Richard Meux Benson founded a religious order within the Church of England during the nineteenth century known as the Society of St John the Evangelist (SSJE) and served as its first Superior.  Benson was a supporter of the Oxford Movement.  His opinions on the Eucharist can be gathered from a letter he wrote in a journal entitled The Cowley Evangelist in July, 1907.  Part of this letter said:

“I hear that some persons … are striving to laugh the true doctrine of our Lord’s presence out of court by representing it as a miracle.  Of course, it is a miracle; all the operations of the living God in this material world are a miracle; birth, nourishment, growth, all are miracles, ‘but seen too oft are miracles in vain’.  They are not miracles in the sense of being contrary to nature, wrought by divine power in order to attest the divine mission of One whom God has sent, but they are miracles as being acts of God’s continuous though secret power by which He raises the things of nature to become the channels of operations which in their original nature they could not have effected.  God’s work must be supernatural.  He acts by infusing some new law, by which the lower creation is raised to do the higher work. … Christ takes the bread and wine into his His glorified body.  If He did not do so, the Church, which is His body in its earthly form, would die.  The Church requires as an earthly organisation to be nourished by earthly elements, but those elements must have a heavenly substance.  Christ must take them into the substance of His glorified body.  Otherwise, they would not be capable of nourishing His body upon the earth.  Without this continuous feeding upon the body of Christ, the Church upon earth would die of starvation. … The word ‘Transubstantiation’, true of our natural food, fails to express the truth of the change which is effected in the bread and wine when they become the body and blood of Christ.  The true bread is given to us ‘from heaven’.  It has a heavenly nature in itself; the bread and wine acquire a heavenly virtue by incorporation into His glorified substance.  We are made Christ’s members, and need to feed upon Christ’s glorified body. … From Christ, the Head, must come the life of each successive generation of the Church, which is His body.  His body has nourishment administered to it by sacramental joints and bands from Himself, the Head, as St Paul teaches us. … Christ comes to us in this Holy Sacrament, not leaping down from His central throne of divine love, as He will do at His second coming, when the number of His elect is complete, and He will return to judge the world, moving all the majesty of heaven, while He brings along with Himself the souls of the saints that are in Him, that they may take up their bodies, which are in Him by sacramental fellowship, though they are now sleeping.  But He comes by an onflow of divine force – substantive, for it is in His human nature that He comes to be the food of man; personal, for in Christ the humanity cannot be without the divine Person; affectionate, for He comes with the love of God; spiritual, for He acts in the power of the Holy Ghost; regenerating, for He lifts us up into a heavenly life; nutritive, for He makes His members to grow in grace by this feeding upon Him, purifying, for our sinful bodies are made clean by His body; divine, because our souls are washed by His ever-living blood; sanctifying, for He, of God, is therein made to us sanctification and redemption; glorifying, for His hidden presence shall be revealed in us hereafter in the glory of His kingdom. … In such a stream of supernatural power, surely the provision of the food by which this grace streams forth cannot but be a miracle.  If it were not, it would be an act altogether unworthy of its relation as ordained by God to raise us from earth to heaven.  The consecration of the sacred elements is not a tentative action, from which great things may follow, but it is a covenant, ordained in all things, and sure.  Hereby, Christ comes to us.  Hereby, we, as His members, appeal to God, that God may remember us as speaking to Him in Christ’s name. … People talk about Christ’s body as if it were the body of any other man.  They do not realise that it is ascended to the right hand of God.  They think of Christ sitting in heaven as He may be represented in a picture, with the form which He might have had during His earthly life.  They do not realise what is meant by His ascension.  He did not ascend to some place in the sky miles and miles away from earth.  He ascended by passing up from an earthly form of existence, measured by space and outline, to an entirely new sphere and manner and capacity of life.  He ascended up a little way above the heads of the bystanders, and then He vanished out of their sight.  He was not lost in distance.  Nor did he cease to exist.  He was crucified in a natural body.  He rose again as a spiritual body.  The spiritual body is incapable of any earthly measurement or form.  It is a heavenly power such as we can in no wise apprehend.  It is no longer in space, but is at the right hand of God, exercising a power by the inherent glory of the Holy Ghost.  It is no longer in space, but it acts independently of space, so that however many may be the altars on which the Holy Eucharist is celebrated, there is no multiplication of Christ’s body.  His body, being now a spiritual body, is a force divinely operating in every crumb of the consecrated bread, communicating the existence of its glorified state to each who feeds thereon.  This is what people are too apt to ignore, so that it seems as if each individual received into himself a separate Christ, and not the divine undivided Christ.  One Christ, one living Force acting throughout the whole of the Church, which is His body, and acting completely in every individual communicant. … We must not think of the sacred elements as if they were transubstantiated into human flesh like our own, but as being lifted up by the divine indwelling so as to be the mediatorial channel of life uniting us as the members of Christ to a vital fellowship with Christ, the Head of the body. … The Sacraments are the means through which the Spirit acts.  The bread and wine consecrated by the Spirit are taken into the body of Christ, so as to be a channel of communication.  If the bread and wine were an empty symbol, they could not effect bodily union between ourselves and Christ.  Our bodies are made members of Christ’s body, of His flesh, and of His bones.  There must be a material substance to act upon our bodies, as there must be a spiritual substance with which we are united. … The miracle is not our work.  It is the work of the Holy Ghost in the body of Christ.  We cannot work the miracle, it is not we who consecrate the bread and wine.  There is only one Priest in the Church of God.  One Victim, one Altar.  The priest who celebrates can neither help the miracle, nor can he nullify it.  However little he believes in the sacramental change, that change is just the same as if he believes in it most fully. … We must realise that it is by the power of the Holy Ghost descending from heaven at Pentecost that we are called to consecrate the bread and wine, and make them channels of mediatorial grace by their identification with the mediatorial Head of the covenant.” (Benson, 1907, quoted in Stone, 1909: II, 587-589).

Benson’s view of the Eucharist as a miracle is intended to deny any view of miracle being apart from nature.  The miraculous nature of the Eucharist is due to the power of God through the operation of the Holy Spirit.  The miracle is that through this power, things of this world, bread and wine, become channels for things of the heavenly or spiritual world.  This says Benson changes the nature of the things of this world, not that they are transubstantiated, but that they are taken into a higher realm, that is, the glorified body of Christ.  It is because of the heavenly virtue given to the bread and wine, by the fact they are taken into or incorporated into the glorified body of Christ, that the bread and wine can be said to be changed and it because of this change that the communicant can be said to feed on the body and blood of Christ.  Benson clearly associates the signs of bread and wine with the signified grace and presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  His view is that of realism.  It is by the signs that Christ comes to people and this is in an objective manner.  It does not matter what the earthly priest or communicant thinks of the gift, it is nonetheless present in the sign in a real way.  Benson is careful however to exclude immoderate realism since he affirms that the presence of Christ cannot be measured by earthly means (space and outline).  Christ’s body is not multiplied in some physical and fleshy manner, but is present on numerous altars as a spiritual body, with the grace of Christ present in the bread and wine in a real, but not immoderate manner.  The bread and wine do not become flesh, but rather they are lifted up by divine indwelling so that they become a mediatorial channel, whereby the communicant and Christ are united.  The bread and wine, the signs, become the channel of communication for the signified, the body and blood of Christ.  The signs therefore cannot be mere empty symbols, but they are rather identified with the signified in a real way, containing and delivering the grace with which they are identified.  Benson’s realism is therefore that of moderate realism.