Therefore it is not true to say that Jesus inwardly rejected all ritual, liturgical and hierarchical elements, and merely suffered that sort of thing as so much “background,” without positively accepting it. In saying this the “critical” theologians fall all too readily into the error of defining our Lord’s teaching exclusively in terms of its novel elements. But the truth is that the new rests on the old and is not to be separated from it. The teaching of Jesus is incomplete without both old and new. The basis of His teaching is no purely spiritual one, but it is the broad basis of the Old Testament religion handed down from Moses and the prophets, a basis which included both sensible and supra- sensible elements, both worship and morality, both a hierarchy and the individual conscience. It was upon this basis that He erected His new thing; or rather, He fulfilled the old and made it into the new. His teaching has a character of “unification, simplification and concentration”[4] in so far as He subordinated all external ordinances and regulations to the one thing necessary, the love of God and our neighbor. He restored to worship a guiding principle, gave it back its soul, its moral and religious significance. But, in doing that, He was restoring its original form and its true meaning as an expression and instrument of the supra-sensible. He did not destroy worship, but revived it. The old became new, and there was made one new thing.

We cannot, therefore, conclude from our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church, that He would have regarded the Catholic Church also as only so much background which had to be tolerated. For those very things which Jesus found lacking in rabbinical worship and teaching, namely, true spiritual religion and the love of God and of one’s neighbor, these things are, as has been seen in the previous Chapters, of the essence of the Catholic Church. The dogma, morality and worship of the Church are Christo- centric, are spirit and life, and her organism is nothing else than applied love. There is in the Catholic Church nothing that is, or may be, purely external, without inner connection with the love of God and of one’s neighbor. By visible things to the invisible: that is the fundamental principle of the whole system of the Church, and it is the principle also which inspired our Lord’s attitude towards Judaism.