It has been remarked that perverse conceptions of the Eucharist were responsible for the equally corrupt teaching about orders. This is the case. Previously to the third century, the Eucharist remained what it had ever been, "the breaking of bread," the commemorative meal. Then there came a change, and men began to read into it a sacrificial meaning and to interpret it as a mystical repetition of the death of Christ. From Cyprian this novel theology apparently passed to Augustine and Ambrose in the fourth century, and thenceforth it became dominant, though by no means universally so, until the eighth and ninth centuries. The rise of Athanasianism in the fourth century, and the abuse of the doctrine of incarnation by that bishop, reacted naturally in the matter of the Eucharist. Christ, who was proclaimed to be the solitary incarnation, the Deity hidden behind a veil of flesh, naturally paved the way for the Eucharist as a sacrament wherein the Deity is hid behind the veil of bread. The one incarnation is, as it were, the complement of the other. Hence, a rigidly literal meaning was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope to become like a God.