that something in him which should be awake is dormant; or, yet worse, that something in him which should be in faultless tune, as the Creator tempered it, is all unstrung; something that should be nobly free to love and to adore is being repressed, "held down." Then only does man fully think aright when he is aright. Then only is he aright when he, made by and for the Eternal Holy One, rests willingly in Him, and lives for Him. "The fear of the Lord is," in the strictest fact, "the beginning of wisdom"; for it is that attitude of man without which the creature cannot "answer the idea" of the Creator, and therefore cannot truly follow out the law of its own being.
"Let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth Him" (Jer. ix. 24) who necessarily and eternally transcends our cognition and comprehension, yet can be known, can be touched, clasped, adored, as personal, eternal, almighty, holy Love.
[14] Geology and the Deluge, p. 46 (Glasgow, 1885).
CHAPTER V
MAN GIVEN UP TO HIS OWN WAY: THE HEATHEN
Romans i. 24–32
Ver. 24.
Wherefore God gave them up, in the desires of their hearts, to uncleanness, so as to dishonour their bodies among themselves.
There is a dark sequence, in the logic of facts, between unworthy thoughts of God and the development of the basest forms of human wrong. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God:—they are corrupt, and have done abominable works" (Psal. xiv. 1). And the folly which does not indeed deny God but degrades His Idea, always gives its sure contribution to such corruption. It is so in the nature of the case. The individual atheist, or polytheist, may conceivably be a virtuous person, on the human standard; but if he is so it is not because of his creed. Let his creed become a real formative power in human society, and it will tend inevitably to moral disease and death. Is man indeed a moral personality, made in the image of a holy and almighty Maker? Then the vital air of his moral life must be fidelity, correspondence, to his God. Let man think of Him as less than All, and he will think of himself less worthily; not less proudly perhaps, but less worthily, because not in his true and wonderful relation to the Eternal Good. Wrong in himself will tend surely to seem less awful, and right less necessary and great. And nothing, literally nothing, from any region higher than himself—himself already lowered in his own thought from his true idea—can ever come in to supply the blank where God should be, but is not. Man may worship himself, or may despise himself, when he has ceased to "glorify God and thank Him"; but he cannot for one hour be what he was made to be, the son of God in the universe of God. To know God indeed is to be secured from self-worship, and to be taught self-reverence; and it is the only way to those two secrets in their pure fulness.
"God gave them up." So the Scripture says elsewhere. "So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lusts" (Psal. lxxxi. 12); "God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven" (Acts vii. 42); "God gave them up to passions of degradation"; "God gave them over to an abandoned mind"; (below, verses 26, 28). It is a dire thought; but the inmost conscience, once awake, affirms the righteousness of the thing. From one point of view it is just the working out of a natural process, in which sin is at once exposed and punished by its proper results, without the slightest injection, so to speak, of any force beyond its own terrible gravitation towards the sinner's misery. But from another point it is the personally allotted, and personally inflicted, retribution of Him who hates iniquity with the antagonism of infinite Personality. He has so constituted natural process that wrong gravitates to wretchedness; and He is in that process, and above it, always and for ever.
So He "gave them up, in their desires of their hearts"; He left them there where they had placed themselves, "in" the fatal region of self-will, self-indulgence; "unto uncleanness" described now with terrible explicitness in its full outcome, "to dishonour their bodies" the intended temples of the Creator's presence, "among themselves," or "in themselves"; for the possible dishonour might be done either in a foul solitude, or in a fouler society and mutuality: |Ver. 25.|Seeing that they perverted the truth of God, the eternal fact of His glory and claim, in their (τῷ) lie, so that it was travestied, misrepresented, lost, "in" the falsehood of polytheism and idols; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. He casts this strong Doxology into the thick air of false worship and foul life, as if to clear it with its holy reverberation. For he is writing no mere discussion, no lecture on the genesis and evolution of paganism. It is the story of a vast rebellion, told by one who, once himself a rebel, is now altogether and for ever the absolute vassal of the King whom he has "seen in His beauty," and whom it is his joy to bless, and to claim blessing for Him from His whole world for ever.
Ver. 26.
As if animated by the word of benediction, he returns to denounce "the abominable thing which God hateth" with still more terrible explicitness. For this reason, because of their preference of the worse to the infinite Good, God gave them up to passions of degradation; He handed them over, self-bound, to the helpless slavery of lust; to "passions," eloquent word, which indicates how the man who will have his own way is all the while a "sufferer," though by his own fault; the victim of a mastery which he has conjured from the deep of sin.
Shall we shun to read, to render, the words which follow? We will not comment and expound. May the presence of God in our hearts, hearts otherwise as vulnerable as those of the old pagan sinners, sweep from the springs of thought and will all horrible curiosity. But if it does so it will leave us the more able, in humility, in tears, in fear, to hear the facts of this stern indictment. It will bid us listen as those who are not sitting in judgment on paganism, but standing beside the accused and sentenced, to confess that we too share the fall, and stand, if we stand, by grace alone. Aye, and we shall remember that if an Apostle thus tore the rags from the spots of the Black Death of ancient morals, he would have been even less merciful, if possible, over the like symptoms lurking still in modern Christendom, and found sometimes upon its surface.
Terrible, indeed, is the prosaic coolness with which vices now called unnameable are named and narrated in classical literature; and we ask in vain for one of even the noblest of the pagan moralists who has spoken of such sins with anything like adequate horror. Such speech, and such silence, has been almost impossible since the Gospel was felt in civilization. "Paganism," says Dr. F. W. Farrar, in a powerful passage,[15] with this paragraph of Romans in his view, "is protected from complete exposure by the enormity of its own vices. To shew the divine reformation wrought by Christianity it must suffice that once for all the Apostle of the Gentiles seized heathenism by the hair, and branded indelibly on her forehead the stigma of her shame." Yet the vices of the old time are not altogether an antiquarian's wonder. Now as truly as then man is awfully accessible to the worst solicitations the moment he trusts himself away from God. And this needs indeed to be remembered in a stage of thought and of society whose cynicism, and whose materialism, show gloomy signs of likeness to those last days of the old degenerate world in which St. Paul looked round him, and spoke out the things he saw.
Ver. 27.
For their females perverted the natural use to the unnatural. So too the males, leaving the natural use of the female, burst out aflame in their craving towards one another, males in males working out their unseemliness—and duly getting (ἀπολαμβάνοντες) in themselves that recompense of their error which was owed them.
Ver. 28.
