However, these experts in the genealogy of ideas do not say whether the ideals of Jesus, let them be new or old, should be accepted or rejected; they do not dare to pretend that Christ did nothing of value when He consecrated by His death a great truth, a forgotten, unused truth. They do not look carefully to see whether there is a real identity of sense and of spirit between the ideas of Jesus and those other older ideas, or whether there is merely a simple assonance and a distant verbal resemblance. And in the meantime, in order to avoid being misled in that matter, they reject Christ’s law and that of the philosophers who, they pretend, were Christ’s teachers, and they continue tranquilly to lead their filthy lives as if the Gospels had not been addressed to them as to other men. After the promulgation of the old Law there was amity between blood kin; and the citizens of the same city bore with each other and did one another no harm; but for strangers, if they were not guests, there was only hatred and extermination. Inside the family a little love; inside the city an approximate justice; outside the walls and the frontiers inextinguishable hatred. Centuries later voices were heard which asked a little love also for the neighbor, for those who were not of the same household but of the same nation, which asked for a little justice even for strangers, even for enemies. This would have been a wonderful step forward; but these voices—they were so few, so weak, so distant—were not heard, or, if heard, were not heeded.