X

After the return to England of King Charles II. in 1660 a conference, known as the Savoy Conference, was held in 1661 between twelve bishops and twelve representatives of the Presbyterians, each side being assisted by nine other divines. A paper of “exceptions” against the Book of Common Prayer was drawn up and presented by the Presbyterian representatives. Among the requests contained in this paper, it was asked that the rubric concerning ornaments, which “seemeth to bring back the cope, albe, etc., and other vestments forbidden by the Common Prayer Book, 5 and 6 Edw. VI.,” might be “wholly left out”; that the words in the Prayer of Humble Access, “that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed through His most precious blood,” might be altered to “that our sinful souls and bodies may be cleansed through His precious body and blood,” for the reason that they “seem to give a greater efficacy to the blood than to the body of Christ”; that it might “suffice to speak” the words of administration “to divers jointly,” and that these words might be “the words of our Saviour as near as may be”; that kneeling at the reception of Communion might be optional as “being not that gesture which the Apostles used, though Christ was personally present amongst them, nor that which was used in the purest and primitive times of the Church”; and that the “declaration on kneeling,” which the Council had added to the Prayer Book of 1552, which was omitted in the Prayer Book of 1559, might be “restored for the vindicating of our Church in the matter of kneeling at the Sacrament (though the gesture be left indifferent)”. In the reply of the bishops to these “exceptions,” it was stated that they thought it “fit that the rubric” concerning ornaments “continue as it is”; that the words in the Prayer of Humble Access “can no more be said” to “give greater efficacy to the blood than to the body of Christ than when our Lord saith, ‘This is My blood which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins,’ etc., and saith not so explicitly of the body”; and on kneeling at the reception of Communion and on the words of administration—

“The posture of kneeling best suits at the Communion as the most convenient, and so most decent for us, when we are to receive as it were from God’s hand the greatest of the seals of the kingdom of heaven. He that thinks he may do this sitting, let him remember the prophet Malachi. Offer this to the prince, to receive his seal from his own hand sitting, see if he will accept of it. When the Church did stand at her prayers, the manner of receiving was more adorantium (St. Augustine, Ps. xcviii.; Cyril, Catech. Mystag. 5) rather more than at prayers, since standing at prayer hath been generally left and kneeling used instead of that (as the Church may vary in such indifferent things). Now to stand at Communion when we kneel at prayers were not decent, much less to sit, which was never the use of the best times.”

“It is most requisite that the minister deliver the bread and wine into every particular communicant’s hand, and repeat the words in the singular number, for so much as it is the propriety of Sacraments to make particular obsignation to each believer, and it is our visible profession that by the grace of God Christ tasted death for every man.”

“Concerning kneeling at the Sacrament we have given account already; only thus much we add, that we conceive it an error to say that the Scripture affirms the Apostles to have received not kneeling. The posture of the paschal supper we know; but the institution of the holy Sacrament was after supper, and what posture was then used the Scripture is silent. The rubric at the end of the 1 Ed. C. that leaves kneeling, crossing, etc., indifferent is meant only at such times as they are not prescribed and required. But at the Eucharist kneeling is expressly required in the rubric following.”

“This rubric [that is the ‘declaration on kneeling’] is not in the Liturgy of Queen Elizabeth, nor confirmed by law; nor is there any great need of restoring it, the world being now in more danger of profanation than of idolatry. Besides the sense of it is declared sufficiently in the twenty-eighth Article of the Church of England.”

In spite of this assertion of the bishops that there was not “any great need of restoring” the “declaration on kneeling,” it was added, with one alteration of great significance, at the end of the Order of Holy Communion in the revised Prayer Book, which was drawn up by Convocation in 1661, and given the sanction of the State by the Act of Uniformity of 1662. The alteration made was by the substitution of the words “corporal presence” for the phrase “real and essential presence”. It has already been pointed out that the declaration in the form adopted in 1552 was capable of an interpretation not inconsistent with the doctrine affirmed by the Council of Trent if the stress was laid on the word “natural,” but that it was not likely to have been drawn up by any who believed in the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated elements. In considering its meaning in the altered form in which it appeared in the Prayer Book of 1662, it is necessary to ask what reasons led the bishops to assent to the addition of the declaration after replying to the Presbyterian divines that it was unnecessary, and with what object the alteration of “real and essential presence” to “corporal presence” was made. On the one hand, it has been maintained that the alteration was made because by the time of the revision of the Prayer Book of 1662 the phrase “real and essential presence” had come to be used in the sense of a presence of Christ spiritually received by those who communicated worthily apart from any presence in the consecrated elements; and that the declaration was therefore altered simply so as to avoid condemning the assertion of such a presence in the communicants. On the other hand, both general probability and an express testimony of Bishop Burnet in his History of the Reformation of the Church of England have been thought to indicate that the alteration was made for the purpose of limiting the condemnation in the declaration to such a gross and carnal presence as was contrary to the teaching of the mediæval theologians and the Tridentine divines. Bishop Burnet’s statement is as follows:—

“We know who was the author of that change, and who pretended that a corporal presence signified such a presence as a body naturally has, which the assertors of Transubstantiation itself do not, and cannot pretend is in this case; where they say the body is not present corporally but spiritually, or as a spirit is present. And he who had the chief hand in procuring this alteration had a very extraordinary subtlety, by which he reconciled the opinion of a real presence in the Sacrament with the last words of the rubric, ‘That the natural body and blood of Christ were in heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ’s natural body to be at one time in more places than one’. It was thus: a body is in a place, if there is no intermediate body but a vacuum between it and the place; and he thought that by the virtue of the words of consecration there was a cylinder of a vacuum made between the elements and Christ’s body in heaven; so that, no body being between, it was both in heaven and in the elements.”

In the margin of this passage, opposite the words “the author of that change,” the initials “D. P. G.” occur, and have with much probability been supposed to denote Dr. Peter Gunning, one of the revisers of the Prayer Book, who was afterwards Bishop of Ely. Whatever the value of the “very extraordinary subtlety” which Burnet ascribes to him, Burnet’s testimony that he was responsible for the alteration in the declaration, that he believed that the body of Christ “was both in heaven and in the elements,” and that he understood the phrase “corporal presence” as condemned in the declaration to signify such a natural manner of presence as is rejected by “the assertors of Transubstantiation,” is of very high importance. It must be added that Burnet in his History of My Own Times writes:—

“One important addition was made, chiefly by Gauden’s means. He pressed that a declaration explaining the reasons of their kneeling at the Sacrament, which had been in King Edward’s Liturgy but was left out in Queen Elizabeth’s time, should be again set where it had once been. The Papists were highly offended when they saw such an express declaration made against the real presence, and the Duke told me that, when he asked Sheldon how they came to declare against a doctrine which he had been instructed was the doctrine of the Church, Sheldon answered, Ask Gauden about it, who is a bishop of your own making; for the king had ordered his promotion for the service which he had done.”

Putting all things together, it is most probable that at the time of the revision of the Prayer Book of 1662 there were among the revises those who regarded the declaration as condemnatory of the doctrine that the consecrated Sacrament is the body and blood of Christ, and also those who saw that it was not inconsistent with such ways of asserting that the body and blood of Christ are spiritually present in the consecrated elements as the mediæval theologians and the Tridentine divines had affirmed.

Besides the addition of the declaration on kneeling in its altered form, no change bearing on the doctrine of the Eucharist was made in the Prayer Book of 1662. Moreover, the Articles of Religion remained unaltered.