forsaken them[9]. This last idea is of course one entirely alien
to St. Paul's mind. To him all God's judgements, at least in this
world, have one intention--to awaken men to recognize the truth and to
stir them to conversion, 'that he may have mercy upon all.' But
otherwise St. Paul's view of the Gentile world, as he experienced it in
the cities of mixed Greek and Asiatic population of the Roman Empire,
and especially in the notoriously wicked Corinth where he was
writing[10], was the ordinary Jewish view. And a contemporary Stoic
philosopher, who wrote at Ephesus under the name of Heracleitus, gives
a picture of society in that city fully as black[11].

At the same time, if we are to be fair, we must recognize that the
account, while true, is not complete. The Gentile life was not without
its 'salt.' There was a great deal of virtue, both domestic and
philosophical, in the {76} empire--more perhaps in the country, of
which St. Paul knew little, than in the towns. And the existence of
this salt he acknowledges when, in the second chapter of this epistle,
he speaks of Gentiles which have no revealed law but do by nature the
things of law, being a law unto themselves, and having the effect of
the law written in their hearts, and a witnessing conscience,
individual and social, to help them[12]: and again, when he intimates
that there is an uncircumcision which puts the circumcision to shame by
keeping the law[13]. But it is not St. Paul's way to exactly correlate
the different aspects of his subject as a modern writer would do. He
is a prophet and preacher, not a formally systematic writer. It is
enough for him that the sin which he is describing is a reality: that
its tendencies are what he describes them to be: that, whatever other
counter tendency there may be, sin is so dominant in the world that its
results are as he represents them, and that the conscience and
experience of those to whom he writes will respond to his indictment.

Nor, if we give its metaphorical meaning to 'idolatry,' is there a word
which St. Paul says in this chapter which would not be true of our {77}
modern civilization in London or Paris or New York. With us indeed
Christianity has been sufficiently vigorous to provide a counteracting
force, of infinitely stronger power than existed in the Roman world, to
resist corruption. The agencies of divine strength and recovery, the
centres of health and light, are infinitely more numerous, s