an
eminent Protestant scholar[2] "a John the Baptist and Judas in one."

[Sidenote: Sacramentarian schism]

The battle with the humanists was synchronous with the beginnings of a
fierce internecine strife that tore the young evangelical church into
two parts. Though the controversy between Luther and his principal
rival, Ulrich Zwingli, was really caused by a wide difference of
thought on many subjects, it focused its rays, like a burning-glass,
upon one point, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood
of Christ in the {108} eucharist. The explanation of this mystery
evolved in the Middle Ages and adopted by the Lateran Council of 1215,
was the theory, called "transubstantiation," that the substance of the
bread turned into the substance of the body, and the substance of the
wine into the substance of the blood, without the "accidents" of
appearance and taste being altered. Some of the later doctors of the
church, Durand and Occam, opposed this theory, though they proposed a
nearly allied one, called "consubstantiation," that the body and blood
are present with the bread and wine. Wyclif and others, among whom was
the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, proposed the theory now
held in most Protestant churches that the bread and wine are mere
symbols of the body and blood.

At the dawn of the Reformation the matter was brought into prominence
by the Dutch theologian Hoen, from whom the symbolic interpretation
[Sidenote: Symbolism] was adopted first by Carlstadt and then by the
Swiss Reformers Zwingli and Oecolampadius. Luther himself wavered. He
attacked the sacrifice of the mass, in which he saw a "good work"
repugnant to faith, and a great practical abuse, as in the endowed
masses for souls, but he finally decided on the question of the real
presence that the words "this is my body" were "too strong for him" and
meant just what they said.

After a preliminary skirmish with Carlstadt, resulting in the latter's
banishment from Saxony, there was a long and bitter war of pens between
Wittenberg and the Swiss Reformers. Once the battle was joined it was
sure to be acrimonious because of the self-consciousness of each side.
Luther always assumed that he had a monopoly of truth, and that those
who proposed different views were infringing his copyright, so to
speak. "Zwingli, Carlstadt and Oecolampadius would never have known
Christ's gospel rightly," he {109} opined, "had not Luther written of