The Ultra-Tübingen critics on their part cannot escape the blame of raising the question in a one-sided purely literary form, and not concerning themselves with the thought contained in the Epistles, because they felt that herein lay the weak point of their undertaking. Instead of analysing the system, they made play with the [pg 141] catchwords Greek and Gnostic, and thought to have got rid in that way of the question regarding the essential character of Paulinism. If contemporary theology did not grasp the problem which was presented to it in its full significance, that was partly due to the pettifogging way in which it was formulated. The representatives of radical criticism were like criminals who cannot rise to the height of their crime! For a time it almost looked as if a _modus vivendi_ had been found between the successors of Baur’s school and the radicals. Steck, who stood on the right wing of the revolutionaries, refused to give up the belief that the historic Paul had in some way or other fought a battle for freedom from the law, and might be indirectly claimed as the starting-point of the theology which reaches its full development in the Epistles. From this it was only a short step to the hypothesis that the Epistles were not wholly spurious but combined thoughts of the Apostle with later views. A criticism based on the distinction of original and interpolated elements did not need to be now for the first time called into being. It already existed, and had indeed made its appearance contemporaneously with Bruno Bauer’s. Like the latter it had been either talked down or left to die of neglect. In the first volume of his “Philosophic Dogmatic” (1855), when speaking of the documentary sources of our knowledge of Christianity, Christian Hermann Weisse defines his attitude towards the Pauline Epistles and offers the results of a study extending over many years, which he had undertaken in opposition to the conservatives on the one side and the Tübingen school on the other._(_108_)_ His method he himself describes as criticism based on style. A man like Paul, he argues, has so characteristic a literary style that it will serve one who has made himself [pg 142] thoroughly familiar with it as an unfailing criterion of what is genuine and what is not. Such a method of criticism must of course be prepared to be accused of arbitrariness and subjectivity. But that is no great matter. The fruits will vouch for the goodness of the tree.