ith an idol was expressly
declared to be 'an abomination,' unless it had been already desecrated
by Gentiles[5]--they could not always resist the opportunity of
appropriating the rich stores of the temples. The 'religious' Scribes
and Pharisees (though not of course the best of them) were, in fact, as
a body truly hypocrites, as our Lord summarily said they were.

And there lies in the moral failure of the Jews a very much needed
warning to us nineteenth-century Christians against censoriousness.
'Judging' occupies so large a part in our ordinary conversation. In
the religious world, we condemn so freely--Romanists, Dissenters, those
who are of a different party to ourselves: in the social world--those
of a different class, those who employ us, or whom we employ, {99}
those whom in any way we do not like or who go contrary to us. We are
always judging. But to judge, we are taught, is a great
responsibility. With what judgement we judge, we shall be judged. It
is of the utmost consequence that before we judge others we should have
judged ourselves. And to have done that truthfully has a tendency to
make us charitable in our estimate of others, because we are deeply
conscious of our own need of merciful and lenient consideration.

2. What St. Paul teaches about the moral consciousness, and
possibility of moral goodness, among the Gentiles has not a Jewish
sound at all. The Jewish teachers generally would not have admitted
any goodness acceptable to God in the heathen world. In fact, St. Paul
is here, as in his speech at Athens, accepting the principle of a
universal presence and operation of God in the human heart, outside the
limit of any special revelation, and he accepts it in terms largely
derived from current Stoic philosophy.

The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated
man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good
life. A good life means a 'life according {100} to nature,' or
'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the
universal reason or God. And as a help in living according to reason,
the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty
lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to
reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we
all do wrong.

'No one,' said Seneca, St. Paul's contemporary, 'will be found who can
acquit himself; and any man calling himsel