The Pastorals already make it apparent that even the Pauline churches are not exempt from the inevitable tendency of the age to fall back upon authority. The very sublimity of Paul's consciousness of apostolic inspiration made it the harder for the next generation to assert any for itself. Moreover heresy was growing apace. If even the outward pressure of persecution tended to drive the churches together in brotherly sympathy, still more indispensable would appear the need of traditional standards to maintain the "type of sound doctrine," "the faith once for all delivered to the saints." Without such it would be impossible to check the individualism of errorists who took Paul's sense of personal inspiration and mystical insight as their model, _without_ Paul's sobriety of critical control under the standard of "the law of Christ." It is no surprise, then, to find even at the headquarters of Paulinism early in the second century a sweeping tendency to react toward the 'apostolic' standards. In particular, as Gnostic exaggeration of the Pauline mysticism led continually further toward disregard of the dictates of common morality, and a wider divergence from the Jewish conceptions of the world to come, it was natural that men like Polycarp and Papias should turn to the Matthæan and Petrine tradition of the Lord's oracles, and to the Johannine 'prophecies' regarding the resurrection and judgment. Had nothing intervened between Gnostics and reactionaries the most vital elements of Paul's gospel might well have disappeared, even at this great headquarters of Paulinism. The Doketists, with their exaggerated Hellenistic mysticism, were certainly not the true successors of Paul. They showed an almost contemptuous disregard for the historic Jesus, a one-sided aim at personal redemption, by mystic union of the individual soul with the Christ-spirit, to the disregard of "the law of Christ," even in some cases of common morality. Paul was characterized by a splendid loyalty to personal purity, to the social ideal of the Kingdom, and to the unity of the brotherhood in the spirit of reciprocal service. On the other hand men like the author of the Pastoral Epistles, Ignatius and Polycarp, with their almost panic-stricken resort to the authority of the past, were not perpetuating the true spirit of the great Apostle. Their reliance was on ecclesiastical discipline, concrete and massive miracle in the story of Jesus, particularly on the point of the bodily--or, as they would have said, the "fleshly"--resurrection. Their conception of his recorded "words," made of them a fixed, superhuman standard and rule, a "new law." Teachers of this type, much as they desired and believed themselves to be perpetuating the "sacred deposit" of Paul, were in reality conserving its form and missing its spirit. Such men would gladly "turn to the tradition handed down," of the Matthæan Sayings, and the Petrine Story. But in the former they would