rpate convictions the most steadfast.

A Dominican friar, Rouard de Card, had proved in a brochure entitled
"On the Adulteration of Sacramental Substances" that most masses were
not valid, because the elements used for worship had been adulterated
by the manufacturers.

For years, the holy oils had been adulterated with chicken fat; wax,
with burned bones; incense, with cheap resin and benzoin. But the
thing that was worse was that the substances, indispensable to the
holy sacrifice, the two substances without which no oblation is
possible, had also been debased: the wine, by numerous dilutions and
by illicit introductions of Pernambuco wood, danewort berries, alcohol
and alum; the bread of the Eucharist that must be kneaded with the
fine flour of wheat, by kidney beans, potash and pipe clay.

But they had gone even farther. They had dared suppress the wheat and
shameless dealers were making almost all the Host with the fecula of
potatoes.

Now, God refused to descend into the fecula. It was an undeniable fact
and a certain one. In the second volume of his treatise on moral
theology, Cardinal Gousset had dwelt at length on this question of the
fraud practiced from the divine point of view. And, according to the
incontestable authority of this master, one could not consecrate bread
made of flour of oats, buckwheat or barley, and if the matter of using
rye be less doubtful, no argument was possible in regard to the fecula
which, according to the ecclesiastic expression, was in no way fit for
sacramental purposes.

By means of the rapid manipulation of the fecula and the beautiful
appearance presented by the unleavened breads created with this
element, the shameless imposture had been so propagated that now the
mystery of the transubstantiation hardly existed any longer and the
priests and faithful were holding communion, without being aware of
it, with neutral elements.

Ah! far off was the time when Radegonda, Queen of France, had with her
own hands prepared the bread destined for the alters, or the time
when, after the customs of Cluny, three priests or deacons, fasting
and garbed in alb and amice, washed their faces and hands and then
picked out the wheat, grain by grain, grinding it under millstone,
kneading the paste in a cold and pure water and themselves baking it
under a clear fire, while chanting psalms.

"All this matter of eternal dupery," Des Esseintes reflected, "is not
conducive to the steadying of