The Gentile ignorance of God was attended, as St Paul saw it, with an induration of heart, of which it was at once the cause and the effect. There is a wilful stupidity, a studied misconstruction of God’s will, which has played a large part in the history of unbelief. The Israelitish people presented at this time a terrible example of such guilty callousness (Rom. xi. 7–10, 25). They professed a mighty zeal for God; but it was a passion for the deity of their partial and corrupt imagination, which turned to hatred of the true God and Father of men when He appeared in the person of His Son. Behind their pride of knowledge lay the ignorance of a hard and impenitent heart.
In the case of the heathen, hardness of heart and religious ignorance plainly went together. The knowledge of God was not altogether wanting amongst them; He “left Himself not without witness,” as the apostle told them (Acts xiv. 17). Where there is, amid whatever darkness, a mind seeking after truth and right, some ray of light is given, some gleam of a better hope by which the soul may draw nigh to God,—coming whence or how perhaps none can tell. The gospel of Christ finds in every new land souls waiting for God’s salvation. Such a preparation for the Lord, in hearts touched and softened by the preventings of grace, its first messengers discovered everywhere,—a remnant in Israel and a great multitude amongst the heathen.
But the Jewish nation as a whole, and the mass of the pagans, remained at present obstinately disbelieving. They had no perception of the life of God, and felt no need of it; and when offered, they thrust it from them. Theirs was another god, “the god of this world,” who “blinds the minds of the unbelieving” (2 Cor. iv. 3, 4). And their “ungodliness and unrighteousness” were not to be pitied more than blamed. They might have known better; they were “holding down the truth in unrighteousness,” putting out the light that was in them and contradicting their better instincts. The wickedness of that generation was the outcome of a hardening of heart and blinding of conscience that had been going on for generations past.
III. By two conspicuous features the decaying Paganism of the Christian era was distinguished,—its unbelief and its licentiousness. In his letter to the Romans St Paul declares that the second of these deplorable characteristics was the consequence of the former, and a punishment for it inflicted by God. Here he points to it as a manifestation of the hardening of heart which caused their ignorance of God: “Having lost all feeling, they gave themselves up to lasciviousness, so as to commit every kind of uncleanness in greediness.”
Upon that brilliant classic civilization there lies a shocking stain of impurity. St Paul stamps upon it the burning word Aselgeia (lasciviousness), like a brand on the harlot’s brow. The habits of daily life, the literature and art of the Greek world, the atmosphere of society in the great cities was laden with corruption. Sexual vice was no longer counted vice. It was provided for by public law; it was incorporated into the worship of the gods. It was cultivated in every luxurious and monstrous excess. It was eating out the manhood of the Greek and Latin races. From the imperial Cæsar down to the horde of slaves, it seemed as though every class of society had abandoned itself to the horrid practices of lust.
The “greediness” with which debauchery was then pursued, is at the bottom self-idolatry, self-deification; it is the absorption of the God-given passion and will of man’s nature in the gratification of his appetites. Here lies the reservoir and spring of sin, the burning deep within the soul of him who knows no God but his own will, no law above his own desire. He plunges into sensual indulgence, or he grasps covetously at wealth or office; he wrecks the purity, or tramples on the rights of others; he robs the weak, he corrupts the innocent, he deceives and mocks the simple—to feed the gluttonous idol of self that sits upon God’s seat within him. The military hero wading to a throne through seas of blood, the politician who wins power and office by the sleights of a supple tongue, the dealer on the exchange who supplants every competitor by his shrewd foresight and unscrupulous daring, and absorbs the fruit of the labour of thousands of his fellow-men, the sensualist devising some new and more voluptuous refinement of vice,—these are all the miserable slaves of their own lust, driven on by the insatiate craving of the false god that they carry within their breast.
For the light-hearted Greeks, lovers of beauty and of laughter, self was deified as Aphrodité, goddess of fleshly desire, who was turned by their worship into Aselgeia,—she of whom of old it was said, “Her house is the way to Sheol.” Not such as the chaste wife and house-keeping mother of Hebrew praise, but Laïs with her venal charms was the subject of Greek song and art. Pure ideals of womanhood the classic nations had once known—or never would those nations have become great and famous—a Greek Alcestis and Antigoné, Roman Cornelias and Lucretias, noble maids and matrons. But these, in the dissolution of manners, had given place to other models. The wives and daughters of the Greek citizens were shut up to contempt and ignorance, while the priestesses of vice—hetæræ they were called, or companions of men—queened it in their voluptuous beauty, until their bloom faded and poison or madness ended their fatal days.
Amongst the Jews whom our Lord addressed, the choice lay between “God and Mammon”; in Corinth and Ephesus, it was “Christ or Belial.” These ancient gods of the world—“mud-gods,” as Thomas Carlyle called them—are set up in the high places of our populous cities. To the slavery of business and the pride of wealth men sacrifice health and leisure, improvement of mind, religion, charity, love of country, family affection. How many of the evils of English society come from this root of all evil!
Hard by the temple of Mammon stands that of Belial. Their votaries mingle in the crowded amusements of the day and rub shoulders with each other. Aselgeia flaunts herself, wise observers tell us, with increasing boldness in the European capitals. Theatre and picture-gallery and novel pander to the desire of the eye and the lust of the flesh. The daily newspapers retail cases of divorce and hideous criminal trials with greater exactness than the debates of Parliament; and the appetite for this garbage grows by what it feeds upon. It is plain to see whereunto the decay of public decency and the revival of the animalism of pagan art and manners will grow, if it be not checked by a deepened Christian faith and feeling.
Past feeling says the apostle of the brazen impudicity of his time. The loss of the religious sense blunted all moral sensibility. The Greeks, by an early instinct of their language, had one word for modesty and reverence, for self-respect and awe before the Divine. There is nothing more terrible than the loss of shame. When immodesty is no longer felt as an affront, when there fails to rise in the blood and burn upon the cheek the hot resentment of a wholesome nature against things that are foul, when we grow tolerant and familiar with their presence, we are far down the slopes of hell. It needs only the kindling of passion, or the removal of the checks of circumstance, to complete the descent. The pain that the sight of evil gives is a divine shield against it. Wearing this shield, the sinless Christ fought our battle, and bore the anguish of our sin.