in the least do this, and we must interpret his saying about the man who brings forth from his treasury things new and old in this way he had studied the religion of his people, their sacred books, and of this Old Testament, which it must not be forgotten he read through the medium of the theology of his time, he made a treasury. This treasury is therefore composed of things of the past, but it was Jesus who made it, and it was he who drew from it; and thus these antique truths, which were wholly old, became new when they had passed through the crucible of his personal experience and were uttered by him. They were at once old and new. It is the ancient heritage which he gave to his disciples, but not until he had transformed it; the old and the new are fused in a higher unity, nothing is abolished, all is fulfilled.

This method of Jesus is eternally true. At the present day, for example, Christian dogmatics ought to be transformed and entirely made over. It never will be done in a fruitful way unless Christians preserve all the past, blotting out not one of the old dogmas, those dogmas which

before their time were the spiritual and moral force of so many generations, but introducing into each one a new life, a vital principle, which will rejuvenate and transform it.

It is therefore an error to classify methodically the various points of the teachings of Jesus and find a system of doctrine in his words, to say, for example, that he taught this about God, that about men. This is entirely to misunderstand the unique and essential character of Jesus' teaching, which was to preach his own person.1 He tells us what he is, and gives himself out for just what he is. He reveals his soul. He tells what he feels, thinks, experiences, with an entire and absolute spontaneity and sincerity.

It is therefore impossible to put this teaching into formulas; it is necessary to rid ourselves of the idea that there is a doctrine of Jesus independent of his perWhat Jesus taught was himself. He preached himself, a thing that St. Paul would not do. For example, when Jesus taught that God is the Heavenly

son.

1 We shall return to this thought and develop it in our last chapter, "The Requirements of Jesus."

Father, he was not seeking to inculcate a doctrine of God. He did not give out any opinions about God, but he told what God was to him, and consequently what he is absolutely. He was possessed with an idea which was to him a certitude, that God was in him, dwelt in him. He heard him, talked with him, and God's words went sounding through his soul; and this is why he preached himself and asked that others should give themselves to him.1 From the beginning, and certainly for a long time before his public life, he had felt himself in close relations with God.

Jesus, then, preserved all the past; with regard to God, sin, man, the reign of God, he repeated what his contemporaries said. He drew everything from the Old Testament, and repeated Jewish doctrines pure and simple; but he repeated them otherwise than had been done before him, because he had made them new in his own consciousness.

More than this, he not only transformed these precepts, not only gave to them a value which makes them seem new, but he further, and especially, put them in

1 Matt. ix. 9.

practice. Why, indeed, had not these maxims, which were already in the Law and on the lips of pious and sincere Pharisees, why had they not changed the world, and how was it that Jesus changed it? Because Jesus was the first one to practise and live them. We may prove that the gospel morality was not itself very original, we may gather together the whole of it from ancient maxims; and yet it was only in the first century that these transformed the world, made it new, and actually recreated it. He not only gave the perfect code of the perfect life; he lived it. For this reason that in him which was striking, that which drew hearts to him, was not his charm, as has been said, but the perfection of his life, the fact that he, first of all men, was perfect as the Father is perfect.

Let us be more circumstantial, studying at yet closer range the spirit of his teaching, comparing it with that of the men of his time.

The Scribes and Pharisees said that the Law was the final authority. In it God spoke. In the Torah was the exterior commandment, before the letter of which

all must bow. It was the word of God in the narrowest and strictest sense of the word. Jesus would certainly not have repudiated this statement. But what did the Scribes draw from it? A servile fear of violating a single one of these commandments; a subtle interpretation of the simplest texts; a multitude of precepts before which they continually trembled in the fear of violating them. parted company with them.

Here Jesus

He believed

in the exterior authority of the Law, but he changed it to an interior authority. Even during his long years of silent obscurity he had begun to have sacred experiences; and one of them, the foundation of his religious certitude, was communion with God.

In the depths of his soul he had a secret conviction which was to be identified, which could not but be identified, with the commandments of the Law, because, like them, it spoke only the truth. He was assured of the approbation of his Father; and thus, when he was confronted by the Law, which also came from the Father, it was not a question of obeying precepts which threaten, command, forbid, like the slave