of your lives, and you shall assuredly, by His strength, be now among the number of those who shall overcome, and, by His free grace and mercy, be hereafter among that blessed company who shall sit down with Him upon His throne, even as He also has overcome, and has set down on His Father's throne, at God's right hand for evermore.

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LECTURE XI.

ROMANS vii. 19.

FOR THE GOOD THAT I WOULD, I DO NOT; BUT THE EVIL WHICH I WOULD NOT, THAT I DO.

HAVING now concluded the history of St. Paul, every portion of which has proclaimed him to be the very chief of the apostles, eminent alike in all spiritual gifts and Christian graces, let us on the present occasion behold him, not on the high eminence upon which he stands as the great apostle of the Gentiles, but in the lowly walk of the Christian's private life. Let us follow him to his home, and to his closet; let us see him upon his knees before God

in private, and hear him pouring forth the humiliating confessions, and acknowledging the internal conflicts and struggles, which prove that, with all his high and holy privileges, he was still, like ourselves, the feeble, fallen, sinning child of sinful parents.

The seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans will present the apostle to us precisely in the situation to which I have referred, and will, by God's grace, minister greatly to the comfort and encouragement and edification of the believer, by convincing him that there is no difficulty under which he labours, no conflict in which he engages, that was not fully understood and experimentally known by St. Paul. For in this chapter we find recorded at greater length than in any other part of sacred writ, the struggle which is perpetually maintained in the renewed heart of every child of God, between the new principle of good which

has been implanted by the Spirit of God, and the old principle of evil which has been derived from our first and sinning parent, Adam.

St. Paul, having dwelt upon this painful but deeply interesting subject through many verses, sums up the matter in these words: "The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now, if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 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."

In speaking of this passage as developing the Christian experience of St. Paul, I am aware that I am differing from some very learned and excellent

commentators, who maintain that in these verses the apostle has no intention of referring to himself; that so far from St. Paul here speaking in his own person, he does not speak in the person of any regenerate or renewed Christian; that although he expresses himself, in the passage before us, in the first person, he is either putting himself in the imaginary position of the unregenerate man, or else speaking of himself, and of his feelings as they existed when he was the unconverted Pharisee, and not as he was when writing this epistle, the enlightened and holy apostle of the Lord Jesus. If this opinion be true, and if in the text and its context the writer be speaking in the person of Saul the unconverted, and not of Paul the apostle of the Lord, then, indeed, we grant that the passage is wholly inapplicable to the purpose for which we have this day produced it. It can no longer be sup