There are some who imagine that St. Paul desired to die in order only that
he might sin no more when he said that he felt in himself a contradiction
between the law of his senses and of his reason; and, feeling this, cried
out: _Oh! unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?_[1] These people, therefore, as though they were so many little
Apostles, when they are, by some trifle, goaded to impatience, instantly
say that they desire to die, and pretend that their only wish is to be in
a condition in which they cannot possibly offend God. This is, indeed, to
cover up mere impatience and irritation with a fine cloak! But what is
still worse, it is to wrench and distort the words of the Apostle and apply
them in a sense of which he never thought. Our Blessed Father, in one of
his letters, gives an explanation of this passage which is so clear and so
excellent that I am sure if will be useful to you. He speaks thus: "_Oh,
unhappy man that I am_, said the great Apostle, _who shall deliver me from
the body of this death?_ He felt within himself, as it were, an armed host
of ill humours, antipathies, bad habits, and natural inclinations which
conspired to bring about his spiritual death; and because he fears them he
declares that he hates them, and because he hates them he cannot support
them without pain, and his grief makes him burst out into the exclamation
which he himself answers in these words: _The grace of God by Jesus
Christ_. This will deliver him not from the death of the body with its
terrors, not from the last combat, but from defeat in the struggle, and
will preserve him from being overcome.
"You see how far the Apostle is from invoking death, although elsewhere
he desires to be set free from the prison of the body that he may be with
Jesus Christ. He calls the mass of temptations which urge and incite him
to sin a body of death, sin being the true death of the soul. Grace is the
death of this death and the devourer of this abortion of hell, for where
sin abounded grace superabounds.
"Grace, which has been merited for us by Jesus Christ our Saviour, to whom
be honour and glory for ever and ever."
[Footnote 1: Rom. vii. 24.]