The Sacrament of the Eucharist is the sacrament to which all the others are ordered. The reception of all the others should be followed by it. It is the crown and consummation of the sacramental system. The sacrament of the Eucharist is not merely the consecrated species of bread and wine, which really and substantially contain the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ and which we receive in Holy Communion: it is also the words of transubstantiation uttered by the priest, which are the vehicle of Christ's substantiative action and make physically present to its his priestly act of self-oblation. The sacrament of the Eucharist in so far as it does this thing, makes present in a sacrament, but really, the priestly action of Christ, is called the Mass. The Mass is thus the supreme sacrament in its active part, as Holy Communion is the supreme sacrament in its passive Part.

Grant us, we beseech thee, so to venerate the sacred mysteries of thy body and blood, that we may ever taste within us the fruit of thy Redemption.

Fructus Redemptionis—the fruit of redemption is grace which Christ merited for us on the Cross—hence the metaphor. We already received grace in Baptism and the other sacraments. But the Eucharist is the Sacrament par excellence of grace. It contains the Author of grace in Person—not so the other sacraments which contain but a participation of the power of Christ. The Eucharist is the very store-house of grace, the very Orchard of the fruit of Redemption, the very fountain-head of the divine life, the very wine-press of the blood.

When God gives his graces to a soul, these graces are never restricted exclusively to the individual. They are bestowed also on the whole Body of Christ. No one can hope to receive graces selfishly, nor can he ascend the Scale of Perfection alone. He may look only towards God and seek him alone, as the three kings journeying to Bethlehem following the beam of the star. But when they have reached their goal and have held the Lord of the whole world in their embrace, they may not stay there alone with him. They are sent back to their country by another way. They return transformed, carrying back what they have received to their own kith and kin. When the soul has reached the heights of perfection, she may not rest there; in one way or another she is sent back to her own folk but to take up a new position, as mediator of the grace she has received.

In his Summa Theologica (II-II, 81, 7) St Thomas Aquinas lays clown a principle which is fundamental for both the theory and the practice of divine worship: ‘We show reverence and honour to God not for his own sake—for he is himself full of glory, and to that glory nothing can be added by any creature: but for our own sake, in as much as by the very fact that we worship and honour God, our minds are put into subjection to him. And in this consists their own fulfilment, for everything attains its fulfilment by being subject to that which is above it: thus the body attains its fulfilment by being made alive by the soul, and the atmosphere by being lit up by the sun …’

We claim to take for granted in the purposes of this essay the central facts of Christ, his reality in history, his verifiable effect, and the chief truths of his life, as they were preserved at least till a generation ago among the divided sects in the break-up of Christendom, and as they are now, and for ever will be preserved, only by the Catholic Church. Thus the divinity of Christ is here assumed, and the doctrine of divine grace and merit which lie poured out upon mankind by his death; his identity with his mystical Body, the Church whose life is but an extension through time and space of his own Incarnate Being; and chiefly here the thesis of his vivifying and redemptive work in the minds and wills of the men who decisively accept his Church.

All over the world today Holy Church is celebrating the coming down of the Holy Ghost whom God sent visibly and with such glory to the apostles and chosen disciples. Of course it was necessary that those men, whose mission it was to be an example to the world and who were to lay down the way of perfection to all who should come after them, should themselves be enlightened and filled with the fervour of divine love, above all their contemporaries. It was only just that they should be consoled with a fuller grace of the Holy Spirit who had been deprived of all joy and altogether abandoned, left desolate within and without.