Christian was not born ‘within the Covenant,’ as the Son of Israel was. Therefore the problem of problems was, for him, the earlier one; for the Jew it was the later. To St Paul himself, accordingly, the question presented itself at the first (in pre-Christian days) in the ‘Jewish’ form. For he was born ‘privileged,’ even beyond the common run of his countrymen. He possessed advantages innumerable. ‘Philippians’ tells us how (in his regenerate days) he regarded these advantages. By a vigorous oxymoron