Capito, writing to his friend Blaurer at the end of 1525, said, ‘Future generations will laugh at the pleasure our age takes in quarrelling when we raise such disturbance about the very signs that should unite us.’ The modern world has in general been as unsympathetic to the eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century as Gibbon was to those of the sixth – ‘the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians’. Yet most of the Christian churches have embodied the orthodox view of the Trinity in their creeds, as Zwingli himself did, accepting the Nicean rejection of the Arian alternative. So, too, public controversy about transubstantiation, the real presence and even the forms of service accompanying mass, eucharist, holy communion, the Last Supper, or the breaking of the bread – every word and phrase with its own undertones – has been singularly muted in the twentieth century, in some measure, no doubt, because organised religion itself has come to a position of defensive alliance against massive public indifference, if not rejection.

Just as convictions of verbal inspiration of the Bible have given way before textual criticism and a proliferation of varying renderings and translations of the Divine Word, so too reliance upon individual proof texts and their hidden meaning has greatly diminished even among theological controversialists.