In the earlier Christian literature sacraments still bear this wide meaning. Tertullian often uses the word thus. In one passage he speaks of a woman known to him who was accustomed to go into ecstasies during the weekly service of the Church; "she converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord, and both sees and hears sacraments" [8] He speaks of "the sacrament of allegory,"[9] "sacraments of metaphors," [10] in both cases alluding to Old Testament types, and again, he explains the wood by which Moses made the waters of Mara sweet (Exodus xv.), as a sacrament symbolizing the cross [11] <#_edn11>
According to Prudentius, the early Christian poet, the Evangelist tells us that Christ gave these [p.61] commands to His disciples: "Seek not carefully for words when ye shall have to descant of my sacrament," [12] "my Sacrament," being evidently here equivalent to "the Gospel."
But, as time passed by, the word sacrament became more and more used for certain mysteries of the Church alone, although far down into the middle ages even in this sense the word had a wider use than that of the seven sacraments of the Council of Trent.
Thus in 393 A.D. the synod of Hippo made a decree as to the use of the sacrament of salt at Easter by the catechumens, and in later times the ringing of bells and the use of the sign of the cross were regarded as sacraments. By the time of Augustine, however, the word sacrament was frequently used in its narrower signification, and already emphasis is laid on the saving power of the sacrament rather than on its significance as a revelation. Yet Augustine, though holding that the sacrament of baptism was necessary to salvation, once wrote thus: "For what else are each of the bodily sacraments, but, so to speak, certain visible words; most holy words it is true, but yet mutable and temporal ones?" [13] <#_edn13>
It is this wider sense of the word which we must [p.62 ]be careful not to lose, the use in which a sacrament means the unfolding and imparting of the spiritual and eternal through that which we see and hear and feel.
Because in times past the Church has tended to narrow the use of the word, and, by confining the Divine operations to certain channels, to misread the great sacrament of life, so lessening the mystery of the world, there is all the more reason that we should not rest content with seeing how inadequate such views have proved. It is true that over the doctrine of sacraments men have fought and wrangled, forgetting the name by which they were called. But it is true, too, that to countless souls it has seemed that through the sacraments the Church has offered them help which has come as in no other way to their lives. And surely this has not been all delusion. The error of the sacramentalist in the past has often rather been that he has confined the Divine presence and the Divine working to certain fixed channels and unchanging visible signs. Those of us who hold that these good men have narrowed down the freedom of the inner life need to meet them not by denying the Divine presence where they see it, but by trying to see and to realize that presence ourselves more fully throughout all our lives. We are called to the worship and the knowledge of the transcendent and immanent God, who is here in the midst of our lives, in the midst of His world and His works, yet is far more than all these. [p.63] When the stern old Tertullian looked out upon the pagan world around him and noted in its religious rites strange mimicry and rivalry of the Christian mysteries, he could perceive no good in what he saw. In the worship of Mithras he found a baptism for the remission of sins, and a sign made on the forehead of the soldier in this pagan army of salvation; a crown purchased by the sword, and the ritual offering of bread. But all this, like the ancient Roman rites of Numa, or the mysteries of Eleusis and of Samothrace, seemed to him but the work of the Evil One. It was the devil's part, he wrote, to invert the truth and make of it his own counterparts, as he seemed to do in much of the ritual of the heathen temple.[14] <#_edn14>