IV

One part of the work of the Oxford Movement was to give theological expression and devotional setting to the doctrine which Dr. Pusey regarded himself as having learnt from his mother’s instruction.

One of the most solid of the literary productions associated with the Movement was the elaborate and learned work, A Treatise on the Church of Christ, by Mr. William Palmer, afterwards Sir William Palmer, of Worcester College, the Rector of Whitchurch Canonicorum. The first edition of this book was published in 1838, the second in 1839, and the third in 1842. In discussing the documents of the Reformation in England, Mr. Palmer wrote:—

“In 1562 the Convocation authorised the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the only formulary of doctrine established by competent authority in England since the publication of the Necessary Doctrine in 1543. It may be well to remark the points of doctrine in which the two formularies agreed and differed. Baptism and the Eucharist alone are in the Articles accounted ‘Sacraments of the Gospel’; but Matrimony, Ordination, and other rites are termed Sacraments in our Homilies approved by the Articles; so that there is no very marked difference as to the number of Sacraments between the two formularies; for the Necessary Doctrine does not pronounce the lesser Sacraments or rites of the Church to be ‘Sacraments of the Gospel’. It seems, in fact, that the Church of England has refrained from limiting the use of the word ‘Sacrament,’ and left her theologians, in this respect, to that ancient liberty of which the Synod of Trent has deprived the Roman Theologians. If the Necessary Doctrine maintains a change of substance in the Eucharist without affirming Transubstantiation, the Article in denying Transubstantiation does not condemn absolutely all change of substance in any sense, but the particular change called by the Romanists Transubstantiation, which supposes the bread to cease to exist. The article condemning ‘the sacrifices of Masses, in which it was commonly said that Christ was offered for the quick and dead, for the remission of pain or guilt,’ rightly censures that erroneous view of the sacrifice, but does not declare against the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice rightly understood, and therefore does not differ from the Necessary Doctrine, which merely acknowledges a sacrifice.… Altogether I see not that there is any very great contradiction between these two formularies in matters of doctrine. I dispute not that several of those who composed the one differed in some points from several of those who composed the other; but their formularies are not so worded as to evince any great or irreconcilable opposition between the public and authorised faith of the Church of England in the reign of Henry VIII. and in that of Elizabeth.

“The Church of England is said to have varied again when, in the time of Charles II., she readmitted the declaration on kneeling at the Sacrament, which not only maintains the existence of the substance of the bread and wine after consecration, but denies the corporal presence. But there is no inconsistency; for the former assertion only amounts to a denial of Transubstantiation, already rejected by the Articles; and the latter is not opposed to the real, spiritual, and heavenly presence of Christ’s body.

“This Catholic and Apostolic Church has always avoided any attempt to determine too minutely the mode of the true presence in the Holy Eucharist. Guided by Scripture, she establishes only those truths which Scripture reveals, and leaves the subject in that mystery with which God for His wise purposes has invested it. Her doctrine concerning the true presence appears to be limited to the following points:—

“Taking as her immovable foundation the words of Jesus Christ, ‘This is My body.… This is My blood of the new covenant,’ and ‘Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life.’ she believes that the body, or flesh, and the blood of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Redeemer of the world, both God and Man united indivisibly in one Person, are verily and indeed given to, taken, eaten, and received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper under the outward sign or form of bread (and wine), which is on this account the ‘partaking or Communion of the body and blood of Christ,’ She believes that the Eucharist is not the sign of an absent body, and that those who partake of it receive not merely the figure, or shadow, or sign of Christ’s body, but the reality itself. And, as Christ’s divine and human natures are inseparably united, so she believes that we receive in the Eucharist, not only the flesh and blood of Christ, but Christ Himself, both God and Man.

“Resting on these words, ‘The bread which we break, is it not the Communion of the body of Christ?’ and again, ‘I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine,’ she holds that the nature of the bread and wine continues after consecration, and therefore rejects Transubstantiation, or ‘the change of the substance’ which supposes the nature of bread entirely to cease by consecration.

“As a necessary consequence of the preceding truths, and admonished by Christ Himself, ‘It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life,’ she holds that the presence (and therefore the eating) of Christ’s body and blood, though true, is altogether ‘heavenly and spiritual,’ of a kind which is inexplicable by any carnal or earthly experience or imagination, even as the Sonship of the eternal Word of God, and His Incarnation, and the procession of the Holy Spirit are immeasurable by human understandings.

“Believing, according to the Scriptures, that Christ ascended in His natural body into heaven, and shall only come from thence at the end of the world, she rejects for this reason, as well as for the last, any such real presence of Christ’s body and blood as is ‘corporal’ or organical, that is, according to the known and earthly mode of the existence of a body.

“Resting on the divine promise, ‘Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life,’ she regards it as the most pious and probable opinion that the wicked, those who are totally devoid of true and living faith, do not partake of the holy flesh of Christ in the Eucharist, God withdrawing from them so ‘divine’ a gift, and not permitting His enemies to partake of it. And hence she holds that such a faith is ‘the means by which the body of Christ is received and eaten,’ ‘a necessary instrument in all these holy ceremonies,’ because it is the essential qualification on our parts, without which that body is not received, and because ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’.

“Following the example of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Apostles, and supported by their authority, she believes that ‘the blessing’ or ‘consecration’ of the bread and wine is not without effect, but that it operates a real change; for, when the Sacrament is thus perfected, she regards it as so ‘divine a thing,’ so ‘heavenly a food’ that we must not ‘presume’ to approach it with unprepared minds, and that sinners, although they only partake of the bread and wine, partake of them to their own condemnation, because they impiously disregard the Lord’s body, which is truly present in that Sacrament. Hence it is that the Church, believing firmly in the real presence of the ‘precious and blessed body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ,’ speaks of the Eucharist as ‘high and holy mysteries,’ exhorts us to consider the ‘dignity of that holy mystery,’ that ‘heavenly feast,’ that ‘holy table,’ ‘the banquet of that most heavenly food,’ even ‘the King of kings’ table’.

“Such is the simple, the sublime, and, what is more, the true and Scriptural doctrine of our Catholic and Apostolic Church.… Our doctrine leaves this subject in the sacred mystery with which God has enveloped it. It is not to be denied that the Roman doctrine of Transubstantiation facilitates the mental conception of that mystery; but it has the fatal defect of being opposed to the plain language of Scripture.”

In this careful statement Mr. Palmer, following what he believed to be the teaching of the Church of England, rejected Transubstantiation, and any view of the presence of Christ’s body as would represent it as being “according to the known and earthly mode of the existence of a body”; and affirmed that “a real change” is effected by the “consecration of the bread and wine,” and that the “reality” of Christ’s body and blood is “given to,” “taken” and “received” and “eaten” “by the faithful” “under the outward sign or form of bread and wine”. Of the Communions made by the wicked, he said, the wicked “do not partake of the holy flesh of Christ in the Eucharist, God withdrawing from them so ‘divine’ a gift”. Without explaining his meaning, he alluded to “the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice rightly understood”.

Elsewhere in his book, Mr. Palmer referred to the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice in the part of his defence of English Ordinations in which he was replying to the objection that the Church of England denies “that there is any sacrifice in the Eucharist”. Speaking of “Eucharistic sacrifice, understood in an orthodox sense,” he said:—

“The Church of England has always acknowledged such a sacrifice. The thirty-first Article is directed against the vulgar and heretical doctrine of the reiteration of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist. It was those ‘missarum sacrificia quibus vulgo dicebatur sacerdotem offerre Christum in remissionem poenæ aut culpæ pro vivis et defunctis’ which are pronounced ‘blasphema figmenta et perniciosæ imposturæ,’ but not ‘missarum sacrificia’ as understood by the fathers and in an orthodox sense. The article was directed against the errors maintained or countenanced by such men as Soto, Hardinge, etc., who, by rejecting the doctrine of a sacrifice by way of commemoration and consecration, and not literally identical with that on the cross, and by their crude and objectional mode of expression, countenanced the vulgar error that the sacrifice of the Eucharist or Mass was in every respect equal to that of Christ on the cross, and that it was in fact either a reiteration or a continuation of that sacrifice. The article was not directed against the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice as explained by Bossuet, Veron, and others, with which we have no material fault to find.”

Reference has already been made to the indications of Eucharistic belief in The Christian Year, published by Mr. Keble in 1827. On the question of the Communions of the wicked there are some important letters of his, written in the years 1854, 1855, and 1856. In March, 1854, Archdeacon Denison, the Archdeacon of Taunton, in consequence of charges made against his Eucharistic teaching, set out eight propositions declaring:—

“1. That the bread and wine become, by the act of consecration, ‘the outward part or sign of the Lord’s Supper’; and, considered as objects of sense, are unchanged by the act of consecration, ‘remaining still in their very natural substances’.

“2. That ‘the inward part or thing signified’ is ‘the body and blood of Christ’.

“3. That ‘the body and blood of Christ,’ being present naturally in heaven, are supernaturally and invisibly but really present in the Lord’s Supper through the elements by virtue of the act of consecration.

“4. That by ‘the real presence of the body and blood in the Lord’s Supper’ is not to be understood the presence of an influence emanating from a thing absent, but the supernatural and invisible presence of a thing present, of His very body and very blood present ‘under the form of bread and wine’.

“5. That the ‘outward part or sign’ and ‘the inward part or thing signified’ being brought together in and by the act of consecration, make the Sacrament.

“6. That the Sacrament, that is, ‘the outward part or sign’ and ‘the inward part or thing signified,’ is given to, and is received by, all who communicate.

“7. That ‘in such only as worthily receive the same [the Sacraments of the body and the blood of Christ] they have a wholesome effect or operation; but they that receive them unworthily purchase to themselves damnation as St. Paul saith’.

“8. That worship is due to ‘the body and blood of Christ’ supernaturally and invisibly but really present in the Lord’s Supper ‘under the form of bread and wine’ by reason of that Godhead with which they are personally united. But that the elements, through which ‘the body and blood of Christ’ are given and received, may not be worshipped.”

With Archdeacon Denison’s general position, and with most of his detailed statements, Mr. Keble was in complete agreement; but he felt some doubt in regard to the assertion that “the inward part” of the Sacrament “is received by all who communicate”. On 18th January, 1855, he wrote to Dr. Pusey:—

“Surely some of our friends are putting themselves in a wrong position in maintaining so earnestly reception by the wicked as an integral part of the doctrine. I am afraid of the consequences when they find they have less sympathy than they had imagined. For myself, I must confess that if I were forced to decide I think there is more to be said against that tenet than for it, especially looking to St. Augustine, and most especially to Tractate 26 on St. John, and to the passage in Ep. xcviii. § (I think) 17, in which he speaks of calling Sacraments by the names of the things of which they are Sacraments. But surely our Church permits us to leave it open, and surely she is right in so doing, and we are wrong to close it either way.”

After a condemnation of Archdeacon Denison’s teaching by the Archbishop (Sumner) of Canterbury, Mr. Keble, while strongly dissenting from the decision of the Archbishop both as to the reception by the wicked and as to adoration, wrote about the reception by the wicked, “as you know, I do not see my way in that point so clearly as Denison thinks he does”; and a lengthy and elaborate correspondence on this matter took place between him and Dr. Pusey, who agreed with Archdeacon Denison. In October, 1856, he was one of those who signed a declaration of protest, which was chiefly written by Dr. Pusey, in which, after making some references to the teaching of Anglican divines, the signatories said:—

“We, therefore, being convinced:—

“1. That the doctrine of the real presence of ‘the body and blood of our Saviour Christ under the form of bread and wine,’ has been uniformly accepted by General Councils, as it is also embodied in our own formularies;

“2. That the interpretation of Scripture most commonly held in the Church has been that the wicked, although they can ‘in no wise be partakers of Christ,’ nor ‘spiritually eat His flesh and drink His blood,’ yet do in the Sacrament not only take, but eat and drink unworthily to their own condemnation the body and blood of Christ which they do not discern;

“3. That the practice of worshipping Christ then and there especially present, after consecration and before communicating, has been common throughout the Church. And, moreover, that the Thirty-nine Articles were intended to be, and are, in harmony with the faith and teaching of the ancient undivided Church;

“Do hereby protest earnestly against so much of the opinion of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the case of Ditcher v. Denison, as implies, directly or indirectly, that such statements as we have cited above are repugnant to the doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles.

“And we appeal from the said opinion, decision, or sentence of his Grace, in the first instance, to a free and lawful Synod of all the Churches of our communion, when such by God’s mercy may be had.”

In the following year, 1857, Mr. Keble published his book On Eucharistical Adoration; or the Worship of Our Lord and Saviour in the Sacrament of Holy Communion, a second edition of which appeared in 1859. In 1858, in consequence of some controversies in the Scottish Church, he published his Considerations Suggested by a Late Pastoral Letter on the Doctrine of the Most Holy Eucharist. Some extracts from these works will show clearly his beliefs in regard to the Eucharist.

“The Person … of Jesus Christ our Lord, wherever it is, is to be adored—to be honoured, acknowledged, sought unto, depended on, with all possible reverence, with the most entire and single-hearted devotion, incommunicable to any finite being—by all creatures whom He has brought to know Him. This proposition, though in the heat of theological warfare it may seem to have been denied, and that recently, cannot, I conceive, be really and advisedly denied by any one who believes the divinity of our Lord. Taking it for granted, I will state it once again. The Person of Jesus Christ our Lord, wherever it is, is to be adored. And now I will add the next proposition in the argument, namely, Christ’s Person is in the Holy Eucharist by the presence of His body and blood therein. From which, as will be seen, follows by direct inference that the Person of Christ is to be adored in that Sacrament, as there present in a peculiar manner, by the presence of His body and blood.

“It is on the second or minor of these three propositions, if on any, that opposition is to be expected, and explanation is necessary. It raises, evidently, the whole question of that which is denominated ‘the real objective presence’ of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. That is to say, whereas the divine nature in Christ is everywhere and always equally present, and so everywhere and always alike adorable; but to us frail children of men He has condescended at certain times and places to give especial tokens of His presence, which it is our duty to recognise, and then especially to adore; thus far, I suppose, all allow who in any sense believe the creeds of the Church, that in the Holy Eucharist we are very particularly bound to take notice of His divine presence as God the Word, and to worship Him accordingly. That which some in modern times have denied is, that He is then and there present according to His human nature, really and substantially present, as truly present as He was to any of those with whom He conversed when He went in and out among us; or, again, as He is now present in heaven interceding for us. Both of these two last mentioned are modes of His human presence, acknowledged by all who confess Him come in the flesh. But that which some affirm, some deny, as part of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, is a third and special mode of presence of the holy humanity of our Lord, denoted and effected by His own words, ‘This is My body, this is My blood,’ a presence the manner of which is beyond all thought, much more beyond all words of ours, but which those who believe it can no more help adoring than they could have helped it had they been present with St. Thomas, to see in His hands the print of the nails; or, again, with so many sick persons to touch the hem of His garment, and so to be made whole. It is no more natural for them to think, one way or the other, of worshipping the bread and wine than it was for the woman with the issue of blood to think of worshipping the garment which she touched instead of Him who was condescending to wear it and make it an instrument of blessing to her.

“If we may reverently say it, … ‘as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man,’ and as ‘God and Man is one Christ,’ so the consecrated bread and wine, and the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, are one Sacrament. And as we know the soul of a man, which we cannot see, to be present by the presence of his living body, which we can see, so the presence of that bread and wine is to us a sure token of the presence of Christ’s body and blood.… And, as persons of common sense are not apt to confound a man’s soul with his body because of the intimate and mysterious connection of the two, … nor yet can you easily bring them to doubt whether meat and drink serve to keep the two together, whether life can come by bread, because they cannot understand how, so no plain and devout reader of Holy Scripture and disciple of the Church would of his own accord find a difficulty in adoring the thing signified, apart from the outward sign or form; or in believing that the one may surely convey the other by a spiritual and heavenly process known to God, but unknown to him and to all on earth.”

“Where His flesh and blood are, there is He by a peculiar and personal presence, in His holy humanity; and being there, … He must needs be adorable.”

“The Eucharist … is the unbloody sacrifice of the New Testament; unbloody, though it be in part an offering of blood; ἀναιμακτός not ἄναιμος. No blood shed in it, but the living blood of Christ with His living body offered up to the Father, for a memorial of the real blood-shedding, the awful and painful sacrifice once for all offered on the cross.

“This memorial Christ offers in heaven, night and day, to God the Father, His glorified body with all its wounds, His blood which He poured out on the cross but on His resurrection took again to Himself, and with it ascended into heaven. With that body and blood He appears continually before the throne, by it making intercession for us, by it reminding God the Father of His one oblation of Himself once offered on the cross.”

“If the Holy Eucharist as a sacrifice be all one with the memorial made by our High Priest Himself in the very sanctuary of heaven, where He is both Priest after the order of Melchizedek and Offering by the perpetual presentation of His body and blood, then, as the blessed inhabitants of heaven cannot but be thought of is adoring Him in both His aspects of Priest and Sacrifice, so how should His Holy Church throughout all the world not adore Him in like manner as often as she ‘goeth up to the reverend Communion’ to offer up spiritual sacrifices, and ‘to be satisfied with spiritual meats’? For there He is in His holy and perfect manhood virtually present as our Priest with him that ministereth, being one of those to whom He said, ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,’ and really present as our sacrifice according to that other word, ‘This is My body, and this is My blood,’ ‘Do this in remembrance of Me’.”

“If we really believe that that which He declares to be His own flesh and blood is Jesus Christ giving Himself to us under the form of bread and wine, how can we help thanking, and therefore adoring (for to thank God is to adore) the unspeakable Gift as well as the most bountiful Giver? seeing that in this case both are one.”

“The rationale of the Holy Eucharist is to be a sacrifice offered by the Son to the Father; it is the transference for the time to earth of the great perpetual commemorative sacrifice in heaven.”

“At the risk of officiousness and unnecessary repetition, I am tempted to set down here a series of dogmatical statements, which I had occasion not long since to draw up for private use. They may perhaps help to relieve some of tedious, haunting, bewildering thoughts, setting forth, as they endeavour to do, the special bearing of the doctrine of the Incarnation on these Eucharistical questions.

“1. I believe that there is one, and only one, true body of the Lord Jesus, in the sense in which any man’s natural body is called his own. That body, I mean, which He took of the Blessed Virgin Mary when He came into the world.

“2. That neither this body nor the reasonable soul which He took to Himself at the same time, nor His manhood consisting of both together, have or ever had any distinct personality, but have subsisted, and ever will subsist, as taken into the Person of the Eternal Son of God.

“3. That, as the divine Word or Person of Christ is everywhere and always present and adorable, so ever since the Incarnation the presence of the body of Christ, or the presence of the soul of Christ, or of both united, whenever and wherever and however He wills to notify it, is to be taken as a warrant and call for especial adoration on the part of all His reasonable creatures, to whom the knowledge of the two natures has been revealed, adoration to Him as to God most high, and to His holy manhood, not separately but as subsisting in His divine Person. I believe, therefore:—

“4. That His sacrificed body, hanging on the cross and laid in the grave, was adorable.

“5. I understand the words, ‘This is My body which is given (broken) for you,’ literally taken, to affirm that what He gives us in the Sacrament is the same body which was sacrificed on the cross.

“6. And I believe that those words ought to be literally taken. Therefore:—

“7. I believe that what He gives us in the Sacrament, under the name of His body, is adorable.”

“The objections usually taken to such statements as the above are taken, some to their evidence, some to their substance. The latter may be referred (speaking broadly) to one or more of the following heads:—

“1. Men cannot in their own minds separate what is said from notions of a carnal and natural presence, as of an earthly body among earthly things; or:—

“2. They are religiously afraid of encroaching on the verity of Christ’s human nature by believing His body to be verily and indeed present anywhere but in one place in heaven.

“With the principle of both these objections, I need hardly say, the maintainers of the presence have entire and perfect sympathy. They would rather die than accept a carnal heathenish doctrine as against the one, or as against the other a notion which would spiritualise away the whole Gospel. But they claim to be believed when they say that they cannot of themselves discern, nor has it ever been enforced on them by any authority to which they are bound to defer, that their doctrine involves either of these notions.”

To these extracts from Mr. Keble’s published works may be added a portion of a letter printed in the volume entitled Letters of Spiritual Counsel and Guidance by the late Rev. J. Keble on the subject of the obligation of Eucharistic doctrine.

“I have long had an opinion that, in respect of the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, we are bound to be especially careful how we make doctrinal statements in such sense as to charge dissentients with heresy, for this reason, that, while the great truths of the creeds have been settled, even as to the wording connected with them, by true Œcumenical Councils (in which statement I include the doctrine of Baptism, as connected with the Pelagian controversy), it has so happened in the providence of God that the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist has never been subject to similar enactments until the eleventh or twelfth century, after the separation of East and West. Well therefore may each person, or each portion of the Church, for himself or itself, form strong opinions, and express them strongly, as God shall guide them, on the several points involved in the doctrine; but to impose them as articles of faith, making those heretics who demur to them, they are not, I conceive, competent, except the point be such an one as can be shown to have been unequivocally received by the whole Church from the beginning, such (for example) as the inspiration of Holy Scripture. What is the authority for the saying that ‘whole Christ’ remains in ‘each particle of either kind’ other than that it was deduced by certain great divines in the middle ages from certain formulæ which had been accepted by certain portions of the Church, and that one or two very exceptional cases occur in early Church History which might be explained on that supposition, but may also be explained in other ways? Where, again, do you find in so many words that the wicked eat and drink the body and blood of Christ in the same sense that the penitent do? The onus probandi surely lies with those who affirm it, considering, (1) our Lord’s express words in St. John 6 and (2) St. Augustine’s words in Tr. xxvi. §§ 15, 18; considering also that when St. Augustine seems to affirm the contrary, he may be using the names of the sacred things for the sacred symbols only, in the way indicated by him in Ep. xcviii. 9. And the apparent separation of the ‘inward part’ from the ‘benefits partaken of’ (in the Catechism) may be due to its being felt by the framers of the Catechism that it was necessary, with a view to the doctrine of the sacrifice, to state the objective presence previous to reception. I own that to me the Catechism and Communion Service appear to be silent as to what the wicked receive, and, indeed, the Articles also, rightly taken.”

Thus Mr. Keble, while not prepared to make definite statements as to the presence of the “whole Christ” in “each particle of either kind” or as to the reception of the body of Christ by the wicked, was convinced that in the Sacrament—that is, as the context shows, in the consecrated bread and wine—is the body of Christ which He took of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was sacrificed on the cross; that this presence of the body of Christ is not after a carnal or natural manner; that Christ thus present is to be adored; and that the Eucharist is a sacrifice offered by Christ to the Father, being a sacrifice of the body and blood which were offered on the cross, and a transference to earth and in time of the abiding sacrifice in heaven.

The teaching of Dr. Pusey about the Eucharist is very voluminous, is contained in writings of different kinds, and is spread over many years. It will promote clearness to give some characteristic instances in, so far as is possible, chronological order. In 1839 Dr. Pusey published a treatise entitled A Letter to the Right Rev. Father in God, Richard, Lord Bishop of Oxford, on the Tendency to Romanism imputed to Doctrines held of old, as now, in the English Church. In this Letter he expressed his belief that—

“In the Communion there is a true, real, actual, though spiritual (or rather the more real because spiritual), communication of the body and blood of Christ to the believer through the holy elements; that there is a true, real, spiritual presence of Christ at the Holy Supper, more real than if we could with Thomas feel Him with our hands, or thrust our hands into His side; that this is bestowed upon faith, and received by faith, as is every other spiritual gift, but that our faith is but a receiver of God’s real, mysterious, precious gift; that faith opens our eyes to see what is really there, and our hearts to receive it; but that it is there independently of our faith.… We see not why we need avoid language used by the fathers, as well as by the ancient liturgies, and quoted with approbation by great divines of our Church, that ‘the bread and wine is made the body and blood of Christ,’ seeing that its being spiritually the body and blood of Christ interferes not with its being still corporeally what the Apostle calls it, ‘the bread and wine,’ nor with the nature of a Sacrament, but rather the better agrees thereto.”

To these positive statements, and to an assertion that “we do not think that our Lord is less really and spiritually present than” “the Romanists,” Dr. Pusey added in the same Letter a careful and explicit rejection, not only of “modem novelties” of “Zurich or Geneva,” but also of the definitions of the Council of Trent and of Bellarmine, and spoke several times of the Roman Catholic doctrine as “carnal”. Thus, he says:—

“We maintain … that Rome has grievously erred by explaining in a carnal way the mode of this presence, and requiring this her carnal exposition to be received as an article of faith. She anathematises us in our Church for holding that ‘in the most holy Sacrament of the Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine,’ and ‘denying that wonderful and remarkable conversion of the whole substance of bread into the body, and of the whole substance of wine into the blood, so that there remain only the appearances of bread and wine,’ ‘which,’ it proceeds, ‘the [Roman] Catholic Church most aptly terms Transubstantiation’. We suppose also that they meant it in a carnal and erroneous sense that they say ‘that the body and blood of Christ is’ not only ‘really,’ but ‘substantially present in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist’; for ‘substantially’ they explain to be not simply equivalent to ‘really,’ but ‘corporeally,’ that ‘the body of the Lord is sensibly touched by the hands, broken and bruised by the teeth’. Further, we think it presumptuous to define, as they do, that ‘Christ is wholly contained under each species,’ whereby they would excuse their modern innovation of denying the cup to the laity, and would persuade themselves by a self-invented and unauthorised theory of modern days that they receive no detriment thereby. Again, we hold it rash to define peremptorily ‘that the body and blood of Christ remain in the consecrated elements which are not consumed or are reserved after the Communion’ (meaning thereby that they so remain independently of any subsequent participation, as of the sick, or by the communicants), although doubtless they are not common bread and wine, but hallowed. Then also we reject what Rome maintains under an anathema, ‘that in the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist Christ the only-begotten Son of God is to be adored with the outward adoration of divine worship, and to be set forth publicly to the people in order to be adored,’ nay, ‘that this most holy Sacrament rightly received the same divine worship as is due to the true God, and that it was not therefore the less to be adored because instituted by Christ the Lord to be received. For that the same Eternal God was present in it whom, when the Eternal Father brought into the world, He said, And let all the angels of God worship Him.’ Lastly, as connected with and dependent upon Transubstantiation, we cannot but hold that the ‘Sacrifice of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and dead, to have remission of pain and guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits,’ and interfere ‘with the offering of Christ once made’ upon the cross.”

In 1841 Dr. Pusey wrote his treatise The Articles treated on in Tract Ninety Reconsidered and Their Interpretation Vindicated in a Letter to the Rev. R. W. Jelf. The positive doctrine here affirmed does not appear to differ in any way from that in the Letter of 1839. As regards the Church of Rome, Dr. Pusey still speaks of “the received doctrine” as “carnal,” and as involving the annihilation of the bread and wine; but he differs from the Letter of 1839 in adding “though happily (one must in candour add) not so defined in the Council of Trent”. In his sermon The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent, preached in 1843, and in the preface to this sermon, written in the same year, he spoke of “the consecrated elements” as “being,” and “becoming” the “body and blood” of Christ, of the “bread which is His flesh,” and described the words of institution as “the form which consecrates the sacramental elements into His body and blood”. In the treatise A Letter to the Right Hon. and the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of London in Explanation of some Statements Contained in a Letter by the Rev. W. Dodsworth, published in 1851, he described the Eucharist as “a pleading of our Lord’s passion in act, a memorial of it, not to ourselves, but to God”; he said that in it “We present before Him not mere bread and wine, but that which, without physical change of substance, consecrated by the words of our Lord and the power and grace of God, is verily and indeed, not carnally, but mystically, sacramentally, spiritually, and in an ineffable and supernatural way, the body and blood of our Lord,” and that “we are admitted, as it were, to see in image” “what in truth” “the one High Priest” “ever doth in heaven,” and that “the Church pleadeth as a suppliant that same sacrifice which He presenteth as High Priest efficaciously”; he excepted from his agreement with Mr. Palmer’s statement the inference that “God withdraws the presence of the body and blood of Christ” from those who communicate unworthily, and said he “should prefer to leave” this question “as a mystery,” since those who communicate unworthily cannot be “partakers of Christ” and “yet” that which they receive “must in some sense be the body and blood of Christ”; he repudiated “a local confinement and humiliation” of Christ in the Eucharist, and maintained that Christ is “to be adored as present,” “not as confined or contained in place,” and not “so as to involve any worship of the consecrated elements”. In this Letter of 1851 he advanced a further step than in the Letter of 1841 towards allowing that the differences between the Church of England and the Church of Rome were not crucial.

“I have never taught anything physical, corporeal, carnal, but spiritual, sacramental, divine, ineffable. And, when I have said, as I could not but acknowledge, that I could not see how the Roman Catholics could mean less by ‘the accidents of bread and wine’ than we by the substance, this was not to draw our doctrine to theirs, but theirs to ours. If it be granted, as they must grant, that all the natural properties remain, size, form, solidity, the same distribution of particles, whereof the elements are composed, the same natural powers of nourishment or exhilaration, the same effect upon the nervous system and every other physical property, I do not know what remains which we mean to affirm and they to deny. But I have said this, not as adopting their mode of explanation, which is not acknowledged by the Greek Church any more than by our own, but as hoping that our differences were not irreconcilable, and that we are condemning a popular physical interpretation which they cannot consistently hold.… I have said that it appears from our Article itself that it condemns Transubstantiation in the sense of implying a physical change.… If any imply not a physical change, the Article does not apply to them.”

In the following year, 1852, Dr. Pusey appears to have temporarily returned to his former view that the doctrine of the Church of Rome was “physical” and “carnal”; for on 16th October in that year he wrote to Mr. Keble, with reference to a forthcoming book by Archdeacon R. I. Wilberforce, “R. W. is writing what I think is quite untenable, that the Roman Church by Transubstantiation does not mean a physical change, which I believe to be contrary to fact”.

The sermon preached in 1853, The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, contained the same positive teaching as earlier writings. Dr. Pusey spoke of the presence as “sacramental, supernatural, mystical, ineffable, as opposed not to what is real, but to what is natural,” as “a presence without us, not within us only,” as parallel to the passing of our Lord’s “spiritual body” “on the morning of the resurrection through the sealed tomb” and to the passing of His body “illœsa virginitate through the doors of the Virgin’s womb,” as “above nature,” and as consequently not inconsistent with the continued existence of the bread and wine notwithstanding the law of “physical nature that two bodies cannot be in the same place at the same time”. Our Lord’s words “This is My body,” are to be taken “solemnly and literally”. What is consecrated and what we receive are the “body and blood of Christ” “not in any physical or carnal way, but spiritually, sacramentally, divinely, mystically, ineffably, through the operation of the word of Christ and of God the Holy Ghost”.

In 1855 Dr. Pusey published his great treatise The Doctrine of the Real Presence as contained in the Fathers from the Death of St. John the Evangelist to the Fourth General Council vindicated. It was a voluminous and elaborate catena of evidence in the form of notes to his sermon preached in 1853, The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. While thus for the most part a statement of evidence and not of his own beliefs, the whole structure of the book and occasional sentences made it clear that the doctrine maintained by him was that the elements continue to exist after consecration, that the body and blood of Christ are present in and under them, and that this presence is of a supernatural kind. For instance, he said:—

“The term ‘in,’ as used by the fathers, does not express any ‘local’ inclusion of the body and blood of Christ; it denotes their presence there after the manner of a Sacrament.… The presence of our Lord’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist is in a supernatural, divine, ineffable way, not subject to the laws of natural bodies. The word ‘in,’ like the word of our Book of Homilies, ‘under the form of bread and wine,’ only expresses a real presence under that outward veil. But the term does imply the existence of the elements, in which the body and blood of our Lord are said to be.”

“What is consecrated upon the altars for us to receive, what under the outward elements is there present for us to receive, is the body and blood of Christ, by receiving which the faithful in the Lord’s Supper do verily and indeed take and receive the body and blood of Christ, by presuming to approach which the wicked … become guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, that is, become guilty of a guilt like theirs who laid hands on His divine Person, while yet in the flesh among us, or who shed His all-holy blood.”

The treatise published in 1857, The Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ the Doctrine of the English Church, with a Vindication of the Reception by the Wicked and of the Adoration of our Lord Jesus Christ Truly Present, was, like the book of 1855, mainly a statement of evidence, but it also contained abundant signs of Dr. Pusey’s own beliefs. He explicitly stated that “there is no physical union of the body and blood of Christ with the bread and wine”; that “where the consecrated bread is, there sacramentally is the body of Christ; where the consecrated wine is, there sacramentally is the blood of Christ”; “the heavenly part is conveyed to us through the earthly symbol consecrated by His word of power”. There were some passages of special interest on the questions of the reception by the wicked and of adoration, subjects both of which were emphasised by being mentioned in the title of the book. As to the reception by the wicked, Dr. Pusey referred to his former “suspense” of judgment, and explained that he now felt clear that those who communicate unworthily receive the body and blood of Christ.

“I was myself long in suspense about these words, partly deferring to the apparent authority of St. Augustine, partly withheld by the difficulty which St. Augustine states, that the wicked cannot ‘dwell in Christ, or Christ in them’.… Now, having seen more accurately that St. Augustine does agree with that great body of Christian fathers who believe that the wicked do receive His body and blood, I have yielded my belief to what before seemed to me the plainest meaning of St. Paul’s words, that the wicked, while they ‘are in no ways partakers of Christ’ Himself, yet receive within them sacramentally His body and blood, which they do not discern nor discriminate.”

Among the passages relating to adoration was the following:—

“Believing as we believe, we should with the magi have fallen down and worshipped the speechless Infant, knowing Him to be God the Word. We should have thought His raiment as Man no hindrance to our adoring Him. Why then should we think it too strange a thing for His marvellous condescension that He should now give us ‘His blessed body and blood under the form of bread and wine’? Or how should His body, which He gives us, not be His living, life-giving body? Or how should His life-giving body be apart from His Godhead, which makes it life-giving? Or how, since His Godhead is present there, should we not adore? We do not adore the Sacrament, as, when He was upon the earth, we should not have adored His raiment, even though the touch of it conveyed the hidden virtue from Him, the Source of life and healing. But Himself, wheresoever or howsoever He is present, we are bound to adore.”

In the preface to the first volume of his collected Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, dated Easter, 1859, Dr. Pusey implied that he had returned to the opinion which he appears to have temporarily abandoned in 1852, that the difference between the Church of England and the Church of Rome on the subject of Transubstantiation is not of importance. To the sentence “the teaching of the English Church, in contrast with that of the schoolmen, as to the continuance of the visible elements in their natural substances,” he added a footnote:—

“I say the schoolmen, because the Roman Church has tacitly modified the meaning of the word ‘substance’ by allowing that the elements retain their natural power of nourishing (Catech. Conc. Trid.) which all the schoolmen denied. The Church of Rome has not explained what it means by a change of substance, while it allows that everything remains which we understand by the word ‘substance’.”

In an appendix, dated Vigil of St. Matthias, 1867, to the sermon Will ye also go away? preached in 1867, Dr. Pusey wrote with reference to an opinion expressed in the preamble of a resolution passed by the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, in February, 1867, that there was a danger lest “certain ritual observances” should “favour errors deliberately rejected by the Church of England”:—

“I cannot for a moment believe that the bishops who passed this resolution meant to condemn as ‘errors deliberately rejected by the Church of England’ those truths which I spoke of as being ‘set before the eyes’ by that ritual. But it becomes necessary for me for my own position and for that character of unreserve and straightforwardness which every one who would benefit the Church of England must maintain, to state what those doctrines are which I believe to be included in it. These are:—

“1. That the Holy Eucharist is the great and central act of Christian worship, our closest nearness to God.

“2. That—while repudiating any materialistic conception of the mode of the presence of our Lord in the Holy Eucharist, such as I believe is condemned in the term ‘corporal presence of our Lord’s natural flesh and blood,’ that is, as though His precious body and blood were present in any gross or carnal way, and not rather sacramentally, really, spiritually—I believe that in the Holy Eucharist the body and blood of Christ are sacramentally, supernaturally, ineffably, but verily and indeed, present ‘under the form of bread and wine,’ and that, ‘where His body is, there is Christ’.

“3. That—thankfully believing that the ‘offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, both original and actual,’ and that our Blessed Lord Himself, having ‘finished upon the cross that one oblation of Himself,’ doth now, while ever living to make intercession for us, add nothing to the infinite merits of the superabundant satisfaction of that His one sacrifice which would suffice to redeem a thousand worlds—I also believe that, as in all our prayers ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’ we plead in word that one meritorious sacrifice, so in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist the priest presents and pleads to the Father that same body which was broken for us, and the blood which was shed for us, therein sacramentally present by virtue of the consecration, which our great High Priest in His perpetual intercession for us, locally present in His natural body at the right hand of the Father, evermore exhibits before the Father for us.…

“4. I do not know the ‘ritual observances’ well enough to say whether the adoration of Christ, truly present, is symbolised in them. But, while I hold the literal meaning of the words of the Articles, ‘The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped,’ I hold also, in the words of Bishop Andrewes, that ‘Christ Himself, the Substance (res) of the Sacrament, in and with the Sacrament, out of and without the Sacrament, is, wherever He is, to be adored, that is, the Substance of the Sacrament, but not the Sacrament, that is, the earthly part, as Irenaeus, the visible, as Augustine’.

“These truths I hold, not as ‘opinions,’ but as matters of faith, for which, if need were, I would gladly ‘suffer the loss of all things’.

“These truths I would thankfully have to maintain, by the help of God, on such terms that, if (per impossibile, as I trust) it should be decided by a competent authority that either the real objective presence, or the Eucharistic sacrifice, or the worship of Christ there present (as I have above stated those doctrines) were contrary to the doctrine held by the Church of England, I would resign my office.”

Dr. Pusey maintained the same position in his sermon This is My Body, preached in 1871.

“The senses can tell us of form, size, colour, weight, taste, smell. Experience tells us of the power of nourishing. They cannot tell us more than these phenomena. Since then they cannot tell the hidden cause of these phenomena, neither are they entitled to deny the hidden presence of the life-giving body of Jesus, because they cannot discern it. The miracle, through which Jesus by His word of power makes His body really present under these bodily forms, is above, but it is no more against, our senses than those equally miraculous operations of His love, whereby He, through His infused grace or the outpouring of His Spirit, converts the averted soul, and, uniting, binds it to Himself with the indissoluble bond of love, or turned the fiery persecutor of all who called upon His Name into the devoted Apostle, whose life was the life of Christ within him.”

“He [St. Paul] does not say, a communion, or communication, or what men will, of a grace, or a virtue, or a power, or an efficacy, or an influence from Christ’s absent body in heaven, even apart from the fact that no such influence from our Lord’s all-holy body in heaven is ever in the remotest degree hinted at. Our dear Lord in His glorious body does ever in the presence of the Father make intercession for us; His meritorious sacrifice and passion live on there; those scars, more glorious than all created light, shine with the effulgence of His Godhead through all the compass of heaven, and pleading His atoning death obtain mercy and pardon for us sinners. But to us He hath given the Communion of His body, not in heaven as yet, but here on earth.”

“Finding that the words ‘real presence’ were often understood of what is in fact a ‘real absence,’ we added the word ‘objective,’ not as wishing to obtrude on others a term of modern philosophy, but to express that the life-giving body, the res sacramenti, is by virtue of the consecration present without us, to be received by us.… The doctrines of the Eucharistic sacrifice and of Eucharistic adoration are involved in the doctrine of the real presence.”

In 1865 Dr. Pusey published his The Church of England a Portion of Christ’s One Holy Catholic Church, and a Means of Restoring Visible Unity, an Eirenicon, in a Letter to the Author of The Christian Year, usually known as his Eirenicon, Part I. In this work he expressed more fully and clearly than before his previous opinion that there is no necessary difference between the Eucharistic doctrine of the Church of England and that of the Church of Rome, as defined in the Council of Trent and by Roman Catholic theologians since the time of that Council.

“With regard to the term Transubstantiation, there must be a real difference between the meaning which it had in the minds of the schoolmen and that which it must now have since the Catechism of the Council of Trent. For it is there taught with authority that ‘the Eucharist has been called bread because it has the appearance, and still retains the quality natural to bread of supporting and nourishing’; but the schoolmen thought that with the ‘change of substance’ that power of nourishing ceased. Yet, this being granted, I know not what can be included in our term ‘substance’, which the English Church affirms to remain, which is not also included in the Roman term ‘accidents,’ which they also affirm to remain. Clearly the doctrine which the Church of England rejects under the term ‘Transubstantiation, or the change of the substance of bread and wine,’ is only one which ‘overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament’ in that the sign and the thing signified became the same. This was so according to the doctrine of the schoolmen, in which ‘substance’ was equivalent to ‘matter’. The meaning of the word ‘substance’ being changed, the Roman doctrine must be so far changed too. Archbishop Plato in the Greek Church admits the term μετουσίωσις in a sense which, if proposed to it, the English Church must accept. ‘The Eastern and Greek-Russian Church admits the word Transubstantiation, in Greek μετουσίωσις, not that physical and carnal Transubstantiation, but the sacramental and mystical, and receives that word Transubstantiation in the same sense in which the oldest fathers of the Greek Church received the words μεταλλαγή, μετάθεσις, μεταστοιχείωσις.’ A sacramental or a hyperphysical change no English Churchman, who believes the real presence as his Church teaches, could hesitate to accept.

“The doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice depends upon the doctrine of the real objective presence. Where there is the apostolic succession and a consecration in our Lord’s words, there, it is held by Roman authorities too, is the Eucharistic sacrifice. The very strength of the expressions used of ‘the sacrifices of Masses,’ that ‘they were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits,’ the use of the plural, and the clause ‘in the which it was commonly said,’ show that what the Article speaks of is not ‘the sacrifice of the Mass,’ but the habit (which, as one hears from time to time, still remains) of trusting to the purchase of Masses when dying, to the neglect of a holy life, or repentance, and the grace of God and His mercy in Christ Jesus, while in health.… In the Holy Eucharist we do in act what in our prayers we do in words. I am persuaded that, on this point, the two Churches might be reconciled by explanation of the terms used. The Council of Trent, in laying down the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass, claims nothing for the Holy Eucharist but an application of the one meritorious sacrifice of the cross. An application of that sacrifice the Church of England believes also. Many years have flowed away since we have taught this, and have noticed how the words ‘sacrifice,’ ‘proper,’ or ‘propitiatory sacrifice’ have been alternately accepted or rejected according as they were supposed to mean that the Eucharistic sacrifice acquired something propitiatory in itself, or only applied what was merited once and for ever by the one sacrifice of our Lord upon the cross.”

“Since the meaning of the word ‘substance’ has been changed since the word Transubstantiation was adopted in the Latin Church to express the ‘change’ produced by consecration in the Holy Eucharist, it is not too much to ask the Roman Church to explain what that ‘substance’ is which they believe to be changed. For, since they require a belief in Transubstantiation as terms of communion, and since the meaning has been changed since the times of the schoolmen, it is but reasonable that they should explain the meaning of that which they require us to express belief in. My own conviction is, that our Articles deny Transubstantiation in one sense, and that the Roman Church, according to the explanation of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, affirms it in another.”

In 1870 Dr. Pusey published his Is Healthful Re-union Impossible? A Second Letter to the Very Rev. J. H. Newman, usually known as his Eirenicon, Part III. which was re-issued in 1876 with the title Healthful Re-union as Conceived Possible before the Vatican Council. In this treatise he still further emphasised his conviction that the Eucharistic doctrines of the Church of England and the Church of Rome were not necessarily in opposition to one another. On the subject of the real presence, as distinct from Transubstantiation, he wrote:—

“Reserving the question of Transubstantiation for the present, since the Council of Trent states the two doctrines separately, we cannot doubt that the Council of Trent, in regard to the real presence, expresses the ancient faith, and we could willingly accept its terms as expressing our belief.”

On the subject of Transubstantiation, he wrote:—

“Since then the body and blood of Christ are present in their substance (for otherwise they could not be present at all), but the presence of that ‘substance’ does not involve the presence of any of the ordinary properties of a body, so neither does the conversion of the substance of the bread and of the wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ involve the conversion of any of the properties of the bread or wine. We may then (as I said) think that by ‘substance’ is meant the ‘essence’ or οὐσία of a thing, that which it is (whatever it is), its quidditas; and under the ‘species’ which remain, and which are the veil of the unseen presence, we may understand ‘the φύσις or nature, including all those properties of which the senses are cognizant, and with them, or among them, the natural power of supporting and nourishing our bodies’. For although the Catechism of the Council of Trent is not authoritative, yet it has, I suppose, more authority than any individual doctor, or than many doctors; and it distinctly asserts that ‘by this name bread the Eucharist has been called, because it has the appearance and still retains the quality natural to bread, of supporting and nourishing’. Whatever may have been the value of the Aristotelian philosophy to Christian theology, it has, I think, in this particular instance, introduced needless difficulty into the divine mystery, difficulty which relates, not to the mystery declared by our Lord, but attaching to the use of the word ‘substance’. For, while affirming that the substance of the bread had ceased to be, they following that philosophy for the most part assumed that the power of nourishing ceased also, and that it was restored by a miracle, for which miracle there is no authority in our Lord’s words which are the foundation of the mystery, nor has the Church ever laid down anything upon it. But, if the species, that is, that which the Roman Church also believes to remain as the outward veil of our Blessed Lord’s presence, retains those natural powers of nourishing and refreshing, then, as I have for many years said, I can see no contradiction; there is nothing, the existence of which the Church of England, while she says that ‘the bread and wine remain in their very natural substances,’ can mean to affirm, the existence whereof the Council of Trent can mean to deny, when it affirms ‘the conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood’. For, in addition to those qualities which, in philosophic language, were termed ‘accidents,’ the Catechism of Trent includes a property which is not cognizable by sight, or touch, or taste, that whereby the body is strengthened and refreshed.… However, then, in ordinary controversy or explanations, we seem to be almost hopelessly met with the contrast of ‘substance’ and ‘accidents,’ yet the contrast belongs to the schools, not to the Church.”

In 1851 Dr. Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter, published A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Exeter on the Present State of the Church. It contained the following passage:—

“I see the same high authority number among the errors of Rome, which our own Church has renounced, that ‘a propitiatory virtue is attributed to the Eucharist’. I am not aware of our Church having anywhere condemned such a doctrine. That it has condemned (as we all from our hearts condemn) as ‘blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits’ ‘the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and dead to have remission from pain or guilt,’ we know and heartily rejoice. But this is very far indeed from saying or meaning that the Eucharist hath not ‘a propitiatory virtue’; and we must be very careful how we deny that virtue to it. The consecrated elements ought not to be separated in our minds from the propitiation for our sins, continually presented for us before the throne of God. Whether we regard them in correspondence with the meat-offerings and drink-offerings of the Old Testament as memorials of the one great sacrifice, and so, in union with that sacrifice, by virtue of Christ’s appointment, representing and pleading to the Father the atonement finished on the cross, or as answering to those portions of the typical sacrifice which were eaten by the priests and offerers, in either case they are intimately united with the altar in heaven, and with its propitiatory virtue. ‘In these holy mysteries’ in an especial manner heaven and earth are brought together.… The partakers of the sacrifice are partakers of the altar, and of all its inestimable benefits, the first of which is the propitiation of our sins. For in the Eucharist, as a Sacrament, ‘we eat our ransom,’ as St. Augustine says, we receive spiritually ‘the body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for,’ ‘His blood which was shed for us’; in the same Eucharist, as a sacrifice, we, in representation, plead the one great sacrifice, which our great High Priest continually presenteth for us in heaven. In heaven He presenteth ever before the Father in Person Himself, mediating with the Father as our Intercessor; on earth He invisibly sanctifies what is offered, and makes the earthly elements which we offer to be sacramentally and ineffably—but not in a carnal way—His body and His blood. For, although once for all offered, that sacrifice, be it remembered, is ever living and continuous, made to be continuous by the resurrection of our Lord. Accordingly St. John tells us in Rev. 5:6, 12, that he ‘beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne stood a Lamb as it had been slain,’ and to Him is continually addressed the triumphal song of the heavenly hosts, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing’. To Him His Church on earth in the Eucharistic service in like manner continually cries, ‘O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world’. Not that tookest away, but still takest, Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi. As, then, the sacrifice is continuous, its propitiatory virtue is continuous, and the fulness of the propitiation is pleaded for the whole Church whensoever the commemoration of it is exhibited in the Eucharist.”

Allusion has already been made in passing, in connection with a letter by Dr. Pusey, to the book by Robert Isaac Wilberforce, Archdeacon of the East Riding, who became a Roman Catholic in 1854. This book was entitled The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. It was published in 1853. The treatment adopted in it was very full and careful, and for the most part followed the general lines of scholastic theology. Archdeacon Wilberforce maintained that the glorified body and blood of Christ are sacramentally present in the Eucharist under the form of bread and wine by virtue of the consecration; that questions relating to Transubstantiation may be left open, pending any authoritative decision in regard to them; and that the Eucharist is a sacrifice of Christ. The following quotations supply indications of the positions stated and defended at length in the book:—

“The manner in which Christ’s presence is bestowed, whether it be by Transubstantiation, or according to any other law, is a point which did not come under consideration during the first eight centuries. On this subject therefore it will not be necessary to enter. But that Christ’s presence in the Holy Eucharist is a real presence; that the blessings of the new life are truly bestowed in it through communion with the New Adam; that consecration is a real act, whereby the inward part or thing signified is joined to the outward and visible sign; and that the Eucharistic oblation is a real sacrifice—these points it will be attempted to prove by the testimony of Scripture and of the ancient fathers.”

“Our Lord’s human body is not subject to the laws of material existence, because His body is a glorified body, and therefore not an object to our senses, unless such be His own will. That we do not commonly discern it is not owing, surely, to distance of place, but to the fact that glorified beings cannot be discerned by those who are in our present state, except at their own pleasure.… Our Lord is present in heaven in a particular place and under an especial form, that form, namely, under which His Apostles beheld Him, and that place to which they saw Him depart, at the right hand of God. This is our Lord’s natural presence, in which He is a fitting object, when it pleases Him, to the senses of men. In this form He showed Himself to St. Stephen at his death, to St. Paul at his conversion, and to St. John in his exile. But our Lord’s presence in the Holy Eucharist is not natural, but supernatural; it is a sacramental presence, the presence, that is, of a res sacramenti, which is not in itself an object to the senses of men. We have no reason therefore to suppose that form and outline belong to it, because these are the conditions through which things become an object to the senses of men. And yet there is a way in which our Lord’s body may be said to be present with form and place in the Holy Eucharist. For there is a connection between the sacramentum and res sacramenti; and form and place belong to the first, though they do not belong to the second. So that, though the res sacramenti in itself has neither place nor form, yet it has them in a manner through the sacramentum with which it is united. Christ’s body therefore may be said to have a form in this Sacrament, namely, the form of the elements, and to occupy that place through which the elements extend. As the spirit may be said to be present in that place where the body is situated, and as light may be said to assume the shape of the orifice through which it passes, so it may be said that the res sacramenti borrows place and shape from the sacramentum with which it is united by consecration.… His will is to be present in the Holy Eucharist, not indeed as an object to the senses of the receiver, but through the intervention of consecrated elements. So that His presence does not depend upon the thought and imaginations of men, but upon His own supernatural power, and upon the agency of the Holy Ghost. He is present Himself, and not merely by His influence, effects, and operation; by that essence, and in that substance, which belongs to Him as the true Head of mankind.”

“If it were made a question, in what manner our Lord’s presence in the Holy Eucharist was supposed to be brought about, and still more if it were requisite to explain this process in terms which all parties in the ancient Church would have been prepared to accept, the inquiry would involve considerable difficulty. It would be necessary to find some mode of adjustment between the tendency of the Eastern school, as it has been called, on one side, and that of the opponents of Eutychianism on the other. The former tendency went so far in some instances as to imply that the outward part retained no real existence at all; the latter led to language which might be represented to mean that it was wholly unaltered. The more scientific statements of the school of St. Augustine did not harmonise exactly with either. And consequently the theory subsequently maintained by Aquinas, that the substance of our Lord’s body and blood supersedes that of the bread and wine, while, so far as the senses go, the latter remain wholly unaltered, was an explanation of the mode in which our Lord’s presence is brought about which did not exactly accord with the statement of any early party.… There can be no necessity therefore for admitting this expression of the manner in which our Lord’s presence is brought about, unless it is commended to us by some later authority to which we are bound to submit. And, therefore, while it is accepted by those who admit the authority of the Council of Trent, it is not accepted by English Churchmen, by whom that council is not recognised. They withhold their assent from this account of the manner in which our Lord’s presence is brought about in the Holy Eucharist, and allow nothing but that in which all parties in the ancient Church were accordant. They hold, of course, as our Article declares, and as Aquinas would not have denied, that according to that popular sense of the word substance, which implies it to be an object of the senses of men, the substance of the elements remains unchanged. But in reference to that more subtle explanation, which was designed by Aquinas, they simply withhold their judgment, and affirm nothing respecting the Holy Eucharist but that which was affirmed by the whole Church, both in the East and West, during the first seven centuries of its existence.”

“The Eucharistic sacrifice is not the offering of the sacramentum only, the first-fruits of nature, but much more that of the res sacramenti, the reality, or thing signified. It is the offering up of the collective Church, Christ’s mystical body, but it is also the offering up of Christ Himself, by whom that body is sanctified. Yet He is not offered up as though anything could be added to the sacrifice of the cross, or as though that sacrifice required renewal. The bloodstained sacrifice which the One Great High Priest for ever pleads before the Father’s throne, admits neither of increase nor repetition.… He who has been consecrated a Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek, chooses this medium for giving effect to His perpetual intercession. That acceptance which he purchased by the sacrifice of the cross, He applies through the sacrifice of the altar. He Himself it is, who through the voice of His ministers consecrates these earthly gifts, and thus bestows the mystery of His real presence. By Himself, again, is the precious Victim presented before the Father’s throne; and the intervention of their heavenly Head gives reality to the actions of his earthly ministers.”

In 1867 a Charge which excited much attention was delivered by the Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Walter Kerr Hamilton. The Bishop maintained that the inward part of the Eucharist, present by means of the consecration under the veil of the outward part of bread and wine, is the body and blood of Christ; that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, in which that which was offered on the cross and is pleaded by our Lord in heaven is presented to God the Father in a sacrificial action; and that these doctrines are the doctrines of the Church of England. In the course of his careful and argumentative Charge he said:—

“As our Lord’s representatives, and so in the Person of Christ putting forth some of His delegated powers, and by His own words, we bless the elements, or rather He blesses them through us. Through Such blessing the oblation becomes a Sacrament, and as such has not only an outward, but an inward part. The outward part, the bread and wine, remains in its appearance, form, and essence or substance, what it was before the act of consecration, but still by consecration it has been made the veil and channel of an ineffable mystery. The inward part is that which our Blessed Lord took from the Blessed Virgin, which He offered to God as an atoning sacrifice on the cross, which the Almighty Father has glorified, has, that is, endowed, ‘not with the actual properties, but with the supernatural gifts, graces, and effects of Godhead,’ and out of which wells forth every blessing of the new covenant. The inward part of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is Christ’s precious body and blood, and so, by virtue of the hypostatic union, Christ Himself.… This inward part of the Sacrament, this presence of the body and blood of Christ, and of Christ Himself, is not after the manner or laws of a body, according to which ordinary laws our Lord’s body is in heaven only, but is a supernatural, heavenly, invisible, incomprehensible, and spiritual presence.… The gifts receive an inward part, even the presence of the res sacramenti, the body and blood of Christ.… This consecration of the gifts stands in closest relation to another great function. That sacrificial action, which is the counterpart of Christ’s perpetual pleading and presentation of His body and blood in our behalf, is consummated when the bread and wine are made the Sacrament of the Lord’s body and blood.… It should seem to us to be only according to the analogy of faith that our Lord should in His own Person ever present the sacrifice, that which was once for all offered up to God as a sacrifice for ever, and that His representatives here on earth should also plead, in a way appointed by Himself, that same sacrifice which the Great Mediator evermore pleadeth in heaven.… Christians keep a feast where they strengthen and refresh their souls on that which is presented to God, in commemoration of His Son’s atoning work, namely, the res sacramenti, the precious body and precious blood, whereby we are made one with Christ, and Christ with us.… The Apostles and those who have received the commission from them, have ministrations entrusted to them, through which the bread and wine become at Holy Communion the body and blood of Christ, and the Church presents before the throne of grace that which is present, namely, Christ’s body and blood in the Sacrament, and by such offering pleads with Christ and through Christ with the Father.… The effect of your blessing the elements is that there becomes a real presence of the Lord’s body and blood in the Sacrament.… You are to call to the remembrance of your God, even as your Saviour is doing in heaven, by pleading His precious body and blood, the new covenant which He has made with man.… Every one who is enabled to receive the doctrine held in the apostolical and literal meaning of our Lord’s words, ‘This is My body,’ ‘This is My blood,’ will almost instinctively pass on to unite himself to the intercessory, mediatorial action of our Lord as the one Priest in heaven.”

“Through consecration the body and blood of Christ become really present, and by this I mean ‘present without us,’ and not only ‘in the soul of the faithful receiver’.”

“If … I desire for you and for myself that we should not give any occasion to have the charge brought against us, that we do not honestly teach the doctrine of the Church of England on its positive side, I am not less anxious that we should with equal honesty distinctly contradict those doctrines which our Church negatives.… These negations may be summed up in some such words as these: ‘The substance of bread and wine is not changed’. The sacrifice of Christ’s natural body is not re-iterated and repeated in that most effectual act of pleading which is called the commemorative sacrifice. Adoration is not due to the consecrated bread and wine, although ‘Christ our Lord (as Bishop Andrewes says) in or without the Sacrament is to be adored’. The presence of Christ is not that of an organical body and of a material character.”

In 1867 the Rev. William J. E. Bennett, then Vicar of Froome-Selwood, published a pamphlet entitled A Plea for Toleration in the Church of England, in a Letter to the Rev. E. B. Pusey. The pamphlet was chiefly on ritual and ceremonial observances, and on episcopal legislation; but these were treated from a doctrinal standpoint; and the following statement, afterwards the subject of much controversy, was made by Mr. Bennett in the course of it:—

“I am one of those who burn lighted candles at the altar in the day-time, who use incense at the holy sacrifice, who use the Eucharistic vestments, who elevate the Blessed Sacrament, who myself adore, and teach the people to adore, the consecrated elements, believing Christ to be in them, believing that under their veil is the sacred body and blood of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Bennett also used the expression “the real, actual, and visible presence of our Lord upon the altars of our churches”.

It is obvious that in the phrases “adore the consecrated elements” and “visible presence” Mr. Bennett had carelessly expressed a meaning which would have been better conveyed in such words as “adore the inward part of the Sacrament” and “presence under visible species”; and at the instance of Dr. Pusey he altered the passages quoted so as to run in the third edition of his pamphlet:—

“I am one of those who … myself adore, and teach the people to adore, Christ present in the Sacrament under the form of bread and wine, believing that under their veil is the sacred body and blood of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”;

“the real and actual presence of our Lord upon the altars of our churches.”

A prosecution of Mr. Bennett for the doctrine about the Eucharist held by him, chiefly as stated in the Plea for Toleration, led to a decision of the Court of Arches on 23rd July, 1870, confirmed on appeal by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on 8th June, 1872, that the statements as corrected in the third edition of Mr. Bennett’s pamphlet were not unlawful in the Church of England.

In 1867 a memorial was presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury on the doctrine of the Eucharist by twenty-one of the more prominent clergy who accepted the teaching which had been promoted by the Oxford Movement. The signatories included Dr. Pusey, Dr. Liddon, Archdeacon Denison, Mr. Carter of Clewer, and Dr. Littledale. It contained the following repudiations and affirmations:—

“(1). We repudiate the opinion of a ‘corporal presence of Christ’s natural flesh and blood,’ that is to say, of the presence of His body and blood as they ‘are in heaven,’ and the conception of the mode of His presence which implies the physical change of the natural substances of bread and wine, commonly called ‘Transubstantiation’.

“We believe that in the Holy Eucharist by virtue of the consecration through the power of the Holy Ghost the body and blood of our Saviour Christ, ‘the inward part or thing signified,’ are present really and truly but spiritually and ineffably under ‘the outward visible part or sign’ or ‘form of bread and wine’.

“(2). We repudiate the notion of any fresh sacrifice, or any view of the Eucharistic sacrificial offering as of something apart from the one all-sufficient sacrifice and oblation on the cross, which alone ‘is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual,’ and which alone is ‘meritorious’.

“We believe that, as in heaven Christ our great High Priest ever offers Himself before the eternal Father pleading by His presence His sacrifice of Himself once offered on the cross, so on earth in the Holy Eucharist that same body once for all sacrificed for us and that same blood once for all shed for us, sacramentally present, are offered and pleaded before the Father by the priest, as our Lord ordained to be done in remembrance of Himself when He instituted the Blessed Sacrament of His body and blood.

“(3). We repudiate all ‘adoration’ of ‘the sacramental bread and wine,’ which would be ‘idolatry,’ regarding them with the reverence due to them because of their sacramental relation to the body and blood of our Lord; we repudiate also all adoration of a ‘corporal presence of Christ’s natural flesh and blood,’ that is to say, of the presence of His body and blood as they ‘are in heaven’.

“We believe that Christ Himself, really and truly but spiritually and ineffably present in the Sacrament, is therein to be adored.”

With this memorial may be compared a clear statement in an undated tract by Dr. Richard Frederick Littledale, entitled The Real Presence.

“The Christian Church teaches, and has always taught, that in the Holy Communion, after consecration, the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ are ‘verily and indeed’ present on the altar under the forms of bread and wine.

“The Church also teaches that this presence depends on God’s will, not on man’s belief, and therefore that bad and good people receive the very same thing in communicating, the good for their benefit, the bad for their condemnation.

“Further, that, as Christ is both God and Man, and as these two natures are for ever joined in His one Person, His Godhead must be wherever His body is, and therefore He is to be worshipped in His Sacrament.

“The body and blood present are that same body and blood which were conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, ascended into heaven, but they are not present in the same manner as they were when Christ walked on earth. He, as Man, is now naturally in heaven, there to be till the Last Day, yet He is supernaturally, and just as truly, present in the Holy Communion in some way which we cannot explain, but only believe, knowing, as we do, that since He rose from the dead His body has more than human powers, as He showed by passing through closed doors.”

One of the most eminent of the younger contemporaries of Dr. Pusey was Dr. William Bright, who became Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford in 1868, and held that office until his death in 1901. Most of his published writings deal with historical subjects; but it may be well to quote from the volume of Selected Letters which was edited by Dr. Kidd, and from a note in his collection of Ancient Collects, a few passages of some special interest in which he alluded to Eucharistic doctrine.

“As for the sacrifice, I should begin by sweeping off the ground all notions of a repetition of the atonement, of a new redemption, ‘satisfaction,’ etc., so as to show that nothing like that is intended. Then, and only then, would it be opportune to show that our Lord, as the Lamb that was slain, must always be still pleading His atonement, and thus acting as our propitiation, and that the Eucharistic memorial is a form of such pleading, inasmuch as He is in an especial manner present in the Eucharist, and if present must be present as the Lamb.”

“The distinction to be taken between our partaking of Christ in Baptism and our partaking of Him through His body and blood in the Eucharist is that the recipient of Baptism is incorporated into Christ’s body mystical, which is itself formed and sustained by His body and blood, but that He does not directly come into spiritual contact with the body and blood till he communicates. Why does he need such contact? What is the rationale of this further privilege? Must we not find it in the Incarnation? The Word became flesh, as for other reasons so for this, that His flesh, being the ‘flesh of God the Word who is the Life-giver,’ may become a medium of imparting a fresh energy of spiritual life to believers. As it has an efficacy which no other ‘flesh’ could have, so it has power of contact or of presence which belong to no other. These powers are exercised, this efficacy is imparted, in the Eucharist. I think, then, that although the phrase ‘sacred humanity’ is quite sound, yet one might add a little by way of bringing out the idea of a mysterious participation of the sacred body and blood of Christ, present or imparted under conditions belonging to their spiritualised or glorified state, and this for the purpose of sustaining spiritual life in the whole being of the faithful or devout receivers. I am sure that the best way of removing or lessening difficulties as to the Eucharistic presence is by linking it as closely as possible to the Incarnation, regarded as in order to the sustentation of spiritual life in Christians. This will help people to see how those great verses in John 6. are the legitimate carrying out of John 1:14–16, and to see, that is, that not Christ’s spirit only, or His grace, has a function in regard to their spiritual life, but His body and flesh also, as being His.”

“I deeply regret that the point of ‘adoration’ was so prominently urged; but, since it has been put forward, I cannot think Denison’s view wrong.”

In other letters Dr. Bright spoke of “the peculiar and unsatisfactory, because unreal, view which Hooker takes of the Eucharistic presence,” and of “the mistake which” “the Roman theology made when it placed the sacrifice of the Mass in a line with that of the cross instead of in a line with the heavenly presentation”. The note in Dr. Bright’s collection of Ancient Collects was also on the Eucharistic sacrifice being “in a line with the heavenly presentation”. He there said:—

“This and the preceding Syrian prayer bear witness to the great truth that the Eucharistic sacrifice, even in its highest aspect, must be put in one line (if we may say so), not with what Christ did once for all upon the cross, but with what He is doing continually in heaven; that, as present naturally in heaven, and sacramentally in the Holy Eucharist, the Lamb of God exhibits Himself to the Father, and pleads the atonement as once finished in act, but ever living in operation; that in neither case does He repeat it or add to it. The notion that it was not unique or perfect, but could be reiterated or supplemented in heaven or on earth, was justly denounced as a ‘blasphemous fable’ in Article 31. But this should not lead us to forget that ‘the Lamb as It had been slain,’ ‘appearing in the presence of God for us,’ ‘is the propitiation for our sins,’ and even now tollit peccata mundi by an intercession consisting in the presentation of Himself.”

A short statement of belief, which was adopted by a unanimous vote at the annual meeting of the members of the English Church Union on 21st June, 1900, affords a convenient instance of the doctrine of the Eucharistic presence held by those who were influenced by the Oxford Movement.

“We, the members of the English Church Union, holding fast to the faith and teaching of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church—that in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper the bread and wine, through the operation of the Holy Ghost, become, in and by consecration according to our Lord’s institution, verily and indeed the body and blood of Christ, and that Christ our Lord, present in the same Most Holy Sacrament of the altar under the form of bread and wine, is to be worshipped and adored—desire, in view of present circumstances, to re-affirm, in accordance with the teaching of the Church, our belief in this verity of the Christian faith, and to declare that we shall abide by all such teaching and practice as follow from this doctrine of the whole Catholic Church of Christ.”