- 47 - me!’ As the wine flowed from the cup as they drank, so on the day of his death did the blood flow from his body. In its essence, however, this meal was symbolic of the spiritual communion Christ intended to maintain with his followers despite the fact that he would be parted from them on earth. Just as the bread that he distributed to the disciples had been a single piece, and as the individual sips of wine that they drank had come from one cup, so the disciples were to be united in spirit and in love with Christ as well as with each other from then on. It was for this unity that Christ prayed so fervently and touchingly that evening. He admonished them to preserve their love for their Master in their hearts and thereby to remain united with him in a spiritual body of which: Christ would be the head and they the limbs. He beseeched them to remember this whenever they came together in order to repeat, in memory of him, the meal that he had partaken with them in farewell. They must not forget that it was a feast of love that their Lord and Master had celebrated with them, and that only those may take part in the observance of this meal who are united with God and mankind by bonds of love. • Whoever does not feel this love in his heart is not fit to receive the commemorative rite of love. Anyone who receives this meal while harbouring within him hatred, enmity, anger, envy and other sins against the love of his fellowman would be guilty of the greatest hypocrisy. That would be an insult of the most flagrant kind to him who instituted this rite in commemoration of his love. Therefore, all who want to receive it should search their hearts, to know whether they truly love the Lord and their neighbours, since otherwise the Communion would be a mockery of Christ. That is the real signi f i cance of the Lord’s Supper and of i ts observance in commemorat ion of him. What, however, has been done to this rite in the course of the centuries? The doctrine has been established that Christ, by virtue of the words he spoke in the act of distributing the bread and the wine, converted the bread into his actual body and the wine into his actual blood, that therefore the bread and the wine had not been mere symbols, but the bread had turned into Christ’s living body and the wine into his living blood, although the transubstantiation was not perceptible to the human senses. It is further asserted that the same transubstantiation takes place even today, whenever a priest pronounces the words of Christ over the bread and the wine. This is perhaps the most preposterous doctrine the human mind has ever been asked to accept. It would mean that on the occasion of the Last Supper in that room in Jerusalem Christ’s person was present 23-fold at the same instant: He was present before the Apostles in body; every morsel of the bread eaten by the 11 disciples was the same living person of Christ, and every sip of the wine they drank was likewise supposed to have been Christ, body and soul, in flesh and blood. It is incomprehensible how human beings could invent such an insane idea. No human and no spirit can multiply himself. Not even God.
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