The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1510 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
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Matzah
,
Matzo
(unleavened bread):
see
MAZZAH
.
Maud
d
:
see
MAWD
D
.
Maundy Thursday
.
The Thursday before
Easter
. It celebrates Jesus' institution of the
eucharist
at the
Last Supper
on that day. The English name ‘Maundy’ derives from a Latin
antiphon
Mandatum novum
(‘a new commandment’, John 13. 34) sung on this day. The royal Maundy Ceremony in the UK, in which the reigning sovereign distributes Maundy money to twelve deserving and (relatively) poor people, has lost all contact with the original commemoration.
Maurice, Frederick Denison
(1805–72).
Christian clergyman and social reformer. He was the son of a
Unitarian
minister, and was unable to graduate from Cambridge University because he could not subscribe to the
Thirty-Nine Articles
. Influenced by the writings of
Coleridge
and by a profound conversion experience, he became an
Anglican
and was ordained in 1834. After a curacy, he became chaplain to Guy's Hospital in London in 1836, when he published
The Kingdom of Christ
. In this he argued that since Christ is the head of every person, all people are bound in a universal fellowship which life in all its aspects should make manifest. In 1853, he published
Theological Essays
, which included a rejection of eternal punishment determined at the moment of death. He had ‘no faith in man's theory of a Universal Restitution’ (i.e.
universalism
), but maintained that the quest for the return of the prodigal would have no end.
This cautious view was nevertheless taken to be a subversion of the necessary foundation for moral life, and he was therefore dismissed from the College (although the real animus against him lay in his connection with Christian Socialism.

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