Personally, moreover, he had never passed through such severe inward struggles as Luther, nor had ever wrestled with such spiritual anguish and distress. The thought of reconciliation with God, and the comforting of conscience by the assurance of His forgiving mercy, were not with Zwingli, as with Luther, the centre and focus of his aspirations and religious interests. He knew not that fervour and intenseness which made Luther grasp at every means for bringing home God's grace to congregations of believers, or to each individual Christian according to his spiritual need. His view, from the very first, extended rather to the totality of religious truth, as revealed by God in Scripture, but sadly disfigured in the creeds of the Church by man's additions and misinterpretations; and he aimed, far more than Luther, at a reconstruction of moral, and especially of communal life, in conformity with what the Word of God appeared to demand. It was easier for him, therefore, to break with the past: critical scruples against tradition did not weigh so heavily on his conscience. His critical faculties, no doubt, were sharpened by the humanistic culture he had acquired. Compared with Luther's peculiar meditative mood, and his half-choleric, half-melancholic temperament, Zwingli evinced, in all his conduct and demeanour, a more clear and sober intelligence, and a far calmer and more easy disposition. His practical policy and conduct was allied with a tendency to judicial severity, in contrast to the free spirit which animated Luther. So rigorous and narrow-minded was his zeal against the toleration of images, that the Wittenberg theologians could not help detecting in him a spirit akin to that of Carlstadt and the other fanatics. In renouncing the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the idea of a sacrifice, Zwingli had rejected altogether the supposition of a Real Presence of Christ's Body at the Sacrament; nay, as he declared later on, he had never truly believed in it. He quoted the words of Christ, 'The flesh profiteth nothing' (St. John vi. 63). He would understand by the Sacrament simply a spiritual feeding of the faithful, who, by the Word of God and His Spirit, are enabled to enjoy in faith the salvation purchased by the death of Christ. He saw no particular necessity for offering this salvation to them by an administration of Christ's Body, which had been given for them, through the visible medium of the bread; nor did he see how by so doing their faith could be strengthened. In Luther's view the practical significance of the Real Presence lay in this, that in this special manner the Christian, who felt his need of salvation, was assured, and became a partaker, of forgiveness and communion with his Saviour. With Zwingli, such a visible communication of the Divine gift of salvation was opposed to his conception of God and the Divine Nature; just as this conception was opposed to that kind of union of