"A real spiritual banquet": Waterland's defence of Cudworth on the Sacrament

From Daniel Waterland's A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, as laid down in Scripture and Antiquity (1737), Chapters XI and XII, a defence of Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth's understanding of the Eucharist as 'a feast upon a sacrifice' (the mainstream 18th century High Church view). Waterland here particularly addresses the criticisms of Cudworth voiced by John Johnson's The Unbloody Sacrifice (1714) and Lutheran theologians.

It is further pleaded [quoting Johnson], that Dr, Cudworth’s notion seems "much of a piece with that conceit of the Calvinists, that we receive the natural body of Christ in the Eucharist, though as far distant from us as heaven is from the earth". But that conceit, as it is called, is a very sober truth, if understood of receiving the natural body into closer mystical union, as explained in a preceding chapter ...

For how could Dr. Cudworth be supposed to make the Eucharist a bare memorial, when he professedly contends for a real spiritual banquet, a real feasting upon all the benefits of the grand sacrifice? Is partaking of the sacrifice nothing more than commemorating? Or is the feast ever the less real, for being spiritual and heavenly, and reaching both to soul and body; both to this world and the world to come? It is plain enough that Dr. Cudworth ’s notion is no way favourable to the figurists or memorialists, but much otherwise ...

In the year 1642, the no less learned Dr. Cudworth printed his well-known treatise on the same subject; wherein he as plainly denies any proper or any material sacrifice in the Eucharist; but admits of a symbolical feast upon a sacrifice, that is to say, upon the grand sacrifice itself commemorated under certain symbols. This appears to have been the prevailing doctrine of our Divines, both before and since.

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

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