This element in which we live and move and have our being, which stretches around and beyond the strictly moral element in us, around and beyond the finite sphere of what is originated, measured, and controlled by our own understanding and will,--this infinite element is very present to Paul's thoughts, and makes a profound impression on them. By this element we are receptive and influenced, not originative and influencing; now, we all of us receive far more than we originate. Our pleasure from a spring day we do not make; our pleasure, even, from an approving conscience we do not make. And yet we feel that both the one pleasure and the other can, and often do, work with us in a wonderful way for our good. So we get the thought of an impulsion outside ourselves which is at once awful and beneficent. 'No man,' as the Hebrew psalm says, 'hath quickened his own soul.'[45] 'I know,' says Jeremiah, 'that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.'[46] Most true and natural is this feeling; and the greater men are, the more natural is this feeling to them. Great men like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute their success to their fortune, their star; religious great men have loved to say that their sufficiency was of God.[47] But through every great spirit runs a train of feeling of this sort; and the power and depth which there undoubtedly is in Calvinism, comes from Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it. Paul is not, like Calvinism, overwhelmed by it; but it is always before his mind and strongly agitates his thoughts. The voluntary, rational, and human world, of righteousness, moral choice, effort, filled the first place in his spirit. But the necessary, mystical, and divine world, of influence, sympathy, emotion, filled the second; and he could pass naturally from the one world to the other. The presence in Paul of this twofold feeling acted irresistibly upon his doctrine. What he calls 'the power that worketh in us,'[48] and that produces results transcending all our expectations and calculations, he instinctively sought to combine with our personal agencies of reason and conscience. [Footnote 45: _Ps._ xxii, 29.] [Footnote 46: _Jer._, x, 23.] [Footnote 47: II _Cor._, iii, 5.] [Footnote 48: _Eph._, iii, 20.]