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indiscriminately administered to the fatihful merely because they "give grace." This caution has, however, not given rise to the accusation that the Church has arbitrarily withheld grace from some of its members because she has not admitted them to the sacraments. Nor has the Church been accused of depriving men of grace because she has refused to confer the sacrament of orders upon them until a certain degree of maturity and theological formation has been attained and a canonical mission be appointed for them. In the current controversy over celibacy, no one cries that celibacy is unjust because it deprives clerics of the grace of matrimony. Generally it is not argued that married men and all women are deprived of grace because they are not admitted to the sacrament of orders. It may be that arguments of this type are forthcoming but we should hope not. They would be based on a misconception of the sacraments of the Church. Indeed, very few priests OJ" laity have reacted vehemently to "the practice of First Communion at seven, first confession at the same age, and confirmation at eleven, on the grounds that this practice deprives younger children of sacramental grace. (We ought to note that Canon 788 speaks of "postponing" the sacrament of confirmation till about seven years of age). When, however, it is suggested that pastoral ani! theological reasons dictate another age for the (first) reception of these sacraments, a cry of alarm is frequently heard: its sound, "the sacraments were instituted to give grace." This, of course, is precisely the point. The sacraments do confer grace. But they are not the indifferent distributors of a quantifiable object called grace. They confer only the grace which they signify, and ultimately the grace which they signify is some dimension of the Incarnate grace, the God-man, the primary sacrament. It is for this reason that one must reflect upon the meaning and existence of the sacramental sign before one can logically speak of the grace of the sacraments. The existence of the sacramental sign is crucial to the conferral of sacramental grace. Thus, if some event which superficially appears as a sacrament is, in reality, non-sensical,. there is neither celebration of sacrament nor conferral of sacramental grace. Consequently, the quest for the most appropriate mo-