Ralph Cudworth published in 1642 a book entitled A Discourse Concerning the True Nature of the Lord’s Supper.  In the Introduction to this work Cudworth argued that “all great errors have been intermingled with some truth” and “that falsehood is pure nonentity, and could not subsist alone by itself” and that the “grand error of the papists concerning the Lord’s Supper” is no exception to this rule, but “perhaps at first did rise by degeneration from a primitive truth, whereof the very obliquity of this error yet may bear some dark and obscure intimation” (Cudworth, A Discourse Concerning the True Nature of the Lord’s Supper, Introduction, quoted in Stone, 1909: II, 315-316).

Cudworth in the body of the work argues that the Eucharist is not a sacrifice but a feast on the past and true sacrifice of Christ and that the Eucharist is a federal rite between God and people.  He says:

“The right notion of that Christian feast called the Lord’s Supper, in which we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ that was once offered up to God for us, is to be derived, if I mistake not, from analogy to that ancient rite among the Jews of feasting upon things sacrificed and eating of those things which they had offered up to God.

Having thus shown that both amongst the Jews under the law and the Gentiles in their pagan worship (for paganism is nothing both Judaism degenerate) it was ever a solemn rite to join feasting with sacrifice, and to eat of those things which had been offered up, the very concinnity and harmony of the thing itself leads me to conceive that that Christian feast under the Gospel called the Lord’s Supper is the very same thing, and bears the same notion, in respect of the true Christian sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, that those did to the Jewish and heathenish sacrifices; and so is epulum sacrificiale, a sacrificial feast, I mean, a feast upon sacrifice, or epulum ex oblatis, a feast upon things offered up to God.  Only this difference arising in the parallel, that because those legal sacrifices were but types and shadows of the true Christian sacrifice, they were often repeated and renewed as well as the feasts which were made upon them; but now, the true Christian sacrifice being come and offered up once for all, never to be repeated, we have therefore no more typical sacrifices left amongst us, but only the feasts upon the one true sacrifice still symbolically continued and often repeated in reference to that one great sacrifice, which is always as present in God’s sight and efficacious as if it were but now offered up for us.” (Cudworth, A Discourse Concerning the True Nature of the Lord’s Supper, Chapter i, quoted in Stone, 1909: II, 316).

Cudworth affirms that in the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ is eaten and drunk and describes this as a feast.  The body and blood of Christ that is eaten and drunk in the Eucharist is said to be that which was once offered up to God for us on the cross.  This seems not to be an immoderate notion of eating and drinking the fleshy body and blood of Christ, since Cudworth argues that the Eucharist is a feast upon the sacrifice, and therefore not a new sacrifice.  The feast upon the sacrifice is also said to be ‘the one true sacrifice symbolically continued and often repeated in reference to that one great sacrifice’.  The feast (the Eucharist) is therefore continued and repeated but the sacrifice (the sacrifice of the cross) is not repeated.  Cudworth’s theology of the Eucharist seems therefore to be that of moderate realism, where the one true sacrifice is instantiated in the feast, that is, the Eucharist, where the body and blood of Christ is received.  Cudworth does not however, instantiate the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, but in the Eucharist generally.