Certainly it is true that even according to this view there remains something objective and impersonal in the notion of a sacrament. It remains true that the grace of Christ is not causally connected with the ethico-religious activity of the believer or the priest, but with the objective accomplishment of the sign. But why is that so? The very impersonal and objective character of the sacrament expresses that profoundest claim of the Church, her most intimate union with Christ, her working purely out of the fullness of Christ, her sanctifying through the might of Christ alone. Precisely because it is not the human element in her which sanctifies men, but the power of Christ alone, therefore the blessing of Christ is not tied to purely natural, human activity, not to the faith and repentance of the sinner, not even to the prayers and sacrifices of saintly, magnanimous souls and specially gifted personalities, whether saintly prophets, bishops, or priests, but to a wholly impersonal thing, a dead sign, which has no other merit save that of being a sign of Christ, a valid expression of His gracious will. The purpose, therefore, of the formula “ex opere operato,” is to secure the deepest essence of Christianity, that thing for which St. Paul suffered and fought, the absolute unmeritedness of grace, and the thought that Christ is “all in all.” And since this idea of the impersonality of the sacraments springs directly from the heart of Christianity, it is consequently as old as Christianity itself, and as old as the Body of Christ, the Church. Students of biblical theology emphasize the fact that the sacramental doctrine of St. John and St. Paul has already got this impersonal conception, that it recognizes an efficacy “ex opere operato,” at least in effect, and is therefore completely Catholic in its character. And how could it be otherwise? When Christ is placed in the center, when we are told emphatically that of His fullness we have all received, then all human intermediaries must stand aside. There can be no human mediators, as Augustine remarked against the Donatists. Christ is the sole worker. When individual Christians in the Corinthian church attached themselves to various gifted personalities and formed a Peter party and a Paul party and an Apollo party, as though they would found their salvation upon these personalities, then St. Paul with the burning zeal of his witness for Christ cried out against this humanization of the Gospel. “What is Apollo and what is Paul? … His servants, through whom ye were made believers…. other foundation can no man lay but that which has been laid, which is Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. iii, 4-5, 11). The sacramental idea is nothing but the realization and maintenance of this basis of Christianity. In her age-long conflicts with Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, and again later on with Waldenses, Albigenses and Hussites, the Church reiterated the sentence of St. Augustine: “The sacraments sanctify through themselves, and not through men” (sacramenta per se sancta, non per homines). For man does not baptize, and man does not absolve, but Christ alone. When the Christian sacrament by this its impersonal character eliminates all human intermediaries, it secures an immediate and free exchange of life between the Head and the members. And so the freedom of the personal religious life is nowhere so perfectly safeguarded as in Catholic piety. And the forms of piety, in which the Catholic’s sacramental experience of Christ achieves self-expression, are as manifold as the innumerable leaves of the trees.