Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New Testament which doubtless give us the nearest approach to the actual words and deeds of Our Lord require us to conceive them as having been without the reflective and emotional element; or again that, in the case of the more derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflectiveness, and not their relative incompleteness and one-sidedness, that cause them to be more readily englobed in the former world, than that former world in the latter: could the facts here found be used as an argument against the importance and strict necessity for religion of the reflective and emotional, the “Subjective” elements, alongside of the “Objective,” the Historical and Institutional ones. It is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic when he finds the necessities of life and those of learned research both driving us more and more to this conclusion; for it is not deniable that Catholicism has ever refused to do more than include the Pauline and Joannine theologies amongst its earliest and most normative stimulations and expressions; and that it has ever retained, far more than Protestantism, the sense, which (upon the whole) is most unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I may so phrase it, the Christianity of certain true elements in the pre- and extra-Christian religions. For it is in the Synoptists that we get the clear presentation of Our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church of His time, as one, even at its keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and not to that of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian Church of their day.--Indeed in these documents all idea of limiting Christianity to what He brought of new, appears as foreign to His mind as it ever has been to that of the Catholic Church. Here we get the most spontaneous and many-sided expression of that divinely human, widely traditional and social, all-welcoming and all-transforming spirit, which embraces both grace _and_ nature, eternity _and_ time, soul _and_ body, attachment _and_ detachment. The Pauline strain stands for the stress necessary to the full spiritualization of all those occasions and materials, as against all, mere unregenerate or static, retention of the simple rudiments or empty names of those things; and predominantly insists upon grace, _not_ nature; eternity, _not_ time; soul, _not_ body; the cross and death here, the Crown and Life hereafter. No wonder it is this latter strain that gets repeated, with varying truth and success, in times of acute transition, and by characters more antithetic than synthetic, more great at developing a part of the truth than the whole.