beyond it, the sense of sin. Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste of energy and waste of time. We then enter that element of morbid and subjective brooding, in which so many have perished. This sense of sin, however, it is also possible to have not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to get rid of it, and the Greeks, with all their great gifts, had this sense not strongly enough; its strength in the Hebrew people is one of this people's mainsprings. And no Hebrew prophet or psalmist felt what sin was more powerfully than Paul. "Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head; therefore my heart faileth me." They are more than the hairs of mine head. The motions of what Paul calls "the law in our members" are indeed a hydrabrood; when we are working against one fault, a dozen others crop up without our expecting it; and this it is which drives the man who deals seriously with himself to difficulty, nay to despair. Paul did not need James to tell him that whoever offends on one point is, so far at least as his own conscience and inward satisfaction are concerned, guilty of all; he knew it himself, and the

unrest this knowledge gave him was his very startingpoint. He knew, too, that nothing outward, no satisfaction of all the requirements men may make of us, no privileges of any sort, can give peace of conscience ;— of conscience, "whose praise is not of men but of God." He knew, also, that the law of the moral order stretches beyond us and our private conscience, is independent of our sense of having kept it, and stands absolute and what in itself it is; even, therefore, though I may know nothing against myself, yet this is not enough, I may still not be just. Finally, Paul knew that merely to know all this and say it, is of no use, advances us nothing; "the kingdom of God is not in word but in power."

We have several times said that the Hebrew race apprehended God,-the universal order by which all things fulfil the law of their being,--chiefly as the moral order in human nature, and that it was their greatness that they apprehended him as this so distinctly and powerfully. But it is also characteristic of them, and perhaps it is what mainly distinguishes their spirit from the spirit of medieval Christianity, that they constantly thought, too, of God as the source of life and breath and all things, and of what they called "fulness of life" in all things. This way of thinking was common to them with the Greeks; although, whereas the Greeks threw

more delicacy and imagination into it, the Hebrews threw more energy and vital warmth. But to the Hebrew, as to the Greek, the gift of life, and health, and the world, was divine, as well as the gift of morals. "God's righteousness," indeed, "standeth like the strong mountains, his judgments are like the great deep; he is a righteous judge, strong and patient, who is provoked every day." This is the Hebrew's first and deepest conception of God,as the source of the moral order. But God is also, to the Hebrew, "our rock, which is higher than we," the power by which we have been "upholden ever since we were born," that has "fashioned us and laid his hand upon us" and envelops us on every side, that has "made us fearfully and wonderfully," and whose "mercy is over all his works." He is the power that " saves both man and beast, gives them drink of his pleasures as out of the river," and with whom is "the well of life." In his speech at Athens, Paul shows how full he, too, was of this feeling; and in the famous passage in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where he asserts the existence of the natural moral law, the source he assigns to this law is not merely God in conscience, the righteous judge, but God in the world and the workings of the world, the eternal and divine power from which all life and wholesome energy proceed.

This element in which we live and move and have our being, which stretches around and beyond the strictly moral element in us, around and beyond the finite sphere of what is originated, measured, and controlled by our own understanding and will,-this infinite element is very present to Paul's thoughts, and makes' a profound impression on them. By this element we are receptive and influenced, not originative and influencing ; now, we all of us receive far more than we originate. Our pleasure from a spring day we do not make; our pleasure, even, from an approving conscience we do not make. And yet we feel that both the one pleasure and the other can, and often do, work with us in a wonderful way for our good. So we get the thought of an impulsion outside ourselves which is at once awful and beneficent. "No man," as the Hebrew psalm says, "hath quickened his own soul." "I know," says Jeremiah, "that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.". Most true and natural is this feeling; and the greater men are, the more natural is this feeling to them. men like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute their success to their fortune, their star; religious great men have loved to say that their sufficiency was of God. But through every great spirit runs a train of

Great

feeling of this sort; and the power and depth which there undoubtedly is in Calvinism, comes from Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it. Paul is not, like Calvinism, overwhelmed by it; but it is always before his mind and strongly agitates his thoughts. The voluntary, rational, and human world, of righteousness, moral choice, effort, filled the first place in his spirit. But the necessary, mystical, and divine world, of influence, sympathy, emotion, filled the second; and he could pass naturally from the one world to the other. The presence in Paul of this twofold feeling acted irresistibly upon his doctrine. What he calls "the power that worketh in us," and that produces results transcending all our expectations and calculations, he instinctively sought to combine with our personal agencies of reason and conscience.

Of such a mysterious power and its operation some clear notion may be got by anybody who has ever had any overpowering attachment, or has been, according to the common expression, in love. Every one knows how being in love changes for the time a man's spiritual atmosphere, and makes animation and buoyancy where before there was flatness and dulness. One may even say that this is the reason why being in love is so popular with the whole human race,-because it relieves in so