Our Lord Jesus Christ, “though He was about to offer Himself once on the altar of the Cross unto God the Father, by means of His death (Heb. 9:5), there to operate an eternal redemption (ib. 12); nevertheless, because His priesthood was not to be extinguished by His death, in the Last Supper on the night in which He was betrayed—that He might leave to His own beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice, such as the nature of man requires, whereby that bloody sacrifice, once to be accomplished on the Cross, might be represented, and the memory thereof remain even unto the end of the world, and its salutary virtue be applied to the remission of those sins which we daily commit—declaring Himself constituted a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech, He offered up to God the Father His own body and blood, under the appearances of bread and wine; and under the symbols of those same things He delivered (His own body and blood) to be received by His Apostles, whom He then constituted priests of the New Testament; and by those words, ‘Do this in commemoration of Me,’ He commanded them and their successors in the priesthood to offer.… If any one saith that in the Mass a true and proper sacrifice is not offered to God … let him be anathema” (Council of Trent, sess. xxii. ch. 1, can. 1). See St. Thomas, 3, q. 85, with the commentaries thereon by Vasquez, Suarez, and the Salmanticenses; Bellarmine, De Eucharistia, lib. v.; De Lugo, De Eucharistia; Thomassin, De Incarnatione, lib. x.; Franzelin, De Eucharistiæ Sacrificio; De Augustinis, De Re Sacramentaria, lib. ii. p. 3; Hedley, p. 147 sqq.