 When saying the prayers that accompany the placing on the altar of the paten with the bread and the chalice with the wine, the priest is told to hold them only "slightly raised".While Martin Luther himself sometimes defended the practice of the elevation and sometimes treated it as an adiaphoron, Lutheran practice is by no means uniform.After the Protestant Reformation, Lutherans largely dispensed with the elevation, putting the Eucharist in the category of beneficium rather than sacrificium, that is, as a gift from God to us rather than from us to God.