Excerpt from The Sacrament Reserved: A Survey of the Practice of Reserving the Eucharist, With Special Reference to the Communion of the Sick, During the First Twelve Centuries

Some criticism will doubtless be disarmed if attention be called here to the limitations and deficiencies of the work.

It seemed, in the first place, inadvisable to pursue the subject beyond a date at which the custom of the Western Church had become generally fixed and uniform. By setting a term to the period surveyed, it was possible to confine the attention mainly to the conditions under which reservation was practiced for the sick, without digressing into the discussion of other purposes for which the reserved Eucharist was later employed. A landmark is obviously reached 1n the Fourth Lateran Council where the most important conclusion about eucharistic doctrine arrived at in the previous era was definitely adopted, and, under the term transubstantiation, became the accepted teaching of the Western Church. It might naturally be asked why, in a history of clinical communion, where the practical question arises as to the advisability or the reverse of employing both species of the sacrament, the survey is not carried down to the date at which concomitance was enunciated as de fide. The answer to this will be found, so the writer believes, in the text of the book itself. The implication of what was afterwards defined as concomitance is here shown to be a constant feature of customs associated with the reserved Eucharist in primitive as well as in later times; and the practice of administering the single species of Bread to the whole and to the sick had become universal in the West long before the specific reassertion at Trent of the doctrine implied.

There are two places where the charge of inadequacy may be anticipated.

One occurs at the section which deals with the place of reservation. The only plea that can be urged is that information concerning this point is surprisingly scarce before the eleventh century. The other is the hiatus in the history of reservation in the East. Such references as could readily be found in the Greek Fathers and early oriental writers have been included, as well as some note of customs followed by the Eastern Churches in modern times, but the inaccessibility of whatever intervening sources may exist prevented the writer from supplying the missing connection. This omission is probably a less grave defect than might at first appear, for there seems to be a general agreement among authorities that no important modifications have taken place in the East since the adoption of intinction. Unfortunately, however, the date at which this mode of communicating first appeared cannot be ascertained with certainty.

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