ves right.

But if we begin to try, that, we find, is just what we cannot do. When a
man begins to hunger and thirst after righteousness, and, discontented
with himself, attempts to improve himself, he soon begins to find a
painful truth in many a word of the Bible and the Prayer Book to which he
gave little heed, as long as he was contented with himself, and with
doing just what pleased him, right or wrong. He soon finds out that he
has no power of himself to help himself, that he is tied and bound with
the burden of his sins, and that he cannot, by reason of his frailty,
stand upright--that he actually is sore let and hindered by his own sins,
from running the race set before him, and doing his duty where God has
put him. All these sayings come home to him as actual facts, most
painful facts, but facts which he cannot deny. He soon finds out the
meaning and the truth of that terrible struggle between the good in him
and the evil in him, of which St Paul speaks so bitterly in the text.
How, when he tries to do good, evil is present with him. How he delights
in the law of God with his inward mind, and yet finds another law in his
body, warring against the law of God, and bringing him into captivity to
the law of sin. How he is crippled by old bad habits, weakened by
cowardice, by laziness, by vanity, by general inability of will, till he
is ready,--disgusted at himself and his own weakness,--to cry, Who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?

Let him but utter that cry honestly. Let him once find out that he wants
something outside himself to help him, to deliver him, to strengthen him,
to stir up his weak will, to give him grace and power to do what he knows
instead of merely admiring it, and leaving it undone. Let a man only
find out that. Let him see that he needs a helper, a deliverer, a
strengthener--in one word, a Saviour--and he will find one. I verily
believe that, sooner or later, the Lord Jesus Christ will reveal to that
man what He revealed to St Paul; that He Himself will deliver him; and
that, like St Paul, after crying "O wretched man that I am, who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?" he will be able to answer
himself, I thank God--God will, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Christ
will deliver me from the bonds of my sins, Christ will stir up this weak
will of mine, Christ will give me strength and power, faithfully to
fulfil all my good desires,