Judge before our eyes, not according to the inadequate imaginations of our minds, but according to the descriptions given of him in the Scriptures, which represent him as one whose refulgence eclipses the stars, whose purity makes all things appear polluted, and who searches the inmost soul of his creatures,—­let us so conceive of the Judge of all the earth, and every one must present himself as a criminal before Him, and voluntarily prostrate and humble himself in deep solicitude concerning; his absolution.”  CALVIN:  Institutes, iii. 12.]

ALL MANKIND GUILTY; OR, EVERY MAN KNOWS MORE THAN HE PRACTISES.

ROMANS i. 24.—­“When they knew God, they glorified him not as God.”

The idea of God is the most important and comprehensive of all the ideas of which the human mind is possessed.  It is the foundation of religion; of all right doctrine, and all right conduct.  A correct intuition of it leads to correct religious theories and practice; while any erroneous or defective view of the Supreme Being will pervade the whole province of religion, and exert a most pernicious influence upon the entire character and conduct of men.

In proof of this, we have only to turn to the opening chapters of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.  Here we find a profound and accurate account of the process by which human nature becomes corrupt, and runs its downward career of unbelief, vice, and sensuality.  The apostle traces back the horrible depravity of the heathen world, which he depicts with a pen as sharp as that of Juvenal, but with none of Juvenal’s bitterness and vitriolic sarcasm, to a distorted and false conception of the being and attributes of God.  He does not, for an instant, concede that this distorted and false conception is founded in the original structure and constitution of the human soul, and that this moral ignorance is necessary and inevitable.  This mutilated idea of the Supreme Being was not inlaid in the rational creature on the morning of creation, when God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  On the contrary, the apostle affirms that the Creator originally gave all mankind, in the moral constitution of a rational soul and in the works of creation and providence, the media to a correct idea of Himself, and asserts, by implication, that if they had always employed these media they would have always possessed this idea.  “The wrath of God,” he says, “is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him, even his eternal power and Godhead, are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made, so that they are without excuse; because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God”