to originality but rather based its
claim on the fact it was not original. Our Lord, it was noticed, did not
base His claim on tradition. In fact He often noticed the Jewish
tradition for the purpose of marking the contrast between it and His own
teaching. "Ye have heard that it hath been said of old time ... but I
say unto you." He commonly refused to give an explanation of what He had
said, but demanded acceptance on His authority. He brought discipleship
to the test of hard sayings, and permitted the departure of those who
could not accept them. He cut across popular prejudices and took small
account of the "modern mind" as expressed by the Sadducees. He expected
the same unhesitating submission from the Apostles whom He was training,
though it was also a part of their training to be the future heralds of
the Kingdom that they should have the "mysteries of the Kingdom"
explained to them. But from the time when Jesus began to preach, saying
"the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," He preached and taught with the same
unhesitating note of certainty, and with the same demand for
intellectual submission on the part of those who heard Him.

And that continues to the end. During the Forty Days, the few sayings
that have come to us have the same ring of authority, of dogmatic
certainty. The result was that when the Apostles went out to teach they
were equipped with a body of truth which they presented to the world in
the same unhesitating way. Indeed, that is the only way in which the
central truths of the Christian Faith can be presented. They are not the
conclusions of argument, which may be taken up and argued over again to
the end of the world,--they are the dicta of revelation. We either know
them to be true because they have been revealed, or we do not know them
to be true at all. They are mysteries, that is, truths beyond the
possibility of human finding which have been made known to man by God
Himself. They are the appropriate data of religion and what
distinguishes it from philosophy. The presence of mystery in philosophy
is annoying, and the aim is to get rid of it, but a religion without
mystery is absurd. Religion deals with the fundamental relations between
God and man and the light it brings us must be a supernatural light.
Such a religion in its presentation naturally cut across the
preconceptions of the traditionalists in Jerusalem to whom nothing new
could be true, as across the preconceptions of the sophists of