in Jesus,
and the might of the Spirit of Jesus to whom he became united, gave him
the power to do what he had so long and so ineffectually been willing.
This was his experience, and he bears witness to it. Even though he
would have made no claim to sinlessness after his conversion, yet the
sense of sin which possessed him so strongly, which made him call
himself 'not worthy to be called an apostle,' 'less than the least of
all saints,' and 'chief of sinners,' was in the main a memory of what
was past. The present sense was the consciousness of power in Christ.
It is inconceivable that St. Paul should describe himself, while a
Christian, as 'sold under sin.' And it was an idea of human corruption
quite different from St. Paul's which prevented Augustine and Calvin
from recognizing that either a pious Jew, or a Gentile which had not
the law, could be moved by the divine Spirit to 'rejoice in the law of
God after the inner man' (ver. 22), quite independently of any
knowledge of Christ.

{263}

But if St. Paul is in a real measure autobiographical in this passage,
there is no reasonable doubt that he is not merely so. He has
generalized his experiences to represent the moral experiences of the
race. The 'I' is the human individual in general. Thus 'alive without
the law,' if it can in a certain sense describe what St. Paul had once
been, describes much better the state of men--Greeks and Romans, or men
all the world over 'before the law came'--who had an easy social
standard and lived natural lives without any troublesome moral ideals,
and were wholly unvisited by conscientious scruples or the terrors of
the divine holiness. Upon such men comes the severer knowledge of the
righteousness of God through the teaching of some prophet or founder of
religion. It may come to men collectively in a nation or group, and
result in some general movement of conscience. Or it may come to an
individual through some circumstance which confronts him with a higher
moral claim than he has ever faced before--through the example of a
friend, through a book or a sermon. To many in St. Paul's day the
synagogues, where 'Moses had in every city them that preached him,' had
been the means of their awakening to the moral {264} claim of God. And
whenever men are thus confronted with the divine law of righteousness,
in a more or less perfect form and with more or less of impressiveness
laying its prohibitions upon them--'Thou shalt not do