In this respect, according to Indian scholar J. Gerrish has argued that Marburg was in essence a debate about the nature of religious symbols, and the relation of the symbolic and the real. It is debatable whether Zwingli completely denied the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but his tendency, and that of his followers, was to reduce the bread and wine to mere symbols. Zwingli, by contrast, repeatedly quoted Jesus’ statement that “the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63), and insisted that the Supper could not be taken as a literal eating and drinking of Christ’s body and blood. Emphasizing the words of institution (“This is My Body”), Luther insisted that, though the elements of bread and wine were signs, they were signs that contained and communicated what they signified. Edward Schillebeeckx has noted that differences of eucharistic doctrine are related to different conceptions of reality, an insight abundantly confirmed by the events at Marburg. Yet the cultural significance of the Marburg Colloquy went beyond the splintering of the young Reformation. The failure of the Reformation to form a unified international movement shaped the course of early modern social, political, and, of course, ecclesiastical history. If Marburg had been nothing more than a rupture between Luther and Zwingli, it would have deserved at least honorable mention as a turning point in European history. At the Colloquy of Marburg in October 1529, the ecumenical efforts of the early Reformers came to an impasse from which Protestantism has never fully recovered. The Reformers, after all, split largely over the question of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The influence of sacramental theology on the course of European history was most directly apparent during the Reformation. The relation between Hume’s treatment of miracles and his understanding of sacramental theology is a question worth investigating. Hume’s skepticism about miracles (and the similar sentiments of his contemporaries) in turn helped launch the movement in biblical studies dedicated to discovering naturalistic explanations for the miracles recorded in the Gospels-a movement justly mocked by Albert Schweitzer. What, for example, are we to make of the fact that David Hume began his treatise on miracles with a discussion of Scottish eucharistic doctrine? In the course of that treatise, Hume claimed that miracles were impossible to prove-a maxim he applied even to the miracles of Jesus. The notion that such a history would be worth writing might seem quaint in our day, but there are hints that the enterprise would be a fruitful one. A history of the relation of sacramental theology and practice to Western intellectual and cultural history has yet to be written.