TRANSUBSTANTIATION

The doctrine held by the church of Rome, that in the Eucharist the bread and wine are annihilated and replaced by the body and blood of Christ. In one of its liturgical offices it says, " This is not bread, but God and Man, my Saviour." It is maintained by Protestants that this dogma, which was made the principal test of a true faith by the Papists at the Reformation, is not found in Scripture, which in the most literal acceptation only a erts of the elements that they are Christ's body and blood; i. e. that the substances coexist in some mysterious manner. Nor can they discover it in the writings of the fathers, or in the canons of the early church. They affirm that the first theologian who a erted even the consubstantiation, or union of substances, was Paschaslus, in the ninth century, and that he was accused of making too gro an explanation of the mystery. It was in the course of these disputes, and in consequence of the formal and definite statement of their opinions to which controversialists were forced, that this idea of transub at i on came into fashion among theologians; nor was it ever propounded as an article of faith by the authority of a council till the beginning of the 13th century in the papacy of Innocent III. [s. 1266]