Now as the philosophy of Christianity is purely and essentially sacramental, so must be the operation of God through the Church.  This “Body of Christ” on earth is indeed a fellowship, a veritable communion of the faithful, whether living or dead, but it is also a divine organism which lives, and in which each member lives, not by the preaching of the Word, not even by and through the fellowship in living and worship, but through the ordained channels of grace known as the Sacraments.  In accordance with the sacramental system, every material thing is proclaimed as possessing in varying degree sacramental potentiality, while seven great Sacraments were instituted to be, each after its own fashion, a special channel for the inflowing of the power of the Divine Actuality.  Each is a symbol, just as so many other created things are, or may become, symbols, but they are also realities, veritable media for the veritable communications of veritable divine grace.  Here is the best definition I know, that of Hugh of St. Victor.  “A sacrament is the corporeal or material element set out sensibly, representing from its similitude, signifying from its institution, and containing from its sanctification, some invisible and spiritual grace.”  This is the unvarying and invariable doctrine of historic Christianity, and the reason for the existence of the Church as a living and functioning organism.  The whole sacramental system is in a sense an extension, in time, of the Redemption, just as one particular Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist, is also in a sense an extension of the Incarnation, as it is also an extension, in time, of the Atonement, the Sacrifice of Calvary.

The Incarnation and the Redemption are not accomplished facts, completed nineteen centuries ago; they are processes that still continue, and their term is fixed only by the total regeneration and perfecting of matter, while the Seven Sacraments are the chiefest amongst an infinity of sacramental processes which are the agencies of this eternal transfiguration.

God the Son became Incarnate, not only to accomplish the redemption of men as yet unborn, for endless ages, through the Sacrifice of Calvary, but also to initiate and forever maintain a new method whereby this result was to be more perfectly attained; that is to say, the Church, working through the specific sacramental agencies He had ordained, or was from time to time to ordain, through His everlasting presence in the Church He had brought into being at Pentecost.  He did not come to establish in material form a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to provide for its ultimate coming.  He indeed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His Church, “in the world, not of it,” which is a very different matter indeed, as the centuries have proved.  His Kingdom is not of this world, nor will it be established here.  There has been no absolute advance in human development since the Incarnation.  Nations rise and fall, epochs