ly at one with St. John {67} when he makes sin and lawlessness
identical as realities in the world. 'Sin is lawlessness[1].' And we
cannot even make a beginning of advance along St. Paul's line of
thought till we recognize the real existence of sin as something
different in kind from ignorance or weakness or lack of development,
and as an incomparably greater evil than those. Sin is the created
will setting itself against the divine will. It is, as a state or an
act, the refusal of God. And the recognition of the awful existence of
this refusal of God is the main clue to understanding the miseries of
the present world.

2. Sin therefore, involving as it does _wilful_ disobedience, can only
be spoken of as prevalent over the heathen world because, not merely
one chosen race, but all men in general have had the opportunity of the
knowledge of God. St. Paul indeed elsewhere modifies the general
assertion of the fact which he makes in this place, by broadly
recognizing that there are states of human existence which are low in
their moral standard, but are rendered comparatively guiltless by the
absence of moral knowledge--states of life where sin exists but is not
reckoned {68} as sin[2]. For 'sin,' he says, 'is not reckoned' as sin
where there is no enlightening law and no consequent condemnation of
conscience. But in this passage, looking at humanity in general, he
asserts, like the author of the Book of Wisdom or the perhaps
contemporary Jewish author of the Apocalypse of Baruch[3], that all men
have had the opportunity of knowing God from His works in nature, and
that their present state is the result of a wilful refusal of Him.
They are 'without excuse.' The sources of the natural knowledge of God
are indeed twofold, for there is the moral conscience, individual and
social, of which St. Paul speaks later; but here it is the evidence of
nature alone of which St. Paul speaks: the witness of the creatures to
'the {69} invisible things' or attributes of their creator, that is to
say, to His power and (generally) His divinity.

3. Assuming then the opportunity of the knowledge of God as lying
behind human records, St. Paul traces the history of sin. It had its
roots in the refusal of the human will to recognize God and give Him
the homage of gratitude and service due to Him. Men 'held down the
truth in unrighteousness,' that is, restrained it from having free
course in their hearts and in the world because of