I

The work entitled Remains of Alexander Knox, Esq. contains very much of interest on theological matters, and not least in regard to the Eucharist. Mr. Knox was private secretary to Lord Castlereagh in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and was engaged in political life, which, however, he abandoned in his desire for study and retirement. He died in 1831. The second volume of the Remains, published in 1834, contains an undated Treatise on the Use and Import of the Eucharistic Symbols and a Letter to John S. Harford, Esq., prefatory to the Treatise on the Eucharist, dated 19th July, 1826. Mr. Knox lays great stress on the Eucharist as the appointed means of conveying to Christians the benefits of the Incarnation. He regards the consecrated elements as the “representatives” of Christ, and the “vehicles” of His “power,” and the means whereby He is “personally present” and is communicated to those who receive the Sacrament. He rejects “Transubstantiation,” and the “gross sense” of “the term of the Lord’s body” which “has been fancied in the Church of Rome”; and does not appear to consider the elements to be made by consecration more than “to be in virtue and efficacy” Christ’s “body and blood”. The most probable interpretation of his teaching is that it is a combination of Receptionism and of the theory of which John Johnson is a good representative.

“The ancient writers of the Church were agreed in ascribing to the consecrated elements in the Eucharist an unutterable and efficacious mystery in virtue of our Saviour’s words of institution, by which He had made those elements, when consecrated after His example, the vehicles of His saving and sanctifying power, and in that respect the permanent representatives of His incarnate Person. But, notwithstanding this exalted estimate of the Eucharist, the notion of a literal Transubstantiation, such as was subsequently introduced into the Western Church, would appear never to have entered into their mind.”

“To understand the mysterious term of the Lord’s body in any such gross sense as has been fancied in the Church of Rome would be to overlook our Redeemer’s expressions, already in part quoted. ‘It is the spirit which quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.’ But let us not therefore rush into an opposite extreme, nor treat the words of an inspired Apostle as we would not treat those of any common intelligent writer. Let us observe that every expression St. Paul uses tends, as it were, more and more, to invest the sacramental symbols with an ineffable measure of derivative dignity and instrumental virtue. He gives no shadow of pretext for any carnal interpretation; but he says all that could be said to make us regard ‘that bread and that cup’ not only as the visible pledge, but the effective organ, of a vital communication from the invisible, but then specially operative and therefore specially present, Redeemer. For He alone it is who could make those symbols to be in virtue and efficacy His body and blood.”

“Contemplated as the actual vehicle of Christ’s own ineffable influences to the capable receiver, it becomes a matter of intrinsic interest, to neglect which would be to neglect both present and everlasting salvation.”

“Our incarnate Saviour is described as the Second Adam, who was to be to us the fountain of a spiritual and heavenly nature, as the first Adam has been to us the fountain of an animal and earthly nature; and we are instructed that, as by the Fall of our earthly progenitor sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and thus one man was to all the source of corruption and mortality, so by the grace of the one Man Jesus Christ a gift of righteousness is given to all who will receive it, which destroys the reign of sin, and is at once the earnest and the principle of a blessed immortality.… In these divine energies and influences of the incarnate Word the co-operation of the Holy Spirit is so expressly and uniformly stated to bear a part as to make this a point of Christian faith ever to be kept in view.… The richest treasures of grace and virtue are provided for us in the adorable Person of our incarnate Saviour, and … not only in virtue of His union with our nature, but of His being crucified, His dying, and His rising again; and … those treasures are communicated to our minds and hearts by the continued agency of the Holy Spirit, who, as it were, passes from the Second Adam into all who aspire to a spiritual union with this ineffable source of a new and heavenly life, and makes them at once His own temple and living members of the great Head of the Church, to whom He unites them in a vital, and (if they faithfully concur) a still advancing and, at length, beatific incorporation.… Such then being the special and peculiar blessing of the Gospel, it might be inferred on general grounds, if even direct evidence were wanting, that the peculiar rite of the Gospel must have a special relation and subserviency to that blessing. But the express designation of the Holy Eucharist by our Lord Himself as His own virtual body and blood, and St. Paul’s appeal to the received belief of the Church that the blessed cup was the communion of the blood of Christ, and that the broken bread was the communion of the body of Christ, established beyond question that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is to serve as the external and visible medium through which the disciples of Christ in all ages are to expect, through the co-operation of the Eternal Spirit, the divinely vivifying influences of His incarnate Person, and the ineffable virtues of His crucifixion and death. The fact being undeniable that there are in the evangelic dispensation such influences and such virtues, and those influences and virtues being denominated by our Lord Himself His flesh and His blood, we are obliged by the terms of St. Paul and by the still stronger terms (if that be possible) of our Lord Himself to identify the internal grace and virtue of the Eucharist with those quickening, strengthening, and purifying communications which are promised to Christians as proceeding from the Person and death of Christ through the ever-co-operative agency of the Holy Ghost.… Is it not, then, with this highest and fullest communication of divine grace that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper has been specifically connected by the very words of institution? It could have been no other than that highest and fullest communication of divine grace which our Lord has promised, and so emphatically dwelt on, in the sixth chapter of St. John. When, therefore, he applies those very terms which He had declared to be in the highest degree significant of spirit and life to those sanctified elements which He was pleased to appoint as sacramental symbols, and when He enjoins that very eating and drinking which in that discourse He had pronounced indispensable to be carried into act in a visible manner, but with such profoundly significant import, in this perpetuated institution, what can we conclude but that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is eminently, and in a way of peculiar appropriation, the visible conduit through which, by the invisible operation of Him who appointed it, is conveyed that special evangelical grace with which the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost have conjointly distinguished and blessed the Christian dispensation?”

“The height of beatific purity and virtue, then, to which as Christians we are called to rise, and the influences from above by which alone we can thus by anticipation dwell in God’s tabernacle and rest upon His holy hill, are the two grand points to which all the devotional forms of our Church are directed. Concluding the matter of our true happiness to consist in a virtual but vital commencement of our future heaven, and the indispensable means of that happiness not less to consist in a really divine communication, our Church aims at forming us to such habits and feelings of devotion as must imply a constant commerce of the heart with heaven, and a gradual approximation to its purity, its serenity, and its happiness through fresh and fuller infusion of that eternal life, which God has given us in His Son.

“Such, I say, is the uniform import and design of all our established services. Their object is to raise us to everything for which we were created, which can make us well pleasing to God, acceptable to men, and happy in ourselves, substantially happy even while in the body, with the assurance of unalloyed and consummate happiness hereafter. And for this exalted purpose, while every possible degree of fidelity and vigilance is to be exercised on our part, we are continually taught to look upward, and expect all increase of wisdom, fortitude, or virtue from the boundless provision made for us in the mystery of redemption. Of this mystery, then, the Church considers the Sacrament of the Eucharist not only to be expressly and profoundly significant, but to constitute in some sort an instrumental organ. That grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which alone we can live, much more grow up and advance, as Christians is, according to our Church, eminently and peculiarly conveyed to us in and through this visible ordinance. As it is that special and appropriate grace of the Gospel which she always has in view, that grace which raises every living member of Christ’s kingdom above even Christ’s distinguished forerunner, so is it this crowning blessing of the Gospel, this concentration of all its lights, and verification of its most precious promises, which she unites indissolubly with the right reception of the Eucharistic symbols; ‘For then,’ says she, ‘we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink His blood; then, we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us’.”