A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

Rubric. “When the priest, standing before the table, hath so ordered the bread and wine, that he may with the more readiness and decency break the bread before the people, and take the cup into his hands, he shall say the prayer of consecration, as followeth.” And in the prayer of consecration, “Here he is to take the cup into his hand,” and, “Here to lay his hand upon every vessel (be it chalice or flagon) in which there is any wine to be consecrated.”

“The minister that delivereth the cup to any shall say, The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,” &c.

Article 30. “The cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the lay people; for both the parts of the Lord’s sacrament, by Christ’s ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike.”

This article is directed against the Romish custom of denying the cup to the laity, concerning which it may be enough to say, that it is clearly and confessedly contrary to the custom of the Church; that for twelve centuries there was no instance to be adduced of any receiving in one kind at the public celebration of the eucharist; and that it was even accounted sacrilege to deprive any of either part of our blessed Lord’s ordinance.—See Bingham, xv. 5, and xvi. 6–27.

It appears from the unanimous testimony of the Fathers, and from all the ancient rituals and liturgies, that the sacrament of the Lord’s supper was, in the early ages of the Church, administered in both kinds, as well to the laity as to the clergy. The practice of denying the cup to the laity arose out of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The belief that the sacramental bread and wine were actually converted into the body and blood of Christ, naturally produced, in a weak and superstitious age, an anxious fear lest any part of them should be lost or wasted. To prevent anything of this kind in the bread, small wafers were used, which were put at once into the mouths of the communicants by the officiating ministers; but no expedient could be devised to guard against the occasional spilling of the wine in administering it to large congregations. The bread was sopped in the wine, and the wine was conveyed by tubes into the mouth, but all in vain; accidents still happened, and therefore it was determined that the priests should entirely withhold the cup from the laity. It is to be supposed that a change of this sort, in so important an ordinance as that of the Lord’s supper, could not be effected at once. The first attempt seems to have been made in the twelfth century; it was gradually submitted to, and was at last established by the authority of the Council of Constance, in the year 1414; but in their decree they acknowledged that “Christ did institute this sacrament of both kinds, and that the faithful in the primitive Church did receive both kinds; yet a practice being reasonably introduced to avoid some dangers and scandals, they appoint the custom to continue of consecrating in both kinds, and of giving to the laity only in one kind,” thus presuming to depart from the positive commands of our Lord respecting the manner of administering the sign of the covenant between himself and mankind. From that time it has been the invariable practice of the Church of Rome to confine the cup to the priests. And it was again admitted at the Council of Trent, that the Lord’s supper was formerly administered in both kinds to all communicants, but it was openly contended that the Church had power to make the alteration, and that they had done it for weighty and just causes. These causes are not stated in the canon of the council. The reformed churches, even the Lutheran, which maintains the doctrine of consubstantiation, restored the cup to the laity. In a convocation held in the first year of Edward the Sixth’s reign, it was unanimously voted that the sacrament of the Lord’s supper should be received in both kinds by the laity as well as the clergy; and therefore it is remarkable that there was nothing on this subject in the articles of 1552: both this and the preceding article [the 29th] were added in 1562.—Bp. Tomline.

Wherever the institution of the Lord’s supper is mentioned, there is not the least hint that the clergy are to receive it in one manner, and the laity in another. And if one part of this sacrament be more necessary than the other, it seems to be the cup; since it represents the blood of Christ, to which remission of sins and our redemption are more often ascribed in Scripture than to his body. It is trifling in the Romanists to say that the blood is with the body: since in the eucharist we commemorate, not the life of our Lord, but his death, in which the blood was separated from his body; (see 1 Cor. xi. 26; Luke xxii. 19, 20;) and to represent his blood, thus separated from his body, the cup was consecrated apart by him. Christ himself also seems to have guarded designedly against this piece of sacrilege of denying the cup to the laity, by commanding that “all” should drink of the cup. (Matt. xxvi. 27.) And in Mark xiv. 23, it is said, that “all drank of it;” which is nowhere expressly said of eating the bread. See also 1 Cor. xi. 26–28, in all which verses the Corinthians in general are expressly required to “drink of that cup.”—Archdeacon Welchman. Veneer.

There is not any one of all the controversies that we have with the Church of Rome, in which the decision seems more easy and shorter than this. And, as there is not any one in which she has acted more visibly contrary to the gospel than in this, so there is not any one that has raised higher prejudices against her, that has made more forsake her, and has possessed mankind more against her, than this. This has cost her dearer than any other.—Bp. Burnet.

For the material of the cup, see Chalice.

CURATE. The person who has the cure of souls in a parish. In this sense the word is used in the Prayer Book, “all bishops and curates,” as the word is still employed in France, Spain, &c.

The word is, in common parlance, used to denote the minister, whether presbyter or deacon, who is employed under the spiritual rector or vicar, as assistant to him in the same church, or else in a chapel of ease within the same parish, belonging to the mother church. Where there is in a parish neither spiritual rector nor vicar, but a clerk employed to officiate there by the impropriator, this is called a perpetual curacy, and the priest thus employed the perpetual curate. The impropriator, by the terms of his sacrilegious gift, is bound to “maintain” the priest: how far this is complied with by those lay impropriators who allow the same stipend now that was given 200 or 300 years ago, we need not wait to inquire. The appointment of a curate to officiate under an incumbent, in his own church, must be by such incumbent’s nomination of him to the bishop. To every one of these several kinds of curates, the ordinary’s licence is necessary before he shall be admitted to officiate.