The Sacramentarian Controversy The doctrine of the real presence of Christ in
the Eucharist had been established in the Romish Church since the Fourth Lateran
Council in the year 1215.
For 300 years the mass and transubstantiation had been the principal
bulwarks of Rome and her greatest blasphemy.
The idea of the corporeal presence of Christ in the Holy Supper through a halo
of sacred importance around it, excited the imagination of the people and
fixed it deeply in their affections.
It was the origin of many ceremonies and superstitions, of great wealth and
dominion to the priesthood, and the most stupendous miracles were said to be
wrought by the consecrated bread, both among the living and the dead.
It thus became the cornerstone of the papal edifice.
Luther, as a priest and a monk, firmly believed in this mystery of
iniquity, and never was, throughout his whole career, delivered from its delusion.
He sinned against God and his own conscience when he accepted priestly
ordination, and from that period a judicial blindness seems to have rested on
his mind as to the power of the priest over the elements.
Transubstantiation, or the actual conversion of the bread and wine into the
real body and blood of Christ, by priestly consecration, was then,
as it still is, the recognized doctrine of the Church of Rome.
Those who doubt this are denounced as infidels.
As a reformer, Luther gave up the term transubstantiation and adopted,
if possible, the still more inexplicable term of consubstantiation.
He renounced the papal idea that the bread and wine after consecration remained no
longer, but were changed into the material body and blood of Christ.
His strange notion was, that the bread and the wine remained just what they were
before real bread and real wine, but that there was also together with the
bread and wine the material substance of Christ's human body.
No invention of man, we may freely affirm, ever equalled this popish doctrine in
absurdity, inconsistency, and irreconcilable contradictions.
The hands of the priest, said the pontiff Urban, in a great Roman council,
are raised to an eminence granted to none of the angels, of creating God,
the creator of all things, and of offering him up for the salvation of the whole
world.
This prerogative, as it elevates the pope above angels, renders pontifical
submission to kings and execration.
To all this the sacred synod, with the utmost unanimity, responded, Amen.
Surely this is the last test of human credulity, and the consummation of human blasphemy.