1. Paul could claim that even in his pre-Christian days he had lived in all good conscience towards both God and man. Yet this profession of uprightness does not prevent him from confessing elsewhere that deep down in his consciousness there had been a mortal struggle between the principles of good and evil, in which the good was far from always winning the victory: "We all," he acknowledges, "had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as others." In the seventh chapter of Romans he has drawn a picture of this struggle, and it is to the very life. Theologians have, indeed, disputed among themselves as to the stage of experience there referred to--whether it is the state of an unconverted or of a converted man. But the human heart has no difficulty in interpreting it. The more thoroughly anyone is a man, the more easily will he understand it; and especially the more upright and conscientious anyone is, the more certainly must he have experienced what is described in words like these, "That which I do I allow not, for what I would that do I not, but what I hate that do I"; "For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not that I do"; "I find, then, a law that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Thus Paul had been a lost man, in hopeless bondage to sin. But he had to repent of his own righteousness as well as of his sin. He had inherited the passionate longing of the Jewish race for fellowship with God--the longing expressed a hundred times in the poetry of his fathers in words like these: "As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God"; "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?" He had been taught that the great prize of life is to be well-pleasing to God, and he had learned the lesson with all the passionate earnestness of his nature. Yet he never could attain to that for which he longed. There always seemed to be a cloud on the Divine face, and he was kept at a distance. Luther went through the very same experience. His was also a passionately religious nature, and he strove with all his might to get into the sunshine of God's face; but his efforts were entirely baffled. Wash them as he would, his hands were never clean.