- 48 - No one - not even God - can be present as a personality in more than one place at the same time. No one can transform into something else and yet remain what he is. Christ could not sit before his Apostles as a man while they were partaking of him in the shape of bread and wine. Christ could not eat himself - for as Christ also partook of the bread of which he gave to his disciples, he was, according to your doctrine, eating himself. I can find no words in your language to adequately brand this doctrine as the height of human delusion. Furthermore, you teach that the same transubstantiation is effected daily by your priests, and that when they pronounce the words ‘This is my body; this is my blood’ every crumb of the bread and every drop of the wine is changed into the person of Christ. • With this, your priests presume to a power t h a t n o t e v e n G o d H i m s e l f p o s s e s s e s , because even He cannot bring about what is i n h e r e n t l y impossible. You may protest all you will that this is an unfathomable mystery; you may call it the mystery of the faith. The fact remains that this doctrine is untrue. The word ‘mystery’ can be used to cover any human fallacy. Words are always available, even when they convey no sense. There is one thing in connection with this doctrine at which I never cease to wonder. You all read the Bible; has it never occurred to you that in the entire New Testament there is not a shred of evidence to support this preposterous view? If, at the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine had been changed into the true Christ, the Apostles certainly would never have wearied of pointing out this incomprehensible event. This miracle of miracles would have been recorded minutely in the gospels, in addition to which the Apostles would have referred to this commemorative supper again and again in their epistles to the early Christians. But you cannot find one single reference to it. The Apostle John, who reclined beside his master during the supper and who was the first to receive a morsel of the consecrated bread, says nothing whatever in his gospel of Christ’s distribution of the bread and wine. He relates that Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. He relates his betrayal by Judas. Is it reasonable that he should have said nothing of the most mysterious and mightiest event in the life of Jesus? The Apostles make no mention of the Lord’s Supper in their epistles. In the Acts of the Apostles, it is recorded only that the early Christians continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in prayer. Here, then, the observance of the supper is described as ‘breaking of bread’, and not as that which you have made out of it today. The bread was broken as a symbol of the death of Christ and of the love that they bore for one another and for him. It was bread that they broke and ate, but while doing so, their thoughts and their prayers were directed to him who had promised them: ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ Partaking of the bread and wine was to them a sacred symbol of their spiritual fellowship with the Redeemer. The Apostle Paul, who wrote a great number of epistles to the congregations, is the only one to refer to the Lord’s Supper, in his first letter to the Corinthians, but not even he would have mentioned it,
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