IX

Among those who have accepted the main positions of the Oxford Movement, Father R. M. Benson, the Founder and first Superior of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Bishop (Gore) of Birmingham, and Father P. N. Waggett, of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, have been notable for the emphasis laid by them on particular aspects of Eucharistic doctrine.

A characteristic feature of Father Benson’s teaching has been the importance attached by him to the spiritual nature of the risen body of Christ, and to the part played by the spiritual risen body in the life of Christians in union with their Lord. An instance of this teaching and of the application of it to the Eucharist may be seen in a letter which Father Benson wrote in 1907, in which he said:—

“I hear that some persons … are striving to laugh the true doctrine of our Lord’s presence out of court by representing it as a miracle. Of course, it is a miracle; all the operations of the living God in this material world are a miracle; birth, nourishment, growth, all are miracles, ‘but seen too oft are miracles in vain’. They are not miracles in the sense of being acts contrary to nature, wrought by divine power in order to attest the divine mission of One whom God has sent, but they are miracles as being acts of God’s continuous though secret power by which He raises the things of nature to become the channels of operations which in their original nature they could not have effected. God’s work must be super-natural. He acts by infusing some new law, by which the lower creation is raised to do the higher work.… Christ takes the bread and wine into His glorified body. If He did not do so, the Church, which is His body in its earthly form, would die. The Church requires as an earthly organisation to be nourished by earthly elements, but those elements must have a heavenly substance. Christ must take them into the substance of His glorified body. Otherwise, they would not be capable of nourishing His body upon the earth. Without this continuous feeding upon the body of Christ, the Church upon earth would die of starvation.… The word ‘Transubstantiation,’ true of our natural food, fails to express the truth of the change which is effected in the bread and wine when they become the body and blood of Christ. The true bread is given to us ‘from heaven’. It has a heavenly nature in itself; the bread and wine acquire a heavenly virtue by incorporation into His glorified substance. We are made Christ’s members, and need to feed upon Christ’s glorified body.… From Christ, the Head, must come the life of each successive generation of the Church, which is His body. His body has nourishment administered to it by sacramental joints and bands from Himself, the Head, as St. Paul teaches us.… Christ comes to us in this Holy Sacrament, not leaping down from His central throne of divine love, as He will do at His second coming, when the number of His elect is complete, and He will return to judge the world, moving all the majesty of heaven, while He brings along with Himself the souls of the saints that are in Him, that they may take up their bodies, which are in Him by sacramental fellowship, though now they are sleeping. But He comes by an onflow of divine force—substantive, for it is in His human nature that He comes to be the food of man; personal, for in Christ the humanity cannot be without the divine Person; affectionate, for He comes with the love of God; spiritual, for He acts in the power of the Holy Ghost; regenerating, for He lifts us up into a heavenly life; nutritive, for He makes His members to grow in grace by this feeding upon Him; purifying, for our sinful bodies are made clean by His body; divine, because our souls are washed by His ever-living blood; sanctifying, for He, of God, is therein made to us sanctification and redemption; glorifying, for His hidden presence shall be revealed in us hereafter in the glory of His kingdom.… In such a stream of supernatural power, surely the provision of the food by which this grace streams forth cannot but be a miracle. If it were not, it would be an act altogether unworthy of its relation as ordained by God to raise us from earth to heaven. The consecration of the sacred elements is not a tentative action, from which great things may follow, but it is a covenant, ordained in all things, and sure. Hereby, Christ comes to us. Hereby, we, as His members, appeal to God, that God may rememberus as speaking to Him in Christ’s name.… People talk about Christ’s body as if it were the body of any other man. They do not realise that it is ascended to the right hand of God. They think of Christ sitting in heaven as He may be represented in a picture, with the form which He might have had during His earthly life. They do not realise what is meant by His ascension. He did not ascend to some place in the sky miles and miles away from earth. He ascended by passing up from an earthly form of existence, measured by space and outline, to an entirely new sphere and manner and capacity of life. He ascended up a little way above the heads of the bystanders, and then He vanished out of their sight. He was not lost in distance. Nor did He cease to exist. He was crucified in a natural body. He rose again as a spiritual body. That spiritual body is incapable of any earthly measurement or form. It is a heavenly power such as we can in no wise apprehend. It is no longer in space, but is at the right hand of God, exercising a power by the inherent glory of the Holy Ghost. It is no longer in space, but it acts independently of space, so that however many may be the altars on which the Holy Eucharist is celebrated, there is no multiplication of Christ’s body. His body, being now a spiritual body, is a force divinely operating in every crumb of the consecrated bread, communicating the existence of its glorified state to each one who feeds thereon. This is what people are too apt to ignore, so that it seems as if each individual received into himself a separate Christ, and not the divine undivided Christ. One Christ, one living Force acting throughout the whole of the Church, which is His body, and acting completely in every individual communicant.… We must not think of the sacred elements as if they were transubstantiated into human flesh like our own, but as being lifted up by the divine indwelling so as to be the mediatorial channel of life uniting us as the members of Christ to a vital fellowship with Christ, the Head of the body.… The Sacraments are the means through which the Spirit acts. The bread and wine consecrated by the Spirit are taken into the body of Christ, so as to be a channel of communication. If the bread and wine were an empty symbol, they could not effect bodily union between ourselves and Christ. Our bodies are made members of Christ’s body, of His flesh, and of His bones. There must be a material substance to act upon our bodies, as there must be a spiritual substance with which we are united.… The miracle is not our work. It is the work of the Holy Ghost in the body of Christ. We cannot work the miracle, it is not we who consecrate the bread and wine. There is only one Priest in the Church of God. One Victim, one Altar. The priest who celebrates can neither help the miracle, nor can he nullify it. However little he believes in the sacramental change, that change is just the same as if he believes in it most fully.… We must realise that it is by the power of the Holy Ghost descending from heaven at Pentecost that we are called to consecrate the bread and wine, and make them channels of mediatorial grace by their identification with the mediatorial Head of the covenant.”

The Bishop (Gore) of Birmingham’s work The Body of Christ was published in 1901, when the writer was still a Canon of Westminster. It was an attempt to state the Scriptural and historical doctrine of the Holy Eucharist in its fulness and its balance, to indicate its relation to widespread or universal instincts of natural religion, to place it in its due position in regard to Christian thought and life as a whole, and by a combination of frankness and caution and consideration in statement to tend towards “the promotion of mutual understanding and unity among Christians”. In this book great stress was laid on the harmony between Eucharistic doctrine and the rest of Christian theology. The fundamental idea is the gift of the spiritual principle of the manhood of Christ, and therefore of Christ Himself, to Christians. The flesh and blood thus given are the flesh and blood of the glorified Christ. This presence of Christ is effected by means of the act of consecration, and through consecration the bread and wine are identified with His body and blood. Christ is Himself present through the Eucharistic service, and He Himself consecrates the elements. Transubstantiation in its cruder form is contrary to reason and instinct, and in its technical form is philosophically unsound and not free from unspiritual tendencies. Since the presence is of the spiritual risen and ascended body of Christ, it is not subject to conditions of space, nor again to the sacramental elements. Hence caution must be observed as to dogmatic statements in regard to the Sacrament when reserved as a centre of worship, and as to what those who communicate unworthily receive. Yet the presence is not dependent on the precarious faith of an individual. The Eucharist is a sacrifice, and has points of contact with the general sacrificial ideas of communion with deity and with the special emphasis in the Jewish religion on propitiation in sacrifice. As a sacrifice, it is the exercise of the Church’s privilege of sonship and the Church’s commemoration of the passion and death and resurrection and ascension and second coming of Christ; it is united with the sacrifice of Christ in heaven; it is the offering of the Church as itself the body of Christ; and it culminates in the Communion and self-oblation of the worshippers.

“Shall we say … that by His flesh we understand the spiritual principle or essence of His manhood, as distinguished from its material constituents? and by His blood, according to the deeply-rooted Old Testament idea, the ‘life thereof,’ the human life of Jesus of Nazareth in His glory? Whether these phrases are thought to be satisfactory or no, in some sense it is the manhood which must be meant by the flesh and blood. At the same time, it is equally evident that it is only because of the vital unity in which the manhood stands with the divine nature that it can be ‘spirit’ and ‘life’. It is the humanity of nothing less than the divine Person which is to be, in some sense, communicated to us, and not (what would be the worst materialism) a separated flesh and blood. What the Father is spoken of as giving us is the whole Christ, the whole of His indivisible and living self.”

“The communication of this spiritual life to us by means of a material and social ceremony is quite analogous to the whole of what we know about the relation of the human spirit to bodily conditions, about the relation of the individual to the society, and about the principles of the pre-eminently human and social religion of the Son of Man.”

“It stands to reason that, if there be thus, as the Christian Church so constantly believed, a real communication to us of the flesh and blood of Christ, it must be the ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ of the glorified Christ, for no other exists. These mysterious things are given to us in the Eucharist under conditions which recall a past state, the state of sacrificial death. It is our Lord as dying that faith recalls; it is His death for us that we ‘proclaim till He come’ in the breaking of the bread. But those very words of St. Paul, ‘till He come,’ suggest that He is no longer dead, that He is alive and in heaven. The Person who now feeds us with His own very life, divine and human, is He who is set before us in a vision of the Apocalypse as a ‘Lamb as it had been slain,’ but alive for evermore in the heavenly places.”

“I do not think it is disputable that the Church from the beginning did, as a whole, believe that the Eucharistic elements themselves in some real sense became by consecration, and prior to reception, the body and blood of Christ in the midst of the worshipping assembly; and that the body and blood thus made present objectively, in undefinable identification with the bread and wine, were the same body (or flesh) and blood as the faithful hoped to receive, that is, the flesh and blood of the living and glorified Christ, the flesh and blood which are spirit and life, and are quite inseparable from the living Person of Christ Himself.”

“Whatever was done in the Eucharist in His name, He was believed to be present and the doer of it. He was there to speak the words and consecrate the gifts. This belief in Christ already present as unseen Minister anticipated and so weakened the emotion following upon the consecration. What was brought about was not the presence of Christ—He was already there—but His adoption of the Church’s gifts to become His body and His blood. Henceforth an attention and a worship already given to Christ as present among the worshippers was more or less focussed upon these holy symbols and instruments. But, if the ancients associated His ‘coming’ with any moment in the service, it was with the first solemn entrance of the elements, and the whole order and ritual of the service fell in with this conception. Now Catholics with one consent still believe that Christ is in some special sense present in the whole Eucharistic service as the invisible Celebrant and consecrating Priest; and the more this belief is realised the less can His coming and presence be represented to the imagination as merely the result of consecration. The difference is not one of doctrine, but of practical emphasis on different parts of truth.”

“Transubstantiation in its first form, as for example the weak and unhappy Berengar was forced by the dominant power in the Church to subscribe to it, was indeed a gross and horrible doctrine.… Most of the contemporary writers against Berengar assert that the body and blood of Christ are to be eaten and drunken ‘with the mouth of the body as well as the mouth of the heart’; and, like some of the earlier Greeks, they deny that the elements after consecration retain their natural properties of nourishing or becoming corrupted or being digested. The nature of the bread and wine was understood to be destroyed in everything but appearance. Miracles were recklessly postulated, and it was sufficient objection to any more reasonable treatment of the mystery that in diminishing the difficulty of belief it reduced the merit of faith. Certainly the atmosphere in which the doctrine of Transubstantiation grows into a dogma is calculated to send a shiver through one’s intellectual and moral being. But the rising scholasticism, or perhaps the evidence of facts, very quickly corrected this extreme tendency. The use indeed of the distinction of substance and accidents, for the purpose of assisting the doctrine of Transubstantiation, was already familiar to Berengar, and he excellently combats the proposed use of it, denying that accidents can exist apart from their substance (or ‘subject’), or apart from that of which they are attributes. But the later scholastics used the distinction with a more laborious precision to formulate the doctrine. By the act of consecration the substrata or substances of the bread and the wine were changed into the substances of the body and blood of Christ; but the accidents or qualities of bread and wine—all that we are cognizant of in our experience of bread and wine—remained with all their natural properties and defects, remained (in the compassion of God) as veils under which the awful realities should be screened. In later days a still further refinement has led Roman theologians to say that the remaining species or accidents of the bread and wine constitute a real object, ‘something objectively real’. But this is in fact to explain away the doctrine and the phrase. Plainly modern philosophy of all schools recognises no distinction between substance and accident, knows no substance other than that ‘something objectively real’ which is constituted by the qualities or relations under which alone any object is known in experience. Thus the modern Roman theologians allow to the consecrated bread and wine all the reality which any one believes bread and wine to possess, or, in other words, explain away Transubstantiation till it remains as little more than a verbal incumbrance due to an inopportune intrusion into Church doctrine of a temporary phase of metaphysics. In its original and more natural meaning, Transubstantiation—the overthrowing of the natural substance by the spiritual—is truly contrary to a fundamental Christian philosophy, and really ‘overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament’. But even in its minimised sense Transubstantiation does not remain only as an incumbrance in terminology, witnessing to a mistake in the dogmatic action of the mediæval Church; for its really materialistic and unspiritualising effects cannot be done away. As soon as the accidents or species have reached a certain stage in the process of being digested by the communicant, or of being destroyed in some other way, it is felt to be irreverent to imagine that they can still be veils of the divine substances.… The result of so materialistic a way of conceiving the relation of the spiritual gift to the outward part of the Sacrament is that the corruption of the material elements involves the withdrawal of the divine gift.… Apart from the degree of authority which Transubstantiation has obtained in the West, and to a certain extent in the East, there is truly on the grounds of antiquity, or Scripture, or reason, nothing to be said for it.”

“The risen body of Christ was spiritual … not because it was less than before material, but because in it matter was wholly and finally subjugated to spirit, and not to the exigencies of physical life. Matter no longer restricted Him or hindered. It had become the pure and transparent vehicle of spiritual purpose.… The spirituality of the risen body of Christ lies not so much in any physical qualities as in the fact that His material presence is absolutely controlled by His spiritual will.… If all subjection to conditions of space was over for the body of the resurrection, even more certainly was it over for the glorified body (if any distinction is to be drawn), the body in which He through His whole Person has become ‘quickening spirit,’ and even His flesh and blood are ‘spirit and life’. As to what the ‘body of glory’ is, silence is our best wisdom.… In claiming spirituality for Christ’s presence we claim for it that, though He condescends to use material means, the sacramental elements, yet He is never subject to them. As in the risen and glorified body in itself, so in its sacramental application to our necessities, spiritual freedom dominates everything with an absolute freedom. The presence is controlled by the purpose. And in a matter where the evidence of the senses is denied us, our only right to be confident that the presence abides with us depends on our remaining under the shelter of the purpose. Thus it seems to me to be illegitimate and insecure to argue that because the presence, admitted to be spiritual, is vouchsafed to us (so to speak) under conditions of bread and wine, therefore I am justified in assuming that it abides under those conditions so long as the bread subsists, or till I am informed to the contrary.”

“Metaphysical study makes us conscious how much the mind … has to do with actually constituting the objects of the outward world, the trees, the animals, the persons. Mind, as it is in me and in all men, not only perceives these things as ready-made, but also has to do with making them to be.… Relations are the work of mind, and relations are necessary to make objects. On the other hand, it is only the sensations given from outside which enable the mind to perceive and know, and so to become a mind at all.… It would be of a piece with this if we are to suppose that a similar relation exists between the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist and our corresponding faculties of spiritual perception, if we are to suppose that, though it is God who makes the bread to be the body of Christ and not man (as it is God who makes the objects in the natural world and not man), yet He makes this spiritual reality to exist relatively, not absolutely, in such sense as to exist only for faith, the faith of the believing and worshipping Church, just as He creates the world relatively, not absolutely, that is, to exist for rational beings and by the action of thought.… The spiritual presence of Christ in His body and His blood (and all that goes with it) rests not on the precarious faith of any individual, but is so relative to the faith of the Church as a whole—that common faculty which rests at bottom on the activity of the Holy Ghost—as that apart from faith, or for one who in no way shares it, it can no more in any intelligible sense be said to exist than the beauty of nature can be said to exist for what is quite without reason. For here again existence proves to mean a relation to a consciousness, only now it is not mere rational sensibility, but spiritual faith.”

“Recent investigation has tended to show that at least one deep root of sacrificial customs, if not the root, is the idea of communion or common sharing in a life believed to be divine.… The development of the sacrificial system among the Jews tended to bring to the front the idea of giving to God in homage and recognition, and propitiating Him by victims, at the expense of the idea of communion with Him.”

“The Eucharist is a sacrifice because in it the Christian Church—the great priestly body, and ‘soul of the world’—exercises her privilege of sonship in free approach to the Father in the name of Christ. She comes before the Father with her material offerings of bread and wine, and of those things wherein God has prospered her, bearing witness that all good things come of Him; and, though He needs nothing from man, yet He accepts the recognition of his Fatherhood from loyal and free hearts. She comes with her wide-spreading intercessions for the whole race of mankind, and for her members living and departed. She offers her glad sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for all the blessings of creation and redemption. She solemnly commemorates the passion in word and in symbolic action, through the bread broken and the wine outpoured, the appointed tokens of Christ’s sacrificed body and blood, reciting before God His own words and acts in instituting the Holy Eucharist. This is the Church’s sacrifice; and it is all that she can do. She can but make the appointed remembrance of Christ’s passion and death and resurrection and of His second coming which she awaits, and offer to the Father the appointed symbols, praying Him by the consecrating power of the Holy Ghost to fill the sacrifice with a divine power by accepting the earthly elements at the heavenly altar. This is the time for God’s response to the Church’s uplifting of her hearts and gifts; and He by His Spirit consecrates the gifts to be, in the midst of the worshipping Church, the body and blood of the Lord. Now the Eucharist is a sacrifice in a second and deeper sense, for God has united the offerings of the Church to the ever-living sacrifice of the great High Priest in the heavenly sanctuary, or has given His presence among them who is their propitiation and their spiritual food. Then, once more, united afresh in one body to God by the Communion in Christ’s body and blood, the Church offers herself, one with Christ as a body with its head, living in the same life and indwelt by the same Spirit; she offers herself that her whole fellowship, both the living and the dead, having their sins forgiven through the propitiation of Christ, may be accepted with all their good works and prayers ‘in the beloved’. And in the self-oblation of the Church is the culmination of the sacrifice.”

In the preface to the fourth edition of this book, published in 1907, Bishop Gore makes an interesting reference to the question of possible compatibility between the Eucharistic doctrine of the Church of England and that of the Church of Rome which has already been referred to in connection with writings in the nineteenth century. In 1906 a Report of a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, which had been appointed in 1904, appeared. The Report, which was signed by all the Commissioners, who included the Archbishop (Davidson) of Canterbury, the Bishop (Paget) of Oxford, and the Bishop (Gibson) of Gloucester, dealt chiefly, in accordance with the terms of reference, with matters of discipline and ceremonial, but was not without incidental statements on the subject of doctrine. Among these it was recognised that the Church of England allows the teaching of “a presence which is” “ ‘real, actual, objective,’ a presence in the Sacrament, a presence upon the altar, under the form of bread and wine,” and teaching in which “the word ‘sacrifice’ ” is applied “in the sense in which Bishop Bull has used it to the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper”. The practices of “the interpolation of the prayers and ceremonies belonging to the canon of the Mass,” “the use of the words ‘Behold the Lamb of God,’ accompanied by the exhibition of a consecrated wafer or bread,” the “reservation of the Sacrament under conditions which lead to its adoration,” the “Mass of the Præ-sanctified,” “Corpus Christi processions with the Sacrament,” “Benediction with the Sacrament,” and “Celebration of the Holy Eucharist with the intent that there shall be no communicant except the celebrant” were declared to be “clearly inconsistent with and subversive of the teaching of the Church of England as declared by the Articles and set forth in the Prayer Book,” and “plainly significant of teaching repugnant to the doctrine of the Church of England”; and these were among the practices which were said to “lie on the Rome-ward side of a line of deep cleavage between the Church of England and that of Rome”. These condemnations on grounds of doctrine necessarily raised again the question whether Dr. Pusey’s later opinion that the Eucharistic doctrine of the Church of Rome was not irreconcilable with the Eucharistic doctrine of the Church of England was correct; and in view of the condemnations of the Commissioners and of the controversy which ensued the Bishop of Birmingham wrote:—

“The main object of this book is to set the specifically Anglican teaching of our formularies on a larger background, by going back behind the Reformation and the middle age upon the ancient Catholic teaching and upon the Bible. I seek to elaborate the Eucharistic doctrine in what I think the truest and completest form. I have to admit that Anglican standards are in certain respects defective, and even misleading when taken by themselves. But after all the Anglican Church does not claim to stand by itself. It refers back behind itself to the ancient and Catholic Church. Thus I am most thankful to believe that it admits a great deal which it does not, in its present formularies, explicitly teach. It admits the doctrine of Dr. Bright’s popular hymn, ‘And now, O Father,’ though it assuredly does not explicitly teach it; though, in fact, our liturgy, more perhaps than any other, leaves out of regard the heavenly altar. Moreover, in the direction of mediæval teaching, it has no careful definitions such as might easily enough have excluded approximations to the teaching of the Roman schools. The ‘anti-Roman’ utterances of the Articles are, as is well known, so vaguely or ambiguously worded that, as weapons of discipline, they would break in our hands. Thus it came about that the Judicial Committee acquitted Mr. Bennett of teaching what the Church of England could be said positively to reject. But it is quite certain that Mr. Bennett’s teaching, even in its revised form, was so similar to current Roman teaching as to afford a perfectly natural background for those practices in connection with the Sacrament which the Commissioners claim should be ‘promptly made to cease’ because they are significant of doctrine condemned by the Church of England. Now it is precisely this that I believe to be untrue. I believe that some practices connected with the Tabernacle and the Monstrance involve an extension of the use of the Sacrament which diverges so widely from Christ’s intention as to be illegitimate. I would prohibit them in the Church of England for this reason; and every Bishop can legitimately prohibit any rite or service or prayer which is not in the Prayer Book. I should be, therefore, quite prepared, apart from any suggestion of a Royal Commission, to cause to cease almost all the practices scheduled. But not—precisely not—on the ground that they involve a doctrine which the Church of England excludes. It does not exclude Mr. Bennett’s doctrine. So the Commissioners recognise. And I am sure that Mr. Bennett’s doctrine, neither more nor less, affords a natural basis for these (devotionally most attractive) practices, unless indeed the devotional logic is restrained by reverent adherence to the purpose of Christ in the institution of the Sacrament.… It is quite true that, if we take a typical Anglican teacher and a typical Roman, we may find ‘a line of deep cleavage’ between them. But, if we take the least Protestant types of Anglican teaching and the most moderate Roman types, the line is hardly apparent; and, if we take the doctrinal requirement of Rome at its minimum, and at the same time recognise how vague are the limits of Anglican Eucharistic theology, we shall come to the conclusion that no such line of deep cleavage exists at all.”

Father Waggett’s volume The Holy Eucharist with Other Occasional Papers, which was published in 1906, contains an address and four shorter papers on the Eucharist. Their special feature is the presentation and treatment of the Eucharistic doctrine taught by Dr. Pusey and others in such a way as to appeal to those who are interested in the science and philosophy of the time. Theologically, the most characteristic thought is that of the uplifting of the earthly elements and of the worshippers into the heavenly life of our Lord.

“By the power of God there is communicated to the earthly elements the reality and power and substance of the glorified body and blood. The earthly things which we bring remain after consecration what they were before, and they become that which they were not before; and, being named naturally and reverently according to their higher reality, according to that ‘inward part’ which is communicated to them from above, according to that which in the highest sense of their being they ‘are’ the holy gifts are said, as they have in every age been said, to ‘become’ the body and blood of Christ.… The empty reality of the earthly things is filled by the truer and indeed absolute reality of the heavenly things.”

“The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ … are now permanent, imperishable, and full of glory and life; and accordingly they are contrasted with all the so-called reality of this lower scene, and their true substance is, in the mystery of the Eucharist, placed under the relative and imperfect reality of the consecrated bread and wine. In the eternal light, therefore, of God’s contemplation, and in the sphere regarded by that divine faith which is planted in man, the bread is the body, the wine is the blood of the Lord.”

“Christ has ascended into heaven. There in heaven, in the unseen world, in glory, at the right hand of the Father are now His once mortal body and blood. We are not to drag down this holy reality into the earthly sphere, that the Treasure of the unseen world and the Light of the heavenly Jerusalem may become the ornament of a circle of carnal experience. This is to bring Christ down from above. No: our thoughts are to rise to heaven, seeking Him beyond the skies, and to press on continually to find these unseen and glorified realities which are the sole food of our souls and even of our bodies in the order of their redemption. But, on the other hand, that bread and wine, those earthly things we knew, are really lifted up into a heavenly use. We brought ‘the best and purest wheaten bread that can be gotten’; and that which we brought, as in another application the rubric says, is allowed to suffice. God accepts it, and it is really taken, translated, exalted, used, filled, sanctified, and empowered with the realities of the kingdom of heaven, of the throne of God’s love.”

“The presence in the Holy Eucharist is the presence of the real body and blood, of the really created and glorified humanity of the Lord. It is a presence not in the regenerate alone, for it is before the regenerate receive it. It is a presence not in the regenerate, but yet it is a presence unto the regenerate; and the encounter which it implies takes place, if we may so say, in that region which is no place, in that plane, in that sphere, in that unspeakable possibility of experience which is the ‘wherein’ in which the man walks with God; in the conversation which is in heaven, in the love of the Spirit, in the energy of the blessed into which we are brought by the new birth, to which entrance is obtained by the precious blood, and in which life is sustained by this very God-filled humanity of which we speak.… Bear with me, therefore, when I say that the presence is ‘unto the regenerate,’ that it stands as a condemnation indeed in the bodily presence of the unbelieving, but shines as a divine manifestation to the heart which reacts to the vibrations of the life of Jesus. And therefore let us not be afraid of the old word which states that the mode and means whereby we receive this heavenly gift is faith.”

“As to our bodily eyes the bread is present, and the media of that presence are the luminiferous ether and so forth; as to our bodily sense earthly foods are given according to the communications of a physical process; so also to our inmost being and to its outer regions of soul and mind and thought and will there is given the heavenly reality of the body and blood of Christ, filled with the power of an endless life.”

“We know that the Lord’s sacrifice is an offering of His whole life to the Father, and that it is such that His divinely unbegun life had already this character of presentation to the Father, from whom, as from the Fount of deity, it springs. So the Incarnation itself is from the first an offering, because it is a bringing of the creature into the great stream of the Son’s love towards the Father, by the Holy Spirit. Now in the Incarnation the Creature also is offered by the same Spirit to the Father, and the whole life of Christ from the conception to the end is one effectual sacrifice. This sacrifice finds its seal in the accomplished work on the cross, its utterance in the outpouring of the blood, where the obedience reached to the climax of self-oblation. But we know that it continues evermore, that our Lord, bearing with Him the blood of an everlasting Testament, has entered in once into the holy place made without hands, not once because He goeth in no more, but once because He never more cometh forth. Having once entered into the holy place, not once because less than twice, but once because for ever, He abides there eternally, rich in the merits of an everlasting sacrifice, showing forth and offering continually the love of created humanity to the Father of all, pouring evermore into the treasury of God’s love and acceptance the abundance which God Himself has insinuated into the stream of human life. That is the eternal sacrifice, Christ appearing ever before the Father for us, appearing in the glory of His love, appearing in the unchanged power of the God-given life, a Lamb as it had been slain, yet living for evermore, upon the altar in the midst of the throne.… By virtue … of the heavenly Treasure put within our reach our actions are in heaven; we also, by that substance given to us, with that substance which we minister standing in the heavenly place, are brought in to be coheirs, to be communicants of that heavenly service, and are made partakers of the eternal mystery of Christ offered to the Father. Through His humanity bestowed upon us we offer with Him, by Him, and through His Spirit, that same offering which He makes by the one Spirit to the Father. This then is our sacrifice. It is all one with the sacrifice of Christ, which embraces in its unfaltering obedience and charity the whole sweep of His experience from His conception unto now; and it is conscious of this union in the memory of Calvary, where the witness of the blood and the water spoke out the hitherto for us unspoken devotion of the Son to the Father.”

A further instance of teaching which lays stress on the relation of the Eucharist to the heavenly offering of Christ may be taken from a Charge, delivered in 1901, by Dr. C. C. Grafton, the Bishop of Fond du Lac, in America, formerly, like Father Benson and Father Waggett, a member of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. After explaining the need of sacrifice in religion, and the different aspects and modes of sacrifice, Bishop Grafton says:—

“Christ … offered Himself on Calvary with shedding of blood for the reconciliation of mankind as the victim on the brazen altar. He is offered in the Eucharist for His covenanted people without shedding of blood like as the shew bread was placed on the holy table and the blood on the altar. Christ presents Himself in glory as the life that has passed through death just as the blood was presented before the mercy seat. Christ’s offices being eternal, in all these cases He is the Priest and Victim, the High Priest for ever and the Lamb. In all three He is the Offerer and the Offered. What is their relation to one another? Let us consider first that of the sacrifice of the altar to that of Calvary. In that the Priest and the Victim are in each case the same, the two are identical. If the actual immolation of the victim is the essence of sacrifice, then, since there is no actual slaying of the Victim in the Eucharist, the Eucharist is not a sacrifice. If sacrifice is an ordained oblation which man offers to God, and through which God gives back some gift to man, it is a true and proper sacrifice. At the altar there is by the breaking of the bread and separate consecration of the cup a mystical immolation of Christ’s body and blood. In this same sense it may be termed a sacrifice. Granting it to be a true and proper sacrifice, and so far alike with Calvary, in what way is it like and in what way does it differ from it? It is like it in all of its fourfold aspects. It is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.… It is also a sacrifice of prayer.… It is also … a propitiatory sacrifice.… The Eucharistic sacrifice is one with that of Calvary in all its four aspects. In what do they differ? In one the Victim is actually slain, in the other there is only a mystical immolation. One is the bloody, the other the unbloody sacrifice. One was unique and can never be repeated, the other is capable of continued repetition. One was offered for humanity, for our race, the other is offered for those in covenant with Christ. One was a sufficient sacrifice, the other is an efficient sacrifice.… Our Lord representing humanity made for humanity on the cross the fourfold offering due from humanity, and God and man by His action were reconciled. By offering the Eucharistic sacrifice, we appropriate and plead Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary for our individual needs.… What is the relation of the sacrifice of the altar to that in heaven? In heaven Christ as ever a High Priest, must have somewhat eternally to offer, and Holy Scripture declares what that offering is when He is seen there as the Lamb of God. If the essence of sacrifice is an actual or mystical oblation, then there is no sacrifice in heaven. But, if sacrifice is the law of the creature’s relation to God wherever he may be, then the worship of heaven must express that law. It may be objected that sacrifice is an act, that the sacrifice on Calvary was an act, but that the oblation of Christ in heaven is a state, and hence cannot be a sacrifice. But it is not with God or our Lord as with us creatures. We must either be in action or in repose. It is not so with God. As cause rightly understood connotes the two ideas of action and finality or rest, so it is with the great first Cause. God is at once unceasing activity and eternal rest. So it is with our Lord. He abides in the passionless tranquillity of the eternal life, yet His saints will follow the Lamb in all the marvellous developments of His majestic operations wherever He goeth. He who is at once action and repose is the Priest and Oblation in the glory of the Blessed Trinity. The sacrifice of the altar is one with that in glory, because it is the same oblation.”