However revolutionary the conversion of anyone may be, it has always antecedents ; and the basal element in St. Paul's religious experience was the awakened conscience lie inherited from his Jewish ancestry- He grew up with the conviction so in- grained in his mind as to be a portion of his very being that the only real blessedness which a liumiin being can enjoy, in time or eternity, lies in tli<- ap- proval of God, pronouncing him righteous. This belief is wrouglit into the minds of children in pious homes, and the absence of it in many of those who occupy the pews at the present day is that which makes preaching diflicult j because the oiler of the gospel to those who have never hungered after righteousness is like offering water to those who arenotathirst. In heathen lands missionaries have to create a conscience, they tell us, before they ap- peal to it ; and it is this which makes their work so laborious. But from his fathers St. Paul had inherited this invaluable sensibility ; and so it comes to pass that he sometimes speaks of his Chris- tian life as continuous with his Jewish experience, though at other times he speaks of the two as separated by a great gulf.
The waj' of satisfying this passion for the Divine favour taught to him by his ancestors and teachers was the fiillilment of the Law, to which he devoted himself with the concentration of a nature which did nothing by halves. It was probably his failure to satisfy himself with these ellbrts that drove him to the persecution of the Christians ; because he was in need of some extra service, to make up for the lack by which his performances were beset. From the time when the I'enth Commandment taught him the spiritual and interior nature of the Law (Ro 7'), he never could appease his conscience, and tliere went on in his breast continually a struggle between the law in the Book and the law in tlie members, described in Ro 7. This was the goad against which he was kicking in his unconverted state, and it is not unlikely that the pain may have been aggravated by observing the heroism and spiritual exaltation of the martyrs, whom he could not but suspect to be better men than him- self.
In the early chapters of Kom. St. Paul gives uni- versality to these experiences of his own, conclud- ing that Gentile and Jew are under sin, and proving that all alike have come short of the glory of God. It might have been thought that, according to his own principles, the Gentiles could not be guilty of sin, because they had no Law. But they had a law, written not on stones but on the tables of the heart ; for in every human being, as he comes into tlie world, there is a conscience, informing him of the existence of God and of the elementary demands of the Divine will, so that he is without excuse if he sins against this natural light. In this sense the Gentiles had without exception been sinners, and even great sinners, descending from one degree of wickedness to another ; because, when they forsook God, He gave them over to themselves ever more and more, punishing sin with sin. From such depths of heathen corruption the Jews might expect to have been saved by tlie restraining force of their Law ; but he charges his fellow-countrj'men with practising the very same sins as were committed by the Gentiles, and that to such a degree that by the scandal of tlieir wickedness the name of Jalnveh had been made a by- word among the heathen. The greater the light the more aggravated is the sin ; and so the Law, which in itself is holy and just and good, had become an instrument not of justification but of condemnation. Not infrequently has St. Paul been accused of exaggeration in thus mak- ing all men out to be sinners, with no dill'erence among them ; but he has the saints as well as the sinners on his side in making the accusation uni-
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versal. It cannot, however, be denied that St. Paul is entering into a region of speculation where it may not be so easy in our time to follow him, when he traces this unii-ersal liability to sin and punish- ment to the fall of Adam and tlie imimtation of the guilt of Adam's first sin to his posterity. It is, indeed, debatable whether the latter is really one of his beliefs, or whether his idea was not rather that all human beings, having fallen into sin on account of their connexion with tlie first man, are held guilty not of Adam's sin but of their own. In either case we recognize the energy with wliich a logical mind pur.sues back to their ultimate source the facts of which it is conscious in its own exi)eri- ence or which it has observed in the conduct of others. St. Paul's theology sprang directly out of experience, and the religious experiences of his boyhood and youth culminated in an overpowering sense of guilt and sinfulness.
Corresjionding with this anterior exercise of con- science there was, at the heart of the conversion itself, an element of terror, which is apt to be over- looked. When St. Paul heard himself accused of persecution b}' the Interlocutor addressing him from above, and was told, in answer to his question, that He whom he was persecuting was Jesus, and when thereupon there flashed into his soul an overwhelm- ing sense of guilt, because the transactions of the foregoing months of his life were suddenly revealed as odious crimes, he anticipated that the next step must be the pouring out on his devoted head of the Divine wrath in some indescribable form. But, when, instead of being so treated, he found himself caught up, as it were, in the Divine arms and pressed to the Divine heart, he knew in an instant that God was a Being totally different from bis con- ceptions of Him hitherto, and that all for which he had been in vain striving with so much labour and sorrow was given to him in a moment without money and without price. This is what he calls the grace of God, and he is never tired of celebrat- ing it.