l enactments. Law,
he found, could enlighten the conscience, but it could never reach deep
enough to the springs of will to strengthen and purify them. God must
become more intimate to man than any external law can make Him. A law
of ordinances can only be a preparatory discipline, intended by the
very falsity of the assumption on which it is based to teach men that
they are not what they fancied themselves. {16} They fancied
themselves beings sufficiently independent to stand on their own basis
and enter into a covenant with God, to make a compact with Him to
observe a law and to abide by the result. It is the function of such a
compact as between independent parties to convince men that any such
relation between God, the Creator and Giver, and man, the creature and
simply the receiver--still more between God the Holy and man the
defiled and weakened--is simply contrary to fundamental facts[20].

As yet, however, St. Paul was only rendered miserable by his experience
under the law. To feel himself a sinner alienated from God was a
profound humiliation to his spiritual pride. He was fired no doubt by
the lofty ideal of the righteous nation, standing before God in virtue
of its righteousness, of its performance of the divine law, and
therefore making its claim on God to vindicate it before the whole
world. He threw himself zealously into rigid observance: only,
however, to find himself humiliated and perplexed.

Meanwhile, he was becoming conscious of the {17} claim of Jesus of
Nazareth to be the Christ. Under what conditions that claim began to
confront him we do not in the least know. But he must have known in
the period before his conversion that the severest attack on the
spiritual position of the Pharisees ever delivered had been delivered
by Him who claimed to be the Christ; that the Pharisees in consequence
had thrown all their influence into the rejection of His claim, and if
they had not been the most direct instruments of His death, yet had
encouraged and sanctioned it. Thus the more dissatisfied he became in
his own conscience, the more zealous he grew for the Pharisaic
position, and the more fanatical, therefore, against the followers of
the crucified Jesus. At what point it began to dawn upon his
conscience that perhaps Jesus was right and not the Pharisees; that
perhaps it was in His teaching that his own restless heart was to find
repose, we can only wonder. Some struggle such as this dawning