Let us now consider what a sacrament really is. I do not think we can get a better definition than in the Catechism of the Anglican Church: “An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”—something that is outer, tangible, that the senses can appreciate, a material object; then, with that, indissolubly connected, certain facts of the invisible world, so that the outer sign is able to act as a channel for the inner reality. But also, under the heading of “outward and visible sign,” you want something beyond the material object; you want a material gesture and material words. These three things are always present in a sacrament; some material object which is the immediate channel, certain sounds or words which make a change in the subtle material mingled with the denser material of that object, and a gesture called often the “sign of power,” as the words are called “words of power.” Now the gesture must be one through which magnetism can be thrown on to the object which is affected by the words. Let us see how those facts are bound together in the sacrament itself, and what is their connexion with the constitution of man and of the worlds in which he lives. The worlds with which the man is connected, for our present purpose, we can take as the physical, astral, mental—the three worlds in which turns the wheel of births and death. He is in those three—either in all of them together, as when in the physical world; in two of them, as when in the astral world; in one only when in the heavenly world. For remember that only in the physical world are the three bodies available that connect him with all of the three at the same time. In these three worlds, then, man is continually living. He is related to them by his physical body, astral body, and mental body, so that you have a living intelligence, a spiritual being, who, by means of the matter that he has appropriated in these three worlds, is able to come into contact with each of them. But now arises the question: Given a spiritual intelligence clothed in this triple veil of matter; given the fact that that spiritual intelligence, by the veil of matter, is in contact with three worlds—how shall he be able to come gradually into conscious connexion with each, so that the stream of spiritual life, coming down from the spiritual world, may at once purify the matter of his bodies, illuminate his consciousness in these three stages, and so begin the great work of spiritualising the whole man? That is the problem that religion has had to solve. So far as ordinary Protestantism is concerned, the body has been cast aside as a very temporary possession, only occupied by the spiritual intelligence during one brief life, and hardly worth troubling about. Hence the body has become very much neglected from the ordinary standpoint of Protestantism, and the reaction against that has taken the form of materialism, so that you find people