But in thus recognising eschatology Ritschl did not take the matter very seriously. He uses the eschatology, in fact, only in order to score a dialectical point against Baur, who had taken too little account of it. In Ritschl’s “Justification and Reconciliation,” where he later on had occasion to give a positive description of Paulinism, he avoided the faintest hint of any eschatological colouring of the Apostle’s ideas. Another work which is occupied with the question of the unity between Paulinism and primitive Christianity is Lechler’s “Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Age.”_(_21_)_ The work is a prize essay in answer to the problem proposed by the Teylerian Society in Holland, as to what constituted “the absolute difference between the doctrine and attitude of the Apostle Paul and that of the other Apostles,” by which the “so-called Tübingen School endeavours to justify its hostile treatment of Christianity.” Lechler opposes his teacher, but is not able to make any advance upon Ritschl in producing evidence of the common elements in the two doctrinal systems. [pg 019] Among the works which controverted the Tübingen view of Paulinism a prominent place belongs to an early work of Richard Adalbert Lipsius on “the Pauline doctrine of justification.”_(_22_)_ Along with his scientific purpose the author also pursues a practical aim. He puts himself at the service of the anti-rationalistic reaction which aimed at restoring the old evangelical ideas to a position of honour, but in doing so did not grasp hands with the orthodoxy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but took as its starting-point the ideas which it finds present in the New Testament. In giving an objective presentation of the central Pauline doctrine of justification he believes that he is offering to the Protestantism of his time a view which it can adopt as its own. For the Apostle of the Gentiles, he argues, justification is not a purely legal, forensic act, but also an ethical experience. Faith is an ethical attitude which produces an inward righteousness. What is really effectual in redemption is the fellowship with Christ in life and death. It is brought about by the Spirit of God and of Christ, who unites himself with the believer and transforms his personality. Lipsius is the first to recognise the two trains of thought in Paulinism, and to remark that the one is based upon the juridical idea of justification, while the other has its starting-point in the conception of sanctification—of the real ethical new creation by the Spirit. He does not, as had always previously been done, make everything of the one and nothing of the other, but aims at showing how they are brought together in the Apostle’s thought. The importance of the eschatological passages does not escape him. He assumes that the thought of the parousia gives an inner unity to the Apostle’s ideas.