No doubt these deep questionings about the law, and the growing misery accompanying them, made him at first all the more zealous for it. No doubt they explain his fanaticism against the Christians. No doubt his 'kicking against the goad' represents the rebellion of his heart against anything which seemed to threaten the position of the law of his fathers, and especially against the utter upheaval of foundations involved in accepting for Christ Him whom the leaders of his people had rejected and caused to be crucified. But when he had effected the great transition, when he had found in Jesus Christ all that satisfied his deepest instincts about God and his deepest desires for union with Him, his old experience of the law took shape in a profound theory of its place in the divine {256} education of the human race. Ultimately man is meant to be in such close and harmonious relations to the divine Spirit that he should both know what is right and do it by an inner light and power. But an outward written law was a necessary prelude to this; and that in the main because sin--individual sins and the long tradition of sin--had hardened men's consciences and blinded their eyes, and the divine law as proclaimed through the conscience had become in consequence either utterly inadequate or had even been silenced altogether. A written law therefore, peremptory and explicit, and announcing its sanction in definite penalties, was needed to teach men anew what God really required. It was given in such a mode as threw men on their own independent moral strength, and by that very fact convinced the best among them of their inward weakness and sin; while to many more it appeared rather as involving an impossible effort--as 'a yoke which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear.' In either case it was their 'tutor to bring them to Christ'--with His teaching of God, not as a taskmaster, but as a Father, righteous indeed, but still more loving. And if there were others again, shallow or worthless men, whom the law simply hardened {257} in the superficial self-righteousness of mere 'observances,' or the worst sort of religious hypocrisy, that was only another way of demonstrating its inadequacy. It left the world to choose between the Pharisees and Christ as representing real righteousness.