threatened decadence and dissolution after apostolic inspiration had died out, was the religion of authority, doctrinal and disciplinary, not the religion of the Spirit. Ecclesiastical appointees take the place as teachers and defenders of the faith of those who had been the inspired apostles and prophets of its extension. And on the other side are the false teachers. They are of Jewish character in their doctrine, aspiring to be "teachers of the Law" though really ignorant of its meaning. The worst of them are actual Jews (Tit. i. 10), which implies that some were not. Moreover the type of doctrine is still less like the Pharisaism of the synagogue than the "philosophy and vain deceit" rebuked by Paul at Colossæ. There is similar distinction of meats (treated in 2nd Tim. iv. 1-5 as a doctrine of "seducing spirits and demons"), and a prohibition of wine and marriage. There is side by side with this ascetic tendency one equally marked toward libertinism and love of money (2nd Tim. iii. 1-9). Both phases remind us of the "concision" of Paul's later letters. But besides the larger development new features appear of Hellenistic rather than Jewish type. The new doctrine of the resurrection as something "past already" is more closely connected with the Pauline mysticism, the present union of the believer with the life of Christ "hid in God," than with the Jewish idea of return to earth in resuscitated flesh. The Paulinist of the Pastorals is already foreshadowing the great conflict of Ignatius, Justin and Irenæus against those who "denied the resurrection," perverting (as the fathers allege) the meaning of Paul's saying, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (_cf._ 2nd Pet. iii. 16). And the Pastorals tend toward the un-Pauline doctrine soon to be formulated in the 'catholic' church: "I believe in the resurrection of the _flesh_." Again the false doctrine now distinctly avows itself a form of Gnosis. "They profess that they know God, but by their works they deny him, being abominable and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate." And our Paulinist's remedy is the traditional doctrine, the "pattern of sound words," the "deposit" of the Church teacher, more especially the whole-some words, "even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the doctrine which is according to godliness." Thus even the rich, if they do good, and become "rich in good works" will "lay up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come."