This raising of man to the most intimate communion of life and love with God cannot be effected by man himself. It can be merited by no human effort. It is the work of God alone. God gives Himself to those to whom He wills to give Himself, with the most gratuitous mercy and love. So it is the Church’s doctrine that every movement of man towards God, every holy thought, every good resolution and every pure affection is initiated and supported by God’s grace—the theologians speak here of “actual” grace; and further, that the definitive establishment of the new life in the soul, the state of direct communion of life and love with God—which the theologians call “sanctifying” grace—is effected in the soul by God alone without human merit. We are made sons of God solely by the eternal love of God, by a mysterious operation of His power effected supernaturally.

The child of God, the saint, is therefore according to the Church’s view essentially a creation of grace, a child of the eternal Love. And since it is the function of Christ and of Christianity to bring the love and grace of God to sense-bound man under the veil of visible and evident signs, therefore the first and chief duty of the Church’s educative activity is the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ. The seven sacraments are God’s appointed means, whereby man shall ordinarily (ordinario modo) experience the action of the grace of Christ, the elevation of his being into the stream of God’s life and love. This does not mean that extraordinary ways and activities of grace are excluded, as was shown in the last Chapter.