not that the body which was assumed comes down from heaven, but the very bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of God. And if you ask how this happens, it is enough for you to hear that it is by the Holy Spirit, just as the Lord also by the Holy Spirit assumed flesh for himself and in himself." In what follows the view is expressly rejected that it is a different body of Christ that is in question: there are not two bodies, but one. Further: "The bread and wine are not types of the body and blood of Christ; not so, but the very body of the Lord deified." The bread of the communion is not simple bread, but is united with the deity; it has accordingly two natures. The body united with the deity is, however, not one nature, but the one is that of the body, the other that of the deity combined with it, so that the two together constitute not one nature but two. Only the not yet consecrated elements, moreover, are to be called "antitypes"; in this way Basil also used the word (!). The mystery, however, is called "participation" because through it we possess a share in the deity of Jesus, but "communion" first, because we have communion with Christ, and secondly, because by the holy food we are united with one another, one body of Christ, members in his body, and therefore of one another. Therefore we have anxiously to watch lest we "participate" with heretics, or allow them to "participate" with us. Finally, it is still to be noticed that, according to John, the sacred food was not subject to the natural processes in the body.

This is the classical doctrine of the Lord's Supper in the Greek Church up to the present day. By the Holy Ghost bread and wine are received into the body of Christ. The eucharistic body is that which was born of the virgin, not, however, by a transubstantiation, as if the body of Christ descended suddenly from heaven and took the place of the elements, but by trans

1 Σῶμά ἐστιν ἀληθῶς ἡνώμενον θεότητι, τὸ ἐκ τῆς ἁγίας παρθένου σῶμα, οὐχ ὅτι τὸ ἀναληφθὲν σῶμα ἐξ οὐρανοῦ κατέρχεται, ἀλλ' ὅτι αὐτὸς ὁ ἄρτος καὶ οἶνος μέτα ποιοῦνται εἰς σῶμα καὶ αἷμα Θεοῦ. εἰ δὲ τὸν τρόπον ἐπιζητεῖς, πῶς γίνεται, ἀρκεῖ σοι ἀκοῦσαι, ὅτι διὰ πνεύματος ἁγίου, ὥσπερ καὶ ἐξ τῆς ἁγίας θεοτόκου διὰ πνεύματος ἁγίου ἑαυτῷ καὶ ἐν ἑαυτῷ ὁ κύριος σάρκα ὑπεστήσατο.

2 Οὐκ ἔστι τύπος ὁ ἄρτος καὶ ὁ οἶνος τοῦ σώματος καὶ αἵματος Χριστοῦ μὴ γένοιτο, ἀλλ' αὐτὸ τὸ σῶμα τοῦ κυρίου τεθεωμένον.

formation and assumption, just as in the Incarnation. The breadbody is received into the real body and is thus identical with it. That is the last word of the Greek Church-only now was the mystery perfect. Only now was the real presence of the true body originated, the doctrine which the Churches of to-day, except the Reformed, wrongly assign to antiquity, nay, to the Apostolic age itself. It is true that Scholastics and Mystics have taught much that was original on the Lord's Supper in the Greek Churches since John; spiritualism also was not abolished; but the history of dogma can give no place to these individual pronouncements. The sacrificial character and the reference to the crucifixion, which are so strikingly neglected by John, were again made prominent in after times. " The physical and liturgical miracle was never, however, so logically analysed or reduced to the categories of being and phenomenon, substance and accident, in the Greek Church as in the West. Attempts

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3

at this were made; but they never obtained any far-reaching importance in the official doctrine. The second Nicene Council of A.D. 787 took its stand on the conception of John. The last exclamations of the assembled Fathers were: "Whoever does not confess that Christ, on the side of his humanity, has an unlimited form, let him be anathema. May the memory of Germanus (of Constantinople) and of John (of Damascus) endure for ever.'

1 Steitz XII., pp. 216 f., 275-286.

2 See Steitz XIII., pp. 3-66. The two controversies about the Lord's Supper of 1155 and 1199 are relatively the most important.

3 The magical view of the Lord's Supper is also seen in the practice of children's communion, which first attested by Cyprian (by Leucius ?), became the rule in the East, after infant Baptism had been established. Participation in the Lord's Supper was even held to be absolutely necessary; so already Cyprian, Testim. III. 25. See the Art. "Communion of Children" by v. Zezschwitz in Herzog's R.-Encykl., 2nd ed.

4 See Mansi XIII., p. 398 sq. and Hefele III., p. 473. On the present doctrine and practice of the Greek Churches as regards the Eucharist, see Gass, Symbolik, pp. 252-277.; Kattenbusch 1. c. I., p. 410 ff. There as also in the Index of Hefele's Conciliengesch. (esp. Vol III. under "Abendmahl", "Messe") we obtain information also as to the numerous detailed decisions bearing on the rite (leavened bread, etc.); compare Heineccius, Abbildung der alten und neuen griechischen Kirche, 1711.

There existed in Christendom, ever since there was a doctrina publica, i.e., from the end of the second century, a kind of subsidiary religion, one of the second rank, as it were subterranean, different among different peoples, but everywhere alike in its crass superstition, naïve doketism, dualism, and polytheism. "When religions change, it is as if the mountains open. Among the great magic snakes, golden dragons and crystal spirits of the human soul, which ascend to the light, there come forth all sorts of hideous reptiles and a host of rats and mice." Every new religion invigorates the products of the ancient one which it supersedes. In one aspect of it we know very little of the "Christianity" of the second rank, for it had no literary existence; in another we are thoroughly familiar with it; for we only need to set before us, and to provide with a few Christian reminiscences, the popular conditions and rites with which Christianity came in contact in different provinces, as also the tendencies, everywhere the same, of the superstitious mob, tendencies inert in the moral sphere, exuberant in the realm of fancy. Then we have this second-class Christianity. It consisted in worship of angels-demigods and demons, reverence for pictures, relics, and amulets, a more or less impotent enthusiasm for the sternest asceticism-therefore not infrequently strictly dualistic conceptions and a scrupulous observance of certain things held to be sacred, words, signs, rites, ceremonies, places, and times. There probably never was an age in which Christendom was free from this "Christianity", just as there never will be one in which it shall have been overcome. But in the fully formed Catholic Church as it passes over into the Middle Ages, this Christianity was not only dragged along with it as a tolerated, because irremovable, burden, but it was to a very large extent legitimised, though under safeguards, and fused with the doctrina publica. Catholicism as it meets us in Gregory the Great and in the final decisions of the seventh 1 Yet some of the apocryphal Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, Apocalypses, etc., come under this head.

2 The works of Usener and Dieterich (Nexua, Leipzig, 1893) are valuable.

Council, presents itself as the most intimate union of Christianity of the first order with that subterranean, thoroughly superstitious, and polytheistic "Christianity"; and the centuries from the third to the eighth mark the stages in the process of fusion, which seems to have reached an advanced point even in the third and was yet reinforced from century to century to a most extraordinary extent.

It is the business of the historian of the Church and of civilisation to describe these developments in detail, and to show how in separate provinces the ancient gods were transformed into Christian saints, angels, and heroes, and the ancient mythology and cultus into Christian mythology and local worship. This task is as æsthetically attractive as that other which is closely allied to it, the indication of the remains of heathen temples in Christian Churches. The temple of Mithras which became St. George's Church, proves that St. George was Mithras; in St. Michael the ancient Wotan had been brought to life again, just as Poseidon in St. Nicholas; the different "mothers of God", who were honoured with all sorts of sacred offerings-one preferred fruits, another animals-only show that Demeter, Venus, Juno, and countless other great mothers and holy or unholy virgins, had merged in the one mother.-The provincial calendars and various "Church Years" conceal significant reminiscences from the old heathen times. Here, however, we are only interested in the questions of principle, how far all this had forced its way into the doctrina publica, and how it was possible for that religion, whose strong point had once been a horror of idols, to admit this stuff as something sacred.

As regards the second question, the points of contact existed in the doctrina publica itself. The following may have been the most important. In the first place, the doctrina had been constructed by the aid of Greek and Roman intellectual culture and philosophy. These, however, were connected by a thousand ties with mythology and superstition, which were not got rid of by assigning a "noumenon" to everything. We need only recall the single instance of Origen to see that the father of free and spiritual theology was at the same time the patron of

every superstition that would admit of receiving the least grain of spiritual contents. Secondly, the doctrina publica sanctioned the Old Testament. Before this, indeed, and even to some extent in the time of the conflict with Gnosticism great pains had been taken to prove that the Old Testament was a Christian book, and to allegorise all its ceremonial features. But the power of interpretation had weakened more and more in comparison with the strength of the letter. What a wealth was embraced in the book of material drawn from the most varied stages of religious history! This material was sacred. No one indeed now got circumcised, or offered bloody sacrifices, or refrained from eating pork, but what did that signify if everything else gradually came somehow or other to be accepted? From the third century the Church needed infinitely more than a doctrina publica; it needed a sacred constitution, holy priests and a holy ritual. The Old Testament from which pretty nearly anything can be legitimised also legitimised this. Thus, side by side with revelation in the form of sacred doctrine, there arose an indefinitely increasing mass of sacred things which could be justified from the Old Testament alone. For its sake the old strict exclusion of the literal meaning of the book and of its ceremonies was abandoned, slowly indeed, but surely. At first the attempt was made to proceed circuitously, and to attribute the ceremonial decrees to the Apostles, because men were still unwilling to appeal directly to the Old Testament commands; but they then became bolder, and finally felt no scruple about using the Old Testament down to matters of detail, the special points of the Temple ritual-the cherubim being cited, for example, in support of the right to worship pictures.

Thirdly, the sacred rites of Baptism, and especially of the Eucharist, offered points of contact for the intrusion of Christianity of the second rank into official Christianity. The public doctrine had already, at a very early date, treated and regarded these rites as mysteries in the ancient sense. Thus the door was thrown wide open to the inrush of everything of the character of a mystery, magic, liturgical miracles, and fetishes. Fourthly, devils and angels had played a great part even in primitive Christianity. The official doc