This unfortunate result becomes apparent in regard to the question of the Law. He is unable to make it in any way intelligible how Paul was necessarily led, as a matter of reasoning, to the conviction that it was no longer valid. In the last resort he can only appeal to the unique character of the vision on the Damascus road. He assumes that this “brought to an issue in the zealous Pharisee not only a theoretic, but also an ethical crisis, terminating that painful condition of inner division which Paul pictures out of his own inmost consciousness when he speaks of the experiences which are associated with subjection to the law.” “Previously,” he continues, “the Pharisee had anxiously sought to conceal from himself, or to argue away, the fact that the law was impossible of fulfilment, and was therefore no way of salvation, but rather the contrary. There now rose upon this melancholy scene, strewn with the shattered fragments of attempts to gain righteousness, a new light streaming from the Christ, whom the legalists had delivered to death, whereas His being raised again by God guaranteed the actual presence of another way of salvation. Not only did his former legal service appear to him a life of sin, his Pharisaic rabbinism as foolishness, his attack upon the Messianic community as enmity to God, but even in his inmost being a crisis had taken place in consequence of which a tension, under which he had hitherto groaned, had suddenly been relaxed.” [pg 105] How do we know that Paul when he was still a persecutor of the Christians was suffering inward distress from his experiences of the powerlessness of the law? How did the vision of Christ bring about the resolution of this tension? How, exactly, did it reveal a way of salvation by which the abolition of the law was implied? In themselves the vision of Christ, and the law, have nothing to do with one another. What Paul received in that moment was the conviction of the Messiahship of Jesus. While other believers were content simply to adopt this conviction, he proceeds to draw from it in some way or other the conclusion that the law was henceforth invalidated. Whether he did that at the moment or only later, we do not know. What is certain is only that he does draw this conclusion, though it is not contemplated either in the thoughts of Jesus or in those of the primitive community.