In the closing years of the nineteenth century several attempts were made to lessen the acuteness of the controversies concerning the Eucharist in the Church of England. The most notable were the Charge delivered in 1898 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Frederick Temple, and a Conference appointed by the Bishop of London, Dr. Mandell Creighton, at the instance of the London Diocesan Conference, which met at Fulham Palace in October, 1900. With them may be associated a Conference held at Oxford in December, 1899, under the chairmanship of Dr. Sanday, the Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, in which both Churchmen and Nonconformists took part, at which, although the discussion of the doctrine of the Eucharist was not prominent, questions relating to priesthood and sacrifice were considered.
The salient point of Archbishop Temple’s Visitation Charge of 1898 in regard to the Eucharist was the contention that the Church of England has expressly affirmed that the Sacrament is a means of conveying to communicants the spiritual gift of union with Christ, but, while rejecting Transubstantiation, has left open the question whether the effect of consecration is to make the body and blood of Christ present under the form of bread and wine.
“Concerning the Holy Eucharist there are two distinct opinions which have for a long time divided Christians from one another. There are those who hold that no special gift is bestowed in the Sacrament, but that the value of it, mainly if not entirely, resides in the effect produced on the soul of the receiver by the commemoration of that wonderful act of love, our Lord’s sacrifice of Himself on the cross.… On the other hand, there are, and always have been, those who believe that this Sacrament conveys to the receivers a special mysterious gift, uniting us to Christ in a special manner and degree, giving new power, new cleansing, new life, and even new insight into spiritual things, leavening the whole being with a heavenly infection.… Between these two opinions there can be no question that the Church [that is, the Church of England] holds the latter.… It is hardly necessary to add that the doctrine of the reality of the gift bestowed in the Holy Communion is universal in the writings of the early Christians, and is still maintained not only by the Anglican Communion, but also by the Greek and other Churches in the East, by the Romans, and by the Lutherans.
“Having come to this point, we reach a further question and another division of opinion. For it may be asked, When is the gift bestowed, and how? It is clear that, if we confine this question to make it mean when is the gift bestowed on the individual communicant, only one answer is possible. It is bestowed on the communicant when he receives the consecrated elements. He cannot receive it before, for till that moment he has not fulfilled the necessary conditions; but the consuming of the bread and wine is the means whereby he receives the gift, and the pledge to him that he has received it. Nor, indeed, is there any dispute upon this point. But, if the question be, not when does the communicant receive the gift, but when does the congregation in which the Holy Eucharist is celebrated receive it, not as individuals but as congregation, the answer may be very different, and on the answer to this question there have been the angriest and longest controversies, and this is the dispute which is commonly called the dispute concerning the real presence. The Church of England has given no answer to this question; and Hooker, undeniably a very high authority on the doctrine of the Church of England, maintains that the real presence should not be looked for in the consecrated elements, but in the receivers. They certainly receive a real gift, and, knowing this, why should we ask any further question? Knowing the reality of the gift, we know all that is needed for our spiritual life. The Church certainly teaches Hooker’s doctrine, but to this it must be added that the Church nowhere forbids the further doctrine that there is a real presence in some way attached to the elements at the time of consecration and before the reception. If there be no real presence until their reception, it may be asked what is the effect of consecration, and may not the consecration be omitted? The answer is obvious. On the theory that the real presence is bestowed in the reception, and not before, then the effect of the prayer of consecration is to attach to the elements, not a presence, but a promise. The bread has been blessed according to our Lord’s command, and the Lord’s promise is that, when the communicant partakes of this bread, so blessed, he shall be a partaker of the Lord’s body. But, though this explanation entirely satisfies all the language of the Articles and the Prayer Book, it is nowhere explicitly asserted so as to exclude altogether the other opinion, namely, that in some mysterious way there is a presence attached to the elements from the moment of their consecration. This was the question raised by the case of Mr. Bennett, of Frome. He had asserted ‘the real and actual presence of our Lord under the form of bread and wine upon the altars of our churches’. He had said of himself, ‘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’. This doctrine, so expressed, the Privy Council refused to condemn. Though it be not explicitly taught in our formularies, there is nothing in those formularies which explicitly forbids a man to hold or to teach it. It is difficult, if not impossible, really to distinguish between this doctrine and the Lutheran doctrine commonly called Consubstantiation, and it is important that it should be clearly understood that it is not unlawful to hold it and to teach it within the Church of England. Up to this point the Church of England leaves the question open. But the Roman Church has gone a step beyond this, and has endeavoured to lay down, not only the time when, but also the mode whereby the great gift is given, and here the Church of England has distinctly negatived the Roman teaching. The doctrine of Transubstantiation is expressed in terms taken from the philosophy of the schoolmen. The fullest exposition of it is to be found in the Summa Theologiœ of Thomas Aquinas. According to this doctrine, the substance of the bread and wine is by the prayer of consecration miraculously converted into the body and blood of our Lord. After that prayer has been said the bread is gone and so is the wine. They have been converted into the Lord’s body and blood. The accidents, as the schoolmen called them, that is, the size, the shape, the colour, the feel, the taste, the smell, the weight, remain unchanged.… Most assuredly, if ever human inventions have been allowed to supersede the teaching of Scripture, this is among the number of such inventions. There is not a word in the New Testament which can be wrested into a support for the doctrines of the conversion of the substance of the bread into the body of the Lord or of the substance of the wine into His blood; and the prayer in some of the early liturgies beseeching the Holy Ghost to make the bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord for us is an absurdly weak foundation for this highly metaphysical structure of a change of the substance without disturbing the accidents and the maintenance of the accidents as accidents of nothing.”
“It is allowed to a man to adore Christ present in the Sacrament if he believes Him to be there present, but it is not allowed to any one to use any other external mark of adoration except that of kneeling to receive the consecrated elements. The priest is not allowed to elevate the elements before the people, lest, perchance, they should be tempted to worship those elements, and not only Christ Himself.”
At the Conference held at Fulham Palace in October, 1900, it was found impossible to agree on any statement of doctrine; but the Conference extracted from the minutes and formally recorded three statements which had been put forward by members of the Conference with eirenic intentions, although unable as a body to assent to any one of them. The first of these statements was by Dr. Handley Moule, then Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, now Bishop of Durham. It was a reverent and devout expression of the line of thought found in particular in Bishop Beveridge and other post-Reformation Anglican divines that our Lord is present in the rite of the Eucharist to bless and distribute the bread and wine, and as so present in the rite and as giving us the signs of His body and blood is rightly to be worshipped.
“I believe that, if our eyes, like those of Elisha’s servant at Dothan, were opened to the unseen, we should indeed behold our Lord present at our Communions. There and then, assuredly, if anywhere and at any time, He remembers His promise, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them’. Such special presence, the promised congregational presence, is perfectly mysterious in mode, but absolutely true in fact, no creation of our imagination or emotion, but an object for our faith. I believe that our Lord, so present, not on the Holy Table, but at it, would be seen Himself, in our presence, to bless the bread and wine for a holy use, and to distribute them to His disciples, saying to all and each, ‘Take, eat, this is My body which was given for you: Drink ye all of this; this is My blood of the new covenant which was shed for you for the remission of sins’. I believe that we should worship Him thus present in the midst of us in His living grace, with unspeakable reverence, thanksgiving, joy, and love. We should revere the bread and the wine with a profound sense of their sacredness as given by Him in physical assurance of our joyful part, as believers in Him, and so as members of Him, in all the benefits of His passion. Receiving them, while beholding Him, we should, through them as the equivalent signs of His once sacrificed body and blood, take deep into us a fresh certainty of our perfect acceptance in Him our sacrifice, and also of our mystical union with Him as He, once dead, now lives for us and in us, thus feeding on Him in the heart, by faith, with thanksgiving. Receiving His signs, we should look up with renewed and inexpressible confidence through Him to the Father. I do not think that the Holy Scriptures give us reason to believe that this sacred procedure (which we cannot see, but which is truly present to faith) involves any special attachment of His presence to the sacred signs, albeit called His body and His blood by reason of their equivalence as divine tokens.”
The second statement was a carefully worded expression by Lord Halifax of the spiritual change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, following the lines of the great mediæval theologians and the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic divines, though without touching on the questions as to the substance and the accidents in the Sacrament.
“That the bread and wine, by virtue of our Lord’s institution, become sacramentally the body and blood of Christ.
“That this change is sacramental, in a sphere outside the cognisance of sense, to be accepted and therefore to be apprehended by faith, that is, that to the eye of faith, since ‘faith is not imagination, but believes only what is objectively true,’ the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ, but that in the natural order they remain what they were before.
“That expressed devotionally in the words of Professor Moule, ‘I see in the Holy Eucharist, which is primarily and before all things the memorial of the Lord’s death, Christ my Lord at the Holy Table coming to me and saying, “This is My body which was broken for you, this is My blood which was shed for you,” ’ or, as was expressed by Canon Gore, Canon Newbolt, and Lord Halifax, ‘That in every Eucharist Christ is the real Consecrator,’ who in the service which He has instituted for the perpetual memory of His death gives to His faithful people His body as broken, His blood as poured out, mystically represented and exhibited under the aspect of death by the separate consecration of the bread and wine.
“That Christ is present in the Holy Eucharist not in a corporal or natural manner, not locally as if He descended from heaven upon our altars, but sacramentally only, spiritually, after the manner of a spirit.”
The third statement was by Dr. Charles Gore, then Canon of Westminster, now Bishop of Birmingham. It to a large extent reproduced the teaching of St. Irenæus as to the co-ordinate presence in the consecrated Sacrament of the natural reality of the bread and wine, and the spiritual reality of the body and blood of Christ.
“I believe that ‘the bread which is of the earth receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread, but Eucharist, made up of two realities (πραγμάτων), an earthly and a heavenly,’ that is, the bread and wine in all their natural reality and the spiritual realities of the body and blood of Christ, which are inseparable from Christ Himself in His whole Person. Therefore, as truly as with the eye of sense I behold the bread and wine, so truly with the eye of faith I am henceforth to behold Jesus Christ present to feed me with His own body and blood, sacramentally identified with the bread and wine.”