In compliance with the command of our Lord the adorable Sacrifice of the Altar has been daily renewed in the Church, from the death of our Savior till the present time, and will be perpetuated till time shall be no more.
In the Acts it is said that while Saul and others were ministering (or, as the Greek text expresses it, _sacrificing_) to the Lord, and fasting, the Holy Spirit said to them: "Set apart for Me Saul and Barnabas." St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, frequently alludes to the Sacrifice of the Mass. "We have an altar," he says, ""whereof they cannot eat who serve the tabernacle."(398) The Apostle here plainly declares that the Christian church has its altars as well as the Jewish synagogue. An altar necessarily supposes a sacrifice, without which it has no meaning. The Apostle also observes that the priesthood of the New Law was substituted for that of the Old Law.(399) Now, the principal office of Priests has always been to offer sacrifice. Priest and sacrifice are as closely identified as judge and court.
St. Paul, after David, calls Jesus "a Priest forever, according to the order of Melchisedech."(400) He is named a _Priest_ because He offers sacrifice; a Priest _forever_ because His sacrifice is perpetual; _according to the order of Melchisedech_ because He offers up consecrated bread and wine, which were prefigured by the bread and wine offered by "Melchisedech, the Priest of the Most High God."(401)
Tradition, with its hundred tongues, proclaims the perpetual oblation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, from the time of the Apostles to our own days. If we consult the Fathers of the Church, who have stood like faithful sentinels on the watch-towers of Israel, guarding with a jealous eye the deposit of faith, and who have been the faithful witnesses of their own times and the recorders of the past; if we consult the General Councils, at which were assembled the venerable hierarchy of Christendom, they will all tell us, with one voice, that the Sacrifice of the Mass is the centre of their religion and the acknowledged institution of Jesus Christ.
Another remarkable evidence in favor of the Divine institution of the Mass is furnished by the Nestorians and Eutychians, who separated from the Catholic Church in the fifth century, and who still exist in Persia and in other parts of the East, as well as by the Greek schismatics, who severed their connection with the Church in the ninth century. All these sects, as well as the numerous others scattered over the East, retain to this day the oblation of the Mass in their daily service. As these Christian communities have had no communication with the Catholic Church since the period of their separation from her, they could not, of course, have borrowed from her the doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice; consequently they must have received it from the same source from which the Church derived it, viz., from the Apostles themselves.