this or that'--if
they do not harden their hearts to it, they pass through the stages of
experience which St. Paul has so admirably idealized. There is that in
them which the prohibitions of the divine law stimulates into
antagonism. They become conscious of a power which beguiles or cheats
them into breaking the law; they awake to the sense of sin and failure
to do God's will, and find that they are not their own masters, but are
drifting under the impulse of what is not themselves. There awakens in
them the conscience and will to approve and choose what is right, and
with that a 'self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood,' as they
realize that though they approve and choose the right they cannot do
it. Thus the conviction is strengthened that their true selves are on
the side of God and right, and that which holds them captive is an
alien tyranny which has got its lodgement in their lower nature.

This is the psychological moment for the arrival of the gospel. The
man who simply {265} desires the right and is paralyzed by his own
impotence to realize it in his own strength, out of the depth of his
despair learns that God is not a taskmaster and judge, but a Father;
that He is not his adversary, but is on his side; that if he will
simply surrender himself to the divine love, as it is made evident in
Christ, all his past failures and sins are as if they had never been,
and for the future God will not teach him from outside and leave him to
struggle alone, but will work in him to will and to do His good
pleasure. Then the sense of moral impotence may pass into the sense of
power in Christ. And in proportion as any man's actual life-history,
or the history of any group of men, corresponds to this ideal sketch,
the period of moral struggle and failure may fall in the main outside
the regeneration and new life in Christ.

But, almost from the beginnings of Christianity, and increasingly as
Christianity has become popular, men have been 'christened' in infancy
or in mature life without the moral issue having been defined or the
moral will awakened. An ordinary Englishman, for example, is baptized
in infancy. This means that he is actually regenerate and introduced
into {266} the body of Christ. In rare cases he is so brought up as to
realize this, and corresponds so willingly with the teaching that he
lives the life of the regenerate from the first, and never, except in a
very refined form, knows the sense of imp