There were no serious controversies about the Lord’s Supper until the early part of the ninth century, when one Paschasius Radbert, a monk of “great acuteness of mind,” wrote a book in which he promulgated the doctrine of transubstantiation. In this book he took the position that the wine in the Lord’s Supper is “the very blood that ran out of the Saviour’s side upon the cross, and for that reason water is mingled with the eucharistical wine;” and the bread “is the very flesh of our Saviour which was born of the Virgin.” At first the doctrine was repugnant to the cultivated, but it was broached in a rude age, and the monks favored it; the materialistic character of European thought assisted it, and gradually it had a host of friends and was prepared to frown down all opposition. The controversy, however, continued with fury till A. D. 1215, when Pope Innocent III assembled a council in Rome, in the Lateran Church, consisting of 412 bishops, in whose hearing he read seventy canons which he had drawn up; among these was the famous canon which gave transubstantiation a legal place in the Catholic Church. The important part of the canon is: There is one universal church of the faithful, out of which no one at all is saved; and in which Jesus Christ himself is at once priest and sacrifice; whose body and blood, in the sacrament of the altar, are truly constrained under the species of bread and wine, which, through the divine power, are transubstantiated, the bread into the body, and the wine into the blood; that for the fulfillment of the mystery of unity, we may receive of that which he received of ours. Another step was taken about 350 years later, when the Council of Trent declared the host an atoning sacrifice: And, since in the divine sacrifice which is performed in the mass, the same Christ is contained and offered in an unbloody manner, who, on the altar of the cross, offered himself, with blood, once for all; the holy synod teaches that that sacrifice is, and becomes of itself, truly propitiatory, so that if, with a true heart and a right faith, with fear and reverence, we approach to God, contrite and penitent, we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. The Lord, forsooth, being appeased by the offering of this, and granting grace and the gift of repentance, remit crimes and sins, even great ones; for it is one and the same host, the same person now offering by the ministry of the priests, who when offered himself upon the cross, only in a different manner of offering; and by this unbloody sacrifice, the fruit of that bloody one are abundantly received; only far be it that any dishonor should be done to that by this. Wherefore according to the tradition of the apostles, offering is duly made, not only for the sins, pains, and satisfactions, and other necessities of the faithful who are alive, but also for the dead in Christ, who are not yet wholly cleansed.