He opposes the voice of his conscience to the tradition of the doctors. There lies precisely the originality of his teaching, which, if one recomposed the materials piece by piece, could be found scattered in the Biblical writings or in the sayings of the rabbis. Like every man who speaks to men, Jesus takes his ideas in the common treasure of his environment and his time; but as to what he makes of it [pour le parti qu'il en tire] one does not say that it proceeds from any one. This independence results, probably, at once from his character and from the circumstances of his education. [186] Thus, as regards the Sermon on the Mount, the act of collecting a number of ethical precepts and maxims from the current literature and lore of one's people and curtly enouncing them, without development, is a proof of supreme moral originality, and is to be regarded as opposing the voice of one's conscience to tradition. Had the rabbis, then, no conscience? Was their ethic a mere tradition, even when they gave out or originated the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount? Was Hillel but a mouth-piece of the law? M. Loisy must in justice pardon us for avowing that so far he has but duplicated a worn-out paralogism, and that he has evaded the plain documentary fact that the Sermon is a literary compilation, [187] and not a discourse at all. And when we turn to specific teachings, his commentary does but compel us to ask how the teaching which he insists upon taking as genuinely uttered by the Teacher can be associated with the Messianist he has been describing. Accepting as genuine the story of the woman taken in adultery, now bracketed in the English Revised Version as being absent from the most ancient manuscripts, but presumably found in the lost Gospel of the Hebrews, [188] he remarks that "the elect of the kingdom must not use marriage; they were to be as the angels in heaven"; [189] and at the same time he describes the veto on divorce as "a trait so personal to the teaching of Christ, and so difficult to comprehend if one denies all originality to that teaching." [190] That is to say, the believer in the speedy end of all marriage relations, and the establishment of a new and angelic life for all who survive, occupied himself earnestly with the restriction or abolition of divorce!