TO-DAY I propose to speak about the Most Holy Eucharist. The Sacrifice of the Mass is the central doctrine of our religion. In it, as we Catholics firmly believe, there is renewed on the Christian altar the sacrifice of Calvary, and by God's power, at the words spoken by the priest, the bread and wine is changed into the very Body and Blood of our Lord. The word used by the Church to express this change of substance is Transubstantiation; and in the mystery of our Faith we hold that we have, under the outward appearances of bread and wine, the true and real presence of our Blessed Lord. As truly and as really as our Saviour, God and man, walked this earth in the days of His pilgrimage, blessing the sick, curing diseases at His touch, and teaching the way of life to the multitudes, so do we firmly believe and hold, that He is amongst us to-day under the Eucharistic forms, ready to help and encourage the weary, to console the afflicted, to bring the assurance of His pardon to the penitent. I am not proving this. I am only stating it, as the firm faith we hold as Catholics. Moreover, not only is the Mass our Christian Sacrifice; but in the Holy Eucharist we have the food of our souls and the proper sustenance of our spiritual life in this world. We hold and truly believe that in Holy Communion we receive really and in fact, and not in any mere figurative sense, our Blessed Lord Himself--Body, Soul and Divinity. This is our faith to-day as it was the unbroken belief of the Catholic Church from the earliest tunes. All round about us now we see other religious bodies, claiming to be Christian which do not share our teaching, and it is good to try and understand how this has come about. The key to the explanation lies in the teaching of Reformation principles in the sixteenth century. When Henry VIII. died, on January 25, 1547, for the first time in history the king had made himself supreme not only in affairs of State but in religion. Many minor changes, besides the destruction of the religious life and the suppression of the monasteries, naturally marked and followed upon the rejection of the Catholic principle of papal authority and the assumption by the king of Supreme Headship over the Church in England. The hopes, entertained by the German Reformers of being able to obtain the adherence of the king and people of England to their reformed doctrines, were disappointed during Henry's life. On his death their hopes revived. Edward VI., a boy, only nine years of age, succeeded to the throne, and the supreme power in the State was seized by those whose sympathies were known to be on the side of the German Reformation. The Lord Protector, Somerset, became the highest authority in the State, and Archbishop Cranmer, for years a Lutheran at heart, was the chief ecclesiastic in the realm.