The carnal doctrine of the sacraments which they are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants.  It was the very essence of Christianity itself.  Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be.  But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all.  He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things.  In Him thus wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of mankind.  He came to redeem man; and, therefore, he took a human body, and he kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it could be applied to its marvellous purpose.  He died, and then appeared what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the limitations of sin.  The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible that it should see corruption.  It was real, for the disciples were allowed to feel and handle it.  He ate and drank with them to assure their senses.  But space had no power over it, nor any of the material obstacles which limit an ordinary power.  He willed and his body obeyed.  He was here, He was there.  He was visible, He was invisible.  He was in the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then He was gone, whither who could tell?  At last He passed away to heaven; but while in heaven, He was still on earth.  His body became the body of His Church on earth, not in metaphor, but in fact.  His very material body, in which and by which the faithful would be saved.  His flesh and blood were thenceforth to be their food.  They were to eat it as they would eat ordinary meat.  They were to take it into their system, a pure material substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to itself.  As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become their own real body.  Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death, but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had no power.  Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision—­but a new creature—­this new creature, which the child first put on in baptism, being born again into Christ of water and the spirit.  In the Eucharist he was fed and sustained and going on from strength to strength, and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God through the gate of