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 three hundred 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 threw 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 corner stone 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 equaled this popish doctrine in absurdity, inconsistency and irreconcileable 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 an 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.