become as little children,--sank down and worked there even before Paul ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting him ready for the crisis of his conversion. Such doctrines offered new fields of righteousness to the eyes of this indefatigable explorer of it, and enlarged the domain of duty of which Pharisaism showed him only a portion. Then, after the satisfaction thus given to his desire for a full conception of righteousness, came Christ's injunctions to make clean the inside as well as the outside, to beware of the least leaven of hypocrisy and self-flattery, of saying and not doing;--and, finally, the injunction to feel, after doing all we can, that, as compared with the standard of perfection, we are still unprofitable servants. These teachings were, to a man like Paul, for the practice of righteousness what the others were for the theory;--sympathetic utterances, which made the inmost chords of his being vibrate, and which irresistibly drew him sooner or later towards their utterer. Need it be said that he never forgot them, and that in all his pages they have left their trace? It is even affecting to see, how, when he is driven for the very sake of righteousness to put the law of righteousness in the second place, and to seek outside the law itself for a power to fulfil the law, how, I say, he returns again and again to the elucidation of his one sole design in all he is doing; how he labours to prevent all possibility of misunderstanding, and to show that he is only leaving the moral law for a moment in order to establish it for ever more victoriously. What earnestness and pathos in the assurance: 'If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily, righteousness should have been by the law!'[29] 'Do I condemn the law?' he keeps saying; 'do I forget that the commandment is holy, just, and good? Because we are no longer under the law, are we to sin? Am I seeking to make the course of my life and yours other than a service and an obedience?' This man, out of whom an astounding criticism has deduced Antinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror 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. This man, whom Calvin and Luther and their followers have shut up into the two scholastic doctrines of election and justification, would have said, could we hear him, just what he said about circumcision and uncircumcision in his own day: 'Election is nothing, and justification is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.' [Footnote 29: _Gal._, iii, 21.]