More than a thousand years later yet, there is a summary made by Paul that reveals the stage reached by sin in his day.  Probably no one knew the world of his time, which has proved to be the world’s crisis time, as did Paul the scholar and philosopher of Tarsus.  Himself a city man, well bred and well schooled, a world traveller, with acute, disciplined powers of observation, and a calm scholarly judgment, he had studied every phase of life cultured and lowly.

He pitched upon the great city centres in his active campaigning, and worked out into the country districts.  He was a world-bred man.  He knew the three over-lapping worlds of his time:  the Hebrew, with its ideals of purity and religion; the Greek, with its ideals of culture; and the Roman, with its ideals of organization and conquest.  He is writing from Corinth, then the centre of Greek life, to Rome, the centre of the world’s life.  His letter is the most elaborate of any of his writings preserved to us.  In its beginning he speaks of man, universally, morally, as he had come to know him.  His arraignment is simply terrific in its sweep and detail.

Let me pause and be measuring the words cautiously and then put this down:—­the description of the latter half of the first chapter of Romans is a true description of man to-day.  At first flush that sounds shocking, as indeed it is.  It seems as if this description can apply only to degraded savages and to earth’s darkest corners.  But the history of Paul’s day, and before, and since, and an under view of the social fabric to-day, only serve to make clear that Paul’s description is true for all time, and around the world.

There is a cloak of conventionality thrown over the blacker tints of the picture to-day in advanced Christian lands.  It is considered proper to avoid speaking of certain excesses, or, if speech must be used, modestly to say “unnamable.”  And it is a distinct gain for morality that it is so.  Better a standard recognized, even though broken.  But commonly the conditions are not changed.  The differences found in different civilizations to-day are differences only of degree.  In the most advanced cities of Christendom to-day may be found every bit of this chapter’s awful details, but properly cloaked.  In European lands the cloaks are sewed with the legal-stitch, which is considered the proper finish.  In lands where our Christian standards are not recognized the thing is as open as in this chapter.

In four short paragraphs containing sixty-six lines in the American Revision, Paul packs in his terrific philippic.  He swings over the ground four times.  Nowhere does he reveal better his own fidelity to truth, with the fineness of his own spirit.  Here, delicacy of expression is rarely blended with great plainness.  No one can fail to understand, and yet that sense of modesty native to both man and woman is not improperly disturbed, even though the recital be shocking.