It is one of the profoundest truths of Catholic theology that besides the purely personal, the religious and moral relation of the Christian to Christ, as manifested in faith and sanctifying love, there is also an extra-personal and wholly factual relation, which consecrates the Christian abidingly to Christ independently of his subjective life in grace, which gives him Christ irrevocably for his own, which incorporates him once and for all into Christ’s high priesthood, and which thereby establishes that indissoluble religious basis upon which the loving intercourse and mutual commerce of Christ and His members is founded. Even the most delicate relation that exists within the Body of Christ, the relation that is of the individual human soul to Christ, is determined by a system of sacred ordinances, of fixed and indissoluble form and of unalterable interconnexion. As in the natural world all free movement of powers is based upon the determinate statics of natural being and its laws, and as all the activity of our subjective powers presupposes the objective world and its stable ordinances, so also in the supernatural world the life of grace with all its striving is closely knit to a permanent basis, to the fixed and inward relations and laws of the Body of Christ. Here once more we recognize the trend of Catholicism towards reality, its complete and fundamental preference for the objective fact and the fixed form. The ultimate basis of this is the fundamental dogma that it is God, and not man, who is the author of natural and supernatural reality, that the new order of being is determined not from below, but from above, and that in the world of religion we have to deal with supernatural facts, which man must simply accept and which do not depend upon him. Man can effectively realize the grace which is imparted to him only on the basis of this sacramental order and within it. Now there are three sacraments which give the Christian his fixed and definite place within the Body of Christ, his fundamental relation to the whole Body, and thereby to the high-priesthood of Christ which supports and pervades the whole. They are the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders. Each of these three sacraments not merely confers grace, but also imparts to the soul of the Christian an abiding religious character, whereby the soul is incorporated in the high-priesthood of Christ in a greater or less degree according to the substance and nature of the sacrament, and remains permanently incorporated therein (character indelebilis), even though—as in the case of the damned—this impersonal and objective relation to Christ results in no abiding subjective and personal relation of grace and blessedness. The highest form of this sacramental incorporation into the high-priesthood of Christ is contained in the sacrament of Holy Orders. This sacrament confers the ineffaceable aptitude and full faculty of conveying the redeeming grace of Christ to the faithful in its widest extent, by word as well as by sacrament. By the priestly character the Christian is consecrated a “minister of Christ” in the full sense of the words, and in so far as the Church is Christ living on in the world, he is consecrated the “minister of the Church.” As the external unity of the members of Christ rests upon pope and bishop, so their inner sacramental unity, their community of grace, rests upon the priest.