I do not lose sight of the fact that the Epistle to the Ephesians ends without salutations, without personal notices of any kind. But in this respect it is not peculiar.(186) _That_,—joined to a singular absence of identifying allusion,—sufficiently explains why Marcion selected this particular Epistle for the subject of his fraud. But, to infer from this circumstance, in defiance of the Tradition of the Church Universal, and in defiance of its very Title, that the Epistle is “Encyclical,” in the technical sense of that word; and to go on to urge this characteristic as an argument in support of the omission of the words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ,—is clearly the device of an eager Advocate; not the method of a calm and unprejudiced Judge. True it is that S. Paul,—who, writing to the Corinthians from Ephesus, says “_the Churches of Asia_ salute you,” (1 Cor. xvi. 19,)—may have known very well that an Epistle of his “to the Ephesians,” would, as a matter of course, be instantly communicated to others besides the members of that particular Church: and in fact this may explain why there is nothing specially “Ephesian” in the contents of the Epistle. The Apostle,—(as when he addressed “the Churches of Galatia,”)—may have had certain of the other neighbouring Churches in his mind while he wrote. But all this is wholly foreign to the question before us: the one _only_ question being _this_,—Which of the three following addresses represents what S. Paul must be considered to have actually written in the first verse of his “Epistle to the Ephesians”?— (1) τοῖς ἀγίοις τοῖς οὔσιν ἐν Ἐφέσῳ καὶ πιστοῖς ἐν Χ. Ἰ. (2) τοῖς ἀγίοις τοῖς οὔσιν ἐν ... καὶ πιστοῖς ἐν Χ. Ἰ. (3) τοῖς ἀγίοις τοῖς οὔσι, καὶ πιστοῖς ἐν Χ. Ἰ. What I have been saying amounts to this: that it is absolutely unreasonable for men to go out of their way to invent a theory wanting every element of probability in order to account for the omission of the words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ from S. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians; while they have under their eyes the express testimony of a competent witness of the iind century that a certain heretic, named Marcion, “presumed to prefix an unauthorized title to that very Epistle,” (“Marcion ei titulum aliquando interpolare gestiit,”)—which title obviously _could not stand unless those two words were first erased from the text_. To interpolate that new title, and to erase the two words which were plainly inconsistent with it, were obviously correlative acts which must always have been performed together.