Because the church of Rome needs to have its adherents believe it is the gatekeeper, the distributor of God's grace, it follows that Rome formulated a concept of the Lord's Supper that is outside the grasp of laymen and can only be experienced via the wizardly incantations of its clergy.
AMEN! Dr. E. That is EXACTLY how I see it too. The only way for the men of the Church to be raised up is to bring Jesus down. This fully matches, and is related to, their salvation model (as you point out). Jesus must be reduced to having actually "accomplished" little on the cross, only that man now has a "chance" to be saved by the men of the Church through the sacraments. Gratitude and honor go to men, not God. As you have said before, it is a perfect expression of the human instinct.
Thanks for posting the Westminster Confession on this. It says it all.
I think the first Christians, that is St. Paul's Peeps gathered around the Eucharist. It was central to their ecclesiology. His congregations would not have considered a worship existence outside of the centrality of the Eucharist. I think you can say you think they were wrong, but I don't think you can deny that the Eucharist was at the center of their understanding of what it meant to be church.
I also think that when you abandon the sacrament as so many churches have, you cut the bond that Christ left us, and as St. Paul reminds us, until such time as he returns.
The Last Supper which became the Lord's Supper was not administered or bequeathed to us meaninglessly. The Eucharist is the sacrificed Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. As C.S. Lewis said, "He said Take and Eat, not take and understand."
The most significant theological battle of the Reformation was the understanding of the Eucharist, and because the Reformers could not come to an understanding, unity was broken before it even began.
Calvin said of Zwingli as regards his understanding of it being a purely spiritual memorial, that he tore down the bad at the expense of building up the good. Luther refused to shake Zwingli's hand when he extended it to him at Marlburg (sp?). Luther didn't consider Zwingli a Christian, which I think was high-handed of him, but you can see from this how important it was, and in many churches it's now been completely abandoned. It's not a good idea to not take Christ at His Word regardless of however one chooses to decipher it all.
I've read and heard people refer to the Last Supper and the administration of the Eucharist as a command, but I don't see it that way at all.
He gifted us the Eucharist as this Mystical bond, something we could take in our hands to remind us that 'lo I'm with you until the consummation of the ages.'
To depart from the understanding of the first Christians and St. Paul as regards the centrality of the Eucharist we do at our own peril, and when done will and has taken an enormous ecclesial toll.