they knew God, did not glorify Him as God, and changed the glory of the Incorruptible God into the likeness of corruptible man, and beasts and creeping things.’  And so they were alienated from the life of God; that is, they became strangers to God’s life; they forgot what God’s life and character was like:  or if they even did awake a moment, and recollect dimly what God was like, they hated that thought.  They hated to think that God was what He was, and shut their eyes, and stopped their ears as fast as possible.

And what happened to them in the meantime?  What was the fruit of their wilfully forgetting what God’s life was?  St. Paul tells us that they fell into the most horrible sins—­sins too dreadful and shameful to be spoken of; and that their common life, even when they did not run into such fearful evils, was profligate, fierce, and miserable.  And yet St. Paul tells us all the while they knew the judgment of God, that those who do such things are worthy of death.

Now we know that St. Paul speaks truth, from the writings of heathens; for God raised up from time to time, even among the heathen Greeks and Romans, witnesses for Himself, to testify of Him and of His life, and to testify against the sins of the world, such men as Socrates and Plato among the Greeks, whose writings St. Paul knew thoroughly, and whom, I have no doubt, he had in his mind when he wrote his first chapter of Romans, and told the heathen that they were without excuse.  And among the Romans, also, He raised up, in the same way, witnesses for Himself, such as Juvenal and Persius, and others, whom scholars know well.  And to these men, heathens though they were, God certainly did teach a great deal about Himself, and gave them courage to rebuke the sins of kings and rich men, even at the danger of their lives; and to some of them he gave courage even to suffer martyrdom for the message which God had given them, and which their neighbours hated to hear.  And this was the message which God sent by them to the heathen:  that God was good and righteous, and that therefore His everlasting wrath must be awaiting sinners.  They rebuked their heathen neighbours for those very same horrible crimes which St. Paul mentions; and then they said, as St. Paul does, ’How you make your own sins worse by blasphemies against God!  You sin yourselves, and then, to excuse yourselves, you invent fables and lies about God, and pretend that God is as wicked as you are, in order to drug your own consciences, by making God the pattern of your own wickedness.’

These men saw that man ought to be like God; and they saw that God was righteous and good; and they saw, therefore, that unrighteousness and sin must end in ruin and everlasting misery.  So much God had taught them, but not much more; but to St. Paul he had taught more.  Those wise and righteous heathen could show their sinful neighbours that sin was death, and that God was righteous.  But they could not