Eucharistic Window

In my last Anglican church, S Thomas's in Oxford, there is a 'Eucharistic Window', put into the church by the great fifty-years-a-vicar-here Canon Thomas Chamberlain. It teaches the doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice by having, at the bottom, a priest facing versus orientem vested in alb and chasuble lifting up a chalice to the level of the Pierced Heart of the corpus on the altar crucifix portrayed in the window. On each side are saints, male and female, local and national, kneeling in adoration. Above is the Lamb of God from the Book of Revelation, blood flowing from His Most Sacred Heart into a chalice, with a selection of the four-and-twenty elders worshipping on each side.

This not only inculcates the desirability of versus orientem, vestments, and altars with crucifixes and candles (things all of which were dangerous innovations in Fr Chamberlain's time), but the unity of the Eucharistic Sacrifice with the Sacrifice of the Lamb at the heavely altar. Not surprisingly, it became the object of a law suit.

In Steeple Aston church, there is a later (between 1896 and 1918) window by Eden working exactly the same theme. At the top is the Lamb of God; lower, the Redeemer ('He ever liveth to make intercession for us'); at the bottom a priest saying Mass at an altar with an open Missal (the crucifixion scene on the left page suggesting that he is just starting Te igitur being slightly subverted by the conjoined thumbs and forefingers). Other tableaux show 'righteous Abel' sacrificing, and Melchizedek; demonstrating a devotion to the Canon Romanus. This window is at least a generation later than the one in S Thomas's (1860), and shows the same teaching transposed into the more 'Roman' idiom of the later Anglican Catholic generation. I suspect that Rector Brown had seen Canon Chamberlain's window. Incidentally, there is another 'Eucharistic Window', of 1888, in Bicester church. Less 'advanced' than Chamberlain's or Brown's, it shows the rector, indeed versus orientem and accompanied by servers, but still wearing an Oxford MA hood. (Tradition has it that Chamberlain smuggled the first chasuble into the usage of S Thomas's by gradually lengthening his MA hood until it had metamorphosed into a red chasuble.)

Fr Brown at Steeple Aston probably also got hassled about his churchmanship. As late as World War II, his successor was accused of being an enemy agent and of deliberately subverting the blackout regulations ... by keeping a light burning before the Blessed Sacrament!

(Any readers know any more Eucharistic windows?)