What arouses suspicion, and at last convinces us, that the third chapter of the first epistle to Timothy is a forgery, is that there is too much on the subject of Bishops from Paul all at once. If the episcopate form of government underlaid or was at the bottom of Paul's mode of government, it surely would have come to the surface or made itself known before it suddenly starts up in the first to Timothy; for he had been engaged in building up churches for at least fifteen years before that. It is characteristic of the forgeries of the second century, when they are inserted into genuine writings, to make their appearance in the form of boulders, very much condensed, but out of place. There is nothing diffusible about them, and we never suspect their presence until we stumble upon or over them. The way the subject of Bishops is introduced, at once creates suspicion. "This is a true saying. If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desires a good thing." It is intended to convey the idea in the start, that the office had been long in existence, and that the profits were such as to excite the cupidity of men. The office of Bishop, in the time of Paul, even if such an office had any existence, was not, as we have shown, a good thing, but the opposite; but in the second century, when the forgery was perpetrated, it was. Good critics have pronounced the whole of the first of Timothy a forgery. The weight of the evidence is in favor of this belief. As to the third chapter, there can be no question. The effort to make it appear that Paul recognized the episcopate form of church government is repeated in the epistle to Titus. It is to be remarked that this effort is only made in the last epistles written by him. The first of Timothy was written in A. D. 64; that to Titus in A. D. 65. All the epistles between A. D. 52 and A. D. 62, have nothing to say on the subject of Bishops. Those written between these two periods, at Paul's death had obtained a wide circulation among all the churches of Asia and Europe, which made it impossible for those who were engaged in corrupting his writings to make changes that could be easily detected and exposed. As long as he lived it could not be done. But the reverse is true of those which were written just before his death. Besides, the Therapeutæ element did not begin to work until A. D. 57, and had not grown bold and strong enough to venture on the corruptions of Paul's writings until some time after his death.