its turn about to be precipitated. Jesus was to separate himself from them. In fact, he had for a long time been separate from them. He had thought himself still of their number, doing nothing else than accentuate the liberality of the best among them. But now he perceived to what an extent he actually repudiated them, and with them all Judaism.

JESUS

CHAPTER IX

OPPOSITION TO JESUS

ESUS preached a long time in Galilee without encountering the slightest opposition. Rabbis were going about the country; he was one of them; they were all free, and no preacher was disturbed by any one in the exercise of his ministry. Exhortations and cures attracted some people and left others indifferent, and the little Jewish world none the less went on its every-day life.

But the success of Jesus was such that at last it excited both jealousy and fear. On certain days the people came in crowds to hear him.1 Certain Pharisees who had been far from attaining such success, saw all this with displeasure; and from this to finding Jesus in error, insisting that his success was not sound, and investigating his life, discovering in it omission of rites

1 Matt. iv. 25; Mark ii. 4; Luke v. 1, viii. 4, 19, xi. 29, xii. 1; etc.

and errors of practice or of doctrine, was not very far. Jesus perceived that he was being spied upon, suspected; that his liberality was criticised; and the time came when he was obliged to hide himself.1

He had already been repelled from Nazareth; and he had certainly been very sensitive to the aloofness of his own compatriots. The Nazarenes, who had known him as a child, persisted in remaining unbelieving. They had seen Jesus grow up in their village; they remembered the carpenter's bench, his sisters were married in the town, his brothers did not believe,2 and decidedly he could not be a prophet in his own country: he admitted that himself. On the border of the lake, Chorazin and Bethsaida had also refused to yield to him.3 But it was above all from the Pharisees that gradually came the most overt opposition, that which was destined to take on formidable proportions and pursue Jesus to the very end.

In the presence of this new opposition,

1 Matt. xiii. 14-16; Mark iii. 7, ix. 29, 30.

2 John vii. 5.

8 Matt. xi. 21, 24; Luke x. 12-15; Matt. xii. 41, 42; Luke xi. 31, 32, xviii. 8.

the tokens of hostility which we have already seen count for nothing. When Jesus was repelled at Jerusalem, it was only by Sadduceeism, a form of Jewish faith which had no strength and no future. When he failed at Nazareth, it was as the consequence of local animosity resting on private motives. But the rupture with the Pharisees was the rupture with Judaism itself, of all in it that was most vital and authentic.

Up to this time- and this is the character of this first period of his ministry - Jesus, as we have said and shown, had remained in the great current of the best Pharisaic ideas. He had pursued a parallel work with that of the Pharisees, in no sense hostile to it, but on the contrary affording numerous points of contact with it; but little by little the resemblance had been effaced. In reality, for a long time Jesus had been little by little detaching himself from Pharisaism without in any wise intending it, believing himself to be faithful to the true spirit of the religion of his people, persuaded that he was destroying nothing, but fulfilling all things. From this time he perceived that the spirit which

animated him and the reform which he desired were not in the least conformable to the hopes of his people, and especially of those who led them, the Pharisees.

On the one hand, his success was increasing; on the other, that which divided him from the old Judaism was growing sharper, a separation was inevitable.

In fact, the formalism of the Pharisees had always displeased him. He had at all times disapproved of the vain practices and affectations of many among them.1 He preached the religion of the heart, and his whole law was the love of God, charity, forgiveness. We have said that he established no religious practice; that if he later instituted Baptism and the Eucharist, still for the moment he desired only a heart-religion which should show itself by fulfilling the will of God and not by exterior mechanical practices. He remained true to the tradition of the prophet Isaiah. That book was certainly among his chosen reading, and we do not dispute that more

1 Matt. xv. 9, ix. 14, xi. 19, vi. 2 ff.

2 Matt. xxii. 37 f.; Mark xii. 28 f.; Luke x. 25 f. 8 Matt. xv. 8; Mark vii. 6; borrowed from Isa. xxix. 13.