Not seldom they imagine they are explaining something when they are in reality only talking round the subject. In this way there enters into their treatment a kind of forced ingenuity, one might almost say flimsiness. Their love of graphic description also sometimes becomes a temptation to them. They do not always remember to keep it within bounds, and sometimes allow themselves to fall into a kind of artificial naïveté. Wernle in particular delights to wield a pre-Raphaelite brush. He pictures the Apostle, for instance, in the evening at his inn, receiving visitors, exhorting and consoling them, weaving tent-cloth, busy with a letter, all at the same time. “Sometimes stones would come flying into the room as he was dictating—the Jews had set on the city mob to attack him. Many an abrupt transition in his letters may have had its origin in a violent interruption of this kind.”_(_121_)_ Feine and Titius begin with a critical examination of previous views. They are not in this wholly disinterested, being in search of a Paulinism which has more to offer to modern religion, as they apprehend it, than the one-sidedly historical post-Baur liberalism. The result is that while they show themselves free from many of the presuppositions and prejudices which are common to the others, they are at the same time not in a position to put Paulinism on a new historical basis. They agree [pg 157] in opposing the separation of Paulinism from Primitive Christianity which is practised by Holsten and Holtzmann. They refuse to be converted to the unsatisfactory view that Paulinism, as being a so unique personal creation, must have remained unintelligible even to Paul’s contemporaries. Before making up their minds to derive the whole of Paul’s doctrine from the vision at his conversion and the influence of Greek ideas, they propose to examine it in reference to the conceptions which connect it with Jesus, with primitive Christianity, and with Judaism. Consequently they are loth to admit Greek elements and the resulting duality in the Apostle’s thought. Feine maintains that in the Apostle’s mind before his conversion, Greek ideas were only present in so far as they had already been adopted by Pharisaism. Titius “will not deny that there is a touch of Hellenism in the great Apostle,” but is far from seeking to explain the doctrine of flesh and spirit and the mysticism connected with the “new creation” purely from this point of view. On the other hand both of them assign a large part in the formation of Paul’s doctrine to his Jewish consciousness, and consequently are led to a comprehensive recognition of eschatology.