'Not fortunate in passing through Mr. Keble's hands': Keble's misuse of Taylor on 'eucharistic adoration'

Many an admiring reader of the "Christian Year" heard with regret that the author of it had written his last work, "On Eucharistical Adoration," with the object of defending the worship of Christ's Body and Blood in the Eucharist, or of His Humanity present there. By these expressions we have to hope that he means no more than the worship of Christ Himself present, for, in truth, they have a rather Nestorian savour. 

In The Teaching of the Anglican Divines in the Time of King James I and King Charles I on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1858), Henry Charles Groves - a clergyman of the Church of Ireland - gave expression to the Old High lament that the traditional High Church parson of The Christian Year had become the Tractarian of On Eucharistical Adoration. The radical change in Eucharistic theology between these two works - from the Virtualism of the former to the explicit rejection of Hooker in the latter - is itself an indicator of the rupture occasioned by Tractarianism. Groves highlights this by referring to Keble's use of Taylor in the later work:

Our old English divines, in fact, are not fortunate in passing through Mr. Keble's hands. He is, as we know from his truly valuable "Christian Year," a man of poetical mind, and so he prefers trimming and arranging his author's dress, rather than setting him before the public gaze in his rough and unadorned Anglican garb. Bishop Taylor is the first whom he thus takes in hand, and tries to make presentable. He thus introduces him: " As Bishop Taylor has taught us to ask, 'If Christ be there, why are we not to worship?" The present pithy sentence, so unlike Taylor's style, may, with a little trouble, be discovered in the extract, which I gave, simply to shew that nothing could justify Mr. Keble in referring to it at all.

The extract from Taylor - in The Worthy Communicant - provided by Groves does, of course, indicate that Taylor certainly did not suggest 'eucharistic adoration' as understood by Keble i.e. an adoration of Christ in the consecrated elements:

But place thyself on thy knees, in the humblest and devoutest posture of worshippers; and think not much in the lowest manner to worship the King of men and angels, the Lord of heaven and earth, the great Lover of souls, and the Saviour of the body; Him whom all the angels of God worship; Him whom thou confessest worthy of all, and whom all the world shall adore, and before whom they shall tremble at the day of judgment. For if Christ be not there after a peculiar manner, whom or whose body do we receive? But if He be present to us, not in mystery only, but in blessing also, why do we not worship? But all the Christians always did so from time immemorial. "No man eats this Flesh, unless he first adores," said St. Austin ... To which many of the Fathers add many other fair inducements, but I think they cannot be necessary to be produced here; because all Christians generally kneel when they say their prayers, and when they bless God, and I suppose no man communicates but he does both. 

We kneel and adore at the Sacrament because we kneel and adore all times at prayer. It is also worth noting that in this section of The Worthy Communicant, Taylor four times refers to the elements as "Symbols", a term rather unlikely to be employed by a work supposedly encouraging Keble's understanding of eucharistic adoration.

By contrast, to adore Christ as in the elements, led to a robust rebuke from Taylor in The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, also quoted by Groves:

No man eats Christ's Body worthily but he that first adores Christ: but to terminate the divine worship to the Sacrament, to that which we eat, is so unreasonable and unnatural, and withal so scandalous, that Averroes, observing it to be used among the Christians with whom he had the ill-fortune to converse, said these words, "Quandoquidem Christiani adorant quod comedunt, sit anima mea cum philosophis" ["Since Christians worship what they eat, let my soul be with the philosophers"].

To invoke Taylor to support adoration of Christ in the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist is, at best, to entirely misunderstand Taylor's eucharistic theology and his plain statements on this matter. At worst, it is to deliberately misquote Taylor to provide a sheen of Anglican respectability to a doctrine and practice which had no place whatsoever in the venerable High Church tradition. This is particularly seen in Keble's use of Taylor, whose writings make abundantly clear his refutation of the practice of eucharistic adoration as promoted by later Tractarians. In the words of Groves, "Our old English divines, in fact, are not fortunate in passing through Mr. Keble's hands".