Alcuin is drawn by the Romans into the controversy on Transubstantiation, which, as we have seen, had not commenced in his time. In a letter to Paulinus, the Patriarch of Aquileia, dated about 787, he requests his correspondent not to forget him in his prayers. “Store up my name in some treasure-house of your memory, and bring it out at that fitting time when you have consecrated the bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ.” If that expression had been used after the long controversy on the subject, it would have been very much more important than at most it is. But it comes nearly fifty years before the controversy was raised by Paschasius Radbert of Corbie in his treatise _De Corpore et Sanguine Domini_ (A.D. 831). Paschasius wrote that after consecration “there is nothing but the Body and Blood of the Lord”, a material statement which Ratramn at once controverted. It was Ratramn’s treatise, denying the carnal presence and maintaining a spiritual view, that had a dominant influence on Ridley and Cranmer. The more subtle refinement of the schoolmen of later times, which we know as transubstantiation, avoids the blunt materialism of Paschasius by distinguishing between an essential and a non-essential element of an existence such as that of bread; giving to the essence which cannot be apprehended by the senses the name of substance, and to the non-essential the name of accident. The change effected by consecration did not, in their view, affect the non-essential, the accident, the part that can be perceived by the senses; it affected only that which can not be so perceived, the essential, the substance. But all this is very far beyond any point which had been reached in Alcuin’s time, or was reached for some long time after him. From him we do not hear anything of substance and accident, of essential and non-essential. He presumably used the expression quoted as a simple and strong statement of his belief in a very real presence, which he and the men of his time unquestionably held, but did not attempt to define.