While the Catholics were all united, the Protestants were shamefully divided upon the most trivial points of discipline, or upon abstruse questions in philosophy above the reach of mortal minds.  It was as true then, as in the days of our Saviour, that “the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.”  Henry IV., of France, who had not then embraced the Catholic faith, was anxious to unite the two great parties of Lutherans and Calvinists, who were as hostile to each other as they were to the Catholics.  He sent an ambassador to Germany to urge their union.  He entreated them to call a general synod, suggesting, that as they differed only on the single point of the Lord’s Supper, it would be easy for them to form some basis of fraternal and harmonious action.

The Catholic church received the doctrine, so called, of transubstantiation; that is, the bread and wine, used in the Lord’s Supper, is converted into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, that it is no longer bread and wine, but real flesh and blood; and none the less so, because it does not appear such to our senses.  Luther renounced the doctrine of transubstantiation, and adopted, in its stead, what he called consubstantiation; that is, that after the consecration of the elements, the body and blood of Christ are substantially present with (cum et sub,) with and under, the substance of the bread and wine.  Calvin taught that the bread and wine represented the real body and blood of Christ, and that the body and blood were spiritually present in the sacrament.  It is a deplorable exhibition of the weakness of good men, that the Lutherans and the Calvinists should have wasted their energies in contending together upon such a point.  But we moderns have no right to boast.  Precisely the same spirit is manifested now, and denominations differ and strive together upon questions which the human mind can never settle.  The spirit which then animated the two parties may be inferred from the reply of the Lutherans.

“The partisans of Calvin,” they wrote, “have accumulated such numberless errors in regard to the person of Christ, the communication of His merits and the dignity of human nature; have given such forced explanations of the Scriptures, and adopted so many blasphemies, that the question of the Lord’s Supper, far from being the principal, has become the least point of difference.  An outward union, merely for worldly purposes, in which each party is suffered to maintain its peculiar tenets, can neither be agreeable to God nor useful to the Church.  These considerations induced us to insert into the formulary of concord a condemnation of the Calvinistical errors; and to declare our public decision that false principles should not be covered with the semblance of exterior union, and tolerated under pretense of the right of private judgment, but that all should submit to the Word of God, as the only rule to which their faith and instructions should be conformable.”