'Let us beware how we forsake ancient customs. Let us address our prayers directly to the saints who are our patrons and intercessors under Jesus Christ. To assert that they have not the prerogative of healing diseases, is in opposition to your Majesty's personal experience and the gift you have received from God of curing the king's evil.... Let us also pay our devotions to statues and images, since the seventh general council commands them to be adored.'[677] When the Sorbonne, in order to defend the prerogatives of the saints, cited the miraculous powers of the king, they employed an argument to which it was dangerous to reply; and, accordingly, we find nothing on this point in the answers of the opponents of the faculty. The discussion, getting off this shoal, turned to the act which is the essence of the Romish doctrine, and priests were once more lashed by the royal hand, which was even more skilful at this work than in curing the evil. MINISTERS. 'There ought to be in the Church a living communion of the members of Christ.[678] But, alas! what do we find there? A crowd of ignorant and filthy priests, the plague of society, a burden to the earth, a slothful race who can do nothing but say mass, and who, while saying it, do not even utter those five intelligible words, preferable, as St. Paul thinks, to ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.... We must get rid of these mercenaries, these mass-mongers, who have brought that holy ceremony into contempt, and we must supply their place with holy, learned, and experienced men.[679] Then perhaps the Lord's Supper will recover the esteem it has lost. Then, instead of an unmeaning babble, we shall have psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs. Then we shall sing to the Saviour, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord, to the glory of God the Father.... What false confidence, what wretched delusion is that which leads so many souls to believe that by attending mass every day, even when piety is neglected, they are performing an act useful to themselves and their friends, both for this life and for that which is to come!'[680] [Sidenote: THE LORD'S SUPPER.] The Sorbonne contended for the external mechanism of the sacramental act, to which their opponents desired to impart a spiritual and living character, and defended without shame or scruple the material advantages the clergy derived from it. SORBONNE. 'The mass is a real sacrifice, of great benefit to the living and the dead, and its excellence is founded on the passion of Jesus Christ. It is right, therefore, to bestow temporal gifts on those who celebrate it, be they good or bad; and the priests who receive them ought not to be called mass-mongers, even though they are paid.'[681] The king's ministers now came to the much disputed doctrine of the presence of Christ in the communion. MINISTERS.