This doctrine concerning "the Sacrifice of the Mass," as commonly held at this time in the Western Church, taught that, at the celebration of the Holy Communion, when the priest had consecrated the sacramental bread and wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ became carnally and corporeally present in the chalice and patten--that the bread and wine were no longer bread and wine, but had been transubstantiated into Christ's own body, which was day by day offered up in sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Pope and the priesthood, by their power of granting or refusing the sacrament to the laity, stood as the sole mediators between God and man. The Continental Protestants, cut off from the main body of the Western Church by the Pope's ban, had formulated theories which struck at the roots of the power of the clergy. Many of them treated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as no more than a solemn ceremony, denying any sacramental character to the rite. The majority of the early English Protestants fell into this extreme view. [Sidenote: =Attitude of the king.=] Now Henry VIII. to the end of his days stood firm to the mediaeval doctrine of the sacrament, and fully accepted Transubstantiation, though he denied the deduction which the Roman Church had drawn from it--that by it the Pope and clergy are the despotic masters of the souls of men. He merely desired to place himself in the position which the Pope had hitherto held, as head of the spiritual hierarchy of England. With the pliant Cranmer and other bishops of his own to serve him, he wished to become as despotic a sovereign over the souls of Englishmen as he already was over their bodies. To a great extent he succeeded, and for the last twelve years of his reign he exercised a hateful spiritual tyranny over his subjects, drawing a hard-and-fast line of submission to his own views, which no man was allowed to overstep in either direction. Roman Catholics who denied his power to supersede the Pope's authority were hung as traitors. Protestants who refused to accept his theory of the Sacraments were burnt as heretics. [Sidenote: =The monasteries.=]