to us a certam blessing, and a sacrifice which man of- fers to God. As a sacrament, or the communion, it stands at the head of all sacred rites ; as a sacrifice it stands alone. The celebration of it under this twofold character fonns the holy of holies of the Christian cultus in the ancient church, and in the greater part of Christendom at this day.' ' Freeman, 1. c. Introduction to Part ii. (1857), p. 2, says of the Eucharist, not without justice, from a historical and theological point of view: "It wa&^confessedly through long ages of the church, and is by the vast majority of the Christian world at this hour, conceived to be ... no less than the highest line of contact and region of commingling between heaven and earth known to us, or provided for us ; — a border- land of mystery, where, by gradations bafOing sight and thought, the material truly blends with the spiritual, and the visible shades o£f into the unseen ; a thing, there- fore, which of all events or gifts in this world most nearly answers to the highest aspirations and deepest yearnings of our wonderfully compounded being ; while in some ages and climes of the church it has been elevated into something yet more awful and mysterious." 492 THEKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590, We consider first the doctrine of the Eucharist as a sac- rament, then the doctrine of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, and finally the celebration of the eueharistic communion and eucharistic sacrifice. The doctrine of the sacrament of the Eucharist was not a subject of theological controversy and ecclesiastical ac- tion till the time of Paschasius Radbert, in the ninth cen- tury ; whereas since then this feast of the Saviour's dying love has been the innocent cause of the most bitter disputes, es- pecially in the age of the Reformation, between Papists and Protestants, and among Lutherans, Zwingliaus, and Calvinists. Hence the doctrine of the ancient church on this point lacks the clearness and definiteness which the ISTicene dogma of the Trinity, the Chalcedonian Christology, and the Augustinian an- thropology and soteriology acquired from the controversies preceding them. In the doctrine of baptism also we have a much better right to ST^eak o^ a. co?isensuspatrum,th.&n in the doctrine of the holy Supper. In general, this period, following the representatives of the mystic theory in the previous one, was already very strongly inclined toward the doctrine of transubstantiation and toward the Greek and Roman sacrifice of the mass, which are insepa- rable in so far as a real sacrifice requires the real presence of the victim. But the kind and mode of this presence are not yet particularly defined, and admit very difierent views : Christ may be conceived as really present either in and with the elements (consubstantiation, impanation), or under the illu- sive appearance of the changed elements (transubstantiation), or only dynamically and spiritually. In the previous period we distinguish three views :