Students of Ephesians, moreover, are coming to hear in it more and more clearly, if we mistake not, the voice of the Apostle and the expression of his mature Christian experience, and of that doctrine of the church in which Royce sees the essence of Paulinism. A. C. Headlam says that it is the careful study of a book that will often solve the question of its origin, and remarks: "To me Ephesians is Pauline through and through, and more even than Romans represents the deepest thought of the Apostle."[260] The important fact is that, when all the disputed epistles are excluded, the progress of criticism has placed beyond reasonable doubt the great body of the Apostle's teaching and the bulk of his writings. The practical question now at issue, as Ramsay has observed, is not, "What did Paul write?" but "What did Paul teach?"[261] 260: "St. Paul and Christianity," 1913, p. viii. 261: _Contemporary Review_, August, 1913, p. 198. In Paul's acknowledged writings we have a solid basis in fact from which to estimate the Gospel narratives and the Acts. The epistles of Paul carry us back into the circle of the earlier apostles and of the Jerusalem church, and throw light upon various events and aspects of the life, character, words, death, and resurrection of Christ. II. THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES The book of Acts, while secondary in interest to the Gospels, occupies a central place in New Testament criticism. It is the bridge between the Ascension and the time thirty years later when Nero persecuted "a great multitude called Christians at Rome." It covers the period in which doctrinal evolution took place. Through its authorship it bridges the gap between the Gospels and the Pauline church among the Gentiles.