From the beginning Christianity has been a religion with ritual worship and it is so because man needs signs to express himself and to enter into communication with others, God, becoming incarnate, bound himself to signs, the normal method of his self-communication to the Church. The Church through the guidance of the Holy Spirit has kept faithful to the Lord, living from his life which she experiences in her worship. But the sacred signs of the Church have nothing in common with the magical rites of some primitive religions; on the contrary they require a definite rite and also moral and religious dispositions, unless the rite is to be without effect. So from the day of her foundation the Church has lived in a world of rites, sacred signs, or sacraments. They are an intrinsic part of her life, instituted by Christ because they correspond to God's purposes for man. The present volume is a complete treatise on sacraments in general, based on the sources, Scripture and Tradition; it covers all the related questions from the nature of a sign to a study of the minister and the matter of each of the sacraments, thus leading to a synthesis of Christian sacramentality.