history of actual sin. It is put first by Paul in his
arraignment here. He gives it chief place by position and by particularity
of description. First was the using of a pure, natural function to gratify
unnatural desires. Then with strange cunning and lustful ingenuity
changing the natural functions to uses not in the plan of nature. Let it
all be said in lowest, softest voice, so sadly awful is the recital. Yet
let that soft voice be very distinct, that the truth may be known. Then
lower down yet the commercializing of such things. Unconcerned barter and
trade in man's holy, most potent function. Putting highest price on most
ingenious impurity.

Then follows the longest of these paragraphs running up and down the grimy
gamut of sin. Beginning with _all_ unrighteousness, he goes on to specify
depravity, greedy covetousness, maliciousness. Oozing out of every pore
there are envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity. Men are whisperers,
backbiters, God-haters, and self-lovers, in that they are insolent,
haughty, boastful. They are inventors of evil things, without
understanding, breakers of faith, without natural affection, ruthlessly
merciless.

The climax is reached in this, that though they _know_ God, and what He
has set as the right rule of life, they not only _do_ these things named,
but they delight in the fellowship of those who habitually practise them.
The stage of impulsiveness is wholly gone. They have settled down to this
as the deliberate choice and habit of life. Man is still a _king_, but all
bemired. He is the image and glory of God, but how shrivelled and
withered; obscured, all overgrown with ugly poison vines.

Let it be remembered at once that this is a _composite_ picture of the
race. Many different sorts of men must be put together to get such a view.
Sin works out differently in different persons. A man's activities take on
the tinge of his personality. So sin in a man takes on the color and tone
of his individuality.

One man has the inner disposition against God, accompanied by no excesses
at all. These things disgust him. He is refined in his tastes, perhaps
scholarly and intellectual in his thinking. That inner disposition may be
a sort of refined ignoring of God either defiant or indifferent. In
another, the animal nature swings to the front, stronger perhaps by
heredity, and, yielded to, it runs to the excess of riot. Then there is
the man with the strange yellow fever, whose love for the