in which profound doctrines were most likely to be preserved for future ages, distinct from the dogmatic or philosophical turns of speech, which, whilst aiming at forms to endure for eternity, are often the most transitory of all, often far more transitory than the humblest tale or the simplest figure of speech. It was the sanction, for all time, of the use of fiction and poetry as a means of conveying moral and religious truth. In the Parables of the Prodigal Son and of the Rich Man and Lazarus, are wrapt up by anticipation the drama and the romance of modern Europe. But with these immense and preponderating advantages of the parabolic style of instruction was combined one inevitable danger and drawback. Great, exalted, general as is the poetic instinct of mankind, it yet is not universal or in all cases supreme.

There

is a prosaic element in the human mind which turns into matter of fact even the highest flights of genius and the purest aspirations of devotion. And, strange to say, this prosaic turn is sometimes found side by side with the development of the parabolic tendency of which we have been speaking; sometimes even in the same mind. Nothing can be more figurative and poetic than Bunyan's Pilgrim;' nothing more homely and stiff than his Grace Abounding.' This union of the two tendencies is nowhere more striking than in the East, and in the first age of Christianity. It appeared in the Gospel narrative itself. Appropriate, elevating, unmistakeable as were our Lord's figures, they were again and again brought down by His hearers to the most vulgar and commonplace meaning. The reply of the Samaritan woman at the wellthe comment of the Apostles on the leaven of the Phariseesthe gross materialism of the people of Capernaum in regard to the very expressions which have in part been pressed into modern Eucharistic controversies, are well-known cases in point. The Talmud is one vast system of turning figures into facts. The 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.' The whole history of early Millennarianism is a product of 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, no doubt, of some such misunderstood metaphor:

6

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

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,' &c., &c. A misinterpretation like this provokes only a smile, because it never struck root in the Church; but it is not in itself more extravagant than some of the Sacramental theories built on figures not less evidently poetic.

2. A second cause of the persistency of this physical limitation of the Sacramental doctrines 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 Dr. 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 an historical insight not usual in his other works, 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 earthly aspect of early Christianity inevitably bore to 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, Dr. Newman, instead of recognising the influence of the perishing Empire on the rising Church, not only insists on binding down the Church to the effete superstitions of the Empire, but regards those superstitions as themselves the marks of a divine Catholicity.

A far sounder and deeper theologian than Dr. Newman 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, as Dr. Newman, 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.'*

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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 the hordes of monks that turned the council-hall of 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 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 cf 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 connexion with the material view of the Sacramental rites. The administration of Baptism is not regarded even by High Churchmen 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 main

Fragment on the Church,' pp. 85, 86.

tain that there is no essential and necessary connexion 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, shifting with each successive shade of importance which has been ascribed to the second order of the Christian clergy, and through them to the hierarchy generally. The sacrificial aspect which supervened upon the rite strengthened the same concatenation of ideas. We have already spoken of this on a former occasion,* and as it forms only a secondary element in the present discussion, we need not enlarge upon it here.

3. These two tendencies-the early tendency to mistake parable for prose, and the early superstitious regard for external objects are sufficient to account for the lower 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 (so to speak) 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. To take an example 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

* Edinburgh Review, April, 1866: 'Ritualism.'

a baser significance; yet still even these are invested by the feeling of the moment with a meaning above themselves, which envelopes 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 Redeemer in the world at large. We have also spoken of those which have represented the same idea in connexion with the sufferers or the heroes of humanity. There are

also legends on which we may for a moment be allowed to 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 some years ago in the pages of this Review,-the discolouration produced by the appearance of certain small scarlet insects which left on the bread which they touched the appearance of drops of blood. This appearance, real or supposed, suggested, probably, the material transformation of the elements into the outward flesh and blood of the frame of the Redeemer. 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 encloses his shrine in Westminster Abbey. Leofric, Earl of Mercia, with his famous Countess Godiva, was believed to have been present with the King, and to have seen it also. This apparition, pure and bright as a spirit,' is evidently something more refined than the identification of the