hey knew Christ or were found in Him.

Let us read the apostle's words, and then consider them in detail:--

And you _did he quicken_, when ye were dead through your trespasses and
sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of this
world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit
that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also all
once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh
and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

We naturally put as a parallel to these and other verses of this
epistle (iv. 17-19) the terrible passage in Romans i, where St. Paul
describes the developement of sin in the Gentile world; how it had its
origin in the refusal of the human will to recognize God, how out of
the perversion of will it spread to the blinding of the understanding,
and then to giving an overmastering power and an unnatural distortion
to the passions, so that a state of moral lawlessness was produced and
maintained.

What are we to say as to the truth of these accounts of the moral
condition of the heathen world? No doubt there is a good deal to be
{91} said on the other side. Roman simplicity and virtue, and the
sanctity of domestic life, had not, as contemporary inscriptions and
historical records make perfectly evident, faded out of the Roman
Empire, and philanthropy and love of the poor were recognized
excellences. Nor had philosophic virtue vanished from the schools[1].
And all this St. Paul would not be slow to recognize. In the Epistle
to the Romans[2] itself he speaks in language, such as a Stoic might
have used, of those who, uninstructed by any special divine law, were a
law unto themselves, in that they showed the practical effect of the
law written in their hearts. We must therefore recognize that St. Paul
is, in the passage we are now considering, speaking ideally; that is to
say, he is speaking of the general tendency of the heathen life, just
as he speaks ideally of the Christian church in view of its general
tendency; and he is speaking of it as he mostly knew it himself in the
notoriously corrupt cities of the east, Antioch and Ephesus. Ephesus,
in particular, had an extraordinarily bad character for vice as much as
for superstition; and what {92} St. Paul says of the heathen life does
not in fact make up a stronger indictment or present a blacker picture
than what is said by a Stoic philosopher