Christian spirituality and ethics, when most closely linked with the central affirmations of the Faith, have been traditionally expounded in terms of the ‘imitation of Christ’, This it is which has given them distinctively Christian ‘shape’, and secured that the Christian life is conceived as a possibility only because of the saving acts of God in Christ upon which as it depends. To describe the Christian life as the ‘imitation of Christ’ is not to present it, however, as a bare literal mimicry, but to stress that, in fact, the life of the Christian man is fundamentally the life of our Lord himself which he lives out in us in the sacramental life of the Church, if we will to have it so. The matter is already seen in this light in New Testament times, in, for example, St Paul's ‘Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies’ (2 Cor. 4, 10) or ‘I have been concrucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal. 2, 20).