'I do not wish it to be thought that they came behind their High-Church brethren in their views of the Eucharist': Laudians and Reformed Conformists together
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) by Henry Charles Groves - a clergyman of the Church of Ireland - is a fascinating read. Groves was born in 1822 in County Down, received orders in 1849, and died in 1903. What makes this work of his particularly fascinating is how it anticipated, from an Anglican context, Nevin's 1867 The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist . Groves was responding to and rejecting Tractarian works which, as he demonstrated, misquoted Caroline Divines in order to present them as rejecting a Calvinist understanding of the Sacrament. By contrast, he points to how Laudians and Reformed Conformists (to use our contemporary term) shared a high Reformed eucharistic theology. To put it another way, he is saying that both illustrations accompanying this post shared the same doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. In this extract
