apart from all question of its ritual elements, that it can
in the nature of things serve only a temporary purpose in the
conscience, by leading us to a truer knowledge of Him who terrifies
indeed, but only in order to reassure, and kills but only in order to
raise to life again.

ii.

At this point it is necessary to answer the two much-disputed
questions--and it is possible to do it briefly--Is St. Paul, in giving
this summary of moral experience, speaking 'of himself or of some other
man'? and--Is the struggle described in verses 14-24 to be regarded as
occurring without or within the frontiers of the regenerate state?

There is no doubt that St. Paul must be in part really describing an
experience through which he passed. He was really, we may imagine,
'alive without the law once' in the sense that he was brought up a
happy Jewish child, under the law but not deeply feeling the terror of
its claims, until he was growing towards {261} the 'independent' period
of life and found himself confronted with its requirements in detail.
There need be no doubt that he is speaking of some experience of his
own when he alludes, here as elsewhere, to the deceitfulness of sin;
and when he describes the two stages of moral progress--the first, in
which the conscience of the man is awakened to recognize that his
habitual practice is not in any full sense controlled by his reason and
will; and the second, in which the will is deliberately enlisted on the
side of good, and the man only made thereby the more conscious that his
will is in no real control of his actions, but that he is the captive
of the alien power of sin. In some sense, though St. Paul does not
give us the materials for saying exactly in what sense, he must have
passed through these stages of experience. He must have really felt
himself the slave of sin, though the sin was of a sort which left him,
'as touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.' He
must have felt that he could not do what he ought; and the bitterness
of his persecuting zeal may have been in part the reflection of this
sense of impotence.

And so far as St. Paul is speaking of himself, there can be no shadow
of doubt that the state {262} of conflict lay almost wholly outside his
conversion and regeneration. It was 'prevenient grace'--God's dealing
with him before he acknowledged Christ--that set his will so strongly
to desire and approve the right; and his new personal faith