The instrument which the man-stealer uses, or perhaps we may say, the cord, whose fatal noose will be tightened round them, if they do not take care, is "philosophy and vain deceit." If Paul had been writing in English, he would have put "philosophy" in inverted commas, to show that he was quoting the heretical teachers' own name for their system, if system it may be called, which was really a chaos. For the true love of wisdom, for any honest, humble attempt to seek after her as hid treasure, neither Paul nor Paul's Master have anything but praise and sympathy and help. Where he met real, however imperfect, searchers after truth, he strove to find points of contact between them and his message, and to present the gospel as the answer to their questionings, the declaration of that which they were groping to find. The thing spoken of here has no resemblance but in name to what the Greeks in their better days first called philosophy, and nothing but that mere verbal coincidence warrants the representation--often made both by narrow-minded Christians, and by unbelieving thinkers--that Christianity takes up a position of antagonism or suspicion to it. The form of the expression in the original shows clearly that "vain deceit," or more literally "empty deceit," describes the "philosophy" which Paul is bidding them beware of. They are not two things, but one. It is like a blown bladder, full of wind, and nothing else. In its lofty pretensions, and if we take its own account of itself, it is a love of and search after wisdom; but if we look at it more closely, it is a swollen nothing, empty and a fraud. This is what he is condemning. The genuine thing he has nothing to say about here. He goes on to describe more closely this impostor, masquerading in the philosopher's cloak. It is "after the traditions of men." We have seen in a former chapter what a strange heterogeneous conglomerate of Jewish ceremonial and Oriental dreams the false teachers in Colossæ were preaching. Probably both these elements are included here. It is significant that the very expression, "the traditions of men," is a word of Christ's, applied to the Pharisees, whom He charges with "leaving the commandment of God, and holding fast the tradition of men" (Mark vii. 8). The portentous undergrowth of such "traditions" which, like the riotous fertility of creepers in a tropical forest, smother and kill the trees round which they twine, is preserved for our wonder and warning in the Talmud, where for thousands and thousands of pages, we get nothing but Rabbi So and So said this, but Rabbi So and So said that; until we feel stifled, and long for one Divine Word to still all the babble.