Righteousness then, as St. Paul conceives it, stands in keeping the law and so serving God.  But to serve God, “to follow that central clue in our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy task....  In some way or other, says Bishop Wilson, ’every man is conscious of an opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit.’” No one is more keenly conscious of this opposition than St. Paul himself.  How is he to bring the evil and self-seeking tendencies of his composite nature into conformity with the law and will of God?  “Mere commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition in the desires it tries to control....  Neither the law of nature nor the law of Moses availed to bind men to righteousness.  So we come to the word which is the governing word of the Epistle to the Romans—­the word all.  As the word righteousness is the governing word of St. Paul’s entire mind and life, so the word all is the governing word of this his chief epistle.  The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike fail to achieve righteousness. ’All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.’  All do what they would not, and do not what they would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable.  ’O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Hitherto we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals; we have now come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of religion.”  Paul is profoundly conscious of his own imperfections, of the tendencies in his nature which war against righteousness; of his inability, in common with all the human race, to follow perfectly the law of God.  He has now come to know Christ’s mind and life.  Christ has, in his own phrase, apprehended him—­laid hold on him; and he is persuaded that Christ so laid hold upon him in order to lead him into perfect, not partial, righteousness—­into entire conformity with the will of God.  In coming to know Christ, he had come to know perfect righteousness, and he desired to attain to it himself, believing that Christ had laid hold on him for that very purpose.

And when we come to the vision of that perfect Righteousness, and Paul’s desire to attain to it, we are seasonably reminded of the order in which his ideas come.  “For us, who approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it is Christ’s divinity which establishes His being without sin.  For Paul, who approached Christianity through his personal experience, it was Christ’s being without sin which established His divinity.  The large and complete conception of righteousness to which he himself had slowly and late, and only by Christ’s help, awakened, in Christ he seemed to see existing absolutely and naturally.  The devotion to this conception which made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion of which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Christ still stronger, by far,