as figures and symbols, as well as agencies, through the Sacraments, and after a fashion that struck home to the soul through the organs of sense.  Music, vestments, incense, flowers, poetry, dramatic action, were linked with the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, and all became not only ministers to the emotional faculties but direct appeals to the intellect through their function as poignant symbols.  So art received its soul, and was almost a living creature until matter and spirit were again divorced in the death that severed them during the Reformation.  Thereafter religion had entered upon a period of slow desiccation and sterilization wherever the symbol was cast away with the Sacraments and the faith and the philosophy that had made it live.  The bitter hostility to the art and the liturgies and the ceremonial of the Catholic faith is due far less to ignorance of the meaning and function of art and to an inherited jealousy of its quality and its power, than it is to the conscious and determined rejection of the essential philosophy of Christianity, which is sacramentalism.

The whole system was of an almost sublime perfection and simplicity, and the formal Sacraments were both its goal and its type.  If they had been of the same value and identical in nature they would have failed of perfect exposition, in the sense in which they were types and symbols.  They were not this, for while six of the explicit seven were substantially of one mode, there was one where the conditions that held elsewhere were transcended, and where, in addition to the two functions it was instituted to perform it gave, through its similitude, the clear revelation of the most significant and poignant fact in the vast mystery of life.  I mean, of course, the Holy Eucharist, commonly called the Mass.

If matter is per se forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand, Manichaean dualism on the other.  Even under the most spiritual interpretation we could offer—­that, shall we say, of those today who try to run with the hare of religion and hunt with the hounds of rationalistic materialism—­matter and spirit unite in man as body and soul, and in the Sacraments as the vehicle and the essence, but temporally and temporarily; doomed always to ultimate severance by death in the one case, by the completion of the sacramental process in the other.  If, on the other hand, the object of the universe and of time is the constant redemption and transformation of matter through its interpenetration by spirit in the power of God the Holy Ghost, then we escape the falsities of dualism, while in the miracle of the Mass we find the type and the showing forth of the constant process of life whereby every instant, matter itself is being changed and glorified and transferred from the plane of matter to the plane of spirit.