[Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =For we know,= we men with our conscience, we Christians with our Lord's light, =that the Law,= this Law which sin so foully abused, =is spiritual,= the expression of the eternal Holiness, framed by the sure guidance of the Holy Spirit; =but= then =I,= I Paul, taken as a sinner, viewed apart from Christ, =am fleshly,= a child of self, =sold to be under sin;= yes, not only when, in Adam, my nature sold itself at first, but still and always, just so far as I am considered apart from Christ, and just so far as, in practice, I live apart from Christ, "reverting," if but for a minute, to my self-life. [Sidenote: Ver. 15.] =For the work I work out, I do not know,= I do not recognize; I am lost amidst its distorted conditions; =for= it is =not what I will that I practise (πράσσω), but= it is =what I hate that I do (ποιῶ).= [Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =But if what I do is what I do not will, I assent to the Law that it,= the Law, =is good;= I shew my moral sympathy with the precept by the endorsement given it by my will, in the sense of my earnest moral preference.[112] [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =But now,= in this state of facts, =it is no longer I who work out the work, but the indweller in me--Sin.= He implies by "_no longer_" that once it was otherwise; once _the central_ choice was for self, now, in the regenerate life, even in its conflicts, yea, even in its failures, it is for God. A mysterious "other self" is latent still, and asserts itself in awful reality when the true man, the man as regenerate, ceases to watch and to pray. And in this sense he dares to say "_it is no more I_." It is a sense the very opposite to the dream of self-excuse; for though the _Ego_ as regenerate does not do the deed, it has, by its sleep, or by its confidence, betrayed the soul to the true doer. And thus he passes naturally into the following confessions, in which we read at once the consciousness of a state which ought not to be, though it is, and also the conviction that it is a state _out of character_ with himself, with his personality as redeemed and new-created. Into such a confession there creeps no lying thought that he "is delivered to do these abominations" (Jer. vii. 10); that it is fate; that he cannot help it. Nor is the miserable dream present here that evil is but a phase of good, and that these conflicts are only discordant melodies struggling to a cadence where they will accord. It is a groan of shame and pain, from a man who could not be thus tortured if he were not born again. Yet it is also an avowal,--as if to assure himself that deliverance is intended, and is at hand,--that the treacherous tyrant he has let into the place of power _is an alien_ to him as he is a man regenerate. Not for excuse, but to clear his thought, and direct his hope, he says this to himself, and to us, in his dark hour.