In the first ages of the Church, the notion of the divinity of the "body and blood" of the communion meal was vague and undefined. The partakers certainly regarded the consecrated bread and wine as carrying some supernatural virtue, since they took away portions for medicinal use; but they thought of the meal very much as devout pagans thought of one of the some kind in their mysteries or temple ritual. When their ritual phraseology was challenged as giving colour to the charge of cannibalism, the Fathers seem always to have explained that the terms were purely figurative; and such was the doctrine laid down by Augustine. But when pagan culture had passed away, and there was none in the barbarized West to challenge the Church as such, the strange literalness of the original liturgy set up the stranger belief that what was eaten in the eucharist was by "transubstantiation" the actual flesh and blood of the God-Man. Where such a belief was possible, it was the special interest of the priesthood to make the affirmation. A stupendous miracle, they claimed, was worked every time the eucharist was administered; but it was worked through the priest. He and he only could bring it about; and thus the central mystery and prodigy of the faith, the command of its most essential ministry, was a clerical monopoly. The economic and spiritual centre of gravity of the entire system was fixed in the priestly order. Under such a dominating conception, Christianity was for the majority a religion neither of faith nor of works: it was a religion of sacerdotal magic. Not he that believed, still less he that loved his neighbour, but he only that received the mystic rite at consecrated hands, was to be saved. Moral teaching there might be, but more than ever it was supererogatory. Already in the fourth century the sacerdotal quality of the rite was defined by the practice of solemnly "elevating" the wine and the hostia or sacrifice, as the bread was termed, before every distribution; and it had become common to administer it two or three times a week. Thus the missa or Mass, as it had come to be termed (traditionally from the formula of dismissal, Ite, missio est, corrupted into Missa est--another pagan detail), had passed from the status of a periodical solemnity to that of a frequent service; and the rite was developed by the addition of chants and responses till it became the special act of Christian worship. The "symbols" were thus already far on the way to be worshipped; and at the beginning of the seventh century Gregory the Great enacted that the slightest irregularities in their use should be atoned for by penances. Thus "if a drop from the cup should fall on the altar, the ministering priest must suck up the drop and do penance for three days; and the linen cloth which the drop touched must be washed three times over the cup, and the water in which it was washed be cast into the fire."