Now the most startling instance of this is this, --that, though his life prior to his conversion seems to have been so conscientious and so pure, nevertheless he does not hesitate to associate himself with the outcast heathen, and to speak as if he were one of them. St. Philip Neri, before 5 he communicated, used to say, "Lord, I protest before Thee that I am good for nothing but to do evil." At confession he used to say, "I have never done one good action." He often said, "I am past hope." To a penitent he said, "Be sure 10 of this, I am a man like my neighbors, and nothing more." Well, I mean, that somewhat in this way, St. Paul felt all his neighbors, all the whole race of Adam, to be existing in himself. He knew himself to be possessed of a nature, he was 15 conscious of possessing a nature, which was capable of running into all the multiplicity of emotions, of devices, of purposes, and of sins, into which it had actually run in the wide world and in the multitude of men; and in that sense 20 he bore the sins of all men, and associated himself with them, and spoke of them and himself as one. He, I say, a strict Pharisee (as he describes himself), blameless according to legal justice, conversing with all good conscience 25 before God, serving God from his forefathers with a pure conscience, he nevertheless elsewhere speaks of himself as a profligate heathen outcast before the grace of God called him. He not only counts himself, as his birth made him, in the number of 30 "children of wrath," but he classes himself with the heathen as "conversing in the desires of the flesh," "and fulfilling the will of the flesh." And in another Epistle, he speaks of himself, at the time he writes, as if "carnal, sold under sin;" he speaks of "sin dwelling in him," and of his 5 "serving with the flesh the law of sin;" this, I say, when he was an Apostle confirmed in grace. And in like manner he speaks of concupiscence as if it were sin; all because he vividly apprehended, in that nature of his which grace had sanctified, 10 what it was in its tendencies and results when deprived of grace.