ct or covenant with {254} them, and within
the terms of this covenant man could deal with God on an independent
basis. God must keep to His covenant and not augment it or change it.
And on their side the people of God under the covenant had nothing to
do but to keep their part of the bargain and claim their reward with a
conscious and proper pride in the merits of their race and of
themselves. This was exactly the spirit in which they rejected Jesus
as the Christ, as it was also exactly this spirit which He had chosen
for His sternest denunciations. But all this idea of merits, all this
boasting, must have come to seem to Saul's mind monstrously untrue to
the real fundamental relation of man to God. For who maketh thee to
differ? and what hast thou, O Jew, that thou didst not receive? And if
thou didst receive it, why dost thou boast thyself as if thou hadst not
received it? Thus St. Paul's training must not only have made him feel
that he could not satisfy himself in keeping the whole law; but it must
also have convinced him that law itself as a principle, law as
understood and represented among the orthodox Jews, was fundamentally
and permanently incompatible with the real relation of man to God.
There were many elements in the Old Testament, {255} notably in the
Psalms, in which a quite different relation of man to God was
indicated--a relation of meek trust as of a son to a father, and of
penitence and dependence and peace. But in the teaching St. Paul had
received, the law, the legal covenant of man and God, which suggested a
quite different moral attitude, was the essential element; and that, we
must suppose, he felt increasingly sure was a foundation on which he
could not stand.

No doubt these deep questionings about the law, and the growing misery
accompanying them, made him at first all the more zealous for it. No
doubt they explain his fanaticism against the Christians. No doubt his
'kicking against the goad' represents the rebellion of his heart
against anything which seemed to threaten the position of the law of
his fathers, and especially against the utter upheaval of foundations
involved in accepting for Christ Him whom the leaders of his people had
rejected and caused to be crucified. But when he had effected the
great transition, when he had found in Jesus Christ all that satisfied
his deepest instincts about God and his deepest desires for union with
Him, his old experience of the law took sh