THE CORONATION OATH AND THE REAL PRESENCE.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Sin,—" An East-End Vicar" has only succeeded in adding one 4:tr two more inaccuracies to those contained in his previous letter. 'The true account of the matter is as follows :—The Declaration 'quoted by your correspondent and the Coronation Oath are two distinct things. Both were -part of the Coronation Service from -the accession of William and Mary to that of George IL, since which time the Declaration has been dissociated altogether from the Coronation. Queen Victoria, for example, was crowned on the 28th of June, 1838, but sh,e made the declaration on the 20th day of the preceding November, in the presence of the two Houses of Parliament.
In the second place, the Declaration says nothing whatever about the doctrine of "the Real Presence." The twenty-eighth of the Thirty-nine Articles both repudiates Transubstantiation and asserts the Real Presence. It asserts that "the Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper." It adds that this takes place "only after an heavenly and spiritual manner," and that "the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten is faith,"—propositions which a believer even in transubstantiation would admit.
To assert that the body of Christ "is given" is to assert that its presence is anterior to the action of the recipient's faith and independent of it. The article, with strict theological accuracy, limits the province of faith to that of appropriating a gift existing already objectively to and independently of it. To assert, indeed, that the presence is only in the communicant is to make the com- municant the real consecrator, in which ease, the part enacted by the officiating priest would rightly deserve to be characterised as a profane farce. Another result of such a theory would be that, in the event of all the communicants being destitute of faith, there would be no sacrament at all,—no "inward part or thing signified."
The fact is, to speak plainly, if the denials of the Old-Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence were logical, those who make theni would give up sacraments altogether, for on their theory they are nothing but profane shams.—I am, Sir, &c.,
AN EAST-END RECTOR.
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