otence or passes through the
period of hopeless struggle. He has never found God's commandments
grievous. But in most cases there is no such pains taken to enlighten
the young conscience, or no such readiness of correspondence. The man
lives as his surroundings suggest--a decent enough life, very likely,
and more or less honourable, but never in face of the full divine law.
And such an one is 'alive without the law.' For him all the
experiences St. Paul describes are still to come, inside the circle of
his actual regeneration. And they may be very gradual and slow, and
may repeat themselves, more or less, innumerable times. St. Paul's is
an ideal picture; but the intended issue is always the same. When we
find ourselves saying, 'To will is present with me, but to do that
which is good is not,' we may be quite certain that we are not
realizing the power of our new birth. We are as men whom God has as
yet only externally visited. We are conscious of our own weakness and
of the {267} strength of evil; but not of the third force, stronger
than either ourselves or the power of evil, which is at our disposal if
we will draw upon it. What is needed is a deliberate and whole-hearted
realization that we are in Christ and Christ is in us by His Spirit; an
unconditional surrender of faith to Him: a practice, which grows more
natural by exercise, of remembering and deliberately drawing by faith
upon His strength in the moments of temptation and not merely upon our
own resources. 'In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth I will do thus
and thus.' So we too may form like St. Paul the habit of victory. We
too may cry in sober earnest 'It is no longer I that live (in my naked
self), but Christ that liveth in me.' 'I thank God through Jesus
Christ our Lord.'

When that sense of struggle or failure which St. Paul describes occurs,
as is generally the case with us traditional Christians, in the process
of our awakening to the knowledge of the new birth, we may in a sense
say that the struggle is part of the process of regeneration[8]; but
the word 'regeneration' best describes, not a process, but a single
divine act upon us and in {268} us[9], and this single divine act is
consistently identified in the New Testament with our baptism, though
it is only realized by our moral conversion when we awake to claim the
privileges of our new life.

iii.

There are two smaller points which claim notice.

We are reminded by the w