It was, however, two less erudite little books that brought him a European literary reputation and the culmination of his ecclesiastical troubles. _L'Évangile et l'église_ appeared in November 1902 (Eng. trans., 1903). Its introduction and six chapters present with rare lucidity the earliest conceptions of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Son of God, the Church, Christian dogma and Catholic worship; and together form a severely critico-historical yet strongly Catholic answer to Harnack's still largely pietistic _Wesen des Christentums_. It develops throughout the principles that "what is essential in Jesus' Gospel is what occupies the first and largest place in His authentic teaching, the ideas for which He fought and died, and not only that idea which we may consider to be still a living force to day"; that "it is supremely arbitrary to decree that Christianity must be essentially what the Gospel did not borrow from Judaism, as though what the Gospel owes to Judaism were necessarily of secondary worth"; that "whether we trust or distrust tradition, we know Christ only by means of, athwart and within the Christian tradition"; that "the _essence of Christianity_ resides in the fulness and totality of its life"; and that "the adaptation of the Gospel to the changing conditions of humanity is to-day a more pressing need than ever." The second edition was enlarged by a preliminary chapter on the sources of the Gospels, and by a third section for the Son of God chapter. The little book promptly aroused widespread interest, some cordial sympathy and much vehement opposition; whilst its large companion the _Études évangéliques_, containing the course on the parables and four sections of his coming commentary on the Fourth Gospel, passed almost unnoticed. On the 21st of January 1903 Cardinal Richard publicly condemned the book, as not furnished with an _imprimatur_, and as calculated gravely to trouble the faith of the faithful in the fundamental Catholic dogmas. On the 2nd of February Loisy wrote to the archbishop: "I condemn, as a matter of course, all the errors which men have been able to deduce from my book, by placing themselves in interpreting it at a point of view entirely different from that which I had to occupy in composing it." The pope refused to interfere directly, and the nuncio, Mgr Lorenzelli, failed in securing more than ten public adhesions to the cardinal's condemnation from among the eighty bishops of France.