ‘with’ instead of ‘in,’ i. e. those who had taken the consecrated elements to sing ‘Thou art in us now,’ and those who had not, to sing ‘Thou art with us now.’”
Whether, therefore, the cult be barbaric or civilized, we find theory and practice identical. The god is eaten so that the communicant thereby becomes a “partaker of the divine nature.”
In the gestures denoting sacerdotal benediction we have probably an old form of averting the evil eye; in the act of breathing on a bishop at the service of consecration there was the survival of belief in transference of spiritual qualities, the soul being, as language evidences, well-nigh universally identified with breath. The modern spiritualist who describes apparitions as having the “consistency of cigar-smoke,” is one with the Congo negroes who leave the house of the dead unswept for a time lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost. The inhaling of the last breath of the dying Roman by his nearest kinsman has parallel in the breathing of the risen Jesus on his disciples that they might receive the Holy Ghost (John xx, 22). In the offering of prayers for the dead; in the canonization and intercession of saints; in the prayers and offerings at the shrines of the Virgin and saints, and at the graves of martyrs; there are the manifold forms of that great cult of the departed which is found throughout the world. To this may be linked the belief in angels, whether good or bad, or guardian, because the element common to the whole is animistic, the peopling of the heavens above, as well as the earth beneath, with an innumerable company of spiritual beings influencing the destinies of men. Well might Jews and Moslems reproach the Christians, as they did down to the eighth century, with having filled the world with more gods than they had overthrown in the pagan temples; while we have Erasmus, in his Encomium Moriae, when reciting the names and functions of saints, adding that “as many things as we wish, so many gods have we made.” Closely related to this group of beliefs is the adoration of relics, the vitality of which has springs too deep in human nature to be wholly abolished, whether we carry about us a lock from the hair of some dead loved one, or read of the fragments of saints or martyrs which lie beneath every Catholic altar, or of the skull-bones of his ancestor which the savage carries about with him as a charm. Then there is the long list of church festivals, the reference of which to pagan prototypes is but one step toward their ultimate explanation in nature-worship; there are the processions which are the successors of Corybantic frenzies, and, more remotely, of savage dances and other forms of excitation; there is that now somewhat casual belief in the Second Advent which is a member of the widespread group wherein human hopes fix eyes on the return of long-sleeping heroes; of Arthur and Olger Dansk, of Väinämöinen and Quetzalcoatl, of Charlemagne and Barbarossa, of the lost Marko of Servia and the lost King Sebastian. We speak of it as “casual,” because among the two hundred and eighty-odd sects scheduled in Whitaker’s Almanack the curious in such inquiries will note only three distinctive bodies of Adventists.
All changes in popular belief have been, and, practically, remain superficial; the old animism pervades the higher creeds. In our own island, for example, the Celtic and pre-Celtic paganism remained unleavened by the old Roman religion. The legions took back to Rome the gods which they brought with them. The names of Mithra and Serapis occur on numerous tablets, the worship of the one—that “Sol invictus” whose birthday at the winter solstice became (see p. [42]) the anniversary of the birth of Christ—had ranged as far west as South Wales and Northumberland; while the foundations of a temple to the other have been unearthed at York. The chief Celtic gods, in virtue of common attributes as elemental nature-deities, were identified with certain dii majores of the Roman pantheon, and the deae matres equated with the gracious or malevolent spirits of the indigenous faith. But the old names were not displaced. Neither did the earlier Christian missionaries effect any organic change in popular beliefs, while, during the submergence of Christianity under waves of barbaric invasion, there were infused into the old religion kindred elements from oversea which gave it yet more vigorous life. The eagle penetration of Gibbon detected this persistent element at work when he described the sequel to the futile efforts of Theodosius to extirpate paganism. The ancestor worship which lay at the core of much of it took shape among the Christianized pagans in the worship of martyrs and in the scramble after their relics. The bodies of prophets and apostles were discovered by the strangest coincidences, and transported to the churches by the Tiber and the Bosphorus, and although the supply of these more important remains was soon exhausted, there was no limit to the production of relics of their person or belongings, as of filings from the chains of S. Peter, and from the gridiron of S. Lawrence. The catacombs yielded any number of the bodies of martyrs, and Rome became a huge manufactory to meet the demands for wonder-working relics from every part of Christendom. A sceptical feeling might be aroused at the claims of a dozen abbeys to possession of the veritable crown of thorns wherewith the majesty of the suffering Christ was mocked, but it was silenced before the numerous fragments of his cross, since ingenuity has computed that this must have contained at least one hundred and eighty million cubic millemetres, whereas the total cubic volume of all the known relics is but five millions. “It must,” remarks Gibbon (Decline and Fall, end of chap. xxviii), “ingeniously be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the profane model which they were impotent to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstitions of paganism if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.”