In the Bern Disputation of 1528, the fourth thesis said "it cannot be proved from the Scripture that the Body and Blood of Christ are substantially and corporeally received in the Eucharist,"[38] and the statement became a distinctive watchword of the early Swiss Reformation. This thesis, a negative one, was perhaps the earliest official statement of a bold attempt to get rid of the priestly miracle in the Mass, which was the strongest theoretical and practical obstacle to the acceptance of the fundamental Protestant thought of the spiritual priesthood of all believers. The question had been seriously exercising the attention of all the leading theologians of the Reformation, and this very trenchant way of dismissing it had suggested itself simultaneously to theologians in the Low Countries, in the district of the Upper Rhine, and in many of the imperial cities. It had been proclaimed in all its naked simplicity by Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt, the theologian of the German democracy; but it was Zwingli who worked at the subject carefully, and who had produced a reasonable if somewhat defective theory based on a rather shallow exegesis, in which the words of our Lord, "This _is_ My Body," were declared to mean nothing but "This _signifies_ My Body." Luther, always disposed to think harshly of anything that came from Carlstadt, inclined to exaggerate his influence with the German Protestant democracy, believing with his whole heart that in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper the elements Bread and Wine were more than the bare signs of the Body and Blood of the Lord, was vehemently moved to find such views concerning a central doctrine of Christianity spreading through his beloved Germany. He never paused to ask whether the opinions he saw adopted with eagerness in most of the imperial cities were really different from those of Carlstadt (for that is one of the sad facts in this deplorable controversy). He simply denounced them, and stormed against Zwingli, whose name was spread abroad as their author and propagator. Nürnberg was almost the only great city that remained faithful to him. It was the only city also which was governed by the ancient patriciate, and in which the democracy had little or no power. When van Hoen and Karl Stadt in the Netherlands, Hedio at Mainz, Conrad Sam at Ulm, when the preachers of Augsburg, Strassburg, Frankfurt, Reutlingen, and other cities accepted and taught Zwingli's doctrine of the Eucharist, Luther and his immediate circle saw a great deal more than a simple division in doctrine. It was something more than the meaning of the Holy Supper or the exegesis of a difficult text which rent Protestantism in two, and made Luther and Zwingli appear as the leaders of opposing parties in a movement where union was a supreme necessity after the decision at Speyer in 1529. The theological question was complicated by social and political ideas, which, if not