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as the Son of God became man without ceasing to be God, or without the human nature passing into the divine, but in such wise that the Godhead forms with the manhood one inseparable God-manhood; so analogously, it was thought, did the body of Christ become bread in the Supper; not in the sense of the bread ceasing to be bread, but in the sense of the glorified body of Christ entering into a perfect union with the real bread. This theory Wiclif sets aside as well as the other of the identification of the bread with the body of Christ. Neither "impanation" nor "identification" was Wiclif's contention, but only a sacramental presence of the body of Christ in and with the consecrated Host, wrought by the virtue of the words of institution-what he also calls a

447

"spiritual," i.e., an invisible presence. He expresses his doctrine of the Supper compendiously in the proposition,"As Christ is at once God and man, so the sacrament of the altar is at once Christ's body and bread-bread in a natural manner, and body in a sacramental manner." 448 Still more compactly does he concentrate his thoughts in the short expression, "The sacrament of the altar is the body of Christ in the form of the bread." 449

Returning to the characteristic touched upon above, according to which the presence of the glorified body of Christ in the Supper is a spiritual presence-like the indwelling of the soul in the body-it follows from this view, as already mentioned, that we see Christ's body in the sacrament not with the bodily, but only with the spiritual eye-that we do not touch Him corporeally, and therefore, also, cannot receive and enjoy Him corporeally, but only spiritually. To this circumstance Wiclif more than once. refers, emphasizing it intentionally, and drawing from it without reserve the conclusion which is its necessary out

come. 450

He remarks that the believer's desire is to partake of the body of Christ not corporeally, but spiritually; and therefore it is that the Omniscient has connected that spiritual manner of presence with the Host which is to be eaten by the believer, and has set aside another manner of the presence because it would be superfluous. Only unbelievers, or persons of a Jewish spirit, join in the murmur of those who, in John vi. 60-61, went back and said, “It is a hard saying." because they understood him to say that a body behoved to be corporeally eaten.451 In more than one place Wiclif appeals to the word of Christ in John vi. 63— "It is the Spirit that quickeneth-the flesh profiteth nothing." 452 I might go the length of maintaining that this expression appears to him, taken along with the words of institution, "This is my body," as the fundamental passage on the subject of the Lord's Supper. The corporeal eating of the bread in the sacrament and the spiritual eating stand as wide asunder from one another, in his view, as the heaven from the earth. A swine or a shrew-mouse is able to consume it carnally, 453 but spiritually they are incapable of enjoying it, because to them faith and soul are wanting.

As Wiclif makes the actual receiving of the body of Christ in the sacrament dependent upon faith, he must necessarily, as a consequent thinker, have held that only the believing communicants are partakers in fact of the body and blood of Christ - while the unbelieving receive exclusively only the visible signs, and not the invisible body of Christ. Up to the present time, it is true, no passage had been found in which this latter thought was expressed in clear and unambiguous terms.454 But in the sermon on the Sixth Chapter of St. John's Gospel, which has already been repeatedly quoted, I find also this thought

ONLY BELIEVING COMMUNICANTS ARE TRULY PARTAKERS. 193

declared without disguise. Here Wiclif distinguishes sharply between corporeal and spiritual tasting of the sacramental food. And in accordance with this, he not only maintains that any one who has not received the sacramental food, may, notwithstanding, truly partake of the flesh and blood of Christ by means of faith-e.g., John the Baptist; but he also declares his belief that the non-elect do not in fact partake of Christ's body and blood, as little as Christ is a partaker of the non-elect-and as little as the man who has partaken of indigestible food can be said to have really consumed it.455

Taking a survey once more of Wiclif's whole investigation of the Lord's Supper, to which he almost constantly returned during the last four years of his life, whatever was the point of Christian doctrine he was discussing at the time, and which he treated of in sermons and popular tracts, as well as in disputations and scientific works, it is impossible not to be impressed with the intellectual labour, the conscientiousness, and the force of will-all equally extraordinary, which he applied to the solution of the problem which he proposed to himself in this particular. With a courage drawn from the sense of duty and from the might of truth, he nobly dared to undertake the dangerous conflict with doctrine which he had come to look upon as a heresy opposed to the teaching of Scripture, dishonouring to God, and the source at the same time of numerous errors, abuses, and mischiefs. His attack upon the dogma of transubstantiation was one so concentrated, and delivered from so many sides, that the scholastic conception was shaken to its very foundations.456

The animated polemic which was directed against Wiclif, and the strong measures which were taken by the hierarchy

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against him and his party, are the loudest testimonies to the importance of the attack which called forth this resistance. Although Huss and the Hussites, the Calixtines at least, did not continue Wiclif's opposition to transubstantiation, his early labours in this field bore fruit in the sixteenth century. The theory which he had so violently shaken fell to the ground as the result of the German and Swiss Reformations; and it is well worth remarking that Luther's judgment of transubstantiation, although he considered it to be a milder kind of bondage of the sacrament, yet agrees in many parts with that hostile criticism which Wiclif had developed against it 140 years before.457

As to Wiclif's positive doctrine of the Lord's Supper, it will hardly be denied either that it is thought out with an uncommon amount of acuteness, or that it does justice to the holiness of the sacrament and its dignity as a real means of grace. It consists, to recur to this once more, of a twofold proposition. The first proposition, "The sacrament of the altar after consecration, as well as before, is true bread and true wine," requires no further elucidation, especially as it has found recognition in all the Protestant confessions. The second proposition, "The sacrament of the altar after consecration is the body and blood of Christ," affirms the real presence of the body and blood of Christ, but not on that account a local and corporeal, but a sacramental and spiritual presence of the same, similarly as the soul is present in every part of the human body. When it is affirmed here with emphasis that the body of Christ in the Supper can only be spiritually seen, received, and enjoyed, but not corporeally, because it is only present spiritually, and when, in consequence, it is only to believers that a real participation of the body of Christ in the Supper is attributed, while to the un

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believing, on the contrary, such participation is denied, it is at this point that the difference of Wiclif's eucharistic doctrine and Luther's falls with the strongest light upon the eye. For it is certain that Luther, at least from the time of his controversy with Carlostadt, taught a corporeal receiving of Christ's body and blood, and as connected with this, a partaking of the body of Christ on the part both of worthy and unworthy communicants. In close connection with the corporeal receiving of Luther, and as a necessary preliminary to it, stands Luther's doctrine of the ubiquity of the body of Christ; whereas Wiclif firmly and distinctly maintains the contrary view, that the body of Christ remains in heaven, and does not descend into every consecrated Host. But notwithstanding these points of difference, Wiclif's doctrine of the Eucharist, with its real but spiritual presence of Christ's body stands nearer to the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper than it does to the Zwinglian, or even to the Calvinistic doctrine; in so far, at all events, as Wiclif understands an immediate presence of the body and blood of Christ, instead of assuming only a communion with Christ's body and blood effected by the Holy Ghost (spiritus sancti virtute). Wiclif's doctrine of the Supper deserves at least sincere recognition and high estimation, on account of the harmonious union which it exhibits of the power of original laborious thought with the energy of a mature and solid Christian faith,458

NOTES TO SECTION XII.

372. Vide Zeitschrift für Historische Theologie, 1847, pp. 597-636.

373. Trialogus, IV., c. 1, p. 244 : Signum; sacrae rei signum; invisibilis gratiae visibilis forma, ut similitudinem gerat et causa existat.

374. Ib. Quomodo ergo sunt solum septem sacramenta distincta specifice?.. p. 245: Mille autem sunt talia sensibilia signa in scriptura, quae habent tantam rationem sacramenti, sicut habent communiter ista septem.