Perhaps this is a little exaggerated in the opposite direction to Harnack. Still I believe it to be in the main right. The mutual knowledge of the Father and the Son rests upon their essential community of nature. But, having recognized this, M. Loisy goes on, with what I cannot but think singular levity, to cast doubt upon the passage. He regards the whole context in St. Matthew as a sort of psalm based upon the last chapter (li) of Ecclesiasticus; and he ascribes it not to our Lord, but to the tradition of the early Church.
This is far from being a favourable specimen of Biblical criticism. We have only to set the two passages side by side to estimate its value. It is possible enough that there are reminiscences not only of this, but of other passages of Ecclesiasticus and of other books in the mind of speaker or writer[[71]]. We might conceive of a defining phrase here or there being due to the Evangelist and suggested by such reminiscences. Or we might conceive of Christ Himself going back in thought (as well He might) to the invitation of personified Wisdom. There would be nothing strange in either supposition. The New Testament everywhere takes up the threads of the Old, and is not confined to the Jewish Canon. But in any case the materials thus supplied are entirely recast; and the whole passage (‘Come unto Me,’ &c.) bears the inimitable stamp of one Figure, and only one[[72]].
The truth is that in the Synoptic Gospels, as well as in the Fourth, there is really a mysterious background, though we see less of the attempt to pierce it. These simple-looking sayings are not so simple as they seem. To take, for instance, one upon which we have touched, ‘he that receiveth you, receiveth Me, and he that receiveth Me, receiveth Him that sent Me.’ The words are almost childlike in their simplicity, and yet they lead up to the highest heights, and down to the deepest depths. No doubt we may rationalize it all away, if we please. We may shut out the mystery from our minds. But we shall not keep it out for long.
Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides—
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul.
There is a movement perhaps on a large scale, like the Bentham period in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, or the sceptical and deistical period a hundred years earlier, and it seems as though everything were to be made clear and intelligible, and the conscience and soul of men were not to be troubled by phantoms any more. And then there come ‘Lake Poets,’ or an ‘Oxford Movement,’ and the other world, the old world, all comes back again; and the forces that try to restrain it are snapped like Samson’s withes.