laudable Practice

He saith that I deny, that we receive in the sacrament that flesh which is adjoined to God's own Son ... I have written in more than an hundred places, that we receive the selfsame body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified and buried, that rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. And the contention is only in the manner and form how we receive it ... For I say (as all the old holy fathers and martyrs used to say), that we receive Christ spiritually by faith with our minds, eating his flesh and drinking his blood: so that we receive Christ's own very natural body, but not naturally nor corporally - Archbishop Thomas Cranmer responding to a Roman apologist in his Answer to Smyth's Preface , 1551. For both you and I agree herein, that in the sacrament is the very true and natural body and blood of Christ, even that which was born of the Virgin Mary, which ascended into heaven, which sitteth on the r...

Writing on ' The Blessings and Graces of the Holy Sacrament' in The Worthy Communicant , Jeremy Taylor quotes both Hilary of Poitiers and Clement of Alexandria. This use of a Latin Father and a Greek Father is suggestive of a desire to both ensure that the Church's theology is 'breathing with both lungs' and to demonstrate a Eucharistic understanding richly rooted in the unity of patristic East and patristic West: The sum of all I represent in these few words of St. Hilary. "These holy mysteries, being taken, cause that Christ shall be in us, and we in Christ." And if this be more than words, we need no farther inquiry into the particulars of blessing consequent to a worthy communion; for "if God hath given his son unto us, how shall not he, with him, give us all things else?" "Nay, all things that we need, are effected by this," said St. Clement of Alexandria, one of the most ancient fathers of the church of Christ ... "They, who ...