laudable Practice

If any good Christian visited with long sickness, and known to the pastor, by reason of his present infirmity, unable to resort to the church for receiving of the holy communion, or being sick, shall declare to the Pastor upon his conscience, that he thinks his sickness to be deadly, and shall earnestly desire to receive the same in his house, the minister shall not deny to him so great a comfort ... The Articles of Perth rightly frame the administration of Communion to the sick in terms of "comfort". For the critics of the Articles, however, the practice of 'clinical Communions' could not be countenanced. In his 1621 account of the 1618 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth , David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38), provided a robust response to the rejection of this wise pastoral practice.  Linsday quotes an opponent claiming that administration of the Holy Communion to the sick encouraged trust not in God but t...

In his attack on Cranmer's Swiss eucharistic theology, Gardiner turns to sources he otherwise definitively rejected: Justus Jonas hath translate a Catechism out of Dutch into Latin, taught in the city of Noremberge in Germany, where Hosiander is chief preacher: in which Catechism, they be accounted for no true Christian men that deny the presence of Christ's body in the sacrament. The words "really" and "substantially" be not expressed, as they be in Bucer, but the word "truly" is there: and as Bucer saith, that is substantially ...  Philip Melancton, no papist nor priest, writeth a very wise Epistle in this matter to Ecolampadius, and signifying soberly his belief of the presence of Christ's very body in the sacrament. Invoking the prominent Lutheran theologians Melanchton and Jonas, and Bucer's eirenic eucharistic theology (a via media between Wittenberg and Zurich), Gardiner followed what is now a common, predictable path amongst papali...