This is practically the method adopted in most of the British Non-Episcopal Churches; instead, however, of the communicants coming forward to the table, they remain in their pews, the bread and wine being handed round by elders or deacons. In the American Non-Episcopal Churches the same plan is usually adopted.
These divergencies of method illustrate the strange fact in the Christian life, that around the simple and beautiful institution of the Lord’s Supper there have raged the fiercest controversies in religious history. So divergent are the views held about it, that the Roman Catholic Church asserts that in every celebration of the Mass our Saviour is again actually offered as a sacrifice, and the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of the Lord, this miracle of transformation being wrought through the consecrating prayer of the priest. The Quakers, at the other extreme, do not observe the service at all, and do not consider it to be a binding ordinance. Here, as so often in life, the truth lies between the extremes. The bread and the wine are the symbols of our Lord’s body and blood. We do not feed on Him by the mere physical eating of the consecrated elements, but we partake of Him through faith as we remember that His body was broken for us, and His blood shed for the remission of our sins. His own loving command as He sat at the table with His disciples was, ‘This do in remembrance of Me,’ and it is through fellowship with Him in spirit—in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross at Calvary—that ‘we feed on Him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.’
There is a semi-sacred bread eaten by the English race, and by no one else—the hot-cross bun—millions of which are devoured in England on Good Friday. Its origin is obscure, as is also that of the word ‘bun.’ Most dictionaries derive it from the old French bigne, or bugne—a swelling; but it certainly occurs in an early Promptorium Parvulorum, as ‘bunne-brede.’ Anent ‘Eating Buns on Good Friday,’ a correspondent in the Athenæum of April 4, 1857, p. 144, wrote:
‘In the Museo Lapidario of the Vatican, on the Christian side of it, and not far off from the door leading into the library, there is a tablet representing in a rude manner the miracle of the five barley loaves. Every visitor must have seen it, for it has been there for years. The loaves are round, like cakes, and have a cross upon them, such as our cakes bear, which are broken and eaten on Good Friday morning, symbolical of the sacrifice of the body of our Lord. Five of these cakes, explanatory of the scene, are ranged beneath an arch-shaped table, at which recline five people, while another, with a basket full, is occupied in serving them. The cakes are so significant of the Bread of Life that one might almost regard the repast as intended to prefigure the sacrifice that was to follow, and the institution connected with it. Having, from the earliest period of memory, cherished a particular regard for hot-cross buns and all their pleasing associations, it was a source of gratifying reflection to see my old favourites thus brought into intimate association with the pious thoughts of the primitive Christians, and to know that at home we cherished an ancient usage on Good Friday which the more Catholic nations of Europe no longer observed. But, alas! there is always some drawback to our full satisfaction in this world, and knowledge is often a cruel dissipation of favourite convictions; my faith in the Christian biography of these buns has recently received a very rude shock.
‘It would appear that they have descended to us, not from any Popish practice, as some pious souls affirm, but from one which was actually, and, like the word which we use to signify the great festival of the Church, Easter, to a paganism as ancient as the worship of Astarte, in honour of whom, about the time of the Passover, our pagan ancestors, the Saxons, baked and offered up a particular kind of cake. We read in Jeremiah (vii. 17, 18): “Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven.” [See also Jeremiah xliv. 18, 19.] Dr. Stukeley, in his Medallic History of Valerius Carausius, remarks that they were “assiduous to knead the Easter cakes for her service.” The worship of a Queen of Heaven, under some significant name or other, was an almost universal practice, and exists still in various parts of the globe. She is usually represented, like the Madonna, bearing her son in her lap, or like Isis, with the infant Horus. We may see such images in the Louvre, and in the great Ethnographical Museum at Copenhagen, where the Queen of Heaven of the Chinese, Tien-how, figures in white porcelain, side by side with Schling-mu, the Holy Mother. Certain metaphysical ideas are apt to flow in a common channel, and get clothed in the same symbolical dress. Hence we find a Queen of Heaven, no less in Mexico than in China, in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and England; and, under the pagan title of a Christian festival, preserve, along with our buns, the memorial of her ancient reign.’
CHAPTER XIII.
GINGER BREAD AND CHARITY BREAD.
But there is a bread which must not escape notice—a true bread—although somewhat sweet and spiced. When it was first introduced into England no one can tell, but it was well known in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, for Shakespeare, in Love’s Labour Lost (Act V., S. 1), makes Costard say: ‘An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread.’ And we find it used in a similar way to the educational biscuits of the present day; for Matthew Prior, in his Alma says:
‘To Master John, the English maid