Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 256-258.

[St. Thomas] insists that in that original condition of men, sacraments would have been useless, even disorderly things. If there were sacraments then, it would have meant that the soul of a man was perfected by some corporal thing; whereas the very essence of that state was the complete domination of the inferior by the superior: the soul by God, the body by the soul, the world by man.

It was a different story after man had sinned. From the first moment of his sin, man lost that complete domination of spirit over matter; from then on he had need, desperate need of sacraments. In every age since then, there have been sacraments. Before the establishment of the Old Testament, there were such sacraments of the natural law as a kind of baptism through the prayers and faith of the parents for the child, sacrifice, tithes, certainly a kind of penance. Before the coming of Christ, the Old Law operated by anticipation of Christ’s redemption through such sacraments as circumcision, the Paschal Lamb, the loaves of proposition . . . the consecration of priests, and so on. With the coming of Christ, our own sacraments were instituted by Him.

These three stages of sacramental life mark a gradual advance to perfection; the matter of the sacraments becomes more determined, men are given surer guarantees of the paths to God, until, with the sacraments of the New Testament, complete determination and clarity put men’s minds serenely at ease. As we shall see later on in this chapter, the great difference between the sacraments of nature, of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, was that only the latter contain and effect the things that they signify; the others are limited to mere signification, exciting the heart of man by what they signify to the necessary acts of faith, hope, and love. . . .

There is a point worth making here by way of forestalling many an objection. The variety in the sacraments in these three stages of man’s history is not an indication of a puzzled divinity gradually discovering better and better means of saving men in the hard school of experience. It is not because of a wavering, indecisive mind that a father orders his children to wear one kind of clothes in summer time and changes his orders when winter comes. The sacraments are fitted to the times of men. Before the old Law and before the Incarnation, the sacraments were essentially prefigures of that central event in history which is the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ; after the story of redemption had been told, the sacraments no longer looked to the future but rather dealt with the present and effective salvation of men.

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Return to Lesson 5: Are there Sacraments in the Old Testament?