5. It has very rarely been the custom of theologians to measure the importance of orthodox opinions by their effect on the lives and hearts of those who adopt them; nor was this predilection for speculative above practical doctrines ever more evident than in the leading controversy of the sixteenth century, that respecting the Lord's supper. No errors on this point could have had any influence on men's moral conduct, nor indeed much on the general nature of their faith; yet it was selected as the test of heresy; and most, if not all, of those who suffered death upon that charge, whether in England or on the Continent, were convicted of denying the corporal presence in the sense of the Roman church. It had been well if the reformers had learned, by abhorring her persecution, not to practise it in a somewhat less degree upon each other, or by exposing the absurdities of transubstantiation, not to contend for equal nonsense of their own. Four principal theories, to say nothing of subordinate varieties, divided Europe at the accession of Edward VI. about the sacrament of the eucharist. The church of Rome would not depart a single letter from transubstantiation, or the change, at the moment of consecration, of the substances of bread and wine into those of Christ's body and blood; the accidents, in school language, or sensible qualities of the former remaining, or becoming inherent in the new substance. This doctrine does not, as vulgarly supposed, contradict the evidence of our senses; since our senses can report nothing as to the unknown being, which the schoolmen denominated substance, and which alone was the subject of this conversion. But metaphysicians of later ages might enquire whether material substances, abstractedly considered, exist at all, or, if they exist, whether they can have any specific distinction except their sensible qualities. This, perhaps, did not suggest itself in the sixteenth century; but it was strongly objected that the simultaneous existence of a body in many places, which the Romish doctrine implied, was inconceivable, and even contradictory. Luther, partly, as it seems, out of his determination to multiply differences with the church, invented a theory somewhat different, usually called consubstantiation, which was adopted in the confession of Augsburgh, and to which, at least down to the end of the seventeenth century, the divines of that communion were much attached. They imagined the two substances to be united in the sacramental elements, so that they might be termed bread and wine, or the body and blood, with equal propriety.[123] But it must be obvious that there is merely a scholastic distinction between this doctrine and that of Rome; though, when it suited the Lutherans to magnify, rather than dissemble, their deviations from the mother church, it was raised into an important difference. A simpler and more rational explication occurred to Zuingle and