The best confirmation of the scientific validity of the importance which Paul thus attaches to the law of righteousness, the law of reason and conscience, God as moral law, is to be found in its agreement with the importance attached to this law by teachers the most unlike him; since in the eye of science an experience gains as much by having universality, as in the eye of religion it seems to gain by having uniqueness. 'Would you know,' says Epictetus, 'the means to perfection which Socrates followed? they were these: in every single matter which came before him he made the rule of reason and conscience his one rule to follow.' Such was precisely the aim of Paul also; it is an aim to which science does homage as a satisfying rational conception. And to this aim hope and fear properly attach themselves. For on our following the clue of moral order, or losing it, depends our happiness or misery; our life or death in the true sense of those words; our harmony with the universal order or our disharmony with it; our partaking, as St. Paul says, of the wrath of God or of the glory of God. So that looking to this clue, and fearing to lose hold on it, we may in strict scientific truth say with the author of the Imitation: _Omnia vanitas, præter amare Deum, et illi soli servire_. But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy task; and here again we are on the most sure ground of experience and psychology. In some way or other, says Bishop Wilson, every man is conscious of an opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit. _Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor_, say the thousand times quoted lines of the Roman poet. The philosophical explanation of this conflict does not indeed attribute, like the Manichæan fancy, any inherent evil to the flesh and its workings; all the forces and tendencies in us are, like our proper central moral tendency the desire of righteousness, in themselves beneficent. But they require to be harmonised with this tendency, because this aims directly at our total moral welfare,--our harmony as moral beings with the law of our nature and the law of God,--and derives thence a pre-eminence and a right to moderate. And, though they are not evil in themselves, the evil which flows from these diverse workings is undeniable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our members, _passion_, according to the Greek word used by Paul, _inordinate affection_, according to the admirable rendering of Paul's Greek word in our English Bible,[31] take naturally no account of anything but themselves; this arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can produce only confusion and misery. The spirit, the law of our mind, takes account of the universal moral order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice of that order expressing itself in us. Paul talks of a man sowing to _his_ flesh,[32] because each of us has of his own this individual body, this