able citizen is free in his relation to the criminal law,
and passes the policeman without any sense of alarm--not because he is
at liberty to break the law, but because he has become accustomed to a
way of living with which the agents of the law are not called upon to
interfere. It is in a sense like this that St. Paul conceives the
Christians to have escaped from the bondage of the Mosaic law.

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3. What is the meaning of the common phrase our 'passions'? It refers
to those feelings which we experience without any action of our will.
It may be a mere neutral sensation of smell. It may be a feeling of
hunger, thirst, desire, anger. These are our 'passions' as opposed to
our actions. These appeal to the will as motives, and it appertains to
the will to determine whether it will yield to them and so translate
passions into voluntary actions. When the will is weak, and passion is
allowed to pass into action uncontrolled, the man becomes the slave of
sin, and his passions, in themselves innocent or only constituting the
material of temptation, become the 'sinful passions' of which St. Paul
speaks in this place.

[1] Matthew Arnold, _St. Paul and Protestantism_, p. 76.

[2] Eph. v. 22.

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DIVISION III. Sec. 6. CHAPTER VII. 7-25.

_The function and failure of the law._

The somewhat confused passage just dealt with, in which several moral
ideas and metaphors are struggling for the mastery, is followed by a
famous passage of luminous power in which St. Paul expounds, with a
profound insight into human nature, the function and failure of law.

The close alliance into which St. Paul constantly puts 'the law' with
the reign of sin, an alliance hardly suggested by any other New
Testament teacher, suggests inevitably the idea that St. Paul, like the
later Gnostics, regarded the law itself as 'sin,' that is, as owing its
origin to the power of evil and working for its ends. Such an idea he
of course repudiates. But all the same it is law, written or
proclaimed, and law only, which both awakens the sense of sin in man
and stimulates sin itself to put {246} forth its power. Let me take
myself, we may imagine St. Paul as saying (for the 'I' of this passage
is very far from being strictly autobiographical), as representing man
in his moral history. I was alive apart from any law once. That is to
say, I lived as suited me best, according to my instincts, asking no
moral questions and troubled