This is the unvarying and invariable doctrine of historic Christianity,
and the reason for the existence of the Church as a living and
functioning organism. The whole sacramental system is in a sense an
extension, in time, of the Redemption, just as one particular Sacrament,
the Holy Eucharist, is also in a sense an extension of the Incarnation,
as it is also an extension, in time, of the Atonement, the Sacrifice of
Calvary.

The Incarnation and the Redemption are not accomplished facts, completed
nineteen centuries ago; they are processes that still continue, and
their term is fixed only by the total regeneration and perfecting of
matter, while the Seven Sacraments are the chiefest amongst an infinity
of sacramental processes which are the agencies of this eternal
transfiguration.

God the Son became Incarnate, not only to accomplish the redemption of
men as yet unborn, for endless ages, through the Sacrifice of Calvary,
but also to initiate and forever maintain a new method whereby this
result was to be more perfectly attained; that is to say, the Church,
working through the specific sacramental agencies He had ordained, or
was from time to time to ordain, through His everlasting presence in the
Church He had brought into being at Pentecost. He did not come to
establish in material form a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to provide
for its ultimate coming. He indeed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His
Church, "in the world, not of it," which is a very different matter
indeed, as the centuries have proved. His Kingdom is not of this world,
nor will it be established here. There has been no _absolute_ advance in
human development since the Incarnation. Nations rise and fall, epochs
wax and wane, civilizations grow out of savagery, crest and sink back
into savagery and oblivion. Redemption is for the individual, not for