In fact, the criticism which thinks it right to speak of the sacraments as having a “magical character” divorces them from their proper and sole source, namely from Christ, the true and only giver of grace, and gives them an independent status. So that they become, not signs of grace, but independent sources of it, instruments endued with their own power, sacred charms. In reality, however, no sacrament stands thus in its own right, or can so stand for a single moment. It has its whole meaning and its whole power in and through Christ alone. Just as Christ, during His earthly life, did not disdain to connect his miracles of bodily healing with homely symbols (cf. Mark vii, 32; John ix, 6), so has He raised the sacraments in a new and higher sense to the position of specific instruments of His redeeming grace (causae instrumentales) in order to sanctify souls through them, through their visible and tangible reality. Nay, more, according to that Scotist view which is now advocated by many theologians, the sacrament itself possesses no strictly “physical” causality in any way immanent in its sign. On the contrary, the sacramental grace flows directly from Jesus into the soul of the believer. The sacrament is no more than an appointed sign of Christ, an objectivisation of the gracious will of Jesus, a visible and perceptible “I will, be thou made clean!”