Strictly speaking it was not Schleiermacher the critic, but Schleiermacher the aesthete who had come to have doubts about 2 Timothy. The letter does not suit his taste. He fails to perceive that, so far as the language goes, the two other letters diverge from the rest of the Pauline Epistles in the same way as I Timothy, and that they also show the same looseness and disconnectedness; only that, in consequence of their smaller extent, it is not so striking. And, most important of all, it escapes him that as regards their ideas all three letters agree in diverging from the remainder of the Pauline Epistles. Schleiermacher’s omissions are supplied by Eichhorn in his well-known Introduction._(_14_)_ He lays it down that the three Epistles are all by the same author, and are all spurious. His criticism deals first with the language and thought of the letters, which he shows to be un-Pauline; then he argues that the implied historical situations cannot be fitted into the life of the Apostle, as known to us from the remaining letters and the Acts of the Apostles; finally, he points to the unnaturalness of the relation [pg 009] between Paul and his helpers as it is represented by these Epistles. The Apostle, he points out, gives them in writing exhortations and directions which on the assumption of a real personal acquaintance and a long period of joint work with them are in any case unnecessary, and become much more so from the fact that the letters look forward to an early meeting. From this Eichhorn concludes that “some one else has put himself in Paul’s place,” and he sees no possibility of the success of any attempt to defend the genuineness of the Epistles against the arguments which he has brought forward. In particular he gives a warning against the seductive attempt to save the genuineness of 2 Timothy by the assumption of a second imprisonment. No hypothesis, he declares, can in any way help the Pastorals, since they must be pronounced from internal evidence—because of their divergence from the remaining Epistles—not to be by the Apostle. This was a long step forward. The circle of writings which have come down under the name of Paul had undergone a restriction which made it possible to give an account of his system of thought without being obliged to find a place in it for ideas which already have a quite early-Catholic ring. Ten years after Eichhorn’s literary achievement, in the year 1824, the Swiss theologian Leonhard Usteri, a pupil of Schleiermacher’s, published his “Development of the Pauline System of Doctrine,”_(_15_)_ which is generally regarded as the starting-point of the purely historical study of Paulinism, the first attempt to give effect to the demands of Semler._(_16_)_