VI

One of the most independent minds of the nineteenth century was that of Frederick Denison Maurice. Maurice was for ten years Chaplain of Guy’s Hospital; he was deposed from his two chairs of Theology and of English Literature and History at King’s College, London, for supposed unorthodoxy on eschatological questions in 1853; he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge in 1866, and held this office until his death in 1872. His work The Kingdom of Christ; or Hints to a Quaker Respecting the Principles, Constitutions, and Ordinances of the Catholic Church, the first edition of which was published in 1838, contained a discussion on the doctrine of the Eucharist of considerable length. Maurice criticised with some severity the views of Quakers, Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Lutherans in regard to the Eucharist, the objections of Rationalists, and the teaching of Roman Catholics; he himself maintained a doctrine that the Eucharist is a sacrificial feast, that Christ is there really present, that the words of institution are to be literally understood in a true and spiritual meaning, and that the partaking of the Sacrament enables communicants to enter into fellowship with Christ in His glory at the right hand of the Father.

“They [that is, the words of institution] might only signify that a person who had been deeply beloved was leaving with the friends from whom He was about to be separated a token and memorial of His intercourse with them. The words, indeed, ‘This is My body, this is My blood,’ might sound strange and hyperbolical, especially in a moment of what seemed final separation, for then the utterances of such a friend would be especially simple and awful, as we know that His other utterances were; but yet they might only signify, This will remind you of My Person, and this of the blood which is about to be so unrighteously shed. Such an explanation, however embarrassing, would be the easiest, nay, it would be the only possible one, unless there were some circumstances connected with the whole character of Him who spake the words, with His other acts and purposes, with the time when they were spoken, which determined them to a different sense. Suppose now that the Person who spoke these words was the Son of Man and the Son of God; suppose at the very time He spoke them He had been declaring Himself to be the way through which men must come to the unseen Father, to be the truth, to be the life, to be in that relation to His disciples in which the vine is to its branches, to be about to bestow upon them a Spirit who should guide them into the knowledge of the Father and of the Son; suppose Him to have told His disciples that they were the appointed messengers of these truths to men; suppose Him to have prayed that not only they, but all who should believe in Him through their word might be one in Him as He and the Father were one; suppose Him to have connected all these mysterious words with the giving up of Himself to death; suppose death to have been felt in all ages and in all countries to be the great barrier between the visible and the invisible world; suppose sacrifice, or the giving up of certain animals to death, and the offering them to some unseen Ruler, had been felt in all countries which attained to anything like national fellowship and consistency to be the means whereby they could approach that Ruler’s presence, obtain His favour, remove His wrath; suppose sacrifices to have been the most essential part of the Jewish institutions, the most important element in their worship, the only way whereby they could draw nigh, as members of a nation, to the God of their nation; suppose them, however, to have been taught, both by the law which appointed those sacrifices and by the prophets who expounded it, that they were not valuable for their own sakes, but were accepted when they were performed by God’s appointment through His priests as a confession on the part of the offerer that he had violated his relation to the head of the commonwealth and to its members, as a submission of the will, as a prayer to be restored to that position which through self-will had been lost, or else as a means of expressing that entire self-surrender which was implied in the fact of belonging to the divine society; suppose that the feast which the disciples were keeping with their Master was the most purely national and strictly sacrificial of all the feasts, that one which celebrated the first deliverance and establishment of the nation, and which recalled the fact that it was a nation based upon sacrifices in which every Jew realised the blessings of His covenant, rejoiced that God was His King, knew that he was indeed an Israelite; suppose all this, and then consider whether that which seemed the only possible interpretation of Christ’s words, though a most difficult and perplexing one, do not become actually irrational and monstrous? Consider whether any one who believed what we know the Apostles did believe respecting their Master, His Person, His Kingdom, could attach any but the very highest significance to language concerning His body and blood. Consider whether any persons who believed what we know they believed respecting their own office and work, could imagine that this significance was limited and temporary. Consider whether persons who connected, as we know they did connect, the kingdom whereof they were ministers with the earlier dispensations, could believe otherwise than that, by the same simple, wonderful method that had been used in all countries, and had been appointed, as they believed, by the authority of God Himself in their own, by the method which had enabled the Jews to enter into the fruition of their covenant and its privileges, and the neglect of which had again and again cheated them of it, He meant to put them in possession of all the substantial good things which He came to bestow upon mankind? Could they doubt that, when they ate this bread and drank this wine, He meant that they should have the fullest participation of that sacrifice with which God had declared Himself well-pleased, that they should really enter into that presence, into which the Forerunner had for them entered, that they should really receive in that Communion all the spiritual blessings which, through the union of the Godhead with human flesh, the heirs of this flesh might inherit? Could they doubt that the state of individual death which they had claimed for themselves in Baptism was here to be practically attained by fellowship with Christ’s death; that the new life which they had claimed for themselves, as members of Christ’s body, was here to be attained through the communication of His life? Could they doubt that, if their spirits were to be raised up to behold the infinite and absolute glory, here they were admitted into that blessedness? that, if their hearts and affections desired a manifested and embodied King, here they became united to Him? that, if spirit, soul, and body were to be subjected to the government of God’s Spirit, that each might be delivered from its own corruption, receive its own quickening, and exert its own living powers, here each received that strength and renewal by which it was enabled to do its appointed work, to overcome its peculiar temptations, to be fitted for its future perfection? Could they doubt that, if they were baptised into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and if this deepest unity were the foundation of such a union among men as no barrier of time, or space, or death could break, here they were actually received into communion with that awful name, and into communion with all the saints who live by beholding it and delighting in it? Could they doubt that here the partial views, and one-sided words, and opposing thoughts of men, found their meeting-point, and complete reconciliation? that here lay the clear vital expression of those distinctions which in verbal theology become dry, hard, dogmatic oppositions? that here it is apprehended how faith alone justifies, and how faith without works is dead? how it is we that act, and yet not we, but Christ in us? how he that is born of God cannot commit sin, and yet if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves? how we may be persuaded that neither death nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ, yet may tremble lest we should be castaways? Could they doubt that it was their office to present Christianity in its different aspects to the different wants and circumstances of their own age and of ages to come; that it was the office of this Sacrament to exhibit it as a whole truth, at once transcendent and practical, surpassing men’s thoughts, independent of men’s faith and opinions, and yet essentially belonging to man, the governing law of his being, the actuating power of his life? Could they doubt that they were to lay the foundation of the Church on earth, and that this Sacrament was to give it permanency, coherency, vitality throughout all generations? And, if this were their faith, why, I ask, is it not to be ours?”

“Our Lord says, ‘This is My body’. St. Paul addresses the Ephesian converts as sitting in the heavenly places with Christ. He tells the Philippians that their bodies shall be made like unto Christ’s glorious body. Surely this is Christianity. It is the Gospel of the deliverance of the spirit and soul and body from all the fetters by which they are held down and prevented from fulfilling each its own proper function, from maintaining their right relations to each other. And this emancipation is connected with and consequent upon our union as members of one body with Christ, the crucified, the risen, the glorified Lord of our race. Now, if these be the privileges of Christian men, and if these privileges, whatever they be, are in this Sacrament asserted and realised, what a low notion it is that we are invited to hold communion, not with Christ as He is, not with His body exalted at the right hand of God, but with a body consubstantiated in the elements.… What we need is that they [the bread and wine] should be made a perfectly transparent medium through which His glory may be manifested, that nothing should be really beheld by the spirit of the worshippers save He into whose presence they are brought. For this end the elements require a solemn consecration from the priest, through whom Christ distributes them to His flock, not that they may be clothed with some new and peculiar attributes, not that they may acquire some essential and miraculous virtue, but that they may be diverted from their ordinary uses, that they may become purely sacramental.… We need some pure untroubled element which has no significancy except as the organ through the which the voice of God speaks to man, and through which he may answer, ‘Thy servant heareth’. Such we believe are this bread and wine when redeemed to His service: let us not deprive them of their ethereal whiteness and clearness by the colours of our fancy or the clouds of our intellect.”

“I have maintained that the character of the Eucharistic feast is sacrificial, that Christ is really present in it, and that the words of institution are to be taken literally.”

“I have maintained that in order to the full acknowledgment of Christ’s spiritual presence, we must distinctly acknowledge that He it clothed with a body; that, if we lose this belief, we adopt a vague pantheistic notion of a presence hovering about us somewhere in the air in place of a clear spiritual apprehension of a Person in whom all truth and love dwell; that the spiritual organ therefore does demand an actual body for its nourishment; that through that spiritual organ our bodies themselves are meant to be purified and glorified; that this Sacrament meets and satisfies the needs both of the human spirit which is redeemed and of the body which is waiting for its redemption. But all these admissions only bring out the difference with the Romanist into stronger relief. To enter into fellowship with Christ as He is, ascended at the right hand of God, in a body of glory and not of humiliation, this must be the desire of a Christian man, if he seek the presence of a real not an imaginary object, if he desire his body as well as his spirit to be raised and exalted. On this ground then he must reject all theories which involve the imagination of a descent into the elements; on this ground, also, he must feel that the intellectual contradiction which such theories contain, and even boast of, is the counterpart of a spiritual contradiction still more gross and dangerous.”