If we read aright Acts xxiv. 20, 21, with Acts xxiii. 6, we see St Paul himself once, under urgent pressure of circumstances, betrayed into an equivocation, and then, publicly and soon, expressing his regret of conscience. "I am a Pharisee, and a Pharisee's son; about the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question." True, true in fact, but not the whole truth, not the unreserved account of his attitude towards the Pharisee. Therefore, a week later, he confesses, does he not? that in this one thing there _was_ "evil in him, while he stood before the council." Happy the Christian, happy indeed the Christian public man, immersed in management and discussion, whose memory is as clear about truth-telling, and whose conscience is as sensitive! [Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =What then? are we superior?[31]= Say =not= so =at all (μηδαμῶς).= Thus now he proceeds, taking the word finally from his supposed antagonist. Who are the "_we_" and with whom are "we" compared? The drift of the argument admits of two replies to this question. "_We_" may be "_we Jews_"; as if Paul placed himself in instinctive sympathy, by the side of the compatriot whose cavils he has just combated, and gathered up here into a final assertion all he has said before of the (at least) equal guilt of the Jew beside the Greek. Or "_we_" may be "_we Christians_," taken for the moment as men apart from Christ; it may be a repudiation of the thought that he has been speaking from a pedestal, or from a tribunal. As if he said, "Do not think that I, or my friends in Christ, would say to the world, Jewish or Gentile, that we are holier than you. No; we speak not from the bench, but from the bar. Apart from Him who is our peace and life, we are 'in the same condemnation.' It is exactly because we are in it that we turn and say to you, 'Do not ye fear God?'" On the whole, this latter reference seems the truer to the thought and spirit of the whole context. =For we have already charged Jews and Greeks, all of them, with being under sin; with being brought under sin,= as the Greek (ὑφ᾽ ἁμαρτίαν) bids us more exactly render, giving us the thought that the race has fallen _from_ a good estate _into_ an evil; self-involved in an awful superincumbent ruin. [Sidenote: Ver. 10.] =As it stands written, that there is not even one man righteous; there is not a man who understands, not a man who seeks his (τὸν) God. All have left the road; they have turned worthless together. There is not a man who does what is good, there is not, even so many as one. A grave set open is their throat,= exhaling the stench of polluted words; =with their tongues they have deceived; asps' venom is under their lips[32]; (men) whose mouth is brimming with curse and bitterness. Swift are their feet to shed blood; ruin and misery= for their victims =are in their ways; and the way of peace they never knew. There is no such thing as fear of God before their eyes.=