“I beg the company’s pardon,” said he, “I have no halo, and I gained eternal blessedness without any eminent distinction.  But after what the great St. Augustine has just told you I believe it right to impart a cruel experience, which I had, relative to the conditions necessary for the validity of a sacrament.  The bishop of Hippo is indeed right in what he said.  A sacrament depends on the form; its virtue is in its form; its vice is in its form.  Listen, confessors and pontiffs, to my woeful story.  I was a priest in Rome under the rule of the Emperor Gordianus.  Without desiring to recommend myself to you for any special merit, I may say that I exercised my priesthood with piety and zeal.  For forty years I served the church of St. Modestus-beyond-the-Walls.  My habits were regular.  Every Saturday I went to a tavern-keeper called Barjas, who dwelt with his wine-jars under the Porta Capena, and from him I bought the wine that I consecrated daily throughout the week.  During that long space of time I never failed for a single morning to consecrate the holy sacrifice of the mass.  However, I had no joy, and it was with a heart oppressed by sorrow that, on the steps of the altar I used to ask, ’Why art thou so heavy, O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within me?’ The faithful whom I invited to the holy table gave me cause for affliction, for having, so to speak, the Host that I administered still upon their tongues, they fell again into sin just as if the sacrament had been without power or efficacy.  At last I reached the end of my earthly trials, and failing asleep in the Lord, I awoke in this abode of the elect.  I learned then from the mouth of the angel who brought me here, that Barjas, the tavern-keeper of the Porta Capena, had sold for wine a decoction of roots and barks in which there was not a single drop of the juice of the grape.  I had been unable to transmute this vile brew into blood, for it was not wine, and wine alone is changed into the blood of Jesus Christ.  Therefore all my consecrations were invalid, and unknown to us, my faithful and myself had for forty years been deprived of the sacrament and were in fact in a state of excommunication.  This revelation threw me into a stupor which overwhelms me even to-day in this abode of bliss.  I go all through Paradise without ever meeting a single one of those Christians whom formerly I admitted to the holy table in the basilica of the blessed Modestus.  Deprived of the bread of angels, they easily gave way to the most abominable vices, and they have all gone to hell.  It gives me some satisfaction to think that Barjas, the tavern-keeper, is damned.  There is in these things a logic worthy of the author of all logic.  Nevertheless my unhappy example proves that it is sometimes inconvenient that form should prevail over essence in the sacraments, and I humbly ask, Could not, eternal wisdom remedy this?”

“No,” answered the Lord.  “The remedy would be worse than the disease.  It would be the ruin of the priesthood if essence prevailed over form in the laws of salvation.”