the painful moral
obligations which it involves. Knowing God, they refused to
acknowledge Him with thankfulness or 'give Him the glory.' Rather they
would themselves 'be as gods.' They 'refused to have God in their
knowledge.' Then from this root in the rebel will sin passed to the
obscuring of the understanding, as is shown in the ridiculous
aberrations of idolatry. 'They became vain in their reasonings, and
their senseless heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,'
the nations in their worship showed themselves fools. Idolatry had
long ago appeared simply ridiculous to Isaiah: he pointed the finger of
scorn at the idolaters. 'They know not,' he cried, 'neither do they
{70} consider: the Lord hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and
their hearts that they cannot understand. And none calleth to mind,
neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part
of the wood in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals
thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it: and shall I make the
residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a
tree? He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside,
that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my
right hand[4]?' Isaiah's language and thought had been elaborated and
developed in the Book of Wisdom[5], and St. Paul appropriates it. To
mistake creatures for the Creator, or to think of the glorious and
spiritual God as if He were in the form of the corruptible body of man
or beast or bird or reptile--so St. Paul alludes to the man worship of
Greece and the animal worship of Egypt--is simple blindness and folly;
blindness and folly in which St. Paul sees the just punishment of {71}
the rebellious will in the region of the intellect. But it has another
punishment in the region of the appetites or passions. As men
deliberately 'repudiated' the knowledge and obedience of God, God
'repudiated' men in penal retribution. He gave them up to become vile
in their own eyes and to find out their impotence to control their own
lusts. They ran riot even in all sorts of unnatural and lawless ways,
so that the world became full of sins of all kinds; sins against God
and sins against man; antisocial sins of all sorts, the sins which
destroy the state and friendship and commerce and the home: and at the
last the very ideal of righteousness had come to be lost. St. Paul, we
notice, makes the lowest moral s