The doctrine that the Mass is a renewal of the Sacrifice of Christ “attained its fullest development in the Middle Ages”; thus Adolf Franz at the conclusion of his work “Die Messe im deutschen Mittelalter.” At the close of the Middle Ages it was the rule to “direct the eyes of the faithful, during the sacrifice on the altar, to the sufferings and death of the Redeemer in all its touching and thrilling reality. At the altar a mystery is enacted; Christ suffers and dies; the priest represents Him, and every act typifies Christ’s Passion; just as He expired on the cross in actual fact, so, mystically, He dies upon the altar.”[383] Though some writers of the period dwell perhaps a little too much on the allegorical sense then so popular in explaining the various acts of the Mass, yet, in their conviction that its character was sacrificial and that it truly re-enacted the death of Christ, they were in perfect agreement with the past. In the explanations of the Mass everyone was reminded of his union with Christ; and our Lord’s sufferings “were brought before the mind of both priest and people”; by this means the “outward ceremonial of the Mass was made a fruitful source of inward edification.” “The abundant mediæval literature on the Mass is a proof both of the needs of the clergy, and of the care displayed by the learned and those in authority, to instruct them. In this matter the 15th century excels the earlier Middle Ages.”[384] The very abuses and the formalism which Franz finds witnessed to in certain mediæval sermons on the Mass, chiefly in the matter of undue stress laid on the “fruits of the Mass,” reveal merely an over-estimation on the part of the individual of his union with Christ, or a too great assurance of obtaining help in bodily and spiritual necessities; of want of fervour or of hope there is not the least trace. It is well worthy of note that Luther, if we may believe what he said in a sermon in 1532, even in his monastic days, did not prize or love the close bond of union established with Christ by the daily sacrifice of the Mass: “Ah, bah, Masses! Let what cannot stand fast fall. You never cared about saying Mass formerly; of that I am sure. I know it from my own case; for I too was a holy monk, and blasphemed my dear Lord miserably for the space of quite fifteen years with my saying of Masses, though I never liked doing so, in spite of being so holy and devout.”[385] In spite of this Luther succeeded in bequeathing to posterity the opinion that it was he who delivered people from that “alienation from God” imposed on the world in the Middle Ages; “who broke down the prohibition of the mediæval Church against anyone concerning himself on his own account with matters of religion”; and who gave back “personal religion” to the Christian.