(Rom. i. 18-21).  From this, it appears that the mind of man has not kept what was committed to its charge.  It has not employed the moral instrumentalities, nor elicited the moral ideas, with which it has been furnished.  And, notice that the apostle does not confine this statement to those who live within the pale of Revelation.  His description is unlimited and universal.  The affirmation of the text, that “when man knew God he glorified him not as God,” applies to the Gentile as well as to the Jew.  Nay, the primary reference of these statements was to the pagan world.  It was respecting the millions of idolaters in cultivated Greece and Rome, and the millions of idolaters in barbarous India and China,—­it was respecting the whole world lying in wickedness, that St. Paul remarked:  “The invisible things of God, even his eternal power and Godhead, are clearly seen from the creation of the world down to the present moment, being understood by the things that are made; so that they are without excuse.”

When Napoleon was returning from his campaign in Egypt and Syria, he was seated one night upon the deck of the vessel, under the open canopy of the heavens, surrounded by his captains and generals.  The conversation had taken a skeptical direction, and most of the party had combated the doctrine of the Divine existence.  Napoleon had sat silent and musing, apparently taking no interest in the discussion, when suddenly raising his hand, and pointing at the crystalline firmament crowded with its mildly shining planets and its keen glittering stars, he broke out, in those startling tones that so often electrified a million of men:  “Gentlemen, who made all that?” The eternal power and Godhead of the Creator are impressed by the things that are made, and these words of Napoleon to his atheistic captains silenced them.  And the same impression is made the world over.  Go to-day into the heart of Africa, or into the centre of New Holland; select the most imbruted pagan that can be found; take him out under a clear star-lit heaven and ask him who made all that, and the idea of a Superior Being,—­superior to all his fetishes and idols,—­possessing eternal power and supremacy ([Greek:  theotaes]) immediately emerges in his consciousness.  The instant the missionary takes this lustful idolater away from the circle of his idols, and brings him face to face with the heavens and the earth, as Napoleon brought his captains, the constitutional idea dawns again, and the pagan trembles before the unseen Power.[1]

But it will be objected that it is a very dim, and inadequate idea of the Deity that thus rises in the pagan’s mind, and that therefore the apostle’s affirmation that he is “without excuse” for being an idolater and a sensualist requires some qualification.  This imbruted creature, says the objector, does not possess the metaphysical conception of God as a Spirit, and of all his various attributes and qualities, like the dweller in Christendom.