It is an interesting and difficult question whether we should regard the intense moral dualism of the Epistle to the Romans as a confession that the writer has had an unusually severe personal battle with temptation. The moral struggle certainly assumes a more tragic aspect in these passages than in the experience of many saintly characters. We find something like it in Augustine, and again in Luther; it may even be suggested that these great men have stamped upon the Christian tradition the idea of a harsher 'clash of yes and no' than the normal experience of the moral life can justify. But it is not certain that the first person singular in such verses as 'O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?' is a personal confession at all. It may be for human nature generally that he is speaking, when he gives utterance to that consciousness of sin which was one of the most distinctive parts of the Christian religion from the first. It does not seem likely that a man of so lofty and heroic a character was ever seriously troubled with ignominious temptations. That he yielded to them, as Nietzsche and others have suggested, is in the highest degree improbable. Even if the self-reproaches were uttered in his own person, we have many other instances of saints who have blamed themselves passionately for what ordinary men would consider slight transgressions. Of all the Epistles, the Second to the Corinthians is the one which contains the most intimate self-revelations, and few can read it without loving as well as honouring its author.
We know nothing of the Apostle's residence at Jerusalem except the name of his teacher. But it was at this time that he became steeped in the Pharisaic doctrines which loamed the framework in which his earlier Christian beliefs were set. It is now recognised that Pharisaism, far from being the antipodes of Christianity, was rather the quarter where the Gospel found its best recruits. The Pharisaic school contained the greater part of whatever faith, loyalty and piety remained among the Jewish people; and its dogmatic system passed almost entire into the earliest Christian Church, with the momentous addition that Jesus was the Messiah. A few words on the Pharisaic teaching which St. Paul must have imbibed from Gamaliel are indispensable even in an article which deals with Paul, and not with Paulinism.