of Antinomianism, that he goes to grace for the
sole purpose of extirpating it, and even then cannot rest without
perpetually telling us why he is gone there."

Righteousness then, as St. Paul conceives it, stands in keeping the law
and so serving God. But to serve God, "to follow that central clue in
our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy
task.... In some way or other, says Bishop Wilson, 'every man is
conscious of an opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit.'" No
one is more keenly conscious of this opposition than St. Paul himself.
How is he to bring the evil and self-seeking tendencies of his
composite nature into conformity with the law and will of God? "Mere
commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition
in the desires it tries to control.... Neither the law of nature nor the
law of Moses availed to bind men to righteousness. So we come to the
word which is the governing word of the Epistle to the Romans--the word
_all_. As the word _righteousness_ is the governing word of St. Paul's
entire mind and life, so the word _all_ is the governing word of this
his chief epistle. The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the
law of Moses, alike fail to achieve righteousness. '_All_ have sinned,
and come short of the glory of God.' All do what they would not, and do
not what they would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty,
miserable. 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body
of this death?' Hitherto we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals;
we have now come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of
religion." Paul is profoundly conscious of his own imperfections, of the
tendencies in his nature which war against righteousness; of his
inability, in common with all the human race, to follow perfectly the
law of God. He has now come to know Christ's mind and life. Christ has,
in his own phrase, apprehended him--laid hold on him; and he is
persuaded that Christ so laid hold upon him in order to lead him into
perfect, not partial, righteousness--into entire conformity with the
will of God. In coming to know Christ, he had come to know perfect
righteousness, and he desired to attain to it himself, believing that
Christ had laid hold on him for that very purpose.

And when we come to the vision of that perfect Righteousness, and Paul's
desire to attain to it, we are seasonably reminded of the order in which
his idea