“And yet Holy Scripture, taken in its plainest meaning, affirms both that the outward elements remain, and still that there is the real Presence of the Body of Christ. And I may, in the outset, say, that when the Articles reject Transubstantiation, they themselves explain what they mean to reject, —a doctrine which ” is repugnant to the plain words of Holy Scripture,” i.e. those words in which our Lord and St. Paul speak of the natural substances as remaining. The Articles call it also ” a doctrine which overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament,” in that the outward and visible part is supposed to have no real subsistence. They except against no statement which does not imply that the natural substances cease to be.
To remove, in the outset, a misconstruction likely to occur. It will be said, ” If the Church of England teaches that the consecrated elements remain in their very natural substances, and yet that the Body and Blood of Christ are present under those outward forms of bread and wine, then we are pledged to what is called Consubstantiation.” This is altogether a mistake. The very term Consubstantiation is a mere term of reproach used against the Lutherans by those who denied any Sacred Presence at all.
In the indivisible Unity of God, we adore the Consubstantial Word which is the Son. Our Blessed Lord in His Divine Nature is Consubstantial with the Father; in His Human Nature, Consubstantial with us, as we confess in the Creed: ” God, of the Substance of the Father, Begotten before the world, and Man, of the Substance of His Mother, Born in the world.” His Body is Consubstantial with ours, of one common substance. Consubstantiation or Impanation would be but physical explanations of the union of two substances.
To receive literally, then, those words of our Lord, ” This is My Body,” does not necessarily imply any absence, or cessation, or annihilation of the substance of the outward elements. In taking them literally, we are bound to take equally in their plain sense His other words, in which He calls what He had just consecrated to be sacramentally His Blood, ” this fruit of the vine;” or, again, those other words of Holy Scripture; ” the Bread which we break;” ” as often as ye eat this Bread;” ” whosoever shall eat this Bread ;” ” so let him eat that Bread;” ” we are all partakers of that one Bread.” Our Blessed Lord, through those words, ” This is My Body,” teaches us that which it concerns us to know, His own precious Gift, the means of union and incorporation with Himself, whereby He hallows us, nourishes our souls to life everlasting, re-forms our nature and conforms it to His own; re-creates us to newness of life; binds and cements us to Himself as Man; washes, beautifies, kindles our minds, strengthens our hearts ; is a source of life within us, joining us to Himself our Life, and giving us the victory over sin and death. Yet He did not deny what Himself and Holy Scripture elsewhere seem in equally plain language to affirm. …
The Presence, of which our Lord speaks, has been termed Sacramental, supernatural, mystical, ineffable, as opposed not to what is real, but to what is natural. The word has been chosen to express, not our knowledge, but our ignorance; or that unknowing knowledge of faith, which we have of things Divine, surpassing knowledge. We know not the manner of His Presence, save that it is not according to the natural Presence of our Lord’s Human Flesh, which is at the Right Hand of God; and therefore it is called Sacramental. But it is a Presence without us, not within us only; a Presence by virtue of our Lord’s words, although to us it becomes a saving Presence, received to our salvation, through our faith. It is not a Presence simply in the soul of the receiver, as “Christ dwells in our hearts by faith ;” or as, in acts of Spiritual, apart from Sacramental, Communion, we, by our longings, invite Him into our souls. But while the consecrated elements, as we believe (because our Lord and God the Holy Ghost in Holy Scripture call them still after consecration by the names of their natural substances, and do not say that they cease to be such),— while the consecrated elements remain in their natural substances, still, since our Lord says, ” This is My Body,” “This is My Blood,” the Church of England believes that “under the form of Bread and Wine,” so consecrated, we “receive the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ”
From: Pusey, E. B. (Edward Bouverie), 1800-1882. “The presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist : a sermon, preached before the University, in the Cathedral Church of Christ, in Oxford, on the second Sunday after Epiphany, 1853.”
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