Should we go further still? May we, ought we in all fidelity to apply the distinction to the Gospel of Christ itself and to the primitive form in which it has come down to us? Most of those who have accompanied us thus far will now recoil and leave us. They will employ against us the very same arguments which appear to them so pitiful when used with respect to the Church and to the Bible. For my part, I cannot comprehend this fear of the freedom left to criticism. It seems to me impossible to deny that in the teaching of Jesus there are parts which are uncertain, things which have been either badly understood or badly reported, an oriental and contingent form which needs to be translated into our modern languages. Who does not see that neither in His language nor in His thought is there anything absolute? Both of them are constantly determined by the generally received ideas of His time, the state of mind of His interlocutors; and unless you desire to deny that Jesus was a man of His age and of His race, how can you abstract Him from His environment and attribute to Him ideas which have neither date nor place? I have already compared Christianity to an oak which has lived and grown for eighteen centuries, and the Gospel to the acorn from which it sprang. But in that acorn itself, as in the tree, it is manifest that there are two things: a principle of life, and some matter borrowed from the Hebraic soil, with which the creating principle was obliged to amalgamate itself in order to enter into history and to become fruitful. The characteristic of life is to render possible and to institute the constant exchange of the materials with which it builds up its works. When this exchange has ceased, life has disappeared. If the Gospel of Jesus were something fixed and finished like a code of laws or a collection of formulas, it would no longer be a power of life. His words defy the centuries and never wither; they are truly eternal, because they leave free and do not imprison in a rigid and immutable letter the spirit of life which animates them.