A long and difficult negotiation ensued. At length the national synod of La Rochelle, convoked in 1607, decided that, though it unanimously approved of the contested article, and held it to be conformable with what had been predicted in the Scriptures, it consented, at the express command of the sovereign, to omit it from the confession of faith. In retaliation, it directed one of its members to prove the justice of the accusation, and the pastor Vignier acquitted himself of the commission in a book entitled, _The Theatre of Antichrist_. We must, to understand this perseverance, bear in mind, that controversy was carried on at that time with extreme bitterness. The pen and the tongue having replaced the sword, passions, which had no longer another vent, were brought into this new battle-field. The necessities of these polemics were so great, that by a singular resolution, the national synod of Saint Maixent distributed the most difficult points of controversy among the provinces, with directions to have them examined by persons capable of successfully opposing, on all occasions, the (Roman) Catholic doctors. This contest assumed sometimes considerable importance, as was the case with the conference opened at Fontainebleau, on the 14th of May, 1600, between Duplessis-Mornay and Duperron. Mornay, in a treatise upon the Eucharist, had collected five or six thousand texts of the Fathers, which appeared to him opposed to the doctrine of transubstantiation. This was, so to speak, the voice of the first centuries of Christianity, which he summoned to testify against the inventions of succeeding ages, and all the venerable doctors of the primitive church rose one after the other, in his book, to protest against the alteration of the Sacrament of the Supper. This treatise was at the same time both a religious and political event; and this is not to be wondered at, if we reflect, on the one side, that the author had lived thirty years in familiarity with the king; on the other, that the dogma of the Eucharist was the great question of the era between (Roman) Catholicism and the Reformation. It was upon this point that the sentences of death pronounced against the heretics had been principally founded, and nothing contributed more, as we have seen, to break up the colloquy of Poissy. The Cardinal de Medicis, legate of the pope, sent six copies of Mornay’s work to Rome, promising to have it refuted by Bellarmine. In place of a refutation, there came despatches from Clement VIII. denouncing a new conspiracy on the part of the heresy. Henry IV. was the more vexed at this because he was then suing before the Holy See for a divorce from his marriage with Marguérite de Valois. The Parliaments also took part in the quarrel; and during a whole winter, the pulpits of the old preachers of the League re-echoed with violent anathemas against the audacious adversary of the real presence.