Excommunication, the extreme punishment inflicted upon great sinners, was pronounced by the faint light of a wax taper, which the priest afterwards extinguished and trampled under foot. In some countries the populace used to carry a bier to the door of the excommunicated person; stones were hurled against his dwelling, and all kinds of foul abuse were heaped upon him. Of a still more solemn nature was the excommunication pronounced by the pope himself on Holy Thursday, in virtue of the bull termed _In Cœna Domini_, against all who appealed to the general council against the decrees and the ordinances of the pontiffs; against the princes who exacted unfair tribute from ecclesiastics; and against heretics, pirates, &c. A deacon read the bull from the balcony (_loggia_, an open tribunal) of St. Peter’s in the presence of the pope, who, as a symbol of anathema, dashed a lighted torch of yellow wax into the open court of the Vatican, which the assistants hastened to extinguish by trampling upon it. It was also on Holy Thursday that the _reconciliation_ of the penitents took place, that is to say, their general absolution, to enable them to take part in the mysteries of Easter. [Illustration: Fig. 193.--Legend of the passage of the viaticum across a wooden bridge, at Utrecht, in 1277. Some dancers having allowed the host to pass without discontinuing their dances, the bridge suddenly gave way and two hundred persons were drowned in the river.--Fac-simile of an Engraving upon Wood by P. Wolgemuth, in the “Liber Chronicarum Mundi:” Nuremberg, 1493, in folio.] 5. _Extreme unction_ has always been given to sick people in danger of death, according to the recommendation of the Apostle St. James. The material of which this sacrament is composed is the _oil of the infirm_, but we can see from old rituals that the place and number of the unctions have varied at different times in the administration of this sacrament (Fig. 194). 6. _Orders_. Besides the higher orders, which were conferred as they are in our own day, the Church included from the earliest times the four minor orders, which were bestowed, as now, upon the tonsured clerks; that is to say, the orders of _porter_, _reader_, _exorcist_, and _acolyte_. [Illustration: Fig. 194.--Three Sacraments: _Marriage_, at full manhood; _Orders_, at old age; and _Extreme Unction_, at death. Right portion of the triptych painted on panel by Roger Van der Weyden.--Antwerp Museum. Fifteenth Century.]