The Catholic Church also erred greatly in teaching infant baptism. As their faculties were undeveloped, infants could not receive the Holy Spirit. The Cathari--at least to the middle of the thirteenth century--did not confer the _consolamentum_ upon newly born infants. According to them, the Church could only abandon these little ones to their unhappy destiny. If they died, they were either forever lost, or, as others taught, condemned to undergo successive incarnations, until they received the _consolamentum_, which classed them with "the Perfected." It was preposterous to imagine that Christ wished to change bread and wine into His Body in the Eucharist. The Cathari considered transubstantiation as the worst of abominations, since matter, in every form, was the work of the Evil Spirit. They interpreted the Gospel texts in a figurative sense: at "This is My Body," they said, simply means: "This represents My Body," thus anticipating the teaching of Carlstadt and Zwingli. They all agreed in denouncing Catholics for daring to claim that they really partook of the Body of Christ, as if Christ could enter a man's stomach, to say nothing worse; or as if Christ would expose Himself to be devoured by rats and mice. The Cathari, defying the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, rejected the sacrifice of the Mass. God, according to them, repudiated all sacrifices. Did He not teach us through His prophet Osee: "I desire mercy and not sacrifice."[1] [1] Osee vi. 6. The Lord's Supper which the Apostles ate so often was something altogether different from the Roman Mass. They knew nothing of sacerdotal vestments, stone altars with shining candelabra, incense, hymns, and chantings. They did not worship in an immense building called a church--a word which should be applied exclusively to the assembly of the saints. The Cathari, in their hatred of Catholic piety, railed in the most abusive language against the veneration of images, and especially of the cross. The images and statues of the saints were to them nothing but idols, which ought to be destroyed. The cross on which Jesus died should be hated rather than reverenced. Some of them, moreover, denied that Jesus had been really crucified; they held that a demon died, or feigned to die in His stead. Even those who believed in the reality of the Saviour's crucifixion made this very belief a reason for condemning the veneration of the cross. What man is there, they said, who could see a loved one, for example a father, die upon a cross, and not feel ever after a deep hatred of this instrument of torture? The cross, therefore, should not be reverenced, but despised, insulted and spat upon. One of them even said: "I would gladly hew the cross to pieces with an axe, and throw it into the fire to make the pot boil." Not only were the Cathari hostile to the Church and her divine worship, but they were also in open revolt against the State, and its rights.