It is, therefore, easy to understand the superstition of the ages of faith which believed that, when the consecrated wafer was offered under appropriate adjurations, the guilty could not receive it; or that, if it were taken, immediate convulsions and speedy death, or some other miraculous manifestation would ensue, thus constituting its administration for such purposes a regular and recognized form of ordeal. This is well illustrated by a form of exorcism preserved by Mansi: “We humbly pray thy Infinite Majesty that this priest, if guilty of the accusation, shall not be able to receive this venerated body of thy Son, crucified for the salvation of all, and that what should be the remedy of all evil shall prove to him hurtful, full of grief and suffering, bearing with it all sorrow and bitterness.”[1098] What might be expected under such circumstances is elucidated by a case which occurred in the early part of the eleventh century, as reported by the contemporary Rodolphus Glaber, in which a monk, condemned to undergo the trial, boldly received the sacrament, when the Host, indignant at its lodgment in the body of so perjured a criminal, immediately slipped out at the navel, white and pure as before, to the immense consternation of the accused, who forthwith confessed his crime.[1099] The antiquity of this mode of trial is shown in its employment by Cautinus, Bishop of Auvergne, towards the close of the sixth century. A certain Count Eulalius was popularly accused of parricide, whereupon he was suspended from communion. On his complaining of thus being punished without a trial, the bishop administered the sacrament under the customary adjuration, and Eulalius, taking it without harm, was relieved from the imputation.[1100] It was usually, however, a sacerdotal form of purgation, as is shown by the Anglo-Saxon laws,[1101] and by the canons of the council of Worms in 868, embodied in the _Decretum_ of Gratian.[1102] Thus, in 941, Frederic, Archbishop of Mainz, publicly submitted to an ordeal of this kind, to clear himself of the suspicion of having taken part in an unsuccessful rebellion of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, against his brother, Otho the Great.[1103] After the death of Henry, slander assailed the fame of his widow, Juthita, on account of an alleged intimacy between her and Abraham, Bishop of Freisingen. When she, too, died, the bishop performed her funeral rites, and, pausing in the mass, he addressed the congregation: “If she was guilty of that whereof she was accused, may the Omnipotent Father cause the body and blood of the Son to be my condemnation to just perdition, and perpetual salvation to her soul!”—after which he took the sacrament unharmed, and the people acknowledged the falsity of their belief.[1104] In 1050, Subico, Bishop of Speyer, sought to clear himself of a similar accusation at the council of Mainz, in the same manner, when according to one version he