own time.

64. The Old Adam and the New.--Paul's discovery of this way of
salvation was an actual experience; he simply knew that Christ, in the
moment when He met him, had placed him in that position of peace and
favor with God which he had long sighed for in vain, and, as time went
on, he felt more and more that in this position he was enjoying the
true blessedness of life. His mission henceforth must be to herald
this discovery in its simple and concrete reality under the name of the
Righteousness of God. But a mind like his could not help inquiring how
it was that the possession of Christ did so much for him. In the
Arabian wilderness he pondered over this question, and the gospel he
subsequently preached contained a luminous answer to it.

65. From Adam his children derive a sad double heritage--a debt of
guilt, which they cannot reduce, but are constantly increasing, and a
carnal nature, which is incapable of righteousness. These are the two
features of the religious condition of fallen man, and they are the
double source of all his woes.

But Christ is a new Adam, a new head of humanity, and those who are
connected with Him by faith become heirs of a double heritage of a
precisely opposite kind. On the one hand, just as through our birth in
the first Adam's line we get inevitably entangled in guilt, like a
child born into a family which is drowned in debt, so through our birth
in the line of the second Adam we get involved in a boundless heritage
of merit, which Christ, as the Head of His family, makes the common
property of its members. This extinguishes the debt of our guilt and
makes us rich in Christ's righteousness. "As by one man's disobedience
many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made
righteous." On the other hand, just as Adam transmitted to his
posterity a carnal nature, alien to God and unfit for righteousness, so
the new Adam imparts to the race of which He is the Head a spiritual
nature, akin to God and delighting in righteousness.

The nature of man, according to Paul, normally consists of three
sections--body, soul and spirit. In his original constitution these
occupied definite relations of superiority and subordination to one
another, the spirit being supreme, the body undermost, and the soul
occupying the middle position. But the fall disarranged this order,
and all sin consists in the usurpation by the body or the soul of the
place of the spirit.