must be followed first
of all. Its light is clearer than the light of intellect, and must be
left supreme. Whatever be the bewilderment of my intellect, I am
self-condemned, {120} God-condemned, if I play false to the moral
light. And arguments to the contrary, however clever-sounding or
philosophical, are in fact sophistry. There is, we must confess, a
good deal of such sophistry to-day in the use of arguments drawn from
the current philosophy of necessitarianism and the idea of heredity.

[1] Chapters ix-xi.

[2] The points are resumed in ix. 1.

[3] Ps. xxxii.

{121}

DIVISION I. Sec. 4. CHAPTER III. 9-20.

_Sin and condemnation universal._

At this point the direct argument with an opponent is dropped; and St.
Paul restates what he has so far been occupied in proving. It is not
that Jews are in a worse position than Gentiles. It is that all
together are involved in the same moral failure. To deepen the
impression that this is a true statement, St. Paul culls from various
psalms and from Isaiah a series of passages describing a general state
of depravity, moral blindness, apathy, failure, unprofitableness,
falsity, hatred, and outrage against God and man. These utterances of
the book of 'the law' (here used for the Old Testament scriptures
generally) are meant for those first to whom this law belonged. They
condemn Jews as well as Gentiles. They show all equally to be under
{122} divine judgement. They prove that if the written law could teach
men God's will, it could not, by the works that it enjoined, enable him
to satisfy God. It had its function only in teaching him to know his
sinfulness by contrast to his plainly declared duty. The conclusion is
then that all men, Jews and Gentiles alike, are involved in sin, are
under the wrath of a holy God, and are in utter need of a deliverance
which they are incapable of procuring for themselves.

What then? are we in worse case than they? No, in no wise: for we
before laid to the charge both of Jews and Greeks, that they are all
under sin; as it is written,

There is none righteous, no, not one;
There is none that understandeth,
There is none that seeketh after God;
They have all turned aside, they are together become unprofitable;
There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one:
Their throat is an open sepulchre;
With their tongues they have used deceit:
The poison of asps is under their lips:
Whose mouth