'A learned prelate of our church': Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures and the Reformed nature of Old High eucharistic doctrine

In the fifth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism, Le Mesurier, in the midst of a critique of transubstantiation, makes this comment:

When you are told that the words of our Lord "this is my body, and this is my blood," are plain words, you may answer with a learned prelate of our church, "very plain indeed, for they are a very plain figure."

The words are interesting for two reasons. Firstly, they they provide a convenient example of how Old High eucharistic theology was conventionally Reformed (and, indeed, this is abundantly clear elsewhere in Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures). Secondly, there is the reference to "a learned prelate of our church" which, as the relevant note indicates, is James Sharpe, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Primate of Scotland 1661-1679.

The fact that Le Mesurier describes Sharpe as "a learned prelate of our church" (emphasis added) indicates both an unembarrassed affinity with the Scottish Episcopalian tradition and a recognition of what would become known as 'Anglicanism'. This reflects wider Old High support for Scottish Episcopalianism in a context in which there was considerable suspicion of the distinctive aspects of the Scottish Communion Office, in addition to a residual Whiggish antipathy towards that church.

In referring to "our church", Le Mesurier is invoking a sense of Protestant Episcopalianism which includes the Scottish Episcopal tradition and, by extension, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. Placed alongside the Reformed eucharistic doctrine he clearly expounds, it points to the Old High understanding of a communion of Protestant Episcopal churches.

The same words from Sharpe are again quoted by Le Mesurier as his reflection on transubstantiation continues:

One of their great doctors says that by the pressing of the teeth the body of Christ loses not its natural but its sacramental essence; which to my apprehension goes a great way towards reducing the matter to what archbishop Sharpe calls "a plain figure," and nothing else.

We might indeed bristle at the statement that Thomas Aquinas is "one of their great doctors", rather than a teacher belonging to all the churches. The passage from Thomas to which Le Mesurier refers is when, in Summa Theologiae, he revises Berengar's recantation with its declaration that "the true body and blood of Christ after consecration ... are ... broken and crushed by the teeth of believers". Thomas, by contrast, states:

And the confession made by Berengarius is to be understood in this sense, that the breaking and the crushing with the teeth is to be referred to the sacramental species, under which the body of Christ truly is.

A case could certainly be made that Le Mesurier is here anticipating some recent interesting interpretations of Thomas and the concerns Thomas shares with Reformed eucharistic theologies. Again, it is very clear that Le Mesurier, with wider Old High thought, affirms a clearly Reformed understanding of the Lord's presence in the holy Sacrament, in which the consecrated bread and wine are 'figures' of the Lord's Body and Blood - language which, while thoroughly Augustinian and with significant patristic precedents, would come to be regarded as 'Low' by many Tractarians.