growth of
sin_. In the seventeenth century after that it was said that man's heart
was a breeding place of thoughts whose pictured forms were bad, only bad,
with no spots of good, nor spurts of good. A thousand years later, Moses
giving the Hebrew tribes the ten commandments, adds a crowd of
particulars, some of them very grewsome, which serve as mirrors to reveal
the common practice of his age. The slant down of those first centuries
has evidently been increasing in its downward pitch.

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 recognize