[Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =For I know that there dwells not in me, that is, in my flesh, good;= in my personal life, so long, and so far, as it "reverts" to self as its working centre, all is evil, for nothing is as God would have it be. And that "_flesh_," that self-life, is ever there, latent if not patent; present in such a sense that it is ready for instant reappearance, from within, if any moral power less than that of the Lord Himself is in command. =For the willing lies at my hand; but the working out what is right, does not.[113]= "_The willing_" (τὸ θέλειν), as throughout this passage, means not the ultimate _fiat_ of the man's soul, deciding his action, but his earnest moral approbation, moral sympathy, _the convictions_ of the enlightened being. [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =For not what I will, even good, do I; but what I do not will, even evil, that I practise.[114]= [Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =Now if what I do is what I do not will, no longer,= as once, =do I work it out, but the indweller in me, Sin.= Again his purpose is not excuse, but deliverance. No deadly antinomianism is here, such as has withered innumerable lives, where the thought has been admitted that sin may be in the man, and yet the man may not sin. His thought is, as all along, that it is his own shame that thus it is; yet that the evil is, ultimately, a thing alien to his true character, and that therefore he is right to call the lawful King and Victor in upon it. And now comes up again the solemn problem of the Law. That stern, sacred, monitor is looking on all the while, and saying all the while the things which first woke sin from its living grave in the old complacent experience, and then, in the regenerate state, provoked sin to its utmost treachery, and most fierce invasions. And the man hears the voice, and in his new-created character he loves it. But he has "reverted," ever so little, to his old attitude, to the self-life, and so there is _also_ rebellion in him when that voice says "Thou shalt." [Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =So I find the Law=--he would have said, "I find it my monitor, honoured, aye and loved, but not my helper"; but he breaks the sentence up in the stress of this intense confession; =so I find the Law--for me,= me =with a will to do the right,--that for me the evil lies at hand.= [Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =For I have glad sympathy with (συνήδομαι) the Law of God;= what He prescribes I endorse with delight as good, =as regards the inner man,= that is, my world of conscious insight and affection[115] in the new life; [Sidenote: Ver. 23.] =but I see= (as if I were a watcher from without) =a rival (ἕτερον) law,= another and contradictory precept, "serve _thyself_," =in my limbs,= in my world of sense and active faculty, =at war with the law of my mind,= the Law of God, adopted by my now enlightened thinking-power as its sacred code, =and seeking to make me captive in that war[116] to the law of sin,= the law =which is in my limbs.=