Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/604

586 Cardinal Humbert at the synod held in 1059, was at length forced to yield to the demands of the multitude and its leaders; and in another synod at Rome (1079), finding that he was only endangering his own position and reputa tion, he turned unexpectedly upon Berengar and com manded him to confess that he had erred in not teaching a change as to substantial reality of the sacramental bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. &quot; Then,&quot; says Berengar, &quot; confounded by the sudden madness of the Pope, and because God in punishment for my sins did not give me a steadfast heart, I threw myself on the ground, and confessed with impious voice that I had erred, fearing the Pope would instantly pronounce against me the sentence of condemnation, and, as a necessary consequence, that the populace would hurry me to the worst of deaths.&quot; He was kindly dismissed by the Pope not long after, with a letter recommending him to the protection of the bishops of Tours and Angers, and another pronouncing anathema on all who should do him any injury or call him a heretic. He returned home overwhelmed with shame and bowed down with sorrow for having a second time been guilty of a great impiety. He immediately recalled his forced con fession, and besought all Christian men &quot; to pray for him, so that his tears might secure the pity of the Almighty.&quot; He now saw, however, that the spirit of the age was against him, and hopelessly given over to the belief of what he had combated as a delusion. He withdrew, therefore, into solitude, and passed the rest of his life in retirement and prayer on the island of St Come near Tours. He died there in 1088. In Tours his memory was held in great respect, and a yearly festival at his tomb long commemorated his saintly virtues. Berengar left behind him a considerable number of followers. All those who in the Middle Ages denied the substantial presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist were commonly designated Berengarians. These so-called Berengarians differed, of course, in many respects from one another, even in regard to the nature of the supper. Berengar s own views on the subject may be thus summed up : 1. That bread and wine should become flesh and blood and yet not lose the properties of bread and wine was, he held, contradictory to reason, and there fore irreconcilable with the truthfulness of God. A change which would leave behind the properties or predicates of bread and wine, yet take away their substances, the subjects of these predicates, seemed to him inherently incredible. In working out the proof of this position he showed very considerable dialectical skill, At the same time he em ployed so many arguments, based on what is called nominalism, that his theory of the Eucharist has been described by M. de Remusat as &quot; nominalism limited to a single question.&quot; 2. He admitted a change (conversio) of the bread and wine into the body of Christ, in the sense that to those who receive them they are transformed by grace into higher powers and influences into the true, the intellectual, or spiritual body of Christ so as to sustain and impart the life eternal. Christ does not descend from heaven to be portioned out by the hands of priests and received into the mouths of communicants, but the hearts of true believers ascend to Christ in heaven, receive into themselves his true and imperishable body, and partake thereof in_ a spiritual manner. The unbelieving receive the external sign or sacramentum ; but the believing receive in addition, truly although invisibly, the reality represented by the sign, the res sacramenti. Berengar draws his reasons for this view from Scripture. In confirmation of its correctness he adduces the testimonies of the earlier church teachers. 3. He rejected the notion that the sacra ment ^ of the altar was a constantly renewed sacrifice, and held it to be merely a commemoration of the one sacrifice of Christ. 4. He dwelt strongly on the importance of men looking away from the externals of the sacrament to the spirit of love and piety which they presuppose, and the divine power and grace, through the operation of which alone they can become channels of religious life. The transubstantiation doctrine seemed to him full of evil, from its tendency to lead men to overvalue what was sensuous and transitory in the sacrament, and to neglect what was spiritual and eternal. 5. He rejected with in dignation the miraculous stories told to confirm the doctrine of transubstantiation. He saw in these legends unworthy inventions originated to ave and influence ignorant and superstitious minds. On this account he was falsely accused of denying miracles altogether. 6. Reason and Scripture seemed to him the only grounds on which a true doctrine of the Lord s supper could be rested. He had a confidence in reason very rare in the llth century, but was no rationalist. He attached little importance to mere ecclesiastical tradition or authority, and none to the voice of majorities, even when sanctioned by the decree of a Pope. In this, as in other respects, he was a precursor of Protestantism.

1em  BERENICE, an ancient city on the western shore of the Red Sea, in 23 56 N. lat. and 35 34 E. long., near the head of the Sinus Tmmundus or Foul Bay. It was founded or enlarged by Ptolemy II., and grew into great importance as an entrepot for the trade between Asia and Africa. Its harbour was sheltered on the north-east by an island that had topaz deposits, and in the neighbourhood were emerald mines. The ruins of a temple in the Egyptian style, but with Greek ornaments, are among the most important discovered on the site.  BERENICE, the name of several Egyptian and Jewish princesses. The two most generally known are—

1., the daughter of Magus, king of Gyrene, and the wife of Ptolemy Euergetes, of Egypt. During her hus band s absence on an expedition to Syria, she dedicated her hair to Venus for his safe return, and placed it in the temple of the goddess at Zephyrium. The hair having by some unknown means disappeared, Conon, the mathematician, explained the phenomenon in courtly phrase, saying that it had been carried to the heavens and placed among the stars. The name Coma Berenices, applied to a constellation, commemorates this incident. Only a few lines remain of the poem in which Callimachus celebrated the transforma tion, but there is a fine translation of it by Catullus.

2., daughter of Agrippa I., king of Judaea, and born probably about 28 A.D. She was first married to her uncle, Herod, after whose death she lived for some years with her brother Agrippa, not without scandal. Her second husband was Polemo, king of Cilicia, but she soon deserted him, and returned again to Agrippa, with whom she was living when Paul appeared before him at Csesarea. During the devastation of Judsea by the Romans, she fas cinated Titus, whom she accompanied to Rome, and who would willingly have married her had it not been for the hatred cherished by the people against the Jewish race.  BEREZINA, a river of Russia, in the government of Minsk, forming a tributary of the Dnieper. It rises in the marshes of Boresoff, and has a course of more than 330 miles, for the most part through low-lying but well-