We have already shown how the seven sacraments of the Church embrace the whole of human life, and how they sanctify all its heights and depths. The soul at peace with God is sanctified in Confirmation and Holy Eucharist; the soul burdened with sin in Baptism and Penance; the afflicted soul, in the awful hour of death, in the Last Anointing. The community life also is sanctified by the sacramental blessing: on its social side by the sacrament of Matrimony, on its religious side by the sacrament of Holy Orders. It is before all else the realism of its sacramental thought which gives the sacramental worship of the Church its religious and moral value. The Church does not attenuate the sacrament into an empty symbol, or into a sign of grace which obtains all its efficacy from subjective faith. On the contrary it is a real expression of our Lord’s gracious will, a sign of Christ (signum Christi), and as such it already ensures the presence of His grace through itself, through its actual performance. That is a fundamental point of Catholic sacramental doctrine. “A sacrament is not fulfilled by the fact that one believes in it, but by the fact that it is performed.” (Sacramenta non implentur dum creduntur, sed dum fiunt.) Thus through the sacraments divine grace wins tangible reality and becomes a visible and present value. Therefore the Catholic, in receiving the sacrament, is as sure of the presence of divine love as the child is of the love of its mother. In the Sacrifice of the Mass we are not merely reminded of the Sacrifice of the Cross in a symbolical form. On the contrary the Sacrifice of Calvary, as a great supra-temporal reality, enters into the immediate present. Space and time are abolished. The same Jesus is here present who died on the Cross. The whole congregation unites itself with His holy sacrificial will, and through Jesus present before it consecrates itself to the heavenly Father as a living oblation. So Holy Mass is a tremendously real experience, the experience of the reality of Golgotha. And a stream of sorrow and repentance, of love and devotion, of heroism and the spirit of sacrifice flows out from the altar and passes through the praying congregation. These are not mere words. From this representation of the Sacrifice of the Cross thousands of Catholics daily draw strength and joy, so that they may face the sacrifices, small or great, of their everyday life. And it was in the shadow of the altar that the Catholic saints—those examples of heroic devotion to Christ and to His brethren—grew to maturity. The Protestant theologian, Niebergall, draws attention to this high value of Holy Mass. “We cannot,” he writes, “set too high a value on the Roman Mass as a spiritual power in the religious life.”[2] And Heiler laments in vigorous terms that the Reformation was not able, while renewing the common worship of God, “to enkindle that intimate and fervent life of prayer which is excited by the Catholic service of Mass.” “I have observed,” he says, “the life of prayer in both communions, long and carefully and with complete impartiality, and I have again and again received the impression that—apart from certain limited sects and minor bodies—there is more and more inward prayer in Catholic than in Protestant worship. When I reflect upon my experience, I am continually reminded of Wellhausen’s characteristic saying that Protestant worship is at bottom Catholic worship … with the heart taken out of it.”[3] The heart that Wellhausen and Heiler intend is the Catholic’s experience of reality in the great Mystery, his assurance that in it the grace of Christ really and truly enters our world of space and time and touches his soul.