though excluded from our formularies at the Reformation, [it] has survived in the language of the people, and may innocently continue to do so, unless injudicious men revive the idea of its connexion with a proper sacrifice.
The pre-1833 popular and uncontroversial use of 'altar' can be widely attested. It appears in Parson Woodforde's diaries. Waterland explains its meaning in the context of a classically Reformed Eucharistic understanding:
The holy table is called an altar, with regard to the spiritual services, that is, sacrifices sent up from it, and so it is a spiritual altar: then as it bears the symbols of the grand sacrifice applied in this service, and herein feasted upon by every worthy communicant, it is a symbolical or mystical table, answering to the symbolical and mystical banquet.
This reflected a Laudian understanding. Taylor referred to "the holy table being a copy of the celestial altar" (also famously reflected in the illustration of Wheatly's A Rational Illustration) and Laud's Canons of 1640 declared that setting the Holy Table at the east end "doth not imply that it is or ought to be esteemed a true and proper altar, whereon Christ is again really sacrificed, but it is and my be called an altar by us in that sense in which the Primitive Church called it an altar, and in no other".
The uncontroversial nature of the usage in the years immediately before 1833 can be seen in Wordsworth's The Ecclesiastical Sonnets, "ye, whom to the saving rite The Altar calls", a usage also seen in Keble's The Christian Year, when in 'Visitation and Communion of the Sick' there is reference to "A simple Altar by the bed". Similarly, in 1831, Hugh James Rose could say in a sermon exemplifying the piety of High Church Receptionism, "Fly ... to His altar for grace and strength and peace".
'Altar', in other words, was a much used, uncontroversial partner to 'Holy Table'. It carried no significance or meaning alien to the native piety of Anglicanism. With the emergence of Tractarianism, however, this practice was unsettled and subverted. Indications of this were already evident in Froude, who, in a January 1835 letter to Newman, later reprinted in the Remains, declared "I shall never call ... the Altar 'the Lord's Table'". In Tract 81, published in 1837, Pusey had critiqued the venerable High Church doctrine of 'a feast upon a sacrifice', saying of it that it merely "takes up one half of the ancient doctrine". He went on to damn with faint praise such a meagre doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice, noting that it "has, however, been valuable, as keeping up a portion of the truth among such as would not, perhaps, have received the whole". In other words, a trajectory had been established which led to Tract XC's declaration that Article 31 could be read to affirm "the decree of Trent" on the sacrificial nature of the Mass.
Against this background, it was inevitable that the popular High Church usage of 'altar' would now become controversial. A practice which, with very little dissent pre-1833, reflected patristic use, now stood accused of being alien to the Anglican Formularies and implying support for Tridentine theology. We might then say that J.C. Ryle's polemic against the use of 'altar' was the achievement of the Oxford Movement, the work of "injudicious men" undermining the widespread support for the teaching, practice, and piety of the High Church tradition, provoking a neo-Puritan reaction against Laudian norms which had shaped Anglican piety since 1660.
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