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Christ taught by signs--signs of fact and signs of word. His most sublime teachings were cloaked in parables: signs in words. He worked cures by means of signs. Remember, for example, His cure of the man blind from birth. He could have simply willed that the man see. But instead, "he spat on the ground, and by means of the spittle made a lump of clay, and then spread the clay over his eyes, and said to him: `Go, and wash' ... So he went, and washed, and came back able to see" (John 9:6f.). It is not surprising that Christ should have decided to distribute salvation to man down through the ages by means of the signs which we call sacraments.
If the sacraments were merely of human origin, they could be nothing more than signs of our hope or our prayers. We could not assure ourselves that we were really washing a soul clean of sin in Baptism, for example, as only the divine power can do this. But because the sacraments have been instituted by Christ for the express purpose of doing what they symbolize, we know that they are more than mere signs. What they signify, they actually accomplish. Baptism does cleanse a soul from sin. Confirmation does strengthen the life of the spirit and bring it to spiritual adulthood. Communion is not merely a sign of Christ's body and blood, it IS these things.
The sacraments are seven--Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Penance or Confession, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and the Anointing of the Sick. All of them consist of some material fact--water, oil, bread, wine--and some external act: pouring, anointing, laying on of hands, uttering words, and all of them by these means symbolize the application of Christ's redemptive grace to men's souls and actually confer this grace.
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