Romans 7:9 : And I was alive apart from the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. The only time Paul was without law was during the years of his childhood, before he reached the years of accountability. On this verse the Cambridge Greek Testament makes the following clear comment 'was living unaffected by law once.' He goes back to a pre-moral state--not necessarily in actual memory of a complete non-moral experience, but comparatively; his life as a child was untouched by number-less demands of law, which accumulated with his moral development; at that period whole regions of his life were purely impulsive one after another they came under the touch of law, and with each new pressure of law upon his consciousness, the sphere, in which it was possible to sin, was enlarged. It was easy to carry this retrospect one step beyond memory, and to see himself living a life of pure impulse before the very first voice of law reached him, and to regard such a stage as a typical stage in the general develop-ment of the moral sense in man." The command came to Paul when he began to realize his own individual responsibility in the matter of obeying God. Then "sin revived." Sin sprang to life. It does not mean that sin came to life again. The Greek student will recognize the perfective function of the preposition prefixed to the word translated revived, and that in-stead of changing the meaning of the verb, adds to it force and vividness--sin came much alive. And then he died spiritually. But we are told that a person is born totally depraved--born dead in trespasses and sins. It would be interesting to hear one of those advocates of hereditary total depravity tell us when Paul was alive without the law and when he died spiritually.