ce in
God's sight because we perform it, meanwhile making 'the law' under
which we act, believed to be divine, a substitute for the living and
personal God, and resenting any fresh and immediate claim of God on the
human soul.

In this mixture of subservience and independence, of religious humility
and human pride, Saul of Tarsus had been brought up 'at the feet of
Gamaliel in Jerusalem.' His was not {14} one of those slack
consciences which enable men to take the lowest line which respectable
public opinion will allow. In every ecclesiastical system the strict
law comes to be mitigated by various dispensations and
compensations--generally substitutions of the easier ceremonial for the
harder moral requirement. But young Saul no doubt took the law in its
fullest sense as the thing to be kept, with all its accompanying
traditions. So taken, it constituted no doubt what St. Peter calls
it[18]--an intolerable yoke. A strict Jew must have had a very
difficult life of it. But it was not this yoke of specific outward
requirements that staggered St. Paul. What he found crushing was the
inward claim--'Thou shall not covet[19].' He who had determined to
appear before God at the last with a clear record as one who had kept
the law, found himself confronted by an inner and searching claim of
the divine righteousness, to which no blamelessness in outward conduct
enabled him to correspond. He could not help feeling himself a sinner
in the eye of God; and the sacrificial system plainly gave his
conscience no relief at all. He does not even allude to it in this
connexion. Meanwhile, as he moved {15} about in Jewish society of the
empire at Tarsus and elsewhere, he found that it required no spiritual
microscope to discover that the law in many of its plainest moral
injunctions was in fact not being observed at all. He seemed to see
that instead of the law being really the means of justification, it in
effect put 'the righteous nation' simply in the position of condemned
sinners, and himself among them, as fully as if they were simply
without a divinely given law, like the 'sinners of the Gentiles.'

We know well how, when the way of God had been learnt more perfectly,
this earlier moral experience of the effect of the law on himself and
others worked itself out in St. Paul's mind into a deep theory of the
function, not of 'the law' only, that is the Mosaic law, but of law
altogether--of 'the letter' of any body of externa