We need hardly say that this profound paragraph has been discussed and interpreted most variously. It has been held by some to be only St Paul's intense way of presenting that great phenomenon, wide as fallen humanity--human will colliding with human conscience, so that "no man does all he knows." Passages from every quarter of literature, of all ages, of all races, have been heaped around it, to prove, (what is indeed so profoundly significant a fact, largely confirmatory of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin,[108]) that universal man is haunted by undone duties; and this passage is placed as it were in the midst, as the fullest possible confession of that fact, in the name of humanity, by an ideal individual. But surely it needs only an attentive reading of the passage, as a part of the Epistle to the Romans, as a part of the teaching of St Paul, to feel the extreme inadequacy of such an account. On the one hand the long groaning confession is no artificial embodiment of a universal fact; it is the cry of a human soul, if ever there was a personal cry. On the other hand the passage betrays a kind of conflict far deeper and more mysterious than merely that of "_I ought_" with "_I will not_." It is a conflict of "_I will_" with "_I will not_"; of "_I hate_" with "_I do_." And in the later stages of the confession we find the subject of the conflict avowing a wonderful sympathy with the Law of God; recording not merely an avowal that right is right, but a consciousness that God's precept is delectable. All this leads us to a spiritual region unknown to Euripides, and Horace, and even Epictetus. Again it has been held that the passage records the experiences of a half-regenerate soul; struggling on its way from darkness to light, stumbling across a border-zone between the power of Satan and the kingdom of God; deeply convinced of sin, but battling with it in the old impossible way after all, meeting self with self, or, otherwise, the devil with the man. But here again the passage seems to refuse the exposition, as we read _all_ its elements. It is no experience of a half-renewed life to "take delight with the law of God after the inner man." It is utterly unlawful for a half-regenerate soul to describe itself as so beset by sin that "it is _not I_, but sin that dwelleth in me." No more dangerous form of thought about itself could be adopted by a soul not fully acquainted with God.