Of these seven sacraments the one round which the whole doctrine and discipline of the Church increasingly centred was, of course, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. The view generally held in the Church was that of St. Augustine, which finds a place in the homilies of Aelfric and in the controversial work of Ratramnus of Corbie (died 868). According to this view, Christ is present in the consecrated elements of the sacrament really but spiritually. "The body of Christ," says Ratramnus, "which died and rose again and has become immortal, does not now die: it is eternal and cannot suffer." But the tendency of the Middle Ages was to materialise all conceptions however spiritual; and Ratramnus had written to controvert Paschasius Radbertus, Abbot of New Corbie, who had applied these materialistic views to the Eucharist. "Although," he asserts, "the form of bread and wine may remain, yet after consecration it is nothing else but the flesh and blood of Christ, none other than the flesh which was born of Mary and suffered on the cross and rose from the sepulchre." During the two succeeding centuries this theory of the corporeal presence gained so much vogue in the Church that when Berengar of Tours taught in the cathedral school of his native city the doctrine of Ratramnus, he was condemned unheard at a Synod at Rome in 1050. But he gained the favour of Hildebrand, who was then at Tours in 1054 as papal legate, and was content with the admission "panem atque vinum altaris post consecrationem esse corpus et sanguis Christi"; and relying on his protection Berengar went to Rome (1059). Here, however, his opponents forced him to sign a confession in conformity with the materialistic view. His repudiation of this as soon as he got away from Rome began a long controversy, the champion on the materialistic side being Lanfranc, then a monk of Bee in Normandy, to whom Berengar had originally addressed himself. Lanfranc held the position that the consecrated elements are "ineffably, incomprehensibly, wonderfully by the operation of power from on high, turned into the essence of the Lord's Body." In 1075 the matter was discussed at the Synod of Poictiers, and Berengar was in danger of his life. Again Pope Gregory, as he had now become, tried to stand his friend, and at a Synod at Rome in 1078 to get from Berengar a confession of faith in general terms. But the violence of Berengar's enemies made compromise or ambiguity impossible. Again Berengar repudiated the forced confession; and Gregory only obtained peace for him until his death in 1088, by threatening with anathema any who molested him. Berengar's objections to the doctrine of Paschasius were shared by all the mystics, who held a more spiritual belief. Thus, St. Bernard distinguishes between the visible sign and the invisible grace which God attaches to the sign; and Rupert of Deutz declares that for him who has no faith there is