So long as faith in the mystery of the Lord's Supper as a holy, nay the holiest, highest truth, governed man, so long was his governing principle the imagination. All criteria of reality and unreality, of unreason and reason, had disappeared: anything whatever that could be imagined passed for real possibility. Religion hallowed every contradiction of reason, of the nature of things. Do not ridicule the absurd questions of the Schoolmen! They were necessary consequences of faith. That which is only a matter of feeling had to be made a matter of reason, that which contradicts the understanding had to be made not to contradict it. This was the fundamental contradiction of Scholasticism, whence all other contradictions followed of course. And it is of no particular importance whether I believe the Protestant or the Catholic doctrine of the Lord's Supper. The sole distinction is, that in Protestantism it is only on the tongue, in the act of partaking, that flesh and blood are united in a thoroughly miraculous manner with bread and wine; [190] while in Catholicism, it is before the act of partaking, by the power of the priest,--who however here acts only in the name of the Almighty,--that bread and wine are really transmuted into flesh and blood. The Protestant prudently avoids a definite explanation; he does not lay himself open, like the pious, uncritical simplicity of Catholicism, whose God, as an external object, can be devoured by a mouse: he shuts up his God within himself, where he can no more be torn from him, and thus secures him as well from the power of accident as from that of ridicule; yet, notwithstanding this, he just as much as the Catholic consumes real flesh and blood in the bread and wine. Slight indeed was the difference at first between Protestants and Catholics in the doctrine of the Lord's Supper! Thus at Anspach there arose a controversy on the question--"whether the body of Christ enters the stomach, and is digested like other food?" [191]