it worse than useless. Meanwhile there was forming itself in Saul's mind the conviction that the whole attitude of the Pharisees towards God was false. They lived as if God had made a contract or covenant with {254} them, and within the terms of this covenant man could deal with God on an independent basis. God must keep to His covenant and not augment it or change it. And on their side the people of God under the covenant had nothing to do but to keep their part of the bargain and claim their reward with a conscious and proper pride in the merits of their race and of themselves. This was exactly the spirit in which they rejected Jesus as the Christ, as it was also exactly this spirit which He had chosen for His sternest denunciations. But all this idea of merits, all this boasting, must have come to seem to Saul's mind monstrously untrue to the real fundamental relation of man to God. For who maketh thee to differ? and what hast thou, O Jew, that thou didst not receive? And if thou didst receive it, why dost thou boast thyself as if thou hadst not received it? Thus St. Paul's training must not only have made him feel that he could not satisfy himself in keeping the whole law; but it must also have convinced him that law itself as a principle, law as understood and represented among the orthodox Jews, was fundamentally and permanently incompatible with the real relation of man to God. There were many elements in the Old Testament, {255} notably in the Psalms, in which a quite different relation of man to God was indicated--a relation of meek trust as of a son to a father, and of penitence and dependence and peace. But in the teaching St. Paul had received, the law, the legal covenant of man and God, which suggested a quite different moral attitude, was the essential element; and that, we must suppose, he felt increasingly sure was a foundation on which he could not stand.