The sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper fulfil these conditions.  Both are symbols of the mystical union between the Christian and his ascended Lord.  Baptism symbolises that union in its inception, the Eucharist in its organic life.  Baptism is received but once, because the death unto sin and the new birth unto righteousness is a definite entrance into the spiritual life, rather than a gradual process.  The fact that in Christian countries Baptism in most cases precedes conversion does not alter the character of the sacrament; indeed, infant Baptism is by far the most appropriate symbol of our adoption into the Divine Sonship, to which we only consent after the event.  It is only because we are already sons that we can say, “I will arise, and go unto my Father.”  The Holy Communion is the symbol of the maintenance of the mystical union, and of the “strengthening and refreshing of our souls,” which we derive from the indwelling presence of our Lord.  The Church claims an absolute prerogative for its duly ordained ministers in the case of this sacrament, because the common meal is the symbol of the organic unity of Christ and the Church as “unus Christus,” a doctrine which the schismatic, as such, denies.[327] The communicant who believes only in an individual relation between Christ and separate persons, or in an “invisible Church,” does not understand the meaning of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and can hardly be said to participate in it.

There are two views of this sacrament which the “plain man” has always found much easier to understand than the symbolic view which is that of our Church.  One is that it is a miracle or magical performance, the other is that it is a mere commemoration.  Both are absolutely destructive of the idea of a sacrament.  The latter view, that of some Protestant sects, was quite foreign to the early Church, so far as our evidence goes; the former, it is only just to say, is found in many of the Fathers, not in the grossly materialistic form which it afterwards assumed, but in such phrases as “the medicine of immortality” applied to the consecrated elements, where we are meant to understand that the elements have a mysterious power of preserving the receiver from the natural consequences of death.[328] But when we find that the same writers who use compromising phrases about the change that comes over the elements,[329] also use the language of symbolism, and remember, too, that a “miracle” was a very different thing to those who knew of no inflexible laws in the natural world from what it is to us, we shall not be ready to agree with those who have accused the third and fourth century Fathers of degrading the Lord’s Supper into a magical ceremony.