Next, St. Paul asks why it is that we are no longer under the Law? Because we have no connection with that state of sin to which the Law was applicable. Our soul is like a wife whose lawful husband is dead. Or, to put the truth into another form, our old state was killed by our identification with Christ crucified, and we are espoused to Christ risen (vii. 1-6). What, then, shall we think of the Law? Is it sin? No. It reveals the sinfulness of sin, and it irritates dormant sin into activity. A thing cannot be identical with another thing which it exposes and irritates. But why did God permit the Law, which is holy, to prove fatal to my soul (vii. 13)? He did not. The Law was not fatal, though sin was all but fatal. Sin was permitted to do its worst that its real hideousness might be apparent. This is what took place. The Law gave me an ideal, but my better self, which corresponds to the Law, could not keep me from ding wrong or make me do right. I became involved in a terrible conflict. This was the opportunity of Christ. He has delivered me from that state of the body which involved me in sin and death. Without Him, I should still be serving the Law of God with my conscience, and the law of sin with my body (vii. 25). Where the Law of Moses failed, Christ splendidly succeeds. He not only sets before men an ideal, but also helps them to attain it, and fulfil the righteous claims of the moral Law, by uniting Himself with them by the Spirit (viii. 1-10). Men are now in a new relation to God: they call Him Father, He sees in them His sons. Though with all creation we wait still in fruitful pain for the fulness of redemption, we wait with confident hope. The Spirit is with us to help and to pray, we remember God's high purpose for us, we have known His love in the past, Jesus in infinite exaltation is interceding for us; {166} who, then, shall ever be able to separate us from the love of God (viii. 11-39)?