This late and gradual development of a devotion, which seems to us now so natural and so unmistakably involved in premises that all men accepted, is certainly a remarkable fact. Even to the present day the Greek Church, though its belief in transubstantiation is no less explicit than our own, has never drawn the inference that our Lord has come in the Blessed Sacrament to be our companion and refuge as well as our food. It seems to have been part of the Divine dispensation, in this as in some other matters, to hold men’s eyes that they should not know Him. Throughout the long centuries our forefathers seem to have regarded the Eucharistic presence as if Christ had wished to preserve His _incognito_ while He dwelt amongst them, or as if He were sleeping as of old in the bark of Peter and would rebuke the want of faith of those who too importunately disturbed His repose. But surely we are right in thinking that if they so apprehended God’s purpose in remaining on our altars, their appreciation of His boon was but inchoative and imperfect. To us now it seems so obvious that the work of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament was not meant to be intermittent, limited to the time of Mass and Holy Communion, that it is hard to believe that Christians who truly recognised this presence in their midst can ever have conceived otherwise. Perhaps we may draw the lesson that if the fulness of understanding were long delayed in so plain a matter, it is not surprising that in other dogmas and practices which justify themselves less obviously there may be developments in the Church’s teaching not suspected or at least not clearly apprehended by our forefathers in the faith.