II

The first edition of The Christian Year was published anonymously by John Keble in 1827. It contained signs that its author regarded the Eucharist as a sacrifice and as the means whereby our Lord is received to be the food of the soul. The poem for “Holy Communion” included the verses:—

“Fresh from th’ atoning sacrifice

The world’s Creator bleeding lies,

That man, His foe, by whom He bled,

May take Him for his daily bread.

O agony of wavering thought

When sinners first so near are brought!

‘It is my Maker—dare I stay?

My Saviour—dare I turn away?’ ”

That headed “Commination” referred to the Eucharist as “our glorious sacrifice”. Six poems added to the third edition in 1828 included one for 5th November, then entitled “An Address to Converts from Popery,” afterwards headed “Gunpowder Treason”. The twelfth and thirteenth stanzas of this poem were:—

“If with thy heart the strains accord,

That on His altar-throne

Highest exalt thy glorious Lord,

Yet leave Him most thine own;

O come to our Communion Feast:

There, present in the heart,

Not in the hands, th’ eternal Priest

Will His true self impart.”

In later years, at any rate, the words “present in the heart, not in the hands” were understood by Mr. Keble to mean that the presence in the hands is of no profit unless there is the presence in the heart also, on the analogy of such passages as “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice”; and that this was the sense intended from the first is to some extent supported by the fact that in one copy of the original poems he had written “There, treasured in the heart”. Before his death, “fearing,” as his brother Mr. Thomas Keble wrote, “that he was misleading others,” he altered the words to “There present, in the heart as in the hands,” the form in which they stand in editions of The Christian Year published since that time.

Though it is possible that Dr. Pusey may have unconsciously read back some of his later beliefs to an earlier time, yet it was his belief, expressed in 1879, that in the early years of the nineteenth century he had as a child “learnt” “the doctrine of the real presence” from his “mother’s explanation of the Catechism, which she had learned to understand from older clergy”.