'At the Reformation the primitive practice was restored': on the 1662 rubric for administering the Sacrament into the hand

"It is to be delivered into their hands." We have the unanimous testimony of the Fathers, that the communicants always received the elements into their own hands ... During the corrupter ages, when the sacramental bread and wine were believed to be the actual Body and Blood of Christ, a wafer was substituted for bread, and that was by the priest put into the mouth of the communicant, that no particle of the Body of Christ should be wasted or lost. And lest the blood should be spilt, or any accident happen, the cup was totally withheld from the laity. At the Reformation the primitive practice was restored, and the Communion in both kinds delivered into the hands of the people.

It is but a brief extract from John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801), addressing the 1662 rubric after the Prayer of Consecration and before administration of the Bread and Cup. What this extract suggests, however, is what was obscured in Anglicanism by the Ritualism and advanced Anglo-catholicism of the later 19th century.

By the end of that century, in Ritualist and advanced Anglo-catholic parishes, the wafer was being placed in the mouth of communicants, and the chalice firmly held by the cleric administering it - when, that is, the main Sunday service was not a non-communicating High Mass. A movement which had started in 1833 with self-proclaimed intentions of renewing the Church of England's fidelity to patristic faith and practice, resulted in the adoption of what the Church of Ireland's Declaration of 1870 rightly termed "innovations in doctrine and worship, whereby the Primitive Faith hath been from time to time defaced or overlaid, and which at the Reformation this Church did disown and reject". Or, to put it another way, the late Georgian Anglicanism of Shepherd was much closer to "the primitive practice" than the Tridentine norms of late Victorian advanced Anglo-catholicism.

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Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

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