EXCURSUS ON THE COMMUNION OF THE SICK.

There is nothing upon which the ancient church more strenuously 

insisted than the oral reception of the Holy Communion. What in later 

times was known as "Spiritual Communion" was outside of the view 

of those early days; and to them the issues of eternity were considered 

often to rest upon the sick man's receiving with his mouth "his food for 

the journey," the Viaticum, before he died. No greater proof of how 

important this matter was deemed could be found than the present 

canon, which provides that even the stern and invariable canons of the 

public penance are to give way before the awful necessity of fortifying 

the soul in the last hour of its earthly sojourn.

Possibly at first the Italy Sacrament may have been consecrated in the 

presence of the sick person, but of this in early times the instances are 

rare and by was considered a marked favour that such a thing should 

be allowed, and the saying of mass in private houses was prohibited 

(as it is in the Eastern and Latin churches still to-day) with the greatest

The necessity of having the consecrated bread and wine for the sick 

led to their reservation, a practice which has existed in the Church 

from the very beginning, so far as any records of which we are in 

possession shew.

St. Justin Martyr, writing less than a half century after St. John's death, 

mentions that "the deacons communicate each of those present, and 

carry away to the absent the blest bread, and wine and water."() It 

was evidently a long established custom in his day.

Tertullian tells us of a woman whose husband was a heathen and who 

was allowed to keep the Holy Sacrament in her house that she might 

receive every morning before other food. St. Cyprian also gives a most 

interesting example of reservation. In his treatise "On the Lapsed" 

written in A.D. , (chapter xxvi), he says: "Another woman, when 

she tried with unworthy hands to open her box, in which was the Holy 

of the Lord, was deterred from daring to touch it by fire rising from it."

It is impossible with any accuracy to fix the date, but certainly before 

the year four hundred, a perpetual reservation for the sick was made in 

the churches. A most interesting incidental proof of this is found in the 

thrilling description given by St. Chrysostom of the great riot in 

Constantinople in the year , when the soldiers "burst into the place 

where the Holy Things were stored, and saw all things therein," and 

"the most holy blood of Christ was spilled upon their clothes."() From 

this incident it is evident that in that church the Holy Sacrament was 

reserved in both kinds, and separately.

Whether this at the time was usual it is hard to say, but there can be no 

doubt that even in the earliest times the Sacrament was given, on rare 

occasions at least, in one kind,

sometimes under the form of bread alone, and when the sick persons 

could not swallow under the form of wine alone. The practice called 

"intinction," that is the dipping of the bread into the wine and 

administering the two species together, was of very early introduction 

and still is universal in the East, not only when Communion is given 

with the reserved Sacrament, but also when the people are 

communicated in the Liturgy from the newly consecrated species. The 

first mention of intinction in the West, is at Carthage in the fifth 

century.() We know it was practised in the seventh century and by 

the twelfth it had become general, to give place to the withdrawal of 

the chalice altogether in the West.() "Regino(De Eccles. Discip. Lib. 

I. c. lxx.) in , Burchard(Decr. Lib. V. cap. ix. fol. . colon. .) 

in , and Ivo(Decr. Pars. II. cap. xix. p. , Paris ) in  all 

cite a Canon, which they ascribe to a council of Tours ordering 'every 

presbyter to have a pyx or vessel meet for so great a sacrament, in 

which the Body of the Lord may be carefully laid up for the Viaticum 

to those departing from this world, which sacred oblation ought to be 

steeped in the Blood of Christ that the presbyter may be able to say 

truthfully to the sick man, The Body and Blood of the Lord avail thee, 

etc.'"()

The reservation of the Holy Sacrament was usually made in the church 

itself, and the learned W. E. Scudamore is of opinion that this was the 

case in Africa as early as the fourth century.()

It will not be uninteresting to quote in this connection the "Apostolic 

Constitutions," for while indeed there is much doubt of the date of the 

Eighth Book, yet it is certainly of great antiquity. Here we read, "and 

after the communion of both men and women, the deacons take what 

remains and place it in the tabernacle."()

Perhaps it may not be amiss before closing the remark that so far as we 

are aware the reservation of the Holy Sacrament in the early church 

was only for the purposes of communion, and that the churches of the 

East reserve it to the present day only for this purpose.

Those who wish to read the matter treated of more at length, can do so 

in Muratorius's learned "Dissertations" which are prefixed to his 

edition of the Roman Sacramentaries(chapter XXIV) and in 

Scudamore's Notitia Eucharistica, a work which can be absolutely 

relied upon for the accuracy of its facts, however little one may feel 

constrained to accept the logical justness of its conclusions.