"A perennial fountain": the meaning of 'feast upon a sacrifice'

Some final extracts from Vicesimus Knox's Considerations on the Nature and Efficacy of the Lord's Supper (1799).

Firstly, Knox points to the origins of the 'feast upon a sacrifice' theme, the most significant and influential account of the Sacrament in the 18th century High Church tradition:

That the Lord's Supper is a feast on, or after, a sacrifice, is an explication of it which has been adopted by the ablest and most learned men. Dr. CUDWORTH, a great and venerable name, first suggested it in this country; and it has been firmly supported by the ingenious arguments of succeeding Divines. They have , indeed, given additional confirmation to it; but the honour of the original idea should, I think, be assigned to CUDWORTH alone.

Secondly, he expounds the richness of this theme:

The partaking of the feast, after the grand Christian sacrifice, is also a participation in it, and confers all its advantages. The Eucharist is this feast, this epulum sacrificiale; to be repeated, while the world endures, after the great sacrifice of Christ on the Cross; which itself is never to be repeated, but the benefits of which are to flow by means of the feast upon it, as from a perennial fountain, till time shall be no more.

This commonplace teaching - a 'feast upon a sacrifice' - was capable of sustaining a vibrant Eucharistic doctrine and piety in pre-1833 Anglicanism.

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