It is the same with the mystery of the sacrament. Let anyone who believes the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist to have grown up very gradually as a sort of legend or myth, an accretion overlaying some originally straightforward and in no way mysterious ceremony, read the words in which the earliest writers who refer to the matter at all speak of it. Let him not only read the way in which they speak of it, but the way in which they acted. When that young boy in the streets of Pagan Rome allowed himself to be killed rather than show to the profane What he carried veiled in his hands, it is evident that he did not think it common bread. When we find in all the very earliest evidence of Liturgy insistence upon and repetition of the mystery, it gives us to think. I say again, for the twentieth time, as I have said at so many other points in this debate, all this is not a proof of the truth of the doctrine, but it is a proof that the historical process with regard to the doctrine is not that of corruption and essential change which our opponents have presumed it to be. It is a proof that, true or false, the mystery of the sacrament now held was originally held, and that the attack upon this doctrine, as upon any other, came as a novelty. I have said that even this phenomenon, unparalleled as it is in the tale of human thought, was capable of explanation by an opponent. But I think if we examine that explanation we shall find it to fail. The explanation is as follows: You are dealing with a body of fervid believers. As time proceeds the excesses, the delusions, the vagaries, proceeding from their very enthusiasm, permeate their body insensibly, and it is only when the process has gone a considerable length that, with a shock, some strong and lucid brain confronts the deluded with reality. Hence (it is said) the novelty of each heresy and the startling effect produced by the first statement of each heretical proposition. This is certainly true of abuses, as for instance the abuse of image worship, when it came to such a pitch that men accepted without question a mass of images, supposed to have appeared in some miraculous fashion without human workmanship. And if it be true of abuses which are recognised to be abuses by all, why should it not be true of fundamental doctrines, considering the blind fervour of which I have spoken and the natural consequences of such fervour? My answer to that explanation is that the cases are not sufficiently numerous to establish a rule. It is true that you do get some few cases, very few, of abuses which proceed some way before they are abolished. But they do not go on long without being pulled up, nor are they so general and manifold as to militate against our judgment that, almost in proportion to its importance, the doctrine or mystery, when it is challenged, is challenged by a new force.