IV

During the reign of James II. many pamphlets were published in England attacking the Church of Rome. Some of these were wholly or partly directed against the doctrines ascribed to the Church of Rome in regard to the Eucharist. Instances may be seen in those entitled A Discourse Concerning the Adoration of the Host as it is Taught and Practised in the Church of Rome, published in 1685; A Discourse against Transubstantiation, published in 1685; and The Necessity of Reformation with Respect to the Errors and Corruptions of the Church of Rome, in two parts, both published in 1686. The writers of these pamphlets reject Transubstantiation; the definition of the Council of Trent that the Eucharist is a “proper sacrifice”; and the view, supposed to be accepted by some Roman Catholics, that in the Mass Christ died anew. Their positive opinions are less clearly stated. It is probable that they believed in a special degree of spiritual communion with our Lord which the reception of the Sacrament made possible for those who partook of it worthily; and held that the Eucharist was in some sense a setting forth of the sacrifice of the death of Christ. An illustration of the extent to which the teaching of the Church of Rome was misunderstood by such writers, possibly not without excuse from some statements made by Roman Catholics not well acquainted with theology, may be seen in the following quotation:—

“The Church of England doth not quarrel at the name of sacrifice; she not only grants, but asserts, that the Eucharist is a commemorative and representative sacrifice. And this was the meaning of the ancient fathers, who frequently call it a remembrance or commemoration, a resemblance or representation, of the sacrifice which Christ once offered upon the cross. And this is as much as Cassander seems to mean by it. But this will not satisfy the present Church of Rome; but Christ (as they will have it) is truly and properly sacrificed; that is, according to their own notion of a sacrifice, Christ is truly and properly put to death as oft as the priest says Mass. For in a true sacrifice (as Bellarmine tells us) the thing sacrificed must be destroyed; and, if it be a thing that hath life, it must be killed. And so indeed many of the Romanists roundly assert that Christ every day is by the Mass-priest.”

In 1687 and 1688 respectively two treatises entitled Two Discourses concerning the Adoration of our Saviour in the Eucharist and A Compendious Discourse of the Eucharist were issued from the private printing press of Obadiah Walker, the Master of University College, Oxford, who had long been suspected of being a Roman Catholic, and had since 1686 arranged for the saying of Mass after the Roman Catholic rite at University College. They were the work of Abraham Woodhead, who had been a Fellow of University College, had been ejected from his Fellowship in 1648, had become a Roman Catholic by 1654, had been re-instated in his Fellowship in 1660, who died in 1678. These treatises contain careful and moderate statements of the ordinary theology of the Church of Rome in regard to the Eucharist. In defending Transubstantiation, and the adoration of our Lord in the Sacrament, and the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the writer takes pains to repudiate gross ideas of a presence of a carnal kind; to explain that by adoration he means “adoration of Christ’s body as present with the symbols before communicating,” not simply “adoration of Christ’s body or of Christ as in heaven in the act of communicating”; and to emphasise that the sacrifice in the Eucharist does not involve any repetition of the sacrifice of the cross or of Christ’s death. The publication of these two treatises elicited a number of replies. One of the most noteworthy was the answer to the first of the two treatises entitled A Discourse of the Holy Eucharist in the Two Great Points of the Real Presence and the Adoration of the Host, which was published anonymously in 1687 but ascribed to William Wake, who afterwards became Dean of Exeter in 1701, Bishop of Lincoln in 1705, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1716. The opinion maintained in this work appears to be a form of Receptionism. The following quotations are representative of the teaching contained in it:—

“Whilst we thus oppose the errors of some by asserting the continuance of the natural substance of the elements of bread and wine in this Holy Eucharist, let not any one think that we would therefore set up the mistakes of others, as if this Holy Sacrament were nothing more than a mere rite and ceremony, a bare commemoration only of Christ’s death and passion. Our Church indeed teaches us to believe that the bread and wine continue still in their true and natural substance, but it teaches us also that it is the body and blood of Christ which every faithful soul receives in that Holy Supper, spiritually indeed and after a heavenly manner, but yet most truly and really too. The primitive fathers, of whom we have before spoken, sufficiently assure us that they were strangers to that corporeal change that is now pretended; but for this divine and mystical, they have openly enough declared for it. Nor are we therefore afraid to confess a change, and that a very great one too, made in this Holy Sacrament. The bread and the wine which we here consecrate ought not to be given or received by any one in this mystery as common ordinary food. Those holy elements which the prayers of the Church have sanctified, and the divine words of our Blessed Saviour applied to them, though not transubstantiated, yet certainly separated to a holy use and signification, ought to be regarded with a very just honour by us; and, whilst we worship Him whose death we herein commemorate, and of whose grace we expect to be made partakers by it, we ought certainly to pay no little regard to the types and figures by which He has chosen to represent the one and convey to us the other. Thus therefore we think we shall best divide our piety if we adore our Redeemer in heaven, yet omit nothing that may testify our just esteem of His Holy Sacrament on earth, nor suffer the most zealous votary for this new opinion to exceed us in our care and reverence of approaching to His Holy Table. We acknowledge Him to be no less really present, though after another manner than they, nor do we less expect to communicate of His body and blood with our souls than they who think they take Him carnally into their mouths.”

“To state the notion of the real presence as acknowledged by the Church of England. I must observe, first, that our Church utterly denies our Saviour’s body to be so really present in the Blessed Sacrament as either to leave heaven or to exist in several places at the same time.… Secondly, that we deny that in the sacred elements which we receive there is any other substance than that of bread and wine distributed to the communicants, which alone they take into their mouths and press with their teeth. In short, ‘all which the doctrine of our Church implies by this phrase is only a real presence of Christ’s invisible power and grace so in and with the elements as by the faithful receiving of them to convey spiritual and real effects to the souls of men. As the bodies assumed by angels might be called their bodies while they assumed them, or rather, as the Church is the body of Christ because of His Spirit quickening and enlivening the souls of believers, so the bread and wine after consecration are the real but the spiritual and mystical body of Christ.’ Thus has that learned man, to whom T. G. first made this objection, stated the notion of the real presence professed by us; and that this is indeed the true doctrine of the Church of England in this matter is evident not only from the plain words of our twenty-eighth Article and of our Church Catechism, but also from the whole tenor of that Office which we use in the Celebration of it.… I will not deny but that some men may possibly have advanced their own private notions beyond what is here said; but this, I am sure, is all that our Church warrants, or that we are therefore concerned to defend. And, if there be any who, as our author here expresses it, do believe Christ’s natural body to be, as in heaven, so in the Holy Sacrament, they may please to consider how this can be reconciled with the rubric of our Church, ‘That the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ are 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’.”

“I know but one objection more that is, or can be, offered against what I have said, and, which having answered, I shall close this point, ‘For, if this be all the Church of England understands when it speaks of a real presence, namely, a real sacramental presence of Christ’s body and blood in the holy signs, and a real spiritual presence in the inward Communion of them to the soul of every worthy receiver, will not this precipitate us into downright Zwinglianism, and render us after all our pretences as very Sacramentaries as they are?’ Indeed, I am not able directly to say whether it will or no, because I find the opinion of Zwinglius very variously represented as to this matter. But yet, first, if by Zwinglianism he means that which is more properly Socinianism, namely, a mere commemoration of Christ’s death, and a thanksgiving to God for it, it is evident it does not, forasmuch as we positively confess that in this Holy Sacrament there is a real and spiritual grace communicated to us, even all the benefits of that death and passion which we there set forth. And this, or something like it, I find sometimes to have been maintained by Zwinglius. But now, secondly, if by Zwinglianism he understands such a real presence as denies only the co-existence of Christ’s natural body now in heaven at the same time in this Holy Sacrament, but denies nothing of that real and spiritual Communion of it we have before mentioned, this is indeed our doctrine, nor shall we be ashamed to own it for any ill names he is able to put upon it.… I shall close up this discourse of the real presence acknowledged by us in this Holy Sacrament with a plain familiar example, and which may serve at once both to illustrate and confirm the propriety of it. A father makes his last will, and by it bequeaths his estate and all the profits of it to his child. He delivers it into the hands of his son, and bids him take there his house and his lands, which by this his last will he delivers to him. The son in this case receives nothing but a roll of parchment with a seal tied to it from his father; but yet by virtue of this parchment he is entituled to his estate performing the conditions of his will and to all the benefits and advantages of it; and in that deed he truly and effectually received the very house and lands that were thereby conveyed to him. Our Saviour Christ in like manner, being now about to leave the world, gives this Holy Sacrament as His final bequest to us; in it He conveys to us a right to His body and blood, and to all the spiritual blessings and graces that proceed from them. So that as often as we receive this Holy Eucharist as we ought to do, we receive indeed nothing but a little bread and wine into our hands, but by the blessing and promise of Christ we by that bread and wine as really and truly become partakers of Christ’s body and blood as the son by the will of his father was made inheritor of his estate; nor is it any more necessary for this that Christ’s body should come down from heaven, or the outward elements which we receive be substantially turned into it than it is necessary in that other case that the very houses and lands should be given into the hands of the son to make a real delivery or conveyance of them, or the will of the father be truly and properly changed into the very nature and substance of them.”

A further illustration of the Eucharistic doctrine held by Archbishop Wake may be seen in his The Principles of the Christian Religion Explained in a Brief Commentary upon the Church Catechism, which he wrote when a parish priest for the use of his parish, and republished when he was Bishop of Lincoln for the benefit of the clergy of his diocese. It contains the following passages:—

“Q. Can Christ any more suffer or die now since His rising from the dead?

“A. No, St. Paul expressly tells us that He can not.…

“Q. How then do those of the Church of Rome say that He is again offered for us as a true and proper sacrifice in this Holy Sacrament?

“A. This Sacrament is not a renewal or repetition of Christ’s sacrifice, but only a solemn memorial and exhibition of it. To talk of an expiatory sacrifice for sin without suffering is not only contrary to Scripture but is in the nature of the thing itself absurd and unreasonable, every sacrifice being put in the place of the person for whom it is offered, and to be treated so as that person in rigour ought to have been, had not God admitted of a sacrifice in his stead. And therefore the Apostle from hence concludes that Christ could not be more than once offered because He could but once suffer. But to suppose that Christ in His present glorified state can suffer is such a contradiction to all the principles of our religion that the papists themselves are ashamed to assert it.

“Q. What do you think of the sacrifice, as they call it, of the Mass?

“A. We do not deny but that in a large sense this Sacrament may be called a sacrifice, as the bread and wine may be called the body and blood of Christ. But that this Sacrament should be a true and proper sacrifice, as they define the sacrifice of the Mass to be, it is altogether false and impious to assert.

“Q. What was then the design of our Saviour in this institution?

“A. To leave to His Church a perpetual, solemn, and sacred memorial of His death for us: that as often as we come to the Lord’s Table and there join in the Celebration of this Holy Sacrament, we might be moved by what is there done at once both to call to our remembrance all the passages of His passion (to consider Him as there set forth crucified before our eyes) and to meditate upon the love of Christ thus dying for us, and upon the mighty benefits and advantages which have accrued to us thereby, and have our hearts affected after a suitable manner towards Him.”

“Q. Are the body and blood of Christ really distributed to every communicant in this Sacrament?

“A. No, they are not; for then every communicant, whether prepared or not for it, would alike receive Christ’s body and blood there. That which is given by the priest to the communicant is as to its nature the same after consecration that it was before, namely, bread and wine, only altered as to its use and signification.

“Q. If the body and blood of Christ be not really given and distributed by the priest, how can they be verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful communicant?

“A. That which is given by the priest is as to its substance bread and wine; as to its sacramental nature and signification it is the figure or representation of Christ’s body and blood, which was broken and shed for us. The very body and blood of Christ as yet it is not. But, being with faith and piety received by the communicant, it becomes to him by the blessing of God and the grace of the Holy Spirit the very body and blood of Christ.…

“Q. How does the bread and wine become to the faithful and worthy communicant the very body and blood of Christ?

“A. As it entitles him to a part in the sacrifice of His death, and to the benefits thereby procured to all His faithful and obedient servants.

“Q. How does every such communicant take and receive the body and blood of Christ in this Sacrament?

“A. By faith; and by means whereof he who comes worthily to the Holy Table is as truly entitled to a part in Christ’s sacrifice by receiving the sacramental bread and wine which is there delivered to him as any man is entitled to an estate by receiving a deed of conveyance from one who has a power to deliver it for his use.”

“Q. Is this the only way in which you suppose Christ’s body and blood to be really present in this Sacrament?

“A. It is the only way in which I conceive it possible for them to be present there. As for His divine nature, that being infinite, He is by virtue thereof everywhere present. But in His human nature and particularly His body. He is in heaven only, nor can that be any otherwise present to us on earth than by figure and representation, or else by such a Communion as I have before been speaking of.

“Q. Does not Christ expressly say that the bread is His body, and the cup His blood?

“A. He does say of the bread and wine, so taken, blessed, broken, and given as they were by Him in that sacred action, that ‘This is My body,’ etc., and so they are. The bread which we break is not only in figure and similitude, but by a real spiritual Communion, His body; the cup of blessing which we bless is by the same Communion His blood. But this does not hinder but that as to their own natural substances they may and indeed do still continue to be what they appear to us, the same bread and wine that before they were.”

“Q. What do you call the host?

“A. It is the wafer which those of the Church of Rome make use of instead of bread in this Sacrament.

“Q. Do those of that Church adore the consecrated wafer?

“A. They do, and that as if it were really what they pretend to believe it is, our Saviour Christ Himself.

“Q. Is there any great harm in such a worship?

“A. Only the sin of idolatry; for so it must needs be to give divine worship to a piece of bread.

“Q. Ought not Christ to be adored in this Sacrament?

“A. Christ is everywhere to be adored, and therefore in the receiving of the Holy Communion as well as in all our other religious performances.

“Q. How can it then be sinful for those who believe the bread to be changed into the body of Christ upon that supposition to worship the host?

“A. As well as for a heathen who believes the sun to be God upon that supposition to worship the sun.”

“Q. May not a person who only looks on and sees the priest officiate commemorate Christ’s death and mediate upon the benefits of it as well as if he received the elements of bread and wine?

“A. I will answer your question with another. May not a person who is not baptised, when he sees that Holy Sacrament administered, be truly penitent for his sins and believe in Christ, and desire to be regenerated and adopted into the communion of His Church as well as if he were himself washed with the water of Baptism? But yet the bare looking on in this case would not entitle such a one to the grace of regeneration; nor will it any more entitle the other to the Communion of Christ’s body and blood.”

“Q. … Is not this Sacrament as perfect in one kind as in both?

“A. Can a thing be perfect which wants one half of what is required to make it perfect?

“Q. Yet it cannot be denied but that he who receives the body of Christ does therewith receive the blood too.

“A. Though that be not the question, yet it not only may be but in this case is absolutely denied by us; nor indeed can it without a manifest absurdity be affirmed. It was the design of our Saviour Christ in this Sacrament to represent His crucified body, His body as it was given for us. Now we know that when He suffered, His blood was shed and let out of His body; and that to represent His blood thus separated from His body, the cup was consecrated apart by Him. And how then can it be pretended that he who communicates in such a body must partake of the blood together with it?”