Therefore the advanced Pauline party were led on to regard the God who is revealed in the Old Testament as a different God from the God revealed by Christ. Cerdo first, and Marcion after him, represented the God of this world, the Demiurge, to be the author of evil; but the author of evil only in so far as that his nature being incomplete, his work was incomplete also. He created the world, but the world, partaking in his imperfection, contains evil mixed with good. He created the angel‐world, and part of it, through defect in the divinity of their first cause, fell from heaven. The germs of this doctrine, it was pretended, were to be found in St. Paul’s Epistles. In the second to the Corinthians, after speaking of the Jews as blinded to the revelation of the Gospel by the veil which is on their faces, the apostle says: “The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”(391) St. Paul had no intention of representing the God of the Jews who veiled their eyes as opposed to Christ; but it is easy to see how readily those who followed his doctrine of antagonism between the Law and the Gospel would be led to suppose that he did identify the God of the Law with the principle of obstructiveness and of evil. So also St. Paul’s teaching that sin was produced by the Law, that it had no positive existence, but was called into being by the imposition of the Commandments, lent itself with readiness to Marcion’s system. “The Law entered, that the offence might abound.”(392) “The motions of sins are by the Law.”(393) “I had not known sin, but by the Law: for I had not known lust, except the Law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”(394) This Law, imposed by the God of the Jews, is then the source of sin. It is imposed, not on the spirit, but on the flesh. In opposition to it stands the revelation of Jesus Christ, which repeals the Law of the Jews. “The Law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”(395) “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified without the deeds of the Law.”(396) “Before faith came, we were kept under the Law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the Law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”(397) We find in St. Paul’s writings all the elements of Marcion’s doctrine, but not compacted into a system, because St. Paul never had worked out such a theory, and would have shrunk from the conclusions which might be drawn from his words, used in the heat of argument, for the purpose of opposing an error, not of establishing a dogmatic theory.