and the letter to Philemon exhibits no lack of distinctive Pauline characteristics.
It is further urged that Paul’s style had developed, and that, in his advanced age, he had lost the vivacity once pecul- iar to him. One is tempted to smile at the suggestion of a development of style in the easy commonplaces of these Epis- tles over the nervous vigour of Romans, the racy incisiveness of Galatians and 2d Corinthians, and the majestic richness of Ephesians. As to a decline on account of age, Paul, on this showing, must have aged very rapidly. He styles himself “the aged’ in Philem. 9. Colossians was written at the same time with Philemon, and Philippians and Ephesians shortly before or after. The Pastorals (assuming Paul’s authorship) cannot have been written more than three or four years later than these; but the Epistles of the Captivity certainly betray no lack of vigour, and exhibit no signs of senility ; and the differences between these and the Pastorals are far greater than between the former and Paul’s earliest letters, written ten years before. The production of an old man may indeed exhibit a lack of energy or a carelessness of style, but an old writer does not abandon his favorite words or his characteristic turns of expression. After following Paul for a dozen years through ten Epistles, all marked by the essential features of his style, one finds it hard to believe that he should suddenly be- come a writer of an entirely different type, ignoring his own characteristic and favorite modes of expression. Surely the themes treated in the Pastorals would have furnished abundant occasion for vids Oeob, arrorvtpwars, vioberia, Simaoctyn Oeod, and écaiéw, which occurs only twice, and in one of these instances is applied to Christ.
VI. As to the character of the teaching, it is possible that the divergence of the teaching and of the Christian ideal of the Pastorals from those of the Pauline Epistles may have been somewhat exaggerated. On a fair construction, the Pastorals may be said to contain the essentials of the Pauline teaching, expressed or implied. More exaggerated, however, is the claim of Godet and Findlay, that the Pastorals repre-