There is no description of sin anywhere to compare with the powerful narrative out of the actual life of the Apostle Paul, found in Romans 7:9-25. The thing which moves us as we read it is the picture here drawn of our own state. A lower nature dominates us and spoils our life. “What I would I do not; what I would not that I do.” The most solemn fact of sin is its accumulation of consequences in the life of the person. Each sin tends to produce a set of the nature. It weaves a mesh of habit. It makes toward a dominion, or as Paul calls it, a law of sin in the [person] who sees a shining possible life, but stays below, chained to a body of sin.

–Rufus Jones, The Double Search