IX

Ralph Cudworth was born at Aller in Somerset in 1617. He was a member of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and became Fellow in 1639. He was appointed Master of Clare Hall in 1645 by the Parliamentary Visitors, who had ejected Dr. Paske from that office. In the same year he was made Regius Professor of Hebrew. In 1654 he was elected Master of Christ’s College. He was appointed to the benefice of North Cadbury in Somerset in 1650, and to that of Ashwell in Hertfordshire in 1662; but it is not known whether he ever resided at either place. He died in 1688. He was a leader of the group of philosophical divines known as the “Cambridge Platonists”. In 1642, when he was only twenty-five, he published a short book of great learning entitled A Discourse Concerning the True Nature of the Lord’s Supper. The main thought of the book is that “all great errors have ever been intermingled with some truth”; that falsehood is pure nonentity, and could not subsist alone by itself”; and that the “grand error of the papists concerning the Lord’s Supper being a sacrifice” is no exception to this rule, but “perhaps at first did rise by degeneration from a primitive truth, whereof the very obliquity of this error yet may bear some dark and obscure intimation”. From this standpoint he traces out the custom of feasting on things sacrificed among Jews and heathens; and deduces the conclusions that the Eucharist is not a sacrifice but a feast upon the one true sacrifice once offered by Christ for us, and a federal rite between God and us.

“The right notion of that Christian feast called the Lord’s Supper, in which we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ that was once offered up to God for us, is to be derived, if I mistake not, from analogy to that ancient rite among the Jews of feasting upon things sacrificed and eating of those things which they had offered up to God.”

“Having thus shown that both amongst the Jews under the law and the Gentiles in their pagan worship (for paganism is nothing but Judaism degenerate) it was ever a solemn rite to join feasting with sacrifice, and to eat of those things which had been offered up, the very concinnity and harmony of the thing itself leads me to conceive that that Christian feast under the Gospel called the Lord’s Supper is the very same thing, and bears the same notion, in respect of the true Christian sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, that those did to the Jewish and heathenish sacrifices; and so is epulum sacrificiale, a sacrificial feast, I mean, a feast upon sacrifice, or epulum ex oblatis, a feast upon things offered up to God. Only this difference arising in the parallel, that because those legal sacrifices were but types and shadows of the true Christian sacrifice, they were often repeated and renewed as well as the feasts which were made upon them; but now, the true Christian sacrifice being come and offered up once for all, never to be repeated, we have therefore no more typical sacrifices left amongst us, but only the feasts upon the one true sacrifice still symbolically continued and often repeated in reference to that one great sacrifice, which is always as present in God’s sight and efficacious as if it were but now offered up for us.”