But if we begin to try, that, we find, is just what we cannot do. When a
man begins to hunger and thirst after righteousness, and, discontented
with himself, attempts to improve himself, he soon begins to find a
painful truth in many a word of the Bible and the Prayer Book to which he
gave little heed, as long as he was contented with himself, and with
doing just what pleased him, right or wrong. He soon finds out that he
has no power of himself to help himself, that he is tied and bound with
the burden of his sins, and that he cannot, by reason of his frailty,
stand upright--that he actually is sore let and hindered by his own sins,
from running the race set before him, and doing his duty where God has
put him. All these sayings come home to him as actual facts, most
painful facts, but facts which he cannot deny. He soon finds out the
meaning and the truth of that terrible struggle between the good in him
and the evil in him, of which St Paul speaks so bitterly in the text.
How, when he tries to do good, evil is present with him. How he delights
in the law of God with his inward mind, and yet finds another law in his
body, warring against the law of God, and bringing him into captivity to
the law of sin.
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