I do not contend that all the Pharisees, or any of them, were the equals of Jesus in spiritual depth, just as I would not contend that all Christians, or any of them, were his equals in that respect. But there is certainly no warrant for saying that all Pharisees understood the common phrases of their religion in a low and narrow sense, as compared with the sense in which Jesus understood them. To say that "Our Father in Heaven" meant for the Pharisee only that God had chosen Israel to be His own people, and that the name Father "did not in the Jewish theology lead to a deeper insight into the nature of God as Love," is one of the flagrant misrepresentations with which Weber's book abounds (Weber, p. 150). There may have been Pharisees to whom the phrase meant nothing more; there certainly were Pharisees to whom it meant that God was near to each one of His children, in love and mercy and personal care. That the Pharisee thought of God only, or even mainly, as distant and inaccessible, or as a taskmaster whose service was hard, is a baseless fiction. Even, then, allowing that Jesus, by the depth and power of his own spiritual nature, did read into the common terms of Jewish religion a fuller meaning than had been previously found there, he nevertheless used those terms because they served to carry that meaning, as they stood and without alteration. We have, then, reached this position, that both Jesus and the Pharisees shared in common a Judaism expressed in the terms of a spiritual Theism, developed in the Synagogue and the home, and learned there alike by the Pharisees and by Jesus. It was certainly not the creation of the Scribes, _quâ_ Scribes, so that Jesus, or anyone else, would need to have sat at the feet of some Gamaliel in order to learn it. It was the spiritual inheritance of the Jew, into which he entered by natural piety, and from which neither the simple and unlearned nor the Scribe versed in the subtleties of the Halachah was excluded. I shall have more to say about this in the concluding chapter.