In spite of condemnation from the Pope, who was suspicious of their teaching, the Waldensians increased in number. They declared that the authority of the Bible was superior to that of the Church, appointed ministers of their own, and denied many of the principal articles of Faith that the Church insisted were necessary to salvation. The mediaeval Church taught that only through belief in these articles of Faith, that is, in the Creeds and Sacraments (_sacramentum_ = something sacred), as administered by the clergy, could man hope to be saved. The most important of the Sacraments, of which there were seven, was the miracle of the Mass, sometimes called ‘transubstantiation’. Its origin was the Last Supper, when Christ before His crucifixion gave His disciples bread and wine, saying ‘Take, eat, this is my body....’ ‘Take, drink, this is my blood which was shed for you.’ The mediaeval Church declared that every time at the service of Mass the priest offered up ‘the Host’, or consecrated bread, Christ was sacrificed anew for the sins of the world, and that the bread became in truth converted into the substance of His body. The Waldensians, and many sects that later broke away from the tenets of the mediaeval Church, denied this miracle and also the sacred character of the priests who could perform it. According to the Church, her clergy at ordination received through the laying on of the bishop’s hands some of the mysterious power that Christ had given to St. Peter, conferring on them the power also to forgive sins. No matter if the priest became idle or vicious, he still by virtue of his ordination retained his sacred character, and to lay hands upon him was to incur the wrath of God. Even in the twelfth century, when St. Bernard travelled in Languedoc, he had been horrified to find ‘the sacraments no longer sacred and priests without respect’. His attempts at remonstrance were met with stones and threats, while the establishment of an ‘episcopal inquisition’ to inquire into and stamp out this hostility only increased Provençal bitterness and determination. ‘I would rather be a Jew,’ was an expression of disdain in the Middle Ages; but in Toulouse the people said, ‘I had rather be a priest,’ and the clergy who walked abroad were forced to conceal their tonsures for fear of assault. ‘Heresy can only be destroyed by solid instruction’ was Innocent III’s first verdict. ‘It is by preaching the truth that we sap foundations of error.’ He therefore sent some Cistercians to hold a mission in Languedoc, and in their company travelled a young Spaniard, Dominic de Guzman, burning to win souls for the Faith or suffer martyrdom. The Cistercians rode on horses with a large train of servants and with wagons drawn by oxen to carry their clothes and their food. This display aroused the scornful mirth of the Albigenses and Waldensians. ‘See,’ they cried, ‘the wealthy missionaries of a God who was humble and despised, loaded with honours!’