and incorruptible nature of God into the images
of men and beasts, birds and reptiles. This intellectual degeneracy
was followed by still deeper moral degeneracy. God, when they forsook
Him, let them go; and, when His restraining grace was removed, down
they rushed into the depths of moral putridity. Lust and passion got
the mastery of them, and their life became a mass of moral disease. In
the end of the first chapter of Romans the features of their condition
are sketched in colors that might be borrowed from the abode of devils,
but were literally taken, as is too plainly proved by the pages even of
Gentile historians, from the condition of the cultured heathen nations
at that time. This, then, was the history of one half of mankind: it
had utterly fallen from righteousness and exposed itself to the wrath
of God, which is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of
men.

57. The Jews were the other half of the world. Had they succeeded
where the Gentiles had failed? They enjoyed, indeed, great advantages
over the heathen; for they possessed the oracles of God, in which the
divine nature was exhibited in a form which rendered it inaccessible to
human perversion, and the divine law was written with equal plainness
in the same form. But had they profited by these advantages? It is
one thing to know the law and another thing to do it; but it is doing,
not knowing, which is righteousness. Had they, then, fulfilled the
will of God, which they knew?

Paul had lived in the same Jerusalem in which Jesus assailed the
corruption and hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees; he had looked
closely at the lives of the representative men of his nation; and he
does not hesitate to charge the Jews in mass with the very same sins as
the Gentiles; nay, he says that through them the name of God was
blasphemed among the Gentiles. They boasted of their knowledge and
were the bearers of the torch of truth, the fierce blaze of which
exposed the sins of the heathen; but their religion was a bitter
criticism of the conduct of others; they forgot to examine their own
conduct by the same light; and, while they were repeating, Do not
steal, Do not commit adultery, and a multitude of other commandments,
they were indulging in these sins themselves. What good in these
circumstances did their knowledge do them? It only condemned them the
more; for their sin was against light. While the heathen knew so
little that their sins wer